topic: Amazon Logging

topic: Amazon Logging

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‘Colombia’s Amazon peoples provide solutions’: Interview with José Homero Mutumbajoy
- Mongabay interviewed José Homero Mutumbajoy, an experienced Indigenous rights defender in Colombia, to hear his take on some of the latest and biggest events affecting Indigenous communities and forests in the country’s Amazon.
- Events include protests against Libero Cobre’s copper mine, the impacts of armed groups, protections of forests for isolated peoples and plans for the upcoming U.N. climate conference.
- Homero Mutumbajoy and other Indigenous delegates came to the U.N. Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues in New York City to spotlight issues they face in their country.
- Homero Mutumbajoy is the human rights and peace coordinator for OPIAC, the national organization for Colombia’s Amazon peoples.

Fake documents, real deforestation drive global trade in illegal Amazon timber
- A report from the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) tracked the equivalent of 1,828 shipping containers of illegal wood sourced in the state of Pará, in the Brazilian Amazon.
- Nearly 3% of this timber was exported to U.S. and European companies, violating commercial rules forbidding illegal timber imports into those markets.
- One of the most coveted species by international markets is ipê, a tropical hardwood whose price increases twentyfold along the supply chain.
- Exports point to flaws in the Brazilian tracking system and impunity for offenders as the main reasons for the persistent widespread illegality of logging.

Pressure bears down around uncontacted tribes at the edge of Brazil’s arc of deforestation
- A family of three isolated Indigenous people got separated from their group and ended up contacting non-Indigenous society in one of the best-preserved areas of the Brazilian Amazon.
- For more than a month, agents with Funai, Brazil’s federal agency for Indigenous affairs, have been camping near the family, helping them hunt and fish.
- The group lives on the edge of the so-called arc of deforestation, in a mosaic of conservation areas and Indigenous territories that form a green barrier to oncoming pressure from land grabbers and cattle ranchers who want the land to increase their wealth.
- Besides the impact on isolated Indigenous communities, the destruction of this part of the Amazon would affect Brazil’s rain cycle and potentially unleash new viruses and bacteria, researchers warn.

Forest management ambitions in Brazilian Amazon aim to make up for lost time
- In 2006, Brazilian President Lula da Silva’s government passed the Public Forest Management Law, implementing a forest concession scheme designed to regulate and legalize logging activities in Brazil’s forest — in particular, the Amazon.
- Forest management consists of removing a small number of trees whose species are valued in the market. After that, the area can only be explored again in 30 to 40 years, following its regeneration cycle.
- Behind on its concessions targets, the current government wants to almost quadruple the current area of federal concessions by 2026.
- Even though it is different from deforestation, timber management has never been seen as a way to conserve the forest by traditional peoples.

Land distribution in the Pan Amazon is tainted by corruption
- Small family farmers waiting for years to obtain documents validating their land claims often need to pay a small bribe to speed up bureaucracy. More flagrant abuses of the land tenure system are perpetuated by land grabbers who manufacture property deeds using several well-known fraudulent schemes.
- Land fraud is very common in jurisdictions where local elected officials collude with their constituents to expedite land grabbing.
- According to an investigation into the Instituto Nacional de Colonização e Reforma Agrária,1,000 politicians and 140,000 civil servants had improperly received public lands, while more than 37,000 parcels were awarded to individuals who were dead at the time of their application.

Mongabay series on illegal timber and cattle wins honorable mention in Brazil journalism prize

Blood Timber, a Mongabay series on illegal logging and cattle ranching in the eastern Brazilian Amazon, has received an honorable mention at the recent Banrisul ARI Journalism Award, a prize recognizing excellence in journalism in Brazil. The three-part series by journalist Karla Mendes revealed a correlation between environmental crimes and killings of Indigenous Guajajara people, […]
Probe details the playbook of one of Amazon’s top land grabbers
- Professional land grabbers operating in the Brazilian Amazon have sophisticated strategies to steal and deforest public lands and get away with it.
- According to the Federal Police, Bruno Heller is one of Amazon’s largest deforesters and relied on legal and technical advice, including a fake contract, bribing police officers, and near-real-time monitoring of deforestation work through satellite imagery, investigators said.
- Low penalties and hurdles faced by federal bodies in seizing back stolen lands from criminals have spurred the land-grabbing industry in Brazil.

Conservation and the rise of corporations in the Pan Amazon
- Despite agreement on the importance of protecting the Amazon’s biodiversity, most people in the Pan Amazon depend directly or indirectly on conventional development and extractive production models.
- Investments by the extractive sector in the mid-nineteenth century were more successful because they were organized by multinational corporations with experience in managing operations in remote geographies (Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, Guyana, Suriname) or by state-owned corporations with practical knowledge of their own country (Brazil, Venezuela).
- In Brazil, some family enterprises evolved into complex holding companies that now finance expansion via joint ventures and international credit markets. A select few have chosen to raise capital by selling equity shares on domestic or international stock markets, although they typically retain majority control to maintain the family legacy.

Illegal logging footprint in the Amazon expanded by a fifth, report finds

Illegal logging in the Amazon jumped by 19% over the past year, according to a new report. Between August 2022 and July 2023, some 126,000 hectares, or 311,000 acres, of forest were cleared illicitly, equivalent to cutting timber from 350 football fields every day without environmental authorization. Experts point to a troubling shift: as illegal […]
Brazil upgrades park to protect Amazon’s tallest tree, allows tourism

South America’s tallest tree, a 400-year-old red angelim in the northern tip of the Brazilian Amazon, is the star of a newly created conservation area called the Giant Trees of the Amazon State Park. The area was officially sectioned off from the larger Paru State Forest on Sept. 30 for stronger protection. At 88.5 meters […]
Report links killings to environmental crimes in Peru’s Amazon
- A new report from the Monitoring of the Andean Amazon Project (MAAP) says the Peruvian Amazon is experiencing a rise in murders against environmental defenders, most of which are related to illegal activities such as mining, logging and coca cultivation.
- Between 2010 and 2022, an estimated 29 environmental defenders were killed in the region.
- The frequency of killings has increased in recent years, with almost half taking place after 2020.
- Indigenous leaders and researchers said many of these killings remain unsolved while the state remains largely absent in protecting communities in these remote regions.

Peruvian logger loses FSC label after latest clash with isolated Mashco Piro
- The Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) has suspended the certification of Maderera Canales Tahuamanu (MCT), a logging company whose concession borders Madre de Dios Territorial Reserve in the Peruvian Amazon.
- The company is accused of encroaching on the traditional territory of the Mashco Piro, an Indigenous group that lives in voluntary isolation and went viral after video captured the tribe on a beach.
- The suspension follows an incident in which at least two loggers were shot dead with arrows, one injured and several others are missing during a confrontation with the Mashco Piro.
- The FSC suspension takes effect Sept. 13 and will last eight months — a move Indigenous rights advocates say is welcome but short of the full cancelation they deem necessary to protect the isolated tribe.

Peru’s isolated Mashco Piro tribe attacks loggers in their ancestral territory

Members of the uncontacted Mashco Piro tribe in Peru recently used bows and arrows to attack loggers working near their reserve. At least one logger was seriously injured and possibly two others as well, according to Survival International, an NGO that advocates for Indigenous rights worldwide. The recent violence follows shortly after the release of […]
After isolated tribes’ rare appearance in Peruvian Amazon, big questions remain for their future
- Viral images and videos in mid-July showed dozens of isolated Indigenous Mashco Piro people on a beach in the Peruvian Amazon asking for food from a nearby village.
- Campaigners and anthropologists point to the continued pressures of large forestry concessions overlapping with their ancestral territory in the Madre de Dios Territorial Reserve where they live.
- The Ministry of Culture, which is responsible for protecting Indigenous peoples living in voluntary isolation, tells Mongabay they have no authority to suspend logging operations and there are no immediate plans to revise the concessions.
- No agreement on the issue or the proposal to create an Indigenous reserve has yet been reached in talks between the regional government, the forestry and wildlife service SERFOR and Indigenous federations.

Verra suspends carbon credit projects following police raid in Brazil
- Verra, the largest registry of the voluntary carbon market, suspended projects targeted by the Federal Police in the Brazilian Amazon following an investigation by Mongabay.
- The “extraordinary action” prevents the selling of new credits, the organization stated.
- The raid occurred two weeks after Mongabay showed the links between the REDD+ projects and a suspected logging scam.
- Verra certified projects that had credits bought by top brands such as the carbon credit broker Moss, the Brazilian low-cost carrier GOL Airlines, the food delivery app iFood, Itaú, one of the country’s leading banks, and the international companies Toshiba, Spotify and Boeing.

Brazil police raid Amazon carbon credit projects exposed by Mongabay
- The Brazilian Federal Police arrested people and seized assets linked to some of the country’s largest carbon credit projects.
- According to the investigators, the group was running land-grabbing and timber laundering crimes in the Amazon for more than a decade and profiting millions of dollars.
- The projects were exposed at the end of May in a one-year investigation published by Mongabay, which showed links between the REDD+ projects and an illegal timber scam.
- Authorities and experts hope the findings will raise the bar for projects in the country and persuade lawmakers to create strict rules for the Brazilian carbon market, which is now under discussion.

Top brands buy Amazon carbon credits from suspected timber laundering scam
- An analysis of two carbon credit projects in the Brazilian Amazon has found that they may be connected to illegal timber laundering.
- Prior to the analysis, forest management plans had already been suspended in the areas over the same issue.
- The projects belong to Ricardo Stoppe Jr., known as the biggest individual seller of carbon credits in Brazil, who has made millions of dollars selling these credits to companies like GOL Airlines, Nestlé, Toshiba, Spotify, Boeing and PwC; his partner in one of the projects was convicted of timber laundering six years ago.
- Their REDD+ projects were developed by Carbonext, known as the largest carbon credit provider in Brazil, and certified by Verra, one of the world’s largest voluntary carbon market registries.

A web of front people conceals environmental offenders in the Amazon
- A paper trail left by a notorious land grabber reveals how he used relatives and an employee as fronts to evade environmental fines and lawsuits, shedding light on this widespread practice in the Brazilian Amazon.
- Fronts prevent the real criminals from having their assets seized to pay for environmental fines, besides consuming time and resources from the authorities, who spend years trying to prove who the real financier of the deforestation is.
- Experts say it’s best to go after environmental offenders where it hurts the most, by seizing their assets, rather than to chase down their true identity.
- This investigation is part of a partnership between Mongabay and Repórter Brasil.

Alis Ramírez: A defender of the Colombian Amazon now living as a refugee in New Zealand
- Because of her opposition to mining, indiscriminate logging in forests and the social and environmental consequences of oil exploration, María Alis Ramírez was forced to abandon her farm in Caquetá, in southern Colombia, and move across the world.
- The various threats she received because of her work as an environmental defender forced her and her family to first move to New Zealand, where she arrived as a refugee in 2019.
- According to reports by human rights organization Global Witness, Colombia is one of the most dangerous countries in the world for environmental and land defenders.
- In New Zealand, she says she can live with a sense of tranquility that would be impossible in Colombia. Although Alis Ramírez is now safe, she has not stopped thinking about her country, the jungle and the river that was alongside her throughout her childhood.

Critics decry controversial bill that loosens deforestation restrictions in Peru
- On Jan. 10, Peru’s Congress approved a new amendment to the country’s forest and wildlife law, which loosens restrictions on deforestation and may affect the rights of Indigenous peoples, experts warn.
- According to opponents of this amendment, this change in legislation could pave the way for a large expansion of deforestation across Peru’s forests, with the Amazon at risk.
- Proponents of the bill argue that it will bring stability to the Peruvian agricultural sector and offer legal security to those dedicated to agricultural production.
- A group of civil society organizations and lawyers have filed a motion with the Constitutional Court, arguing the new revision violated the Constitution.

Grassroots efforts and an Emmy-winning film help Indigenous fight in Brazil
- The 2022 documentary “The Territory” won an Emmy award this January, shining a light on the Uru-eu-wau-wau Indigenous people and the invasions, conflicts and threats from land grabbers in their territory in the Brazilian Amazon from 2018 to 2021.
- After years of increasing invasions and deforestation in the protected area, experts say the situation has slowly improved in the past three years, and both Indigenous and government officials in the region “feel a little safer.”
- Grassroots surveillance efforts, increased visibility of the problems, and a more effective federal crackdown against invaders have helped tackle illegal land occupiers and allowed the Indigenous populations to take their land back.
- Despite the security improvements, however, the territory still struggles against invasions and deforestation within the region, experts say.

Amazon deforestation declines but fossil fuels remain contentious, COP28 shows
- COP28 celebrates the strong downward trend in deforestation in the Amazon over the last year, but also reveals a conflict between Amazonian nations over fossil fuels.
- Colombia has stopped all new oil exploration contracts in a bid to eliminate dependency on the fossil fuel economy. On the other hand, Brazil announced plans that could make it the world’s fourth-largest oil producer by the end of this decade.
- Indigenous groups who live and depend on the Amazon Rainforest lament that they haven’t been heard or involved in important decision-making during COP28 that would ultimately impact them.
- Experts say that international finance is “fundamental” for climate action, and while this theme has been on the table at COP28, there has been no tangible action that would meet the scale required to preserve the Amazon Rainforest.

Safety of Peru’s land defenders in question after killing of Indigenous leader in the Amazon
- Quinto Inuma was killed on November 29 while traveling to the Santa Rosillo de Yanayacu community in Peru’s Amazon following a meeting of environmental defenders.
- For years, the Indigenous Kichwa leader had been receiving threats for his work trying to stop invasions, land trafficking, drug trafficking and illegal logging in his community, forcing him to rely on protection measures from the Ministry of Justice.
- After Inuma’s death, a group of 128 Indigenous communities released a statement appealing for justice and holding the Peruvian state reponsible for its inaction and ineffectivtieness in protecting the lives of human rights defenders in Indigenous territories. Several other Indigenous leaders who receive threats have requested protection measures from the state but have not gotten a response.
- According to an official in the Ministry of Justice, providing the Kichwa leader with protection measures was very complex because he lived in a high-risk area. The only thing that could be done, they said, is to provide permanent police protection, which wasn’t possible for the local police.

How creative & emotive communication conserved 55,000 acres of Peru’s Amazon
- Protecting the Peruvian Amazon is dangerous work, but conservationist Paul Rosolie and his nonprofit Junglekeepers team have attracted millions of dollars in funding to protect 55,000 acres of rainforest in the country’s Madre de Dios region.
- Rosolie first received international recognition via his 2014 memoir, “Mother of God: An Extraordinary Journey in the Uncharted Tributaries of the Western Amazon.”
- Today, he runs both a nonprofit and an ecotourism service that employs and is co-led by local and Indigenous people.
- In this podcast episode, Rosolie reflects on his decade-plus journey to today and shares his recipe for conservation success.

In Brazil’s Amazon, a clandestine road threatens a pristine reserve
- Terra do Meio Ecological Station, a pristine reserve under federal protection, has suffered invasions amid efforts to open up an illegal road cutting through the rainforest.
- Much of the deforestation is spilling over from APA Triunfo do Xingu, a sustainable use reserve that has become one of the most deforested corners of the Amazon in recent years.
- Federal and state authorities have cracked down on environmental crime in the region, but experts say this has not been enough to halt the advance of the road or stop outsiders from turning forest into pasture.
- Environmentalists worry that, if invaders succeed in fully opening up the road, it would splinter an important ecological corridor meant to protect the region’s rich biodiversity and its Indigenous residents.

New online map tracks threats to uncontacted Indigenous peoples in Brazil’s Amazon
- Mobi, a new online interactive map, draws information from public databases, government statistics and field observations to paint a comprehensive picture of the threats that uncontacted Indigenous peoples face in the Brazilian Amazon.
- The exact location of uncontacted communities is deliberately displaced on the map to avoid any subsequent attacks against them from those who engage in illegal activity in or near their territories.
- The tool can help Indigenous agencies deploy more effective protective actions to fend off threats such as diseases and environmental destruction, which can wipe out vulnerable populations.
- Activists hope the platform will help create a vulnerability index that ranks uncontacted populations according to the severity of threats against them, which can promote stronger public policies.

Forest conservation efforts in Peru are failing across the board, study says
- Forest conservation initiatives in Peru in the past decades have had little to no effect, as deforestation continues to skyrocket in the country, according to a new study by the International Forestry Research Center, CIFOR.
- Peru has attracted millions of dollars in forest conservation initiatives and has 254 public and private parks and protected areas, yet deforestation has been rising steadily since 2001 by more than 326,000 acres per year. In 2020, forest loss peaked, reaching 502,000 acres of tropical forest, the equivalent of 379 football fields.
- CIFOR’s research includes a literature review of 17 studies evaluating the impact of conservation initiatives in the country over the years. REDD+ mechanisms consistently performed poorly, having the least effect both on forest cover and community economic situations.
- Researchers call for strengthening government agencies and creating a better dialogue with academics who are studying and monitoring conservation mechanisms and their impacts.

Logging permit threatens Quilombola bioeconomic ‘paradise’ in the Amazon
- Loggers have entered the Trombetas River Biological Reserve in Oriximiná, in Brazil’s Pará state, to develop a forest management project that has divided the local Quilombola community.
- The reserve is known for its successful bioeconomy project, but the association representing the six local communities signed a contract with a logging company to explore timber in the area.
- The Quilombola say they weren’t properly consulted about the contract and the Public Ministry of Pará recommended interrupting actions for timber management, but the association says it will not suspend the work without a judicial order.
- The Quilombola territory is part of the mosaic of protected areas between the Amazon River and the border with Suriname and Guyana, one of the largest continuous forest blocks in the world.

Professional services abound for Amazon land grabbers seeking legitimacy
- How does public land in the Brazilian Amazon, including chunks of protected areas and Indigenous territories, end up under private ownership?
- This investigation unveils the network of realtors and engineers who take advantage of Brazil’s disjointed land registration system to launder stolen land.
- Experts say the CAR land registry in particular, which was meant to prevent environmental crimes, has instead made land grabbing easier than ever.
- This article was originally published in Portuguese by The Intercept Brasil and is part of the Ladrões de Floresta (Forest Thieves) project, which investigates the appropriation of public land inside the Amazon and is funded by the Pulitzer Center’s Rainforest Investigations Network.

Can a new regional pact protect the Amazon from environmental crime? (commentary)
- Police, prosecutors, money-laundering experts and others convened last week in Brazil to tackle drug and environmental crimes like illegal mining and logging that are growing in scale across the Amazon.
- The group resolved to move law enforcement beyond occasional raids and periodic destruction of machinery used by organized crime syndicates and toward a concerted and pan-Amazonian push for local, regional and global cooperation on law enforcement.
- While acknowledging the increasing scale of these crimes, participants were optimistic: “We are living in a new moment to fight environmental crime and protect the Amazon,” said the newly appointed director for Amazon environmental crime with Brazil’s federal police, for example.
- This post is a commentary. The views expressed are those of the authors, not necessarily of Mongabay.

Peru congress debates stripping isolated Indigenous people of land and protections
- A new bill under debate in Peru’s congress seeks to reevaluate the existence of every Indigenous reserve for isolated peoples to determine whether to keep them or scrap them completely.
- The bill would shift decision-making power into the hands of regional governments and include economic interests in the evaluation process, changes which human rights and environmental experts call legally flawed and a human rights violation.
- Some regional governments and companies backing the proposed bill have questioned studies confirming the existence of isolated peoples and seek to place oil exploitation, logging and economic development as a priority.
- In the event of the bill’s approval, all open proceedings relating to Indigenous reserves and Indigenous peoples in isolation would be suspended.

Make it local: Deforestation link to less Amazon rainfall tips activism shift
- A new study supports mounting evidence that deforestation in the Amazon Rainforest correlates with a reduction in regional rainfall.
- Experts say this research reinforces the findings of other studies that claim the Amazon is leaning toward its “tipping point” and the southern regions are gradually becoming drier.
- Environmentalists see this research as an opportunity to reshape conservation activism and policy towards local communities.

In Brazil, criminals dismantle one of the best-preserved swaths of the Amazon
- The Terra do Meio Ecological Station spans 3.37 million hectares (8.33 million acres) in the Brazilian Amazonian state of Pará and is home to hundreds of wildlife species, including many threatened with extinction.
- Despite its protected status, Terra do Meio has come under growing pressure, with data showing deforestation doubling in 2022, reaching 4,300 hectares (nearly 11,000 acres).
- Environmentalists say the destruction within Terra do Meio is being driven by illegal loggers, miners and land speculators — and they fear a new road slicing through the reserve could usher in more destruction.
- Advocates are placing their hopes in Brazil’s new president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who has promised to crack down on invasions into protected reserves and rein in sky-high deforestation rates.

The $20m flip: The story of the largest land grab in the Brazilian Amazon
- This is the story of how three individual landowners engineered the single-largest instance of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon.
- The clearing of 6,469 hectares (or 15,985 acres) of forest in the southern part of Pará state could earn them nearly $20 million in profit at current land prices.
- The case is emblematic of the spate of land grabs targeting unallocated public lands throughout the Amazon, where speculators clear and burn the vegetation, then sell the empty land for soy farms, or plant grass and sell it for cattle ranching.
- This article was originally published in Portuguese by The Intercept Brasil and is part of the Ladrões de Floresta (Forest Thieves) project, which investigates the appropriation of public land inside the Amazon and is funded by the Pulitzer Center’s Rainforest Investigations Network.

Brazil-U.S. cooperation is key for global forest conservation (commentary)
- On Friday, Brazilian President Lula visits President Biden in Washington, D.C., to discuss topics including the U.S. joining the multilateral Amazon Fund, aimed at fighting deforestation in Brazil: a commitment could be announced during the meeting.
- In the early 2000s, then President Lula’s Brazil slowed Amazon deforestation, designating 60 million acres of new protected areas and Indigenous territories, mounting anti-deforestation law enforcement operations, and cutting off farm credit to landowners who leveled forests illegally.
- The U.S. joining the Amazon Fund would be very important, but a genuine partnership is about more than money, a new op-ed argues: “The U.S. and Brazil should share their cutting-edge science, technology and data to monitor forests. Both sides have world-class space agencies and innovations to track and manage land use,” they write.
- This post is a commentary. The views expressed are those of the authors, not necessarily of Mongabay.

Lula’s government must go far beyond undoing Bolsonaro policies on Amazon forest & Indigenous rights (commentary)
- Despite the hope embodied in Brazil’s new president, the protection of Indigenous peoples and reducing deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon still face an uphill struggle.
- “To ensure continued protection for Brazil’s environment and Indigenous communities, Lula and his government institutions need to go beyond merely undoing Bolsonaro’s previous policies. They must expand the work that they do,” the authors of a new op-ed argue.
- This post is a commentary. The views expressed are those of the authors, not necessarily of Mongabay.

From deforestation to restoration: Policy plots path to Amazon recovery
- Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Brazil’s new president, took office and promised to halt deforestation and to restore degraded land but plans to regenerate deforested areas remain unclear.
- The Science Panel for the Amazon at the COP27 climate summit provided the scientific basis to guide debates and decisions around the large-scale recovery of deforested and degraded areas.
- The most significant opportunity for large-scale and low-cost restoration is concentrated in public forests, protected areas and Indigenous lands that have suffered recent degradation.
- For areas with high levels of degradation, especially on private lands, productive restoration models capable of providing sustainable economic development are the main bet.

Mongabay’s top Amazon stories from 2022
- Violence against activists and Indigenous people in the Amazon has made world headlines, with little progress on tackling impunity.
- The victory of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Brazil’s presidential race and a more prominent role in the government for Indigenous representatives have brought more hope around slashing deforestation and preventing the Amazon from reaching a point of no return.
- Infrastructure and mining projects have continued sprouting across the Amazon basin, threatening the livelihoods of Indigenous people and driving more forest loss.
- Deforestation rates in Brazil dropped by about 11% in 2022, but an overview of President Jair Bolsonaro’s term shows the worst forest loss in decades.

Fighting wildlife trafficking in Peru: Q&A with prosecutor Alberto Caraza
- The department of Loreto, in northeast Peru, shares a nearly uninhabited border with Ecuador, Colombia and Brazil, making it ideal for illegal logging and wildlife trafficking.
- A law passed in November allows prosecutors to treat wildlife traffickers as organized crime groups with harsher sentences.
- Loreto prosecutor Alberto Yusen Caraza Atoche, who specializes in environmental crime, spoke to Mongabay about protecting the department’s vast Amazonian rainforest, and how Peru’s recent political upheaval impacts that work.

Brazil’s new environmental future under Lula: Q&A with Marina Silva
- Considered for Brazil’s Ministry of the Environment, environmentalist Marina Silva says in an interview with Mongabay that the election of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva means a new cycle of prosperity for the country, “when it will be possible to make the transition to a new development model that is capable of fighting inequality with democracy and sustainability.”
- “Part of the agribusiness sector is realizing that this practice by Bolsonaro is bad for business,” the congresswoman-elect said about the possibility of reconciling the environmental agenda and the demands of agribusiness.
- Silva stressed that the current challenges are much greater than those faced when she was a member of Lula’s first administration in 2003: “We are not going to become sustainable in the blink of an eye. It’s a transition.”

Bolsonaro loses election but finds big support in Amazon Arc of Deforestation
- In a close runoff, incumbent Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro was defeated in his reelection bid against former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
- Bolsonaro, however, won in eight of the 10 Brazilian municipalities with the biggest deforestation rates in the Amazon forest last year.
- Bolsonaro won in the majority of the 256 municipalities in the Arc of Deforestation, which accounts for about 75% of the deforestation in the Amazon, as well as in Novo Progresso, in Pará, where ranchers, loggers and land-grabbers orchestrated a significant burning of deforested areas in 2019.
- Historical, economic, social and religious elements explain the preference for Bolsonaro in a swath of Brazilian territory where people have been encouraged to cut the forest down.

First-ever regional court case involving rights of uncontacted peoples awaits verdict
- The Inter-American Court of Human rights, one of three regional human rights tribunals, is evaluating the first-ever case concerning the rights of Indigenous communities in voluntary isolation, also known as uncontacted tribes.
- At the base of Ecuador’s case are three massacres against the Tagaeri and Taromenane people, which occurred in 2003, 2006, and 2013. Some members of the Waorani nation have been accused of perpetrating at least two of these massacres.
- Logging and extraction in the forest put pressure on the rainforest and resources, increasing violent conflict between communities, say the lawyers representing the uncontacted peoples. The outcome of the case could set a major legal precedent for other communities in voluntary isolation across the Amazon.
- The state insists that it has done what it could to support human rights in the region and that the oil industry nor the state is a cause of violent attacks between communities.

Brazil may fail Paris Agreement targets by 137% if Bolsonaro stays in office
- Brazil could fail greenhouse gas emissions targets set in the Paris Climate Agreement by 137% in 2030 if President Jair Bolsonaro’s environmental policies continue, according to a new study.
- Up to 23% of the Brazilian Amazon could be deforested, turning much of the region into a savanna if the current trend isn’t reversed.
- With Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, heading for a runoff against Bolsonaro in late October, specialists say the results could represent the beginning of a new era for environmental policy, but it would take an intense mobilization of civil society for a significant change.

Conservatives tighten grip on Brazil Congress, hampering environmental agenda
- Brazilians elected a more conservative Congress in the Oct. 2 ballot, with supporters of President Jair Bolsonaro and the agribusiness lobby winning seats in both the lower and upper houses.
- Experts say that if former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva wins the runoff presidential vote on Oct. 30, he could curtail some of the pressure from the agribusiness caucus and reverse the past four years of destructive policies for the Amazon.
- Two Indigenous women and former environment minister Marina Silva are expected to lead the opposition against the agribusiness, mining and logging agenda in Congress, after winning seats in the lower house.

The Amazon will reach tipping point if current trend of deforestation continues
- A report by the Amazon Network of Georeferenced Socio-Environmental Information (RAISG) claims that 26% of Amazon forests have transformed irreversibly and show high levels of degradation.
- The savannization of the Amazon is already visible in Brazil and Bolivia, while Ecuador, Colombia and Peru seem to be heading in the same direction.
- The report also seeks to make visible the role of Indigenous peoples in protecting the Amazon, and to ensure that Indigenous people are at the center of the fight against climate change.

Brazil 2022: Election, environment and the future of the Amazon
- Prior to the Oct. 2 Brazilian election, Mongabay aims to ensure the public has access to factual information on environmental issues in the country.
- Mongabay’s efforts include a year long joint investigation with Earthsight, which has uncovered new evidence of corruption and illegality used by Brazil’s largest flooring exporter, Indusparquet, and its suppliers.
- Mongabay has also produced a collection of Twitter threads that examine the interplay between Brazil’s elected officials — mainly the Bolsonaro administration — the environment and Indigenous peoples.

In the Amazon, Bolsonaro’s far right may retain power even if Lula wins
- While polls show former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva ahead in the upcoming elections, far-right ideology persists in the Amazon region.
- Bolsonaro’s allies lead the polls for governor in five of the nine Amazon states: Acre, Mato Grosso, Rondônia, Roraima and Amazonas.
- In all Amazonian states, polls indicate that the two presidential candidates are tied, in contrast to national polls.
- Experts say that even if most states choose right-wing governors, the federal government will determine the future of the Amazon rainforest.

Bolsonaro trails in polls, but his base in Congress looks likely to persist
- With Brazil’s presidential election scheduled for Oct. 2, environmental activists have expressed hope that a turning point in favor of nature could be just weeks away if Jair Bolsonaro loses.
- But two-thirds of the current lower house of Congress voted for anti-environmental bills, and experts predict that the profile of the lawmakers will remain right-wing and pro-agribusiness.
- Deforestation in the Amazon rose to its highest levels in 10 years under Bolsonaro, who vowed to open up the rainforest to agriculture and mining.
- However, experts say a greener agenda could be possible depending on who is appointed the next lower and upper house presidents, a decision that will be made early next year.

Illegal logging and trade in fine wood threaten Wampis communities in the Peruvian Amazon
- More than 20,000 board feet of protected forest species, such as cedar and mahogany, are being lost from forests inhabited by Wampis communities every month, according to estimates by community leaders.
- The extraction and sale of these fine woods have increased since the start of 2022 after two Wampis communities obtained permits for the use of certain forest resources.
- According to Wampis leaders, since the issuing of the permits to the two communities, loggers have been able to cut down and transport cedar and mahogany wood, despite these trees being protected species.

Crimes against the Amazon reverberate across Brazil, analysis shows
- Crimes associated with illegal logging, mining and other illicit activities in the Brazilian Amazon are being felt in 24 of Brazil’s 27 states, a new report shows.
- Records of more than 300 Federal Police operations between 2016 and 2021 show that crimes such as tax evasion, money laundering, corruption and wildlife trafficking are reverberating far beyond the rainforest.
- Deforestation is at the center of the criminal economy in the Amazon, driving four main illegal activities: logging, mining, occupation of public lands, and environmental violations associated with agriculture.
- Nearly half of the police operations investigated crimes that occurred in protected areas in the Amazon, including 37 Indigenous territories.

Bolsonaro agenda gets a lift from dominance of ‘new right’ in Congress
- A ranking of federal lawmakers in Brazil based on their legislative and voting records has highlighted the rise of a “new right” that’s firmly behind President Jair Bolsonaro’s agenda of rolling back environmental and Indigenous protections.
- The Ruralômetro scale, developed by investigative news outlet Repórter Brasil, shows at least 351 out of 513 members of the Chamber of Deputies scored unfavorably on socioenvironmental issues.
- Among the legislation they helped draft or voted in favor of include those that weaken environmental law enforcement, favor predatory economic activities, undermine labor protections, hamper access to social benefits, and hinder agrarian reform.
- Joênia Wapichana, the first Indigenous woman elected to the Chamber of Deputies, said the strengthening of this “ruralist” base has forced environmentalists on the defensive, without much room to advance their own bills.

In Brazil, an Indigenous land defender’s unsolved killing is the deadly norm
- Two years after the death of Indigenous land defender Ari Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau in Brazil’s Amazonian state of Rondônia, questions about who killed him and why remain unanswered.
- Perpetrators of crimes against environmental activists are rarely brought to justice in the country, with a government report showing zero convictions for the 35 people killed in incidents of rural violence in 2021 — about a third of them in Rondônia.
- Indigenous groups and environmental activists in Rondônia say they fear for their lives as the criminal gangs that covet the Amazon’s rich resources act with impunity in threatening defenders and invading protected lands.
- Activists and experts point to a combination of the government’s anti-Indigenous rhetoric and the undermining of environmental agencies as helping incite the current surge of invasions and violence against land defenders in Rondônia and the wider Brazilian Amazon.

Consumer countries mull best approach to end deforestation abroad
- Major global consumers like the U.K., the U.S. and the EU are debating how best to reduce the amount of tropical deforestation resulting from the production of the commodities they import.
- Some experts argue that laws should restrict any products tinged with deforestation, while others say regulations should allow in imports that come from areas that were deforested legally in the countries in which they were produced.
- The debate involves questions around sovereignty, equality, and, ultimately, what strategy will best address the urgent need to stem the loss of some of the world’s most important repositories of carbon and biodiversity.

A new index measures the human impacts on Amazon waters
- Based on the best scientific data available, the unprecedented Amazon Water Impact Index draws together monitoring and research data to identify the most vulnerable areas of the Brazilian Amazon.
- According to the index, 20% of the 11,216 Brazilian Amazon micro basins have an impact considered high, very high or extreme; half of these watersheds are affected by hydroelectric plants.
- The same index points out that 323 of the 385 Indigenous Lands in the Brazilian Amazon face a medium to low impact, which demonstrates the fundamental role of these areas in protecting the aquatic ecosystems of the Amazon.
- The Amazon River Basin covers 7 million square kilometers (2.7 million square miles) and contains 20% of all freshwater on the Earth’s surface; still, little is known about the impacts of increased human activity on aquatic ecosystems.

‘Giving up’: Amazon is losing its resilience under human pressure, study shows
- The Amazon Rainforest is losing its ability to bounce back from repeated disturbances, according to a new study.
- Researchers found that three-quarters of the Amazon has lost some resilience, or ability to regain biomass after disturbance. This loss of resilience is especially high in regions close to human activity and with less rainfall.
- As the forest is slashed, burned and degraded, it’s left with less vegetation, which means less evapotranspiration, leading to less rain. And less rain leads to further droughts, fires, tree death and forest degradation — a feedback loop of destruction and loss of resilience.
- The lead author describes the findings as “depressing” but also says that “having an early warning of this gives us a chance to do something about it … Rather than focusing on the trajectory the Amazon is on, we can instead try and change it.”

Chemical defoliants sprayed on Amazon rainforest to facilitate deforestation in Brazil
- Chemicals created to kill agricultural pests are being sprayed by aircraft into native forest areas.
- Glyphosate and 2,4-D, among others, cause the trees to defoliate, and end up weakened or dead in a process that takes months. Next criminals remove the remaining trees more easily and drop grass seeds by aircraft, consolidating deforestation.
- Brazil’s environmental agency, IBAMA, discovered that in addition to land grabbers, cattle ranchers use the method in order to circumvent forest monitoring efforts.

Mongabay’s top Amazon stories from 2021
- The world’s largest rainforest continued to come under pressure in 2021, due largely to the policies of Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro.
- Deforestation rates hit a 15-year-high, while fires flared up again, combining to turn Brazil’s portion of the Amazon into a net carbon source for the first time ever.
- The rainforest as a whole remains a net carbon sink, thanks to conservation areas and Indigenous territories, where deforestation rates remained low.
- Indigenous communities continued to be hit by a barrage of outside pressure, from COVID-19 to illegal miners and land grabbers, while community members living in Brazil’s cities dealt with persistent prejudice.

Exports of threatened species’ timber boomed under Bolsonaro, probe finds
- An investigation begun in May this year by the Brazilian Federal Police highlighted “a major scheme facilitating the smuggling of rainforest products.”
- Between February 2020 and May 2021, close to 100,000 metric tons of wood was exported to the United States, France, Japan, Germany and Belgium, an eighth of which came from rainforest species considered threatened by the Brazilian Forestry Service (SFB).
- These details have been unearthed in an unprecedented report by Brazilian investigative journalism outlet Agência Pública working with the Latin American Center for Investigative Journalism (CLIP).
- The fallout of the police investigation has already seen Brazil’s environment minister resign and other officials and timber companies come under scrutiny.

Mongabay reporter sued in what appears to be a pattern of legal intimidation by Peruvian cacao company
- A Peruvian cacao company that sued a Mongabay Latam writer for reporting on its deforestation in the Amazon has also targeted others in what lawyers said appears to be a pattern of intimidation.
- Tamshi, formerly Cacao del Perú Norte SAC, had its lawsuit against Mongabay Latam’s Yvette Sierra Praeli thrown out by a court in November.
- A separate lawsuit against four environment ministry officials, including the one who led the prosecution of the company, has also been dropped, although it may still be appealed.
- In a third lawsuit, environmental activist Lucila Pautrat, who documented farmers’ allegations against Tamshi, was handed a two-year suspended sentence and fine, but is appealing the decision.

Betty Rubio, the tech-savvy Kichwa leader defending threatened territory
- In 2018, Betty Rubio became the first woman president of her region’s Indigenous federation, a role in which she faces threats from narcotrafficking, logging and illegal mining.
- The Kichwa leader says her grandfather warned her about the risks of deforestation, so today she’s participating in an environmental monitoring project to detect illegal activities in the Amazon.
- In Peru, where only 4% of presidencies in Indigenous communities are held by women, Betty tries to encourage her female colleagues to take leading positions in their organizations.

Brazil leads Amazon in forest loss this year, Indigenous and protected areas hold out
- Satellite imagery brings us a first look at this year’s deforestation hotspots, areas where forest cover was lost in high densities across the Amazon, amounting to more than 860,000 hectares (2.1 million acres).
- The majority of deforestation (76%) occurred in Brazil and was clustered around roads, according to a recent report from Amazon Conservation’s Monitoring of the Andean Amazon Project (MAAP); many of the areas deforested this year in Brazil have also burned.
- In Colombia, deforestation hotspots this year were in and around numerous protected areas, including Tinigua and Chiribiquete national parks, as well as Indigenous reserves, particularly Yari-Yaguara II and Nukak Maku; in Peru, rice farming and a new Mennonite colony drove recent deforestation.
- Of primary forests loss across the western Amazon between 2017 and 2020, three-quarters were outside protected areas and Indigenous territories, highlighting the importance of these key land use designations for safeguarding the remaining Amazon rainforest.

Illegal logging reaches Amazon’s untouched core, ‘terrifying’ research shows
- Satellite imagery shows that logging activity is spreading from peripheral areas of the Amazon toward the rainforest’s core, according to groundbreaking research.
- The satellite-based mapping of seven of Brazil’s nine Amazonian states showed a “terrifying” pattern of logging advance that cleared an area three times the size of the city of São Paulo between August 2019 and July 2020 alone.
- At the state level, lack of transparency in logging data makes it impossible to calculate how much of the timber production is illegal, experts say.
- Evidence of cutting in Indigenous reserves and conservation units — where logging is prohibited — make clear that illegal logging accounts for much of the activity, according to the report.

As illegal logging route in Peru nears Brazil, Indigenous groups warn of calamity
- Loggers are illegally reopening an abandoned road in Peru’s Ucayali region, threatening the dozens of Indigenous territories along the country’s border with Brazil, activists say.
- The UC-105 road reportedly cut through the Sawawo Indigenous Reserve in Peru last month, stopping just 11 kilometers (less than 7 miles) from the Brazilian border.
- The project is not authorized by Peru’s government but has forged ahead anyway, with no environmental impact studies or consultation with communities, Indigenous leaders say.
- Critics of the road say it will bring a surge in deforestation, drug trafficking and river degradation for the region’s Indigenous communities, who have been fighting off the loggers for decades and are now demanding authorities act to stop the advance of the road.

‘Join us for the Amazon,’ Indigenous leaders tell IUCN in push for protection
- At the IUCN World Conservation Congress in Marseille, France, Indigenous leaders and conservationists called for support of their effort to protect 80% of the Amazon Basin by 2025.
- Scientists say the Amazon region has already lost 17% of its forest cover and that an additional 17% has been degraded by forest loss, fragmentation, wildfires and drought, and that these pressures are pushing the rainforest toward a critical tipping point.
- While the recognition of Indigenous land rights would be a critical first step, experts say that Indigenous communities need support in enforcing their land rights and their efforts to defend the Amazon.
- A motion that would support area-based conservation targets with the view to protecting at least 80% of the Amazon by 2025 was eventually approved by the IUCN World Conservation Congress.

Planned Brazil-Peru highway threatens one of Earth’s most biodiverse places
- Serra do Divisor National Park on Brazil’s border with Peru is home to numerous endemic animals and more than a thousand plant species, but faces a double threat from a planned highway and a bid to downgrade its protected status.
- The downgrade from national park to “environmental protection area” would paradoxically open up this Andean-Amazon transition region to deforestation, cattle ranching, and mining — activities that are currently prohibited in the park.
- The highway project, meant to give Acre another land route to the Pacific via Peru, has been embraced by the government of President Jair Bolsonaro, which has already taken the first steps toward its construction.
- Indigenous and river community leaders say they have not been consulted about the highway, as required by law, and have not been told about the proposed downgrade of the park, both of which they warn will have negative socioenvironmental impacts.

Timber troubles fell Ricardo Salles, Brazil’s environment minister
- Three weeks after being named in a second probe into alleged illegal exports of Amazon timber and facing growing opposition, Brazil’s controversial environment minister, Ricardo Salles, was ousted on June 23 “upon request,” as announced in the country’s official gazette.
- Despite his controversial remarks and heavily criticized policies that fueled deforestation rates in the Amazon, Salles enjoyed relative stability in the government, until a month ago when the legal troubles flared up.
- In a press conference in Brasília, Salles said he was resigning to allow the facilitation of the country’s environmental negotiations on the international stage and in the national agenda, which will require Brazil to “have a strong union of interests.”
- Salles has been replaced by Joaquim Alves Pereira Leite, who has been in the environment ministry since 2019 and held a board seat for more than 20 years at an agribusiness lobbying institute. While some politicians have welcomed his appointment, others have called for a shift in Brazil’s environmental policies.

Brazil’s environment minister faces second probe linked to illegal timber
- Brazil’s highest court has authorized an investigation into alleged obstruction of justice by Environment Minister Ricardo Salles, who has admitted to siding with suspected illegal loggers targeted in a police operation.
- Following the country’s biggest ever bust of illegal timber in March, Salles traveled to the site in the Amazon and declared on social media accounts that he had personally checked the origin of a sample of the wood and found it was not of illegal origin, despite the police’s evidence to the contrary.
- The new investigation into Salles comes two weeks after the Federal Police began a probe into allegations that the minister was involved in exports of illegal timber to the U.S. and Europe.
- Salles’s term as environment minister has been marked by skyrocketing deforestation rates, a record-high number of rural land conflicts, the gutting of environmental regulators, and an increase in invasions and attacks on Indigenous lands.

Science refutes United Cacao’s claim it didn’t deforest Peruvian Amazon
- Years of satellite imagery and analysis reveals that United Cacao, a company once publicly traded on the London Stock Exchange, deforested nearly 2,000 hectares (about 5,000 acres) of primary forest in the Peruvian Amazon.
- The evidence refutes the company’s narrative that farmers had degraded the land before it arrived.
- The deforestation, as well as other legal violations, have led to sanctions against a successor to United Cacao’s Peruvian subsidiary, now called Tamshi SAC.
- But Tamshi is now claiming that Mongabay Latam improperly used the term “deforestation” and has sued for defamation.

‘Amazônia must live on’: Photographer Sebastião Salgado returns home with his new book
- Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado traveled the Amazon for six years to capture nature and the people of the world’s largest rainforest, now depicted in his new book, Amazônia.
- Salgado, one of the most respected documentary photographers in the world, returned to the region four decades after gaining fame shooting the Serra Pelada gold mine and its thousands of mud-covered diggers.
- The book is also a cry for preservation of what remains of the Amazon: “My wish … is that in 50 years’ time this book will not resemble a record of a lost world,” he says.

Brazil’s environment minister investigated for alleged illegal timber sales
- A week after Brazil’s Lower House of Congress approved a bill that exempts environmental impact assessments and licensing for development projects, Brazil’s environment minister, Ricardo Salles, has been named in a probe for alleged illegal exports of Amazon timber, following a Federal Supreme Court ruling on May 19.
- The ruling cites “extremely atypical financial transactions” totaling $2.7 million involving a law firm where Salles is one of the stakeholders.
- The federal police carried out raids in various ministry offices in the early hours of May 19, which led to the suspension of 10 high-ranking environmental officials, including Eduardo Bim, the head of the IBAMA, the country’s environmental agency.
- Salles denied any wrongdoing and called the operation “exaggerated” and “unnecessary” in a press conference on May 19.

Karipuna people sue Brazil government for alleged complicity in land grabs
- Leaders of the Karipuna Indigenous group in Brazil are suing the government for what they say is complicity in the continued invasion and theft of their land.
- Findings by Greenpeace and the Catholic Church-affiliated Indigenous Missionary Council (CIMI) show 31 land claims overlapping onto the Karipuna Indigenous Reserve, while 7% of the area has already been deforested or destroyed.
- The Karipuna Indigenous, who rebuilt their population to around 60 in the last few decades from just eight members who survived mass deaths by disease that followed their forced contact with the outside world in the 1970s, are seeking damages of $8.2 million, the right to permanent protection, and the cancellation of all outsider land claims to their territory.
- Land grabbing has been fueled by the political rhetoric and action of President Jair Bolsonaro and his allies, who are seeking to drastically reduce protected areas in the Amazon and weaken environmental protections, activists and experts say.

‘Zero illegal deforestation’ – One more Bolsonaro distortion (commentary)
- At U.S. President Joe Biden’s virtual climate summit on Earth Day, 22 April, Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro promised “zero illegal deforestation by 2030.”
- “Zero illegal deforestation” can be achieved in two ways: by stopping deforestation, and by legalizing the deforestation that is taking place. The second path is in full swing.
- A series of laws facilitating “land grabbing” (which in Brazil means large-scale illegal appropriation of government land) is being fast-tracked in the National Congress with support from Bolsonaro.
- Once grabbed land is legalized, the deforestation on it can be “amnestied” and subsequent deforestation legally permitted. The end result is more deforestation. All deforestation, legal or not, causes climate change. This post is a commentary. The views expressed are those of the author, not necessarily Mongabay.

Criticizing Brazil over Amazon conservation will likely backfire (commentary)
- Although Brazilians share a concern for the Amazon, and even hosted the groundbreaking Earth Summit in 1992, polls show less consensus on who is responsible for Amazon deforestation, who is best addressing this problem, or the role of foreign actors.
- When activists or leaders from abroad single out Brazil and its president as bad actors on the environment, they risk potential backlash from Brazilians who often view such attacks as a double standard.
- The heavy-handed tone that the Biden Administration has adopted may create unfortunate roadblocks to the progress which is possible, argue two authors from the Amazon Environmental Research Institute and the University of São Paulo.
- This article is a commentary. The views expressed are those of the authors, not necessarily Mongabay.

Brazilian woman threatened by Amazon loggers wins global human rights award
- Rural community leader Osvalinda Alves Pereira is the first Brazilian to receive the Edelstam Prize, a Swedish award given to human rights defenders. She was honored this November for her brave stand against illegal loggers and for her defense of the Amazon agrarian reform community of Areia in Pará state.
- Illegal loggers there have repeatedly threatened Osvalinda and her husband with violence, forcing them out of their community and into urban safe houses. Now the couple has returned to their rural home; threats to Osvalinda and her community have resumed since she received the Edelstam Prize.
- Illegal deforestation, especially the illegal export of rare and valuable Amazon woods, has been strongly aided by the deregulatory policies of Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, according to critics, who also say that the president’s incendiary rhetoric is emboldening illegal loggers and others to violence.
- Still threatened by logging militias in Amazonia, Osvalinda received the award just a week after President Bolsonaro in a speech tried to shift responsibility for the policing of Amazon illegal deforestation away from Brazil and onto its foreign trading partners who are importing timber from the South American nation.

Planned road to bisect pristine, biodiverse Brazilian Amazon national park
- The BR-364 highway stretches for 4,325 kilometers across Brazil, ending in Acre state. Now authorities, backed by Acre’s state government and Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, want to extend it with a 152-kilometer branch road through Serra do Divisor National Park, near demarcated Indigenous reserves, and to the Peru border.
- Meanwhile, the Brazilian Congress is moving a bill forward to fast track the branch road’s approval by degrading the conservation status of the national park and reclassifying it as an APA, an Área de Proteção Ambiental, which would allow timber harvesting, ranching, agriculture and mining.
- Environmentalists and Indigenous communities warn that the planned road and the reduction in protections for Serra do Divisor National Park would open up the conservation unit and a pristine portion of the Brazilian Amazon, providing access to loggers, cattle ranchers and landgrabbers.
- Though the road is still not approved, local sources say as much as 30 kilometers of forest along the route have already been cleared to the park’s border. “With each day, each year that passes, the deforestation advances further. The destruction of humans is relentless… And for us, it’s really difficult to witness,” said one Indigenous leader.

2020 fires endangering uncontacted Amazon Indigenous groups
- Amazon fires this year are seriously threatening Indigenous territories in which isolated uncontacted Indigenous groups make their homes. Brazil has an estimated 100+ isolated Indigenous groups living within its borders, more than any other Amazonian nation.
- Particularly threatened by fires in 2020 are the isolated Ãwa people who live on Bananal Island in Tocantins state; the uncontacted Awá inhabiting the Arariboia Indigenous Reserve in Maranhão state; and uncontacted groups in the Uru Eu Wau Wau Indigenous territory in Rondônia and Ituna Itatá Indigenous territory in Pará, the Brazilian state with the highest deforestation and land conflicts rates.
- All of these Indigenous territories are under intense pressure from land grabbers, illegal loggers and ranchers, with many of this year’s fires thought to have been set intentionally as a means of converting protected rainforest to pasture and cropland.
- Meanwhile, the Jair Bolsonaro government has hobbled IBAMA, Brazil’s environmental agency, defunding it and preventing it from fighting fires, causing one critic to accuse the administration of having “waged war against Indigenous peoples” and of “an ongoing genocide.”

Forest degradation outpaces deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon: Study
- Brazilian Amazon deforestation rates have declined from, and stayed below, their 2003 peak, despite recent increases. However, this decline was offset by a trend of increased forest degradation, according to an analysis of 23 years of satellite data. By 2014, the rate of degradation overtook deforestation, driven by increases in logging and understory burning.
- During the 1992-2014 study period, 337,427 square kilometers suffered a loss of vegetation, compared to 308,311 square kilometers completely cleared, a finding that has serious implications for global greenhouse gas emissions and biodiversity loss.
- Forest degradation has been connected to outbreaks of infectious diseases as a result of increased contact between humans and displaced wildlife. Degradation can also facilitate the emergence of new diseases and some experts warn that the Amazon could be the source of the next pandemic.
- These findings could have major implications for Brazilian national commitments to the Paris Climate Agreement, as well as international agreements and initiatives such as the Aichi Biodiversity Targets and REDD+, which rely on forest degradation monitoring.

In the Amazon, women are key to forest conservation
- Women are a driving force in the movement to protect the Amazon rainforest, the largest rainforest in the world.
- Joining us on this episode of the Mongabay Newscast is environmental journalist Sarah Sax, who recently wrote about the Women Warriors of the Forest, an all-female Indigenous group that is employing new tactics and building new alliances to protect the forests they call home.
- We also interview Dr. Dolors Armenteras, who is a pioneer in the use of remote sensing to monitor Amazon forests and biodiversity, and has been named one of the most influential scientists studying forest fires.
- Despite her pedigree, Armenteras has faced discrimination as a woman scientist, and discusses how she is supporting the next generation of women scientists to help them overcome such biases.

Bleak milestone: 500 major fires detected in Brazilian Amazon this year
- 516 major fires, most of them illegal, covering 376,416 hectares (912,863 acres) were detected between May 28 and August 25, 2020, with the Amazon fire season not even half over, and expected to run at least through September.
- Of those fires, 12% were within intact forests, while the rest were in recently deforested areas where the cut trees were allowed to dry out before being lit on fire to convert the former rainforest to cattle pasture and croplands.
- Most of these fires were illegal, being in direct defiance of a total Amazon fire ban issued by Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro on July 15, 2020.
- IBAMA, Brazil’s environmental agency, which annually fought Amazon fires in the past, has a greatly diminished role this year, having largely been defunded by the Bolsonaro administration. Fire suppression this year falls to the Brazilian Army, which has little experience controlling Amazon blazes.

Peru gov’t needs to act on COVID-19 in Amazon Indigenous cases, NGOs say
- A group of organizations has sent a letter to Peruvian President Martín Vizcarra asking for urgent support for Indigenous communities, which have been overlooked during the COVID-19 crisis, according to activists.
- The demands in the letter include the deliverance of food, medicine and medical supplies, as well as the cessation of extractive activities that are carrying the virus into traditional territories.
- It’s estimated that 125 Indigenous people have died from COVID-19 in the Ucayali region of the Amazon since the start of the pandemic. However, it’s difficult to get accurate numbers due to a lack of testing.

More than 260 major, mostly illegal Amazon fires detected since late May
- The Amazon fire season is building momentum, with 227 fires covering nearly 128,000 hectares, reported between May 28 and August 10. By today, that number rose to 266 fires.
- More than 220 of the May 28 to June 10 fires occurred in Brazil, with just six in Bolivia, and one in Peru. 95% of the Brazilian fires were illegal and in violation of the nation’s 120-day ban on fires. Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro has called the 2020 reports of deforestation and fires a “lie.”
- Most Amazon blazes are set, with land grabbers, ranchers and farmers using fire as a deforestation tool, and as a means of converting rainforest to pasture and croplands.
- Fourteen of the Brazilian fires were within protected areas. The most heavily impacted of these were Jamanxim and Altamira national forests in Pará state — areas long notorious for criminal land grabbing.

New Indigenous storytelling platform brings community perspectives to the world
- A new Indigenous geostorytelling platform, Tribal Stories, launched on Aug. 9, the International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples.
- The launch of the platform, by Netherlands-based nonprofit People’s Planet Project (PPP), featured films created by Indigenous filmmakers from the A’i Cofan community in Ecuador and the Kīsêdjê community in Brazil.
- PPP supports filmmaking and the use of geospatial data for storytelling and legal advocacy work.

Illegal farms on indigenous lands get whitewashed under Bolsonaro administration
- An exclusive study shows that 114 properties have been certified inside indigenous territories awaiting demarcation in the Brazilian Amazon, spurred in large part by a recent statute that leaves these reserves unprotected from such illegal land grabs.
- The certified lands span more than 250,000 hectares (620,000 acres) inside indigenous territories, some of them authorized before FUNAI, the agency for indigenous affairs, issued the statute allowing registry on unratified lands.
- Landowners have already registered claims for more than 2,000 private properties in indigenous areas inside the Amazon, including areas that are home to isolated peoples.
- Indigenous groups, civil society organizations, the Federal Public Prosecutor’s Office and state prosecutors have denounced the statute and are challenging it in various courts.

Brazilian government taken to court for assault on environment, climate
- The Bolsonaro government has waged an aggressive campaign to negate Brazil’s environmental laws and de-tooth its environmental protection agencies — even as deforestation rates have reached a ten year high and violence by land grabbers and illegal loggers against indigenous and traditional peoples has grown rapidly.
- In an attempt to stall the systematic deregulation, defunding and firings, socio-environmental NGOs, public prosecutors and opposition political parties have launched three lawsuits, targeting actions taken by Environment Minister Ricardo Salles and Eduardo Bim, president of IBAMA, the country’s environmental agency.
- The first suit aims to annul a recent measure signed by Bim, enabling illegally harvested Brazilian timber to be exported more easily to the U.S., EU and elsewhere. Evidence allegedly demonstrates a cozy and corrupt relationship between Bim and the forestry industry.
- The second and third suits address Amazon deforestation (demanding reactivation of the administration of the R$1.5 billion Amazon Fund) and climate change (requiring the reinstatement of administration of the R$8.5 million Climate Fund). Both these effective programs have been derailed by the Bolsonaro government.

A bid to legitimize invasions of Brazil’s indigenous lands faces a court challenge
- In April, Brazil’s indigenous affairs agency FUNAI authorized the registration and sale of land on unratified or unregistered indigenous territories, potentially affecting 237 reserves in 24 states.
- Regulation No. 9, as it’s known, affects at least 9.8 million hectares (24 million acres), rendering an area the size of Iceland open to real estate transactions.
- Amazonas is the state with the most threatened reserves — a total of 30 in the sights of land grabbers, landed estate owners, and oil and gas companies — followed by Mato Grosso do Sul, where indigenous communities already live in dire conditions of extreme poverty, hunger and violence.
- FUNAI’s regulation has already withstood a court challenge on a technicality, but now faces a new bid for annulment by the state attorney general of Mato Grosso, who calls it a dereliction of FUNAI’s own mission.

Amazon deforestation gig economy booms despite COVID-19 (Photo Essay)
- Illegal deforestation has become an omnipresent part of economic activity in the Brazilian Amazon. Mongabay went to Rondônia state to meet some of the loggers who benefit from the dodgy market, then traces the path of logs going to “informal” sawmills, moved by river to ports, maybe to become decking in the U.S. or EU.
- Some experts hoped that COVID-19 would slow Amazon deforestation, but early indications are that the reverse is happening. From January to April 2020, the rate of Amazon deforestation alerts rose sharply by 55%. Deforestation is linked closely with fires, so a challenging fire season is expected this year.
- In this exclusive two part story and photo essay, we first follow the activities of Amazon loggers seeking highly-valued woods, and then trace the actions of miners scratching out a meager living seeking gold in the rivers of Rondônia state.

Offensive against the Amazon: An incontrollable pandemic (commentary)
- The acceleration of Amazonian deforestation and environmental degradation — powered by the Bolsonaro government’s successive blows to environmental protection policies — is directly related to the precarious state of public healthcare in the region, amplifying the lethality of diseases like Covid-19.
- This commentary is being published at a time when Brazil is suffering from the worst deforestation in a decade, and is second only to the United States in the number of Covid-19 cases (515,000 in Brazil today) and fourth in the world regarding the number of Coronavirus deaths (topping 29,000).
- The views expressed are those of the authors, not necessarily Mongabay.

Green alert: How indigenous people are experiencing climate change in the Amazon
- Late rainfall, intense drought, dry riverbeds, more forest fires, less food available — indigenous communities across the Brazilian Amazon suffer social transformations due to climate change.
- Indigenous people believe that climate change has even affected their physical health: previously controlled diseases like measles and yellow fever, they say, have inexplicably reappeared in the rainforest, and even indigenous women’s menstrual cycles are beginning at an earlier age.
- Indigenous people have found many ways to take action and lessen the harm. These approaches include selecting and growing seeds that are more resistant to drought and heat, investing in frontline firefighters and even a smartphone app that offers information about climatic variations.

Loggers attack Brazilian environmental official in Amazon; Bolsonaro silent
- In April an official from IBAMA, Brazil’s environmental agency was violently assaulted by loggers and needed hospital treatment in Pará state. The incident was caught on video.
- The IBAMA operation was targeting illegal deforestation carried out by land grabbers, wishing to convert large areas of forest into ranches within the Cachoeira Seca Indigenous Reserve. Out of all Brazil’s indigenous territories it ranked third for worst deforestation from August 2018 to July 2019.
- As permitted by Brazilian law, the IBAMA officials had burnt tractors and trucks used by the criminals, angering the loggers. The loggers are selling the illegally extracted timber to fund the further deforestation of large areas.
- The Association of IBAMA employees believe that President Jair Bolsonaro’s anti-indigenous and anti-environmental rhetoric is fuelling the attacks on environmental agency workers.

As habitat degradation threatens Amazon species, one region offers hope
- Two recent studies looked into the impact of human disturbance on ecological diversity in Amazonia habitats. Another study in the Rupununi region of Guyana found how important maintaining connectivity is to maintaining ecosystem health.
- The first study investigated how forest fragmentation impacts mixed-species flocks of birds. The research found evidence that forest habitat fragmentation in the Amazon has caused mixed-species bird flocks to severely diminish and even disappear.
- A second study evaluated the impact of logging and fire on seed dispersal in tropical forest plots in the eastern Brazilian Amazon. The research team found that Amazon forests which have been heavily logged and burned are populated primarily by tree species with smaller seeds, and smaller fruits.
- The remote Rupununi region provides water connectivity between the ancient Guyana Shield and the Amazon basin. A recent study there identified more than 450 fish species within the Rupununi region. The research illustrated the value of conserving connectivity between diverse habitats.

Brazil opens 38,000 square miles of indigenous lands to outsiders
- FUNAI, Brazil’s indigenous agency, has reversed a long-standing policy with a new instruction paving the way for the legitimization of outsider land claims made within indigenous territories which are still in the process of gaining official recognition.
- Brazil’s 1988 Constitution guarantees indigenous land rights on ancestral lands, but the government has delayed the process for decades. The new policy opens 237 as yet unrecognized indigenous areas, covering 37,830 square miles, an area the size of the U.S. state of Indiana — much of it still covered in rainforest.
- Critics of the Jair Bolsonaro government say that the new instruction will create legal cover for landgrabbers, ranchers, soy growers, loggers, and other outsiders to invade indigenous ancestral lands, claim permanent title to the property and exploit land vital to indigenous survival.
- The policy, say analysts, seems destined to result in close contact and clashes between outsiders and indigenous people, and is especially a threat to isolated indigenous groups, many who currently live within un-demarcated ancestral lands. There is also a high risk of indigenous infection with COVID-19.

Brazil sacks officials who curbed deforestation on Amazon indigenous lands
- The Brazilian government of President Jair Bolsonaro has fired two IBAMA, environmental agency coordinators with a history of significantly reducing deforestation in indigenous territories (TIs) in the Xingu River basin in southern Pará state.
- The Apyterewa, Trincheira Bacajá, Kayapó, and Ituna Itatá territories, where the two men were conducting operations this year, saw some of the highest levels of illegal deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon in 2019. By March 2020, the duo had reduced illegal tree loss in the Ituna Itatá reserve from 7,467 hectares in 2019, to zero.
- A protest letter from 16 IBAMA environmental inspectors characterized the firings as “retaliation” and hindering ongoing investigations. The dismissals came after a Brazilian TV report featured an IBAMA operation led by the two officials resulting in the shutting down of illegal mining and the seizure of a huge weapons cache.
- NGOs condemned the dismissals, saying they came at a time when indigenous groups need protection from intruders carrying the Covid-19 virus. Bolsonaro laid off top tier federal environmental and indigenous regulators in 2019. Now, say critics, he is sacking second and third tier officials in order to give land grabbers a free hand.

Flooding devastates Ecuador’s indigenous communities in the Amazon
- Extreme floods in the Ecuadoran Amazon have left hundreds of indigenous people homeless.
- Such events have become more frequent, partly as a result of human-driven climate change.
- These communities have little to no access to basic services, which leaves them in an extremely vulnerable situation.
- Further complicating their plight is the global COVID-19 pandemic that has now made its way into Ecuador, one of the Latin American countries hit hardest by the coronavirus so far.

Satellite data show Amazon rainforest likely drier, more fire-prone this year
- Satellite data show regions of the Amazon with severe negative changes in soil moisture and groundwater, meaning this year will likely be drier than 2019.
- While a severe drought is unlikely, a drier year may increase the spread of wildfires and trigger an earlier spike in deforestation rates, experts say.
- Although weather forecasts for the Amazon are highly unpredictable, which could potentially reverse the current deficit, climate models by Brazil’s Center for Weather Forecasting and Climate Research (CPTEC) show no indication of above-average precipitation in the coming months.
- A technical report by the Amazon Environmental Research Institute (IPAM) published this week anticipates a surge in fires caused by the deforestation spike of 2019, as the modus operandi of land grabbers is to deforest one year then set fire the next, in order to successfully transform forest into farmland and pastures.

Fight against Amazon destruction at stake after enforcement chief fired
- Brazil’s environmental agency, IBAMA, has stepped up efforts to fight environmental crimes during the COVID-19 crisis amid concerns that loggers, land grabbers and illegal miners could infect indigenous populations.
- However, the fate of these operations is now uncertain following the firing of IBAMA enforcement director Olivaldi Azevedo last week.
- On April 20, Brazil’s Federal Prosecutor’s Office (MPF) launched an investigation into Azevedo’s dismissal, questioning whether IBAMA’s operations in Pará state would be affected and citing risks to the region’s indigenous people.
- Elsewhere, indigenous activists are celebrating an important court victory after a judge ordered the removal of North American missionaries accused of trying to convert isolated indigenous communities in the Vale do Javari region, near the border with Peru.

$3 million and an official apology: Brazil’s Ashaninka get unprecedented compensation for deforestation on their land
- An unprecedented court settlement guaranteed reparations to the Ashaninka people of the state of Acre, in the Brazilian Amazon, whose lands were deforested in the 1980s to supply the European furniture industry. The logging company penalized was owned by the family of the current governor of Acre, Gladson Cameli.
- The conflict was resolved through mediation from the Prosecutor General of the Republic, Augusto Aras, after the case had circulated in the courts with no resolution for 20 years.
- The indigenous people only agreed with the negotiation because it included an official apology and a recognition of their “enormous importance as guardians” of the Amazon.

In Brazil, COVID-19 outbreak paves way for invasion of indigenous lands
- Reports of continuing land invasions, killings of indigenous leaders, and rising numbers of COVID-19 infections inside indigenous reserves has raise concerns about the increased vulnerability of indigenous communities to violence and infection by illegal extraction gangs as the pandemic rages.
- In Rondônia state, the epicenter of last year’s Amazon fires, members of the Karipuna indigenous people have submitted a complaint to the local Federal Prosecutor’s Office reporting non-indigenous people clearing forest inside their reserve, less than 10 kilometers (6 miles) from the village where the group lives.
- Fear of the spread of COVID-19 by non-indigenous invaders inside Brazil’s indigenous communities has grown in recent days following reports of the hospitalization and death of a Yanomami teenager.
- At least five indigenous people have been infected by the virus in Brazil so far, according to a map produced by an NGO advocating for indigenous rights, and at least two indigenous people living in cities have died after being infected.

Calls for justice after latest murder of indigenous Guajajara leader in Brazil
- Zezico Rodrigues Guajarara, a teacher from the Arariboia indigenous reserve in northeastern Maranhão state, was found shot dead on March 31. The motive for the killing remains unknown.
- He is the fifth Guajajara indigenous leader to be slain since November in the lawless frontier region dominated by powerful landowners and logging mafias.
- Indigenous leader Olímpio Iwyramu Guajajara, who is himself under state protection following an earlier killing of a prominent community member, told Mongabay he felt “particularly vulnerable in our territory.”
- Zezico had long reportedly received death threats from both indigenous and non-indigenous people involved with illegal logging. The federal police have been called in to investigate the murder.

China’s revised forest law could boost efforts to fight illegal logging
- In the first revision to the country’s Forest Law in over twenty years, China has banned trade in illegal logs. But will the change be enforced?
- On December 28, 2019, Chinese legislators revised the country’s Forest Law to ban “purchase, process or transport” of illegal logs.
- China is the world’s largest importer of legal and illegal timber, and if the change is enforced it could boost efforts to fight the illegal logging trade.
- Advocates say that the true measure of the changes will be how they are implemented and enforced.

Brazil drastically reduces controls over suspicious Amazon timber exports
- Forest degradation nearly doubled in the Brazilian Amazon last year, rising from 4,946 square kilometers in 2018, to 9,167 square kilometers in 2019. Experts say this is likely due to soaring illegal timber harvesting and export under President Jair Bolsonaro.
- To facilitate illegal harvesting of rare and valuable timber, like that of the Ipê tree, whose wood can sell for up to $2,500 per cubic meter at Brazilian export terminals, Bolsonaro’s environment officials have reversed regulations that formerly outlawed suspicious timber shipments, making most such exports legal.
- Experts say that the relaxation of illegal export regulations not only protects the criminal syndicates cutting the trees in Amazonia, but also shields exporter Brazil, and importers in the EU, UK, US and elsewhere, preventing them from being accused of causing Amazon deforestation via their supply chains.
- Activists fear overturned timber export regulations will embolden illegal loggers, who will escalate invasions onto indigenous and traditional lands, as well as within conservation units. More than 300 people were assassinated over the past decade as the result of land and natural resource conflicts in the Brazilian Amazon.

Bolsonaro sends Congress bill to open indigenous lands to mining, fossil fuels
- President Jair Bolsonaro has long pledged to open Brazil’s indigenous reserves in the Amazon and elsewhere to commercial mining, oil and gas exploration, cattle ranching and agribusiness, new hydroelectric dam projects, and tourism. This week he sent a bill to Congress that would do just that.
- And while the legislation would allow consultation with impacted indigenous populations, they would lack the power of veto, except in cases of “garimpo” or wildcat mining. Though the bancada ruralista agribusiness lobby is strong in Congress, it remains to be seen whether the bill will be approved.
- The legislation would also allow the use of GM, genetically modified, seeds in agricultural projects, a practice previously banned because of the danger of contaminating native seeds. Royalties would be paid to indigenous communities for the economic activities allowed in their reserves and communities.
- Bolsonaro called his project a “dream” but it has already met with withering criticism from indigenous organizations who see it as a nightmare. Apib, the Articulation of Indigenous Peoples, called it a ‘death project’ which would, under the mask of false good intentions, effectively authorize the invasion of their lands

Use it, don’t lose it: Q&A with Amazon eco scientist Marcelino Guedes
- In an exclusive interview with Mongabay, Marcelino Guedes, a researcher at Brazil’s Amapá Federal University, talks about how important the management of traditional knowledge is for strengthening the forest economy in Brazil to overcome the paradigm that sees standing forest as an enemy of development.
- “Human practices can be managed to become the basis for conservation in Amazonia,” he says. Countering the idea that forests must be maintained in their virgin state, he says the rational use of a forest’s resources is the best way to create an effective conservation dynamic, considering the many pressures the region is undergoing.
- Guedes cites the Intermediate Disturbance Hypothesis, which holds that small changes to the environment are crucial for increasing biodiversity. These disturbances can be natural, as in the case of a storm, or caused by humans, which is the case of the indigenous peoples of Amazonia, who have, over the last 5,000 years, been modifying and enriching the landscape through itinerant agriculture and dispersal of native species.

NGOs demand inquiry into Environment Minister aid to Amazon land grabbers
- 25 environmental and indigenous organizations have made an official complaint to the Brazilian Attorney General’s Office requesting an investigation for abuse of power and misconduct in office by Environment Minister Ricardo Salles and Chico Mendes Institute for Biodiversity Conservation (ICMBio) head, Homero Cerqueira.
- It is alleged that Salles and Cerqueira met with convicted criminals including known Amazon land grabbers, and that both officials pledged to end inspections inside the Chico Mendes Extractive Reserve (Resex), a protected area in Acre state under heavy pressure from illegal deforesters. ICMBio oversees Brazil’s parks.
- Last week President Jair Bolsonaro established the Amazon Council, putting the nation’s Vice President at its head, and subordinating Salles and the Environment Ministry to the new council. Some analysts speculate that Salles has fallen from favor due to his reckless speech and actions, though others disagree.
- Some speculate the new council is a merely a public relations maneuver meant to show international and national critics that Bolsonaro cares about the Amazon. Few expect the council to zealously press forward with conservation efforts, while others see it as a means of bypassing the Environment Ministry.

Impending Amazon tipping point puts biome and world at risk, scientists warn
- Climate models coupled with real world biome changes are causing prominent scientists to forecast that, unless action is taken immediately, 50 to 70% of the Amazon will be transformed from rainforest into savanna in less than 50 years.
- That ecological disaster would trigger a vast release of carbon stored in vegetation, likely leading to a regional and planetary climate catastrophe. The Amazon rainforest-to-savanna tipping point is being triggered by rapidly escalating deforestation, regional and global climate change, and increasing Amazon wildfires — all of which are making the region dryer.
- While models produced the first evidence of the tipping point, events on the ground are now adding to grave concern. The Amazon has grown hotter and dryer in recent decades, and rainforest that was once fireproof now readily burns. Plant species adapted to a wet climate are dying, as drought-resistant species flourish. Deforestation is escalating rapidly.
- Scientists say the tipping point could be reversed with strong environmental policies. However, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro is moving in the opposite direction, with plans to develop the Amazon, including the opening of indigenous reserves to industrial mining and agribusiness, and the building of roads, dams and other infrastructure.

Brazil’s Bolsonaro creates Amazon Council and Environmental Police force
- Brazil has formed a new Amazon Council headed by Vice President Hamilton Mourão, a retired general and supporter of Amazon mining development. The council will oversee “the activities of all the ministries involved in the protection, defense and development and sustainable development of the Amazon.”
- A new Environmental Police force is also being created made up of military police from state forces, which will have the potential to put thousands of agents into the field for Amazon operations.
- Meanwhile, Bolsonaro slashed the budget for IBAMA, Brazil’s environmental enforcement agency, cutting it by 25% as compared to 2019. IBAMA has been recognized internationally for its key role in enforcing Brazil’s laws against illegal loggers and land grabbers, for reducing deforestation and fighting Amazon fires.
- Critics are concerned over Bolsonaro’s militarization of Amazon environmental, development, and security administration, seeing it as a throwback to the days of Brazil’s military dictatorship from 1964 to 1985, when new highways and other infrastructure projects greatly benefited land grabbers and wealthy landowners.

Antonio Donato Nobre: “The forest is sick and losing its carbon-sequestration capacity”
- A researcher at the INPE Center of Land System Science, Antonio Donato Nobre, describes the state of degradation threatening the future of the Amazon rainforest in an exclusive interview with Mongabay.
- Nobre fears the forest is nearing what he describes as a “tipping point,” after which it will no longer be able to regenerate on its own, thus embarking on the path to desertification. “This is not about protecting the forest simply to please environmentalists. The living forest is essential for the survival of human civilization,” he says.
- In order to reverse the current state of destruction, Nobre proposes the development of a forest economy – capable, in his opinion, of generating nearly 20 times as much revenue as extensive cattle ranching. As an example, he cites the project Amazônia 4.0, which defends the use of technology for the sustainable exploration of biodiversity.

Brazil on the precipice: from environmental leader to despoiler (2010-2020)
- Brazil’s 21st century environmental record is most easily visualized via Amazon deforestation: poor regulation and lawlessness led to peak deforestation in 2004, with 27,772 square kilometers cleared. Better laws and enforcement, and a soy moratorium led to a dramatic decline to 4,571 square kilometers in 2012.
- Since then, first under Workers’ Party President Dilma Rousseff, then under Michel Temer, deforestation rates began to rise. The rate saw its biggest jump this year under President Jair Bolsonaro, with a loss of 9,762 square kilometers — the worst deforestation since 2008.
- From 2011-2016, the Amazon saw numerous hydroelectric project controversies, including the construction of the Belo Monte mega-dam, two huge hydroelectric projects on the Madeira River, plus multiple dams on the Teles Pires River. The Lava Jato corruption scandal and an economic downturn curbed dam building.
- Brazil’s ruralist agribusiness interests consolidated power, first under Temer, and more so under Bolsonaro, launching multiple attacks on indigenous and traditional land rights. Bolsonaro’s anti-environmental and anti-indigenous policies are a mark of his administration, a trend expected to continue in 2020.

Experts blame Bolsonaro for surge in deforestation, warn of worse to come
- Between August 2018 and July 2019, an area of 9,762 square kilometers (3,769 square miles) of primary forest was cleared, according to data released by the Brazilian National Institute of Space Research (INPE) last week.
- The area, roughly the size of Hawaii’s Big Island, represents the highest deforestation rate in 11 years.
- Experts contacted for this story told Mongabay that the 30 percent surge of forest loss over the past year could be even higher for the coming months amid lack of enforcement and large cleared areas preceding fires in August and September 2019.
- The spike in deforestation is a direct result of the actions of President Jair Bolsonaro, who has been dismantling environmental agencies and environmental legislation to pave the way to open up Amazon protected areas to agribusiness and mining, experts said.

Enforce Brazilian laws to curb criminal Amazon deforestation: study
- Recent research finds that a failure to track environmental infractions and to enforce environmental laws and regulations is aiding and abetting ever escalating rates of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon and Cerrado.
- Researchers studied the failings of three environmental initiatives: the TAC da Carne, blocking cattle sales raised in deforestation embargoed areas; the Amazon Soy Moratorium, stopping sales of soy grown on deforested lands; and DOF timber permitting, which allows logging only in approved areas.
- The study found that timber, soy and cattle producers often subvert Brazil’s environmental laws by illegally “laundering” harvested logs, beef and soy to conceal illegal deforestation. These practices have been largely helped by the weak governance of the Jair Bolsonaro administration.
- The scientists recommend the closing of illegal soy, cattle and logging laundering loopholes via the strengthening of Brazilian environmental agencies, the improvement of monitoring technologies, better integration of policies and systems, and putting market pressure on producers.

‘Guardian of the Forest’ ambushed and murdered in Brazilian Amazon
- Paulo Paulino Guajajara, a 26-years-old indigenous Guajajara leader was killed on Friday in an Amazon rainforest ambush allegedly by loggers in the Araribóia Indigenous Reserve, one of the country’s most threatened indigenous territories, which is located in Brazil’s Maranhão state.
- Paulo was a member of “Guardians of the Forest,” a group of 120 indigenous Guajajara who risk their lives fighting illegal logging in the Araribóia reserve. The Guardians also protect the uncontacted Awá Guajá hunter-gatherers — one of the most at risk indigenous groups on the planet.
- Indigenous leader Laércio Guajajara, also a Guardian, was hit by gunfire too, but was able to escape and was later taken to a hospital, said indigenous chief Olímpio Iwyramu Guajajara, the Guardians’ leader. All three Guardians have reportedly been threatened by loggers recently.
- Federal Police and Maranhão state police are investigating the attack, which also reportedly resulted in a logger being killed; Paulo’s body was buried on Sunday. The killing is the most recent in a rising tide of violence against indigenous activists since Jair Bolsonaro took power in January.

China, EU are importing soybeans from unregistered Brazil farms: report
- Considered one of the main drivers of deforestation in the country, soybean is Brazil’s main commodity, with exports valued at more than $33 billion in 2018.
- Padding this figure, however, are soybean crops grown on unregistered farms skirting environmental regulations.
- Twelve percent of soybean farms in the Amazon rainforest and Cerrado savanna lack land registration, but two-thirds of crops from the municipalities with the most blind spots are exported, mostly to China (39 percent) and Europe (12 percent), with 33 percent going to the domestic market.
- U.S. commodities traders ADM, Bunge and Cargill are the biggest exporters of crops from these areas, along with Brazil’s Amaggi, the world’s biggest private soybean producer.

Indigenous and riverine communities unite to fight Amazon invaders
- The Brazilian Amazon basin, now under the administration of President Jair Bolsonaro, is increasingly a place of conflict, as loggers and land grabbers — many inspired by the government’s incendiary rhetoric — step up their invasions of indigenous and traditional lands.
- One example can be found along the Mamuru River in Pará state. There the Sateré indigenous group (now living mostly inside the Andirá Marau Indigenous Reserve), and non-indigenous traditional riverine communities (living in the Mamuru State Agro-extractivist Project, known as PEAEX Mamuru), are resisting incursions.
- Loggers and outsiders making dubious land claims are moving in on the disputed government-held common lands that lie between the indigenous reserve and PEAEX Mamuru, a cluster of 18 settlements. The Sateré say this land is part of their ancestral territory, but was mistakenly excluded from the Andirá Marau Reserve.
- Another threat to indigenous and traditional land claims: a new Pará state law that no longer requires that outsiders live currently on the lands they claim, making it far easier for land grabbers to legitimize those claims. In response, indigenous and traditional riverine communities are now forming a unified resistance.

As 2019 Amazon fires die down, Brazilian deforestation roars ahead
- This year’s August Amazon fires grabbed headlines around the world. In response, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro and his administration accused the media of lying and exaggerating the disaster, then finally sent in the army to combat the blazes. As of October, many of the fires were under control.
- But experts note that the fires are only a symptom of a far greater problem: rampant and rising deforestation. Altogether, 7,604 square kilometers (2,970 square miles) of rainforest were felled during the first nine months of this year, an 85 percent increase over the same period last year.
- Unscrupulous land speculators are growing rich, say experts, as they mine, log and clear rainforest — operations often conducted illegally on protected lands. Typically, the speculators cut valuable trees, burn the remainder, and sell the cleared land at a heavily marked up price to cattle ranchers or agribusiness.
- So far, Bolsonaro has done little to inhibit these activities, while doing and saying much to encourage deforestation, mining and agribusiness. The government has de-toothed the nation’s environmental agencies and slashed their budgets, while hampering officials from enforcing environmental laws.

Brazilian Amazon fires scientifically linked to 2019 deforestation: report
- A scientific report released today by the Monitoring of the Andean Amazon Project (MAAP) reveals critical overlap between deforestation and fire alerts. Mongabay had exclusive access to the report ahead of release.
- At least 125,000 hectares (310,000 acres) of the Brazilian Amazon — the equivalent to 172,000 soccer fields — were cleared through 2019 and then burned in August. The findings offer a base map overlapping 2019 deforestation and fire hotspots, and include 16 high-resolution time lapse videos unveiling newly cleared agricultural lands linked to fire occurrences.
- MAAP’s findings show that the dramatic photos that garnered worldwide attention of smoky fires sweeping the Brazilian Amazon in August do not correspond with burning rainforest, but instead coincide with areas intentionally deforested this year, with the cleared land then set ablaze to finish the agricultural conversion process.
- Although the report didn’t detect major forest fires in Brazil to date, the risk still exists, as the dry season deepens, given that many fire occurrences were detected on agriculture-forest boundaries. The study doesn’t say how much of the 125,000 hectares cleared in the first 8 months of 2019 were illegally deforested.

State governors support Bolsonaro’s Amazon mining, agribusiness plans
- In a meeting with nine Amazon state governors called by Jair Bolsonaro to discuss the region’s wildfires, the president pushed the states to back his policies which seek to bring major mining and agribusiness operations onto indigenous lands. Doing so would be a direct violation of the 1988 Constitution.
- Backing Bolsonaro were the governors of Acre, Roraima, Tocantins, Rondônia, Amazonas, Mato Grosso and Amapá states. Only the Pará and Maranhão governors opposed opening more forest areas to development and favored upholding current indigenous land use rights.
- Most of the state governors agreed with Bolsonaro that indigenous groups hold control over too much Brazilian land that could be mined or turned over to agribusiness, greatly profiting the nation, while also bringing indigenous people into mainstream Brazilian society.
- The federal Congress is presently crafting legislation that could open indigenous lands to mining and industrial agribusiness. It is also preparing to vote on a bill that seems likely to pass and would allocate R$ 1 billion (US$ 240 million) to combat deforestation and fires in the Amazon and carry out land regularization.

Giant Norway pension fund weighs Brazil divestment over Amazon deforestation
- KLP, Norway’s largest pension fund, with over US$80 billion in assets, is saying it may divest from transnational commodities traders operating in Brazil such as Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), Bunge and Cargill, if they work with producers who contribute to deforestation. KLP has $50 million in shares and loans with the firms.
- KLP is also reaching out to other investors to lobby them to use their financial influence to curb Amazon deforestation via supply chains. On August 28, Nordea, the largest asset management group in the Nordic region announced a temporary quarantine on Brazilian government bonds in response to this year’s Amazon fires.
- International investment firms play a pivotal role in preserving or deforesting the Amazon. A new report found that mega-investment house BlackRock ranks among the top three shareholders in 25 of the largest public “deforestation-risk” companies, firms dealing in soy, beef, palm oil, pulp and paper, rubber and timber.
- The Amazon deforestation process is complex. But it often proceeds by the following steps: land speculators invade the rainforest, illegally cut down and sell the most valuable timber, then set fire to the rest; they then can sell the land for 100-200 times its previous worth to cattle ranchers, who may eventually sell it to soy growers.

Bolsonaro expresses ‘love’ for Amazon as it burns, offers no policy shift
- The number of fires in the Amazon biome topped 41,858 in 2019 as of August 24 (up from 22,000 this time last year). Scientists are especially concerned about wildfires raging inside protected areas, such as Jamanxim National Forest in Pará state and Mato Grosso’s Serra de Ricardo Franco Park.
- While the Bolsonaro government blames hot weather for the Amazon blazes, others disagree. They point to the link between fires and their use to illegally clear rainforest by land speculators, who — emboldened by Bolsonaro’s lax enforcement policies —sell cleared land for 100-200 times more money than it would sell for with trees covering it.
- Preliminary data shows deforestation rising under Bolsonaro. The rate in June 2019 was 88 percent higher than in June 2018; deforestation soared by 278 percent in July 2019 as compared with July 2018. The rise, analysts say, is due in part to the dismantling of IBAMA, Brazil’s environmental enforcement agency.
- Bolsonaro has pledged to bring in the army to fight the Amazon blazes and deployed the first units over the weekend, while on Monday the G7 nations promised an emergency $20 million in aid to help Amazon countries fight wildfires and launch a long-term global initiative to protect the rainforest.

Amazon rainforest fires leave São Paulo in the dark
- The number of forest fires in Brazil soared 85 percent between January 1 and August 20 compared to a year ago, according to data from the Brazilian National Institute of Space Research (INPE). Roughly half of fire occurrences of this year were registered in the last 20 days, INPE data showed.
- In a technical note released in the evening of August 20, the Brazilian NGO IPAM (Institute of Environmental Research in Amazonia) said the occurrences are directly connected to deforestation as it didn’t find any evidence to argue that the fires could be a consequence of a lack of rain.
- Fires in Brazil came to spotlight since the afternoon of August 19, when São Paulo’s skies suddenly turned black, spurring discussion about the linkage between the fires and the phenomenon. Since then, “Amazon Fires” are trending on Twitter under the hashtag #PrayforAmazonas.
- Far-right President Bolsonaro reacted on August 21, raising suspicion that members of NGOs could be behind the fires in retaliation against the government for having caused the suspension of a $33.2 million payment from Norway to the Amazon Fund.

Precision conservation: High tech to the rescue in the Peruvian Amazon
- Peru’s Los Amigos Biological Station stands on a dividing line between the devastation caused by a gold rush centered on La Pampa, and a vast swath of conserved lands that includes Manú National Park — likely the most biologically important protected area in Latin America — plus its conserved buffers.
- Teaming up to defend these thriving forests and their biodiversity are conservationists and technologists — an innovative alliance that includes Conservación Amazónica (ACCA), Amazon Conservation (ACA), the Andes Amazon Fund, along with other organizations.
- Among the precision conservation tools they use to patrol against invading artisanal miners and illegal loggers are drones, acoustic monitoring, machine learning, lidar and thermal imaging — all applied to protecting one of the most biologically diverse regions on Earth.
- Conservationists are hopeful not only that they’ll be able to protect Manú National Park and its buffers, but that they may be able to one day help remediate and restore the wrecked habitat of La Pampa. This integrative approach, they say, is vital to conserving the region’s biodiversity against the escalating climate crisis.

Germany cuts $39.5 million in environmental funding to Brazil
- Germany has announced plans to withdraw some €35 million (US $39.5 million) to Brazil due to the country’s lack of commitment to curbing deforestation in the Amazon rainforest shown by the administration of far-right President Jair Bolsonaro.
- The funding loss will impact environmental projects in the Amazon, Atlantic Forest and Cerrado biomes.
- The cut will not, however, impact the Amazon Fund — a pool of some $87 million provided to Brazil each year by developed nations, especially Norway and Germany — to finance a variety of programs aimed at halting deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon.
- Some experts have expressed concern that Germany’s $39.5 million cut could cause other developed nations to withdraw Brazil funding, and even threaten the Amazon Fund, or the ratification of the recently concluded EU/Mercosur Latin American trade agreement.

Future of Amazon deforestation data in doubt as research head sacked
- The Brazilian government and the world have relied on the INPE (Brazilian National Institute of Space Research) satellite monitoring system to track deforestation since 1988, without controversy. INPE’s data gathering program has been hailed as one of the best such operations in the tropics.
- However, after INPE reported a major uptick in the rate of Brazilian Amazon deforestation in June and July 2019, as compared with the same months in 2018, the Bolsonaro administration responded angrily by accusing the agency of manipulating data, of lying, and of being in conspiracy with international NGOs.
- On August 2, the president fired Ricardo Magnus Osório Galvão, the head of INPE, leaving officials inside the institution concerned for the future of the satellite monitoring program. The government has repeatedly said it plans to develop a costly, privatized deforestation tracking system which would replace INPE.
- Galvão’s removal triggered an outcry from scientists, NGOs and Brazilian federal prosecutors who are concerned over the threat to the future accuracy of Amazon deforestation monitoring. The Bolsonaro administration plans to announce a replacement shortly.

New film reveals at-risk ‘uncontacted’ Awá tribe in Brazilian Amazon
- A just released documentary film includes footage of an uncontacted indigenous group known as the Awá Guajá, hunter-gatherers described by NGO Survival International as the most threatened tribe on the planet. The indigenous group lives in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest in Northeast Maranhão state.
- The footage was captured by chance by cameraman Flay Guajajara, a member of the Mídia Índia (a collective of indigenous communicators of various ethnicities) when he and other Guajajara Indians were on a hunting trip in the Araribóia reserve, one of the country’s most threatened indigenous territories. *
- The Awá share the Araribóia reserve with their Guajajara relatives. In late 2012, the Guajajara set up a group who call themselves “Guardians of the Forest” and risk their lives combatting illegal logging to protect the reserve and the Awá’s lives.

Amazon infrastructure puts 68% of indigenous lands / protected areas at risk: report
- 68 percent of the indigenous lands and protected natural areas in the nine nations encompassing the Amazon region are under pressure from roads, mining, dams, oil drilling, forest fires and deforestation, according to a new report by RAISG, the Amazonian Geo-referenced Socio-Environmental Information Network.
- Of the 6,345 indigenous territories located within the nine Amazonian countries surveyed, 2,042 (32 percent) are threatened or pressured by two types of infrastructure activities, while 2,584 (41 percent) are threatened or pressured by at least one. Only 8 percent of the total are not threatened or pressured at all.
- In the case of the 692 protected natural areas in the Amazon region, 193 (28 percent) suffer three kinds of threat or pressure, and 188 (27 percent) suffer threats or pressure from two activities.
- “These are alarming numbers: 43 percent of the protected natural areas and 19 percent of the indigenous lands are under three or more types of pressure or threat,” said Júlia Jacomini, a researcher with the ISA, Instituto Socioambiental, an NGO and RAISG partner.

Brazil’s Roraima state at mercy of 2019 wildfires as federal funds dry up
- Brazil, and particularly the Amazonian state of Roraima, have seen large numbers of forest fires so far this year. From January through May, Brazil recorded 17,913 blazes nationwide, with 11,804 occurring in the nine Amazonian states. Only 2016 saw more harm in the Brazilian Amazon, when 13,663 wildfires burned over the same period.
- From January to May, Roraima registered 4,600 fires, the most numerous of any state for that period (Roraima saw just 1,970 fires during all of last year). The previous annual record for a Brazilian state was set by Mato Grosso, which suffered 4,927 forest fires in all of 2016.
- The uptick in fires is being blamed on a number of factors, including worsening Amazon drought brought by climate change, land theft and illegal deforestation (fire is typically used as a tool to clear rainforest in preparation for use by cattle ranchers and large-scale agribusiness).
- Another contributing factor: federal deforestation and firefighting policies. Since March, the Bolsonaro government has cut $7.3 million slated for fire prevention and environmental inspections to Ibama and ICMBio, Brazil’s two federal environmental agencies.

The Sateré-Mawé move to reclaim Amazon ancestral lands from invaders
- The Andirá-Marau Indigenous Reserve in Brazil’s Amazonas state — in a remote part of the Amazon basin — covers 7,885 square kilometers (3,044 square miles), and is occupied by 13,350 Sateré-Mawé indigenous people who live sustainably off the rainforest.
- However, an area of Sateré-Mawé ancestral land along the Mariaquã River lies outside the demarcated reserve. It was abandoned by the Sateré-Mawé due to an epidemic. The Indians have renewed their claim to the territory since 2002 but FUNAI, Brazil’s indigenous agency, has not yet sorted the situation out.
- But the Mariaquã lands are now in dispute, as illegal loggers and land grabbers invade and threaten the indigenous people living in the area around the village of Campo Branco. Dozens of outsiders have made land claims to CAR, Brazil’s Rural Environmental Registry, and allegedly threatened the Indians if they don’t vacate.
- Mongabay’s reporting team joined a small group of Sateré-Mawé as they travelled to Campo Branco to strengthen their indigenous land claim. The Sateré fear that President Bolsonaro’s pledge to pass a law allowing Brazilians with “official” land claims to use arms to evict indigenous “invaders” could be used against them.

Former Brazilian enviro ministers blast Bolsonaro environmental assaults
- A new manifesto by eight of Brazil’s past environment ministers has accused the rightist Bolsonaro administration of “a series of unprecedented actions that are destroying the capacity of the environment ministry to formulate and carry out public policies.”
- The ministers warn that Bolsonaro’s draconian environmental policies, including the weakening of environmental licensing, plus sweeping illegal deforestation amnesties, could cause great economic harm to Brazil, possibly endangering trade agreements with the European Union.
- Brazil this month threatened to overhaul rules used to select deforestation projects for the Amazon Fund, a pool of money provided to Brazil annually, mostly by Norway and Germany. Both nations deny being consulted about the rule change that could end many NGOs receiving grants from the fund.
- Environment Minister Riccardo Salles also announced a reassessment of every one of Brazil’s 334 conservation units. Some parks may be closed, including the Tamoios Ecological Station, where Bolsonaro was fined for illegal fishing in 2012 and which he’d like to turn into the “Brazilian Cancun.”

‘Resisting to exist’: Indigenous women unite against Brazil’s far-right president
- Brazil today is home to 900,000 indigenous people, speaking 274 languages and with widely differing cultural traditions. Indigenous rights were enshrined in Brazil’s 1988 constitution, including the demarcation and protection of indigenous ancestral lands.
- But indigenous people have felt seriously threatened since Jair Bolsonaro took office in January, as illegal invasions of indigenous territories have rapidly escalated, and as the administration threatens to put policies in place to limit further indigenous demarcations, eliminate indigenous comments on infrastructure projects, and cut back on health services.
- Many of the leaders in the fight against Bolsonaro’s policies are women; in this story, they give voice to their outrage at the danger to their homelands, communities and families.

UK supermarkets implicated in Amazon deforestation supply chain: report
- Deforestation due to cattle ranching has increased in Brazil since 2014. With between 60 and 80 percent of deforested Amazon lands used for pasture, European retailers who source beef from Brazil risk amplifying Amazonian forest destruction unless international action is taken.
- A report from the UK organization Earthsight finds that UK supermarket chains — including Sainsbury’s, Asda, Morrisons and Lidl — are still importing corned beef from Brazil’s largest beef producer, JBS, despite the company being implicated in a long string of corruption and illegal deforestation scandals over the last decade.
- JBS, one of the largest food companies in the world, has faced multiple corruption charges leading to the arrest of two of its former CEOs and was fined $8 million in 2017 for illegal deforestation in the Amazon.
- Many hope the forthcoming EU Communication on Stepping Up Action to Halt Deforestation will propose legislation to ensure EU companies and suppliers are not contributing to deforestation and human rights abuses. However, experts say such an agreement will only work if corporate standards are mandatory not voluntary.

Dismantling of Brazilian environmental protections gains pace
- In his first 100 days in office, Jair Bolsonaro has moved fast to change personnel and reduce the authority of IBAMA, Brazil’s environmental agency, and ICMBio, which manages its conservation areas. His actions are seen as most benefiting ruralists — wealthy elite agribusiness and mining interests.
- Presidential Decree No. 9,760 creates “conciliation centers” to investigate environmental fines, and provides multiple new ways for appealing fines, while also preventing funds gathered via penalties from being distributed to NGOs for environmental projects.
- Some worry the government may use the new decree as a precedent for forgiving the hefty R$250 million (US$63.4 million) fine imposed by IBAMA on Brazil’s gigantic Vale mining company for environmental law infractions related to the Brumadinho tailings dam disaster, in which 235 people died.
- A large number of IBAMA staff have been fired, including 21 of its 27 regional superintendents, responsible for combating deforestation. Many of Bolsonaro’s replacements within the top ranks of the Environment Ministry, IBAMA and ICMBio are coming from the military.

China, EU, US trading with Brazilian firms fined for Amazon deforestation: report
- Soy, cattle, timber and other commodity producers fined for Amazon illegal deforestation in Brazil continue to sell their products to companies in China, the European Union and United States according to a new report. The document names 23 importing companies, including giants Bunge, Cargill and Northwest Hardwoods.
- Large international investment firms, such as BlackRock, also continue to pump money into Brazilian firms, despite their being fined for illegal Amazon forest loss by the Brazilian government, according to the report. Many Brazilian producers deny the accuracy of the Amazon Watch document.
- Forest losses in the Brazilian Amazon jumped 54 percent in January 2019 compared to a year ago, and are expected to increase under the Bolsonaro administration which has announced plans for extensive environmental deregulation, and is making an aggressive push to develop the Amazon rainforest for agribusiness and mining.
- With Brazilian government checks on deforestation diminishing, many analysts feel that the only way to limit the loss of Amazon forests now will be to shed a bright light on global commodities supply chains in order to make consumers worldwide aware of the participation of international companies in deforestation.

Stinging ants: Amazon indigenous group girds itself to hold ancestral lands
- The ancestral home of the Sateré-Mawé indigenous group is the Andirá-Marau Indigenous Reserve, an officially demarcated, heavily forested region covering 780,000 hectares (3,011 square miles) in Amazonas and Pará states, Brazil.
- The reserve itself — along with indigenous villages around it that were not included in the demarcated area — are increasingly under attack from illegal loggers and land grabbers.
- To steel themselves against the challenges posed by invading outsiders, and to create unity among their tribal groups, Sateré young men participate in a ritual known as Waumat, in which they endure the painful bites of stinging ants.
- They also renew their commitment to active resistance through dances and songs that celebrate myths, past wars, victories, losses, and terrible exploitation by the colonial Portuguese. The Sateré are feeling especially challenged today by the anti-indigenous rhetoric and policies of the rightist Bolsonaro administration.

Bolsonaro draws battle lines in fight over Amazon indigenous lands
- Parintins, site of Brazil’s big annual indigenous festival, is typical of towns in the Brazilian Amazon. The Sateré, and other indigenous groups living or working there, often endure discrimination and work analogous to slavery. Civil rights are few and indigenous populations inhabit the bottom rung of the economic ladder.
- Now more than ever, indigenous groups fear the loss of their cultural heritage and land rights as guaranteed under the 1988 Brazilian Constitution. New president Jair Bolsonaro wants to achieve indigenous societal “assimilation,” a process by which an ethnic minority group’s traditional way of life and livelihoods is erased.
- The strongest advocates of indigenous assimilation are the ruralistas, rural wealthy elites and agribusiness producers, who have the most to gain via access to the timber, land and mineral wealth found within indigenous territories. The bancada ruralista agribusiness lobby is strong in Congress, and it supports Bolsonaro.
- The Sateré, along with other indigenous groups, have endured a long history marked by extermination and exploitation. Brazil’s 900,000 indigenous people are increasingly joining together to fight the anti-indigenous policies proposed by the Bolsonaro administration and supported by the ruralists.

Shade or sun? Forest structure affects tree responses to Amazon drought
- Large-scale satellite data has shown that while large trees expand their crown during the dry season, small trees drop leaves – possibly due to limited light availability in the shaded understory. A new study finds that tree response to dry weather is far more complex, influenced by exposure to the sun and root depth.
- Detailed measurements of leaf growth and leaf loss during the annual dry season and extreme drought events shows that small trees respond differently to water deprivation depending on their surrounding environment – shaded trees gain leaves but exposed trees tend to lose them, a possible sign of dehydration stress.
- Two novel study approaches revealed a complex pattern of leaf growth and loss in response to dry weather: ground-based lidar imaging that produced high-resolution 2D image slices of forest structure, and statistical division of data based on an understory tree’s distance from the canopy top, rather than from the ground up.
- Losing leaves could spell death for individual trees, but these small-scale changes can also impact transpiration and have consequences for regional weather patterns and regional climate change. Also, importantly, degraded forests, with many open clearings, could be less resilient to worsening Amazon drought.

Amazon could be biggest casualty of US-China Trade war, researchers warn
- The US is the world’s largest soy producer and historically has exported the majority of its soybeans to China.
- But after President Donald Trump’s high China tariffs resulted in a Chinese retaliation of a 25 percent import tariff on US agricultural goods last year, United States soy exports to China dropped 50 percent, and Chinese imports of Brazilian soybeans increased significantly.
- Soy production has been linked to large-scale deforestation in the Amazon rainforest and Cerrado savanna — Brazil’s two largest and ecologically most important biomes.
- If the US/China trade war continues, new research suggests that the amount of land dedicated to soy production in Brazil could increase by up to 39 percent in order to fill Chinese demand, causing new deforestation by up to 13 million hectares (50,139 square miles) of forest, an area the size of Greece, researchers estimate.

3 massacres in 12 days: Rural violence escalates in Brazilian Amazon
- The Amazon has seen 3 probable massacres in 12 days — likely a record for the region — as violence has exploded in areas of heavy deforestation where the building of large dams has brought a capital infusion, sent land prices soaring, and invited land speculation by land grabbers, loggers and ranchers.
- A Brazilian landless movement peasant leader and a leading dam activist are among those killed. The attacks have been concentrated in areas centered around the Belo Monte mega-dam; in the Madeira basin near the Jirau dam; and near the Tucuruí dam on the Tocantins River in Pará state.
- Investigations are ongoing, but early reports are that at least 9 people are dead, with some witnesses saying more have been killed, especially rural landless peasant workers. Before becoming president, Jair Bolsonaro expressed strong hostility against the landless peasant movement (Movimento dos Sem Terra, or MST).
- The Bolsonaro Administration has yet to condemn or comment significantly on the recent wave of killings. As of this article’s publication, the international community has taken little notice of the spike in violence.

Brazil’s key deforestation drivers: Pasture, cropland, land speculation
- New research shows that the expansion of cropland (row crops) in Brazil nearly doubled between 2000 and 2014, from 26 million hectares (100,387 square miles) to 46.5 million hectares (179,538 square miles).
- 80 percent of new cropland in Brazil came as a result of the conversion of pastures, while only 20 percent resulted from the direct conversion of native vegetation to croplands, especially soy.
- However, while pastureland “absorbs” cropland expansion, and displaces it away from forests, studies show Brazilian deforestation to be most highly driven by land speculation, whereby land speculators deforest an area, possibly selling off the timber, then converting the land to pasture, and then again quickly selling the land to a soy producer at a much increased price.
- Study data also confirmed a strong correlation between the implementation of the 2006 Amazon Soy Moratorium and declines in forest-to-soy direct conversion. However, Amazon conversion to pasturelands remains high. Meanwhile, the Cerrado savannah has seen rapid deforestation due to both pasturelands and soy plantations.

New maps show where humans are pushing species closer to extinction
- A new study maps out how disruptive human changes to the environment affect the individual ranges of more than 5,400 mammal, bird and amphibian species around the world.
- Almost a quarter of the species are threatened by human impacts in more than 90 percent of their range, and at least one human impact occurred in an average of 38 percent of the range of a given species.
- The study also identified “cool” spots, where concentrations of species aren’t negatively impacted by humans.
- The researchers say these “refugia” are good targets for conservation efforts.

Scott Wallace on the importance of protecting uncontacted indigenous groups in the Amazon
- On this episode of the Mongabay Newscast, we speak with Scott Wallace, a journalism professor at the University of Connecticut, National Geographic writer, and author of the New York Times best-selling book, The Unconquered: In Search of the Amazon’s Last Uncontacted Tribes.
- The Unconquered tells the story of an expedition into remote Amazon rainforests undertaken by the head of Brazil’s Department of Isolated Indians in order to gather information about an uncontacted tribe known as “the Arrow People” and use that information to better protect the indigenous group from the ever-advancing arc of Amazonian deforestation.
- Wallace discusses his travels in the Amazon, the latest developments affecting the Arrow People, his reporting on the threats facing isolated and uncontacted indigenous tribes, and why allowing these uncontacted indigenous groups to go extinct would be a “great stain” on our humanity.

Fears of a dire precedent as Brazil seeks results-based REDD+ payment
- Critics worry that Brazil’s reference level for deforestation and the lack of guarantee that the carbon will stay locked up could set an unsustainable precedent for future payments.
- The forest reference levels currently used in the proposal are high enough that deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon could double and Brazil would still qualify for “results-based” payments.

Bolsonaro government takes aim at Vatican over Amazon meeting
- The Catholic Church has scheduled a Synod for October, a meeting at which bishops and priests (and one nun) from the nine Latin American Amazon countries will discuss environmental, indigenous and climate change issues.
- Members of the new rightist Brazilian government of Jair Bolsonaro are eyeing the event with suspicion, seeing it as an attack on national sovereignty by a progressive church.
- To show its opposition to the Amazon Synod, the Brazilian government plans to sponsor a rival symposium in Rome, just a month before the Pope’s meeting, to present examples of “Brazil’s concern and care for the Amazon.”
- At issue are two opposing viewpoints: the Catholic Church under Pope Francis sees itself and all nations as stewards of the Earth and of less privileged indigenous and traditional people. Bolsonaro, however, and many of his ruralist and evangelical allies see the Amazon as a resource to be used and developed freely by humans.

Brazil sees growing wave of anti-indigenous threats, reserve invasions
- At least 14 indigenous reserves have been invaded or threatened with invasion, according to Repórter Brasil, an online news service and Mongabay media partner. Threats and acts of violence against indigenous communities appear to have escalated significantly since President Jair Bolsonaro assumed office.
- Indigenous leaders say Bolsonaro’s incendiary language against indigenous people has helped incite that violence, though the government denies this, with one official saying the administration will “stop the illegality.” Indigenous leaders point out that, so far, the government has failed to provide significant law enforcement assistance in the crisis
- Among recent threats and attacks: a top indigenous leader, Rosivaldo Ferreira da Silva of the Tupinambá people, claims to have detected a plot by large-scale landowners and military and civilian police to murder him and his family. The Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau and Karipuna reserves in Rondônia state have been invaded by land grabbers and illegal loggers.
- Another five indigenous territories near the city of Altamira in Pará state have also reportedly been invaded.

10 reasons U.S. must hold Peru to trade deal and protect Amazon (commentary)
- Peru’s pioneering forest inspection agency OSINFOR has taken the lead in exposing the rampant illegalities that have dominated Peru’s timber trade for decades, but it has done so only because it has been independent of other government ministries.
- In December 2018, Peru moved OSINFOR into the Ministry of Environment, effectively stripping it of its independence, a decision that could gravely compromise OSINFOR’s effectiveness in the future.
- This move also arguably violates the Trade Promotion Agreement between Peru and the United States, which entered into force 10 years ago and stipulates that OSINFOR must be “independent.”
- The U.S., a top importer of Peruvian timber, has a major responsibility for ensuring that it is produced legally and therefore must insist Peru respect the Trade Promotion Agreement by making OSINFOR independent again. – This post is a commentary. The views expressed are those of the author, not necessarily Mongabay.

Invaded Uru-eu-wau-wau indigenous reserve awaits relief by Brazil’s new government
- On January 12, Brazil’s Uru-eu-wau-wau Indigenous Reserve in Rondônia state, which covers 1.8 million hectares (6,950 square miles) and includes significant intact rainforest, was invaded by 40 land grabbers, some of them armed, who began cutting down trees, cut 15.5 miles of trails, and started subdividing cleared land into lots.
- Detected, challenged and videotaped by indigenous men, the invaders said they came from “outside” and that 200 more invaders would be coming soon. Indigenous inhabitants made an immediate appeal to the new Bolsonaro administration for significant law enforcement assistance to repel the invaders.
- While federal police in high numbers have not been deployed as requested, the federal and state governments did send in a high level official delegation to investigate the situation including new FUNAI National Indian Foundation president General Franklimberg de Freitas.
- The government says the situation is being watched closely, but is under control for now, and that the administration will “stop illegality.” But indigenous leaders fear “the invaders believe they have support” from the Bolsonaro government. The incident is ongoing. There have been two arrests, but to date the invaders have not been completely expelled.

Amazon at risk: Brazil plans rapid road and rail infrastructure expansion
- New Minister of Infrastructure Tarcísio Gomes de Freitas is considered one of President Jair Bolsonaro’s most capable ministers. The former army engineer wants to streamline Brazil’s infrastructure agencies, root out corruption, and is seeking foreign investors, especially China, to finance a rush of new transportation construction.
- Conservationists and indigenous groups worry that Tarcísio Freitas’ plans to push forward with new roads and railways – including Ferrogrâo (Grainrail) and FIOL (the Railway for the Integration of the Center-West) – could open the Amazon and Cerrado biomes to land grabbers, illegal loggers, illicit ranchers and industrial agribusiness.
- While Tarcísio Freitas says that new Amazon transportation routes can help industrial agribusiness grow without causing new deforestation, in a Mongabay interview last year, he failed to address how all of this new infrastructure could be accomplished without also degrading Amazon forests or impacting indigenous communities.

Bolsonaro acts; Brazil’s socio-environmental groups resist
- The Bolsonaro administration is barely two weeks old, but the new president and his appointees continue to make incendiary statements and press forward with provisional measures and policies that could seriously infringe indigenous, quilombola and agrarian reform land rights, and environmental protections.
- Protest has been loud against the government’s plan to shift the responsibility for indigenous land demarcation away from FUNAI, the indigenous affairs agency, to the Agriculture Ministry, which is dominated by agribusiness and far right ruralists who have long desired indigenous lands. Another proposal may “rent” indigenous lands to ruralists.
- Amazon land thieves also have been emboldened since the election, with the invasion of the Arara Indigenous Reserve in southeast Pará state on 30 December, two days before Bolsonaro took office. On 11 January, land thieves invaded the Uru-eu-wau-wau reserve in Rondônia state. There has been no federal law enforcement response to either conflict.
- On 5 January armed land grabbers attacked a landless rural workers agrarian reform encampment occupied by 200 families in Colniza in Mato Grosso state. One landless peasant was killed and nine seriously wounded. The landless peasants were awaiting a court ruling as to whether a nearby tract would be deeded to the group.

Brazil’s indigenous agency acts to protect isolated Kawahiva people
- On 14 December, FUNAI, Brazil’s indigenous agency, supported by law enforcement, launched an operation to clear invaders – land thieves, illegal loggers, miners and ranchers – from the Pardo River indigenous reserve in Mato Grosso state. They did so possibly because FUNAI expects President Bolsonaro to curtail such raids in future.
- The reserve was established in 2016, after a 15-year effort by FUNAI to get it recognized. The territory covers 411,848 hectares (1,590 square miles) and is meant to protect the ancestral lands of the Kawahiva, a small beleaguered indigenous band that still lives there.
- Giving the Kawahiva a reserve was controversial from the start, and strongly opposed by loggers and agribusiness who denied the Kawahiva existed. FUNAI expeditions have since filmed the Kawahiva, proving that they do in fact continue to inhabit the territory.
- FUNAI officials fear that the Bolsonaro administration will refuse to demarcate the Pardo River Kawahiva reserve, and possibly even try to abolish it. Indigenous groups across Brazil say that if the government refuses to conclude the demarcation process for numerous indigenous reserves, and tries to dissolve some territories, they will resist.

Bolsonaro hands over indigenous land demarcation to agriculture ministry
- The new president of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro has issued an administrative decree shifting the responsibility for indigenous land demarcation from FUNAI, the government’s indigenous affairs office, to the ministry of agriculture.
- Also as part of the decree, Bolsonaro shifted authority over the regularization of quilombola territory (land belonging to runaway slave descendants), from the government’s agrarian reform institute, INCRA, to the ministry of agriculture.
- Critics responded with alarm, seeing the move as a direct conflict of interest. But the bancada ruralista agribusiness lobby in Congress has long demanded this government reorganization, which analysts say will give agribusiness the political levers needed to invade and transform indigenous territories and treat forests as an industrial resource.
- Brazil’s indigenous communities are known to be the best stewards of the Amazon. But Bolsonaro’s moves could signal the weakening, or even the dismantling, of the indigenous reserve system. The potentially resulting wholesale deforestation could be a disaster to indigenous peoples, biodiversity, and even the regional and global climate.

Brazil: Bolsonaro supporter works to imprison Dorothy Stang’s successor
- Brazilian President-elect Jair Bolsonaro is reportedly considering logger and politician Silvério Fernandes to head the Xingu, Pará, branch of the Brazilian Institute for Settlement and Land Reform (INCRA). Fernandes and other ruralists have accused Father José Amaro Lopes de Souza of serious land reform-related crimes.
- Father Amaro is the successor of U.S. missionary Dorothy Stang, murdered in 2005. Amaro says he committed no crime, though admits to supporting landless worker settlements in Anapu, Pará state. Father Amaro was charged and imprisoned earlier this year and held in proximity to the man convicted of organizing Stang’s murder.
- Land conflicts in Anapu began in the 1970s when Brazil’s military government invited outsiders to occupy land there, with the provision that they could keep it when they produced crops or livestock. Few succeeded, and the land reverted to the state. Later, agrarian reform communities were established which Stang supported.
- She was killed in 2005. Land conflicts simmered after that, with violence erupting after 2015 when the nearby Belo Monte dam was finished and unemployed workers, allegedly prompted by loggers, poured into Anapu to claim land. If Fernandes gets the INCRA title, he’ll hold sway over workers’ settlement policy in the Xingu region.

Bolsonaro shapes administration: Amazon, indigenous and landless at risk
- President-elect Jair Bolsonaro has chosen Ricardo Salles as Brazil’s environment minister. The former São Paulo state government environment secretary is under investigation for allegedly redrawing maps allowing protected lands to be developed for mining and factories. His statements are heavily pro-agribusiness and sometimes espouse violence.
- The selection of ruralist Tereza Cristina as agriculture minister, and Ernesto Araújo as foreign minister, also almost certainly signals difficult days ahead for Brazil’s environment. Cristina has pushed hard for fast track approval of toxic pesticides. Araújo calls climate change a “Marxist” conspiracy.
- Analysts say that, by choosing ministry appointees who hold extreme views on the environment, Bolsonaro is making Brazil vulnerable to economic reprisals from the international community – especially from developed nations and companies responding to voters and consumers who oppose harm to the Amazon and indigenous groups.
- Former army officer Bolsonaro has chosen six retired generals to head ministries; other military men join him as VP and chief of staff. Activists fear these appointments will have a chilling effect on Brazilian democracy, leading to repression. Deforestation and violence against activists since the campaign, including assassinations, continue rising in Brazil.

‘Amazon Besieged’: Q&A with Mongabay contributor Sue Branford about new book
- From 2016 to 2017, Mongabay contributors Sue Branford and Maurício Torres traveled to the Tapajós River Basin, in the heart of the Brazilian Amazon, to report on the controversial plan to turn the region into a major commodities export corridor.
- Branford and Torres wrote a 15-part investigative series (published in partnership with The Intercept Brazil) based on what they’d found during their travels for Mongabay in the Tapajós Basin, one of the most biodiverse and culturally rich places on Earth. Now, the reporters have turned those pieces into a book, Amazon Besieged, which was published by Practical Action Publishing this month.
- Mongabay spoke with Sue Branford about what new perspectives she gained on the issues covered in the book while compiling her and Torres’ on-the-ground reporting for publication, what she hopes the average reader takes away from Amazon Besieged, and what she thinks the prospects are for the Amazon under the incoming Bolsonaro Administration.

Amazon indigenous groups and truckers ally to oppose Brazil’s Grainrail
- It is well documented that the construction of new transportation infrastructure in the Amazon leads to an invasion by illegal loggers, illicit ranchers, and other land grabbers. Which is why indigenous people are opposed to Grainrail, a new railroad that, if approved, will penetrate the Tapajós basin threatening 20 indigenous territories.
- The Baú Indigenous Territory has already been reduced in size by the government which gave into pressure from invading land grabbers. Now, the Kayapó people worry that the construction of Grainrail will bring an onslaught of new land invaders and further reductions of their territory.
- This concern is especially strong as Jair Bolsonaro comes to power. He has made it known that he is opposed to the concept of indigenous preserves, while also being on the side of Amazon development and in favor of the fast tracking of environmental licensing for infrastructure projects – which means Grainrail could go forward quickly.
- Indigneous groups have found an unusual ally against Grainrail: truckers who fear they will lose their livelihoods if the planned railroad goes forward. Indigenous groups and truckers are both known for their use of direct actions, such as roadblocks and strikes, to get their views heard – methods that could lead to conflict with Bolsonaro.

Top U.S. flooring retailer linked to Brazilian firm snagged in timber bust
- An investigation by Brazil’s environmental enforcement agency and the federal police led to allegations that Indusparquet, a prominent supplier of tropical wood flooring, was using fraudulent permits to hide illegally harvested wood.
- Government authorities fined the company, made the largest seizure of timber ever in the state of Sãa Paulo, and shut down Indusparquet’s primary warehouse for three weeks.
- Indusparquet has denied wrongdoing and appealed the sanctions, and U.S.-based flooring retailer Floor & Decor has continued to source tropical wood flooring from the company.
- Timberleaks, which first reported the link between Indusparquet and Floor & Decor, contends that the Lacey Act requires companies like Floor & Decor to go beyond the documentation provided by their suppliers — which in this case was alleged to be fraudulent — to ensure the source of those products is legal.

Tax havens and Brazilian Amazon deforestation linked: study
- Tax havens are found in countries that demand no or low taxes for the transfer of foreign capital through their jurisdictions. Typically, tax havens, like those in the Cayman Islands, are very secretive and lack transparency.
- This secrecy protects institutional or individual investors from being in the public spotlight when making investments that are controversial, such as those in agribusiness companies in Brazil known to have caused significant Amazon deforestation, or those investing in illegal fishing.
- According to a recent study, between 2000 and 2011, 68 percent of all investigated foreign capital to 9 top companies in the soy and beef sectors in the Brazilian Amazon was transferred through tax havens. Soy and beef production cause major Amazon deforestation. Also, 70 percent of vessels known to be involved in illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing were funded via tax havens.
- Better transparency is needed so that investments moved through tax havens can be tracked so as to determine their impacts on the environment and on indigenous and traditional communities. This improved transparency would likely result in greater public scrutiny and force greater responsibility on investors who today remain largely anonymous.

Purus-Madeira: the Amazon arc of deforestation marches north
- For the past decade, the southern part of Amazonas state has seen some of the highest rates of deforestation increase in Brazil, threatening the unique moist forest ecosystem found on the divide between the Purus and Madeira river basins.
- The municipalities of Apuí and Lábrea, on the Transamazon highway (BR-230) lead this destructive trend. But now a variety of land users, including legal and illegal loggers, cattle ranchers, entrepreneurs and land grabbers are moving north along the currently unpaved BR-319 highway, causing major deforestation.
- Environmentalists warn that this new wave of Amazon destruction will continue sweeping northward, and intensify, if the Brazilian government continues investing in the BR-319, improving the 890-kilometer (550 mile) road linking the city of Porto Velho in Rondônia state with Manaus in Amazonas state and with the rest of Brazil.
- The new Bolsonaro government is expected to prioritize infrastructure investments in the region, likely weakening regulations governing environmental impact assessments. That could mean the fast tracking of full paving for the BR-319 soon. Among listed Bolsonaro goals is the opening of the Amazon to “new partnerships.”

Bolsonaro pledges government shakeup, deregulation, Amazon development
- Events are unfolding rapidly in Brazil, as president elect Jair Bolsonaro selects members of his administration and continues to propose what many analysts see as sweeping and draconian changes to the Brazilian government and environmental regulations.
- Bolsonaro, while stepping back from plans for a merger of the Environment Ministry with the Agriculture Ministry, still plans major government reorganization. Paulo Guedes, his chief economic advisor, for example, could lead a super ministry merging duties of the Finance, Planning, Industry and Foreign Trade ministries.
- During the presidential campaign, Amazon deforestation rates rose by nearly 50 percent, possibly as Bolsonaro supporters and land grabbers anticipate government retreat from environmental protections. Analysts worry Bolsonaro will criminalize social movements and end the demarcation of indigenous reserves assured by the 1988 Constitution.
- Bolsonaro also chose Tereza Cristina as Agriculture Minister. She is known for her intense support of pesticide deregulation, and for backing a bill to fast track socio-environmental licensing of large infrastructure projects such as dams, railways, roads, industrial waterways, and mines – a position Bolsonaro also supports.

Violence spikes during Brazil elections, rural minorities fear worse
- Brazil has seen a major upswing of violence in recent years, with 63,880 homicides in 2017, a trend that includes both urban and rural areas, and parts of the Amazon where land grabbing and other environmental crimes are common.
- The highly polarized Brazilian presidential election between progressive candidate Fernando Haddad and far-right candidate Jair Bolsonaro seems to have escalated threats and acts of violence across the country. In the period after the 7 October first round election, three land activists were murdered in the Amazon.
- Critics have accused Bolsonaro of perpetrating “fake news” and of inciting violence, especially against minorities, including urban LGBT communities, and rural indigenous groups, Quilombos (descendants of runaway slaves living in remote rural communities), and the landless peasant movement (MST).
- The runoff presidential election is scheduled for Sunday, 28 October, and polls show Bolsonaro with a significant lead over Haddad, with Bolsonaro expected to be Brazil’s next president, barring surprises. Whether Bolsonaro will carry through on incendiary promises made during his candidacy is unknown.

Jair Bolsonaro: looming threat to the Amazon and global climate?
- Jair Bolsonaro is poised to win the Brazilian presidential runoff on 28 October – currently polling with 58 percent of the vote. He holds strong policy positions in opposition to the environment, indigenous rights and traditional land claims.
- Bolsonaro has pledged to open the Amazon to economic exploitation, greatly expand energy production, abolish Brazil’s environmental ministry, relax environmental licensing and regulation, open indigenous reserves to mining, and back out of the Paris climate accord.
- Moreover, Bolsonaro’s once tiny PSL Party elected 52 new federal deputies and four senators in the 7 October election. It is very likely that these ultra-right PSL representatives will caucus with the right-wing bancada ruralista agribusiness and mining bloc in Congress, giving them a majority.
- As a result, analysts say that if Bolsonaro is elected president, he will probably have the full support of Congress in fulfilling his agenda, with only the Supreme Court likely standing in the way of significant Amazon deforestation and other environmental harm.

Fate of the Amazon is on the ballot in Brazil’s presidential election (commentary)
- In the late 20th and early 21st century, Brazil set policies that made it a world leader in reducing deforestation, helping safeguard the Amazon.
- However, the gains made over those years are now at risk due to the proposed environmental policies of far-right candidate Jair Bolsonaro, who analysts say is highly likely to become Brazil’s president in a runoff election on 28 October.
- Bolsonaro has pledged to shut down Brazil’s environmental ministry, relax environmental law enforcement and licensing, open indigenous reserves to mining, ban international environmental NGOs such as Greenpeace and WWF from the country, and back out of the Paris climate accord.
- A study by this commentary’s authors estimates that Brazilian deforestation and carbon emissions under Bolsonaro’s policies would cause unprecedented Amazon forest loss, and contribute to destabilizing the global climate. This post is a commentary. The views expressed are those of the authors, not necessarily Mongabay.

Landless movement leader assassinated in Brazilian Amazon
- Landless movement leader Aluisio Sampaio, known as Alenquer, was murdered last Thursday in his home in Castelo de Sonhos in Pará state – an area that has become increasingly violent as land grabbers take over, clear forest, and sell the land for high profits to cattle ranchers.
- When Mongabay interviewed Alenquer late in 2016, he was helping defend the land rights of a peasant settlement along the BR-163 highway. At the time, he had been receiving death threats, and wore a bullet-proof vest provided to him by the government. The peasant settlement was later visited by armed gunman.
- Following that confrontation, Alenquer published a Youtube video accusing two prominent local citizens of threatening to kill him. Authorities have so far arrested two suspects in relation to Alenquer’s murder, while another man was killed in a police shootout on Saturday. The police investigation is on going.
- Alenquer’s murder comes as Brazil sees an uptick in violence that some analysts tie to the strong showing on 7 October of Brazilian far-right presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro, projected to win a 28 October runoff. Bolsonaro, a law-and-order candidate, has made inflammatory statements regarding violence.

Amazonia and the setbacks of Brazil’s political moment (commentary)
- In the October 7 Brazilian election, far right candidate Jair Bolsonaro won 46 percent of the vote, not enough to earn the presidency, but triggering a runoff election October 28 with Fernando Haddad who came in second with 29 percent. Analysts say that, barring surprises, Bolsonaro could be Brazil’s next leader.
- Bolsonaro was elected based on several issues, including reaction to government corruption and his stance on crime. However, says analyst Philip Fearnside, Jair’s most lasting impacts will likely be on the environment, especially the Amazon, indigenous and traditional peoples, and destabilization of the global climate.
- The candidate has promised to abolish Brazil’s environmental ministry, expel NGOs such as Greenpeace and WWF from the country, slash science and technology budgets, “sell” indigenous lands, and “relax” licensing for major infrastructure projects such as dams, industrial waterways, roads and railways.
- But his most impactful act could be a pledge to pull out of the Paris Climate Agreement, ending Brazil’s global commitment to reduce deforestation, triggering massive Amazon forest loss, and possibly runaway climate change. This post is a commentary. The views expressed are those of the author, not necessarily Mongabay.

Fire fundamentally alters carbon dynamics in the Amazon
- With higher temperatures and increasingly severe droughts resulting from climate change, fires are becoming a more frequent phenomenon in the Amazon.
- New research finds that fires fundamentally change the structure of the forest, leading it to stockpile less carbon even decades after a burn.
- The research also shows that the burning of dead organic matter in the understory can release far more carbon into the atmosphere than previously thought.

8,100-square-mile indigenous reserve recognized in Brazilian Amazon
- There are 462 government-declared Indigenous Lands (TIs) in Brazil, but of these only 8 percent have been demarcated, a boundary-marking process vital to preventing and to prosecuting illegal incursions by land grabbers, loggers, miners and other outsiders.
- On 19 September the Kaxuyana-Tunayana TI on the border of Pará and Amazonas state received Ministry of Justice approval for demarcation of its 2.1 million hectares (8,108 square miles). However, drastic budget cuts at FUNAI, Brazil’s indigenous affairs agency, leaves the date at which the demarcation process will begin unknown.
- At least 18 different indigenous groups live within the remote Kaxuyana-Tunayana TI, including four isolated uncontacted groups. In the 1960s, the Brazilian government removed many indigenous people forcibly from the region, transporting them in Air Force planes. Some returned, walking all the way back to their home territory.
- Indigenous advocates, and indigenous people living in the Kaxuyana-Tunayana TI, worry that the growing political strength of the bancada ruralista agribusiness lobby in Congress will result in the abolishment of FUNAI and prevent the demarcation process from ever happening. But they remain hopeful.

Pasture expansion driving deforestation in Brazilian protected area
- Climate scientists were wary when the Brazilian government announced in August that its 2020 goals for the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions had already been met. Lending credence to those concerns, it appears even protected areas in the country aren’t currently safe from forest destruction.
- Brazil’s Triunfo do Xingu Area of Environmental Protection has become a deforestation hotspot over the past few months, with more than 14,000 hectares of the protected area impacted by the expansion of pasture since May.
- Though deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon peaked around 2004, the Triunfo do Xingu protected area has lost more than 350,000 hectares (nearly 865,000 acres) of tree cover since its founding in 2006.

Purus-Madeira: journey to the Amazon’s newest deforestation frontier
- In August, Mongabay contributor Gustavo Faleiros and filmmaker Marcio Isensee e Sá visited the unique biodiverse Amazon forests located on the divide between the Purus and Madeira river basins, where a decades-delayed plan to improve the BR-319 highway is gaining momentum, bringing environmental transformation.
- The introductory video and story presented here, along with a series of feature articles to follow in coming weeks, shows how federal road improvements are bringing outsiders, entrepreneurs and outlaws to the region — all eager to profit by reducing the forest via logging operations, cattle production and other businesses.
- In this first dispatch, we profile Realidade, a small village in the Brazilian Amazon where loggers, businessmen and land grabbers are still in the early stages of occupation.
- Although deforestation here isn’t yet as fast or serious, as in Pará, Mato Grosso and other states, business growth rates are among Brazil’s highest. With scientists warning that further Amazon deforestation could worsen climate change, bringing extreme drought and a shift from rainforest to savanna in the region, analysts urge that the vast Purus-Madeira moist forest ecoregion be conserved.

‘Predatory agribusiness’ likely to gain more power in Brazil election: report
- 248 candidates, about two-thirds of federal deputies seeking re-election to the Brazilian congress this October either introduced, or voted for bills harmful to the environment, indigenous peoples, and rural workers, according to a survey conducted by Repórter Brasil.
- The survey compiled the voting records of Brazilian deputies up for re-election, a record then assessed for negative or positive impacts by eight socio-environmental organizations. The results are presented online as the Ruralometer.
- Out of the 248 candidates running for re-election, 138 (or 55 percent) are part of the Parliamentary Agricultural and Livestock Front – the bancada ruralista agribusiness caucus, well known for its strongly negative socio-environmental agenda.
- Analysts say that the current Congress is the most conservative since the end of Brazil’s military dictatorship in 1985, but they expect it will move further right after the 7 October election. Experts blame the conservative makeup of Congress on the wealth and influence of ruralists and agribusiness, and on campaign finance laws.

Brazil hits emissions target early, but rising deforestation risks reversal
- The decline in deforestation between 2016 and 2017 saved emissions of the equivalent of 610 million metric tons (672 million tons) of carbon dioxide from the Brazilian Amazon and 170 million metric tons (187 million tons) from the Cerrado, Brazil’s wooded savanna, according to the Brazilian government.
- The emissions reductions, announced Aug. 9, eclipsed the targets that the Brazilian government set for 2020.
- However, amid rising deforestation over the past few years, particularly in the Amazon, experts have expressed concern that the reductions in emissions might not hold.

Fake logging permits undermine Amazonian conservation, say experts
- System in Brazil for issuing permits found to intentionally overestimate high-value timber species.
- The system for issuing these fraudulent permits has created a fake “surplus” of licensed timber.
- Experts now say that the falsified numbers are contributing to the widespread forest degradation that comes with illegal logging and the overexploitation of Amazonian timber species.

Death foretold? A courageous Amazon peasant couple resists illegal loggers
- The Terra do Meio (Land in the Middle) is a continuous mosaic of protected areas, 20 indigenous territories and 10 conservation units covering 28 million hectares in the heart of the Amazon and intended as a buffer against illegal deforestation and land theft. As big as Colorado, it represents one of the world’s largest areas of conserved tropical rainforest.
- Today, this vast conserved area in Pará state is under great pressure from organized crime and illegal loggers, with the Riozinho do Anfrísio Extractivist Reserve one of the most assaulted by illicit timber harvesters in all of Amazonia. The Areia settlement, created by the National Institute of Agrarian Reform (INCRA) in 1988, lies adjacent to the reserve.
- Areia’s residents have suffered for decades from threats of violence and murder from the illegal loggers, with many locals abandoning their land or giving in to the criminals. Organic farmers Osvalinda Maria Marcelino Pereira and Daniel Pereira have resisted, holding onto their plot, with Osvalinda founding the Association of the Women of Areia.
- Hounded by hired gunmen and threatened with death, the two have become isolated and are now seeking outside support for their cause. Federal agencies have offered little help, and there are allegations that the illegal loggers are being shielded from prosecution. Similarly desperate situations are occurring among peasant farmers across Amazonia.

Temer’s deforestation policies put Paris goals at risk, scientists warn
- A letter in the journal Nature Climate Change penned by ten prominent Brazilian scientists is making a splash in major Brazilian media outlets. They warn that weak environmental governance by the Temer administration and the bancada ruralista, agribusiness and mining lobby, is resulting in policies that are increasing deforestation.
- The scientists especially singled out Temer, noting that: “the President of Brazil has signed provisional acts and decrees lowering environmental licensing requirements, suspending the ratification of indigenous lands, reducing the size of protected areas and facilitating land grabbers to obtain the deeds of illegally deforested areas.”
- The scientists say that these policies are undermining attempts to reduce deforestation and the CO2 emissions that clear cutting causes. As a result, Brazil may need to spend US$2-5 trillion additionally to curb its carbon emissions by other means in order to hit the nation’s Paris Climate Agreement targets.
- The warning comes as Brazil gears up for October national elections. Environmental issues rarely have a great influence on Brazilian voters, but the scientists hope that knowledge of the severe and costly consequences of the current government’s policies could help better inform Brazilians as they go to the polls.

Brazil’s political storm driving Amazon deforestation higher
- Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon was dramatically reduced between 2005 and 2015, surged in 2016, then fell in 2017. Preliminary figures from IMAZON suggest the trend has now reversed, with deforestation up 22 percent between August 2017 and May 2018, compared to the same period the prior year. But, so far, official confirmation from INPE of this surge is lacking.
- Experts say the source of the uptick lies with land-grabbers emboldened by the bancada ruralista, the agribusiness lobby, which has won many recent legislative and administrative victories, drastically cutting environmental and indigenous agency budgets, and pushing bills to shrink conservation units and erode indigenous land rights.
- A recent Forest Code Supreme Court ruling may have further encouraged wealthy land-grabbers, when it granted billions in amnesty, forgiving fines against many guilty of illegal deforestation. Today, Pará’s Triunfo Xingu Area of Environmental Protection and the Indigenous Territory of Apyterewa are especially threatened by land-grabbing.
- So is Pará’s Jamanxim National Forest; land thieves there hope congress will pass a bill to dismember the preserve, along with other Brazilian conservation units. Environmentalists worry that the election of right-wing populist Jair Bolsonaro as president, dubbed “Brazil’s Trump,” in October could send deforestation rates soaring.

US/China trade war could boost Brazil soy export, Amazon deforestation
- President Donald Trump is pressing hard for a trade war with China. So far, he has imposed $50 billion in tariffs on the Chinese, and threatened another $200 billion; the Chinese are retaliating. An all-out U.S./China trade war could have serious unforeseen repercussions on the Brazilian Amazon, including increased deforestation, intensified pressures on indigenous groups, and escalated climate change.
- The concern is that China will shift its commodities purchases, including beef and soy, away from the U.S. to Brazil. The Amazon and Cerrado biomes are already major exporters of both commodities, and are creating a boom in infrastructure construction to bring those products to market. Even without a trade war, experts expect Brazil to edge out the U.S. this year as the world´s largest soy producer.
- The U.S. tariffs may already be prompting a shift in trade. Trump first threatened China with tariffs in January. By April, U.S. soy sales to China were down 70,000 metric tons compared to the same period last year. Data also shows a surge in Brazilian Amazon deforestation between February and April of 2018, compared to 2017, a possible response by Brazil soy growers eager to profit from a trade war.
- If the U.S./China trade war results in a significant surge in Brazilian commodities production, deforestation rates there could soar. Scientists worry that Amazon deforestation, now at 17 percent, could be pushed past a 20-25 percent climate tipping point, converting rainforest to savanna, greatly swelling carbon emissions, and potentially destabilizing the regional and even global climate.

Illegal loggers ‘cook the books’ to harvest Amazon’s most valuable tree
- A new study finds that illegal logging, coupled with weak state-run timber licensing systems, has led to massive timber harvesting fraud in Brazil, resulting in huge illicit harvests of Ipê trees. This process is doing major damage to the Amazon, as loggers build roads deep into forests, causing fragmentation and creating greater access.
- To reduce document fraud, the Brazilian federal government this month required that all states register or integrate their timber licensing systems within a national timber inventory and tracking system known as Sinaflor. While this should reduce fraudulent paperwork, onsite illicit timber harvesting practices remain a major problem.
- Better oversight of forest management plans and more onsite inspections of timber operations are needed to curb illegal logging practices and to prevent harvesting on public lands and in indigenous reserves. The high value of Ipê wood — selling for up to $2,500 per cubic meter at export — makes it very profitable for illegal loggers.
- Ipê wood is largely shipped to the U.S. and Europe. Analysts say that buyers all along the timber supply chain turn a blind eye toward fraud, with sawmills, exporters, and importers trusting the paperwork they receive, rather than questioning whether the lower prices they pay for Ipê and other timber may be due to timber laundering.

Brazil has the tools to end Amazon deforestation now: report
- A coalition of environmental NGOs known as the Zero Deforestation Working Group has developed a practical plan called “A Pathway to Zero Deforestation in the Amazon.” First proposed at the COP23 climate summit in Bonn, Germany, last November, the NGOs propose workable strategies for ending deforestation quickly in Brazil, while also yielding significant economic and social benefits.
- Deforestation continues, the report says, because cleared land is worth more than forested land in the Amazon, so there is a strong economic incentive to buy up large amounts of forestland and clear it. Also, enforcement of Brazilian forestry laws remains weak. Finally, markets have been slow to make, and implement, commitments to remove deforestation from their supply chains.
- Deforestation solutions require a new development vision for the Brazilian Amazon, say analysts, with policies that promote the sustainable use of forest products, and policies that end the expansion of agro-commodities into native forests, and promote agribusiness growth on the nation’s surplus of 15-20 million hectares of already deforested and degraded land.
- Law enforcement to curb illegal land grabbing also needs to happen, especially on the 70 million hectares of public land in Amazonia not allocated for specific uses. Also, government must start tracking cattle from point of origin with indirect suppliers, where deforestation occurs, to slaughterhouses. A key step to a solution: open talks between agribusiness and environmentalists.

Tambopata: Where forest conservation and opportunity meet
- Robin Van Loon is founder of Camino Verde in Peru, an organization working to go above and beyond sustainable agro-economics in favor of regenerative agro-economics.
- The Tambopata Region of the Peruvian Amazon is one of the most biodiverse places on the planet where new species are still being discovered. It’s home to species of trees used and nurtured by Camino Verde for profit and forest health.
- The vision of Robin Van Loon and his team at Camino Verde: see the forest for the trees, and you’ll find a way to preserve both for generations to come.

Brazil’s actual forest-related CO2 emissions could blow by Paris pledge
- Brazil is reporting its CO2 emissions within U.N. guidelines, but those rules ignore significant sources of national greenhouse gas emissions ¬by disregarding carbon emitting processes related to forests, say scientists. None of this underreporting is likely unique to Brazil, but it is perhaps more acute there than in other nations due to Brazil’s vast forests.
- The U.N. doesn’t require Brazil and other developing nations to count certain greenhouse gas emissions in detail, especially sources it classifies as non-anthropogenic. This, for example, includes CO2 released from wildfires. However, most fires in the Brazilian Amazon are set by people clearing land, so those CO2 emissions are largely human-caused.
- Forest degradation, methane emitted from reservoirs, and carbon released from soils where forests are converted to croplands or pastures go partly or totally untallied in emission reports, sometimes because data is lacking, or because the UN hasn’t included the source in its reporting criteria. Another problem: low-resolution satellite monitoring allows small-scale deforestation to go undetected, so is unreported.
- As a result, Brazil’s actual carbon emissions are almost certainly higher than the figures reported to the United Nations — how much higher is unknown. But, experts say, that if this missing carbon were added to Brazil’s reported emissions, the nation would likely not meet its 2025 Paris Climate Agreement goal.

Maroon 5’s James Valentine on why he’s working to stop illegal logging
- On today’s episode, we speak with multiple-Grammy-winning musician James Valentine about his work to stop illegal logging and make concert tours more environmentally friendly.
- As lead guitarist of Maroon 5, Valentine has traversed the globe numerous times on tour, taking the band’s music around the world. But late last year, Valentine went to Peru with a much different mission: he was part of a group of musicians who spoke in Lima in support of the “No More Blood Wood” campaign. He also visited a sustainable logging operation in Guatemala's Maya Biosphere Reserve in 2016.
- Valentine is here to tell us about his experiences in Peru and Guatemala and to tell us all about the work he and Reverb are doing to keep illegal wood out of musical instruments, lower the environmental impact of touring, and engage music fans in environmental action.

Indigenous Amazonian women demand end to extraction
- After long journeys by foot and bus, the women gathered in Ecuador’s capitol Quito to protest last week and call for a meeting with Ecuador’s president, Lenin Moreno.
- After several days of protest, Moreno agreed to a meeting with the group today.
- Amazonian leaders say they plan to discuss their mandate, particularly the sexual exploitation and harassment they face due to extractive activities in the Amazon and the loss of economic opportunity.

Amazon forest to savannah tipping point could be far closer than thought (commentary)
- In the 1970s, scientists recognized that the Amazon makes half of its own rainfall via evaporation and transpiration from vegetation. Researchers also recognized that escalating deforestation would reduce this rainfall producing effect.
- A 2007 study estimated that with 40 percent Amazon deforestation a tipping point could be reached, with large swathes of Amazonia switching from forest to savannah. Two newly considered factors in a 2016 study – climate change and fires – have now reduced that estimated tipping point to 20-25 percent. Current deforestation is at 17 percent, with an unknown amount of degraded forest adding less moisture.
- There is good reason to think that this Amazon forest to savannah tipping point is close at hand. Historically unprecedented droughts in 2005, 2010 and 2015 would seem to be the first flickers of such change.
- Noted Amazon scientists Tom Lovejoy and Carlos Nobre argue that it is critical to build in a margin of safety by keeping Amazon deforestation below 20 percent. To avoid this tipping point, Brazil needs to strongly control deforestation, and combine that effort with reforestation. This post is a commentary. The views expressed are those of the author, not necessarily Mongabay.

Brazil high court Forest Code ruling largely bad for environment, Amazon: NGOs
- In a tight decision, the Brazilian Supreme Court (STF) upheld the constitutionality of much of Brazil’s 2012 New Forest Code, that had been created under the powerful influence of the bancada ruralista agribusiness lobby. The upheld 2012 New Forest Code is a weaker body of environmental regulations than the 1965 code created under Brazil’s military government.
- The court ruling made constitutional a declared amnesty for those who illegally cleared their Legal Reserves (lands, by law, they must not clear) before 22 July 2008, eliminating required fines and tree replantings. It allows for the reduction of Legal Reserves in states or municipalities largely occupied by indigenous reserves or protected areas.
- The STF decision also allows for the reduction in size of APAs (Areas of Permanent Protection), even when considered fundamental by environmentalists for maintaining water supplies and preventing climate disasters such as floods and mudslides.
- The ruling allows farmers who have already illegally cleared protected APAs, to get authorization to clear even more land, and approves farming activities on steep slopes and hilltops. Environmentalists were critical of the high court decision, while agribusiness praised it.

Moment of truth: Study reveals high percentage of illegal Peruvian timber exports
- Research has shown that the origin of most of the wood that leaves Peru is unknown.
- A new report reveals that most of the wood exported from Peru in 2015 was of illegal or unknown origin.
- Published by the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA), the report says that the amount of illegally-sourced wood bound for export remains extremely high three years after a major bust.

Pope set to visit site of deforestation, indigenous struggle in Peru
- Pope Francis plans to visit Puerto Maldonado in the Peruvian region of Madre de Dios Friday morning on his trip to South America.
- He will speak with indigenous communities in a coliseum.
- Madre de Dios had the second-highest rate of deforestation in the Peruvian Amazon in 2017, with 208 square kilometers (80 square miles) of forest cover loss as a result of farming, logging and mining.

Record Amazon fires, intensified by forest degradation, burn indigenous lands
- As of September 2017, Brazil’s Pará state in the Amazon had seen a 229 percent increase in fires over 2016; in a single week in December the state saw 26,000 fire alerts. By year’s end, the Brazilian Amazon was on track for an all-time record fire season.
- But 2017 was not a record drought year, so experts have sought other causes. Analysts say most of the wildfires were human-caused, set by people seeking to convert forests to crop or grazing lands. Forest degradation by mining companies, logging and agribusiness added to the problem.
- Huge cuts made by the Temer administration in the budgets of Brazilian regulatory and enforcement agencies, such as FUNAI, the nation’s indigenous protection agency, and IBAMA, its environmental agency, which fights fires, added to the problem in 2017.
- The dramatic rise in wildfires has put indigenous communities and their territories at risk. For example, an area covering 24,000 hectares (59,305 acres), lost tree cover within the Kayapó Indigenous Territory from October to December, while the nearby Xikrin Indigenous Territory lost roughly 10,000 hectares (24,710 acres) over the same period.

Brazil 2017: environmental and indigenous rollbacks, rising violence
- The bancada ruralista, or ruralist lobby, in Brazil’s congress flexed its muscles in 2017, making numerous demands on President Michel Temer to make presidential decrees weakening environmental protections and revoking land rights to indigenous and traditional communities in Brazil – decisions especially impacting the Amazon.
- Emboldened ruralists – including agribusiness, cattle ranchers, land thieves and loggers – stepped up violent attacks in 2017, making Brazil the most dangerous country in the world for social or environmental activists. There were 63 assassinations by the end of October.
- Budgets to FUNAI, the indigenous agency; IBAMA, the environmental agency; and other institutions, were reduced so severely this year that these government regulatory agencies were largely unable to do their enforcement and protection work.
- In 2017, Temer led attempts to dismember Jimanxim National Forest and National Park, and to open the vast RENCA preserve in the Amazon to mining – efforts that have failed to date, but are still being pursued. Resistance has remained fierce, especially among indigenous groups, with Temer sometimes forced to backtrack on his initiatives.

Selective logging reduces biodiversity, disrupts Amazon ecosystems: study
- Reduced-impact logging, also called selective logging, which gained popularity in the 1990s, aims to balance biodiversity impacts with global demand for timber by extracting fewer trees. But the success of this approach is coming under increasing scrutiny.
- A new study in the Brazilian Amazon found that dung beetle communities, and their important role as “ecosystem engineers,” is severely disrupted by even low-level timber extraction, with sharp reductions in species richness.
- Multitudes of studies on birds, mammals, amphibians and invertebrates around the globe demonstrate the same finding: that even low-levels of timber extraction have significant impact on species diversity.
- This extensive research suggests that selective logging techniques should be shelved in favor of “land-sparing” timber extraction strategies, which create a patchwork of highly logged sites and intact forest reserves.

EU-LatAm trade deal good for agribusiness; bad for Amazon, climate – analysis
- The EU-Mercosur trade deal, being concluded this month by the European Union and the South American trade bloc (Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay) is being negotiated in secret. However, part of the document has been leaked to Greenpeace, alarming environmentalists.
- The leaked secret trade documents show that the accord would encourage the export of high-value goods, like automobiles, from Europe to Latin American, while encouraging the export of huge amounts of low-value products – including beef and soy – from South America.
- This emphasis on production and international consumption could greatly increase the need for agricultural land in Latin America, and result in a major increase in deforestation of the Brazilian Amazon and Cerrado, and Argentine Chaco.
- The conversion of forests to crop and range lands could significantly decrease carbon storage, leading to a rise in carbon emissions that could help push global temperatures more than 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels by the end of the century, with potentially catastrophic results for ecosystems and civilization.

Peru: the man who overcomes fear to defend the forest
- The vice president of the Tambopata National Reserve management committee has reported invasions and threats on several occasions.
- Demetrio Pacheco says that he has found burned and fallen trees inside his concession.

Videos detail corruption in massive illegal Peruvian timber case
- New video shows Peruvian timber executives knew they might be trafficking illegal timber out of the country aboard one of the largest captured shipments of illegal timber in Peru’s history, the Yacu Kallpa.
- The video, released by NGO Global Witness, shows that despite public claims, exporters often know that documents do not guarantee legal origin of timber.
- The videos include representatives from three of the exporting companies involved in the Yacu Kallpa case: Corporación Industrial Forestal, Inversiones WCA, and Sico Maderas.

From carbon sink to source: Brazil puts Amazon, Paris goals at risk
- Brazil is committed to cutting carbon emissions by 37 percent from 2005 levels by 2025, to ending illegal deforestation, and restoring 120,000 square kilometers of forest by 2030. Scientists warn these Paris commitments are at risk due to a flood of anti-environmental and anti-indigenous measures forwarded by President Michel Temer.
- “If these initiatives succeed, Temer will go down in history with the ruralistas as the ones who put a stake in the beating heart of the Amazon.” — Thomas Lovejoy, conservation biologist and director of the Center for Biodiversity and Sustainability at George Mason University.
- “The Temer government’s reckless behavior flies in the face of Brazil’s commitments to the Paris Agreement.” — Christian Poirier, program director at Amazon Watch.
- “There was, or maybe there still is, a very slim chance we can avoid a catastrophic desertification of South America. No doubt, there will be horrific damage if the Brazilian government initiatives move forward in the region.” — Antonio Donato Nobre, scientist at INPA, the Institute for Amazonian Research.

As negotiators meet in Bonn, Brazil’s carbon emissions rise
- Brazil pledged in Paris to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 37 percent by 2025 over 2005 levels. But its emissions shot up 8.9 percent in 2016, largely due to deforestation and agriculture. That increase threatens Brazil’s Paris goal.
- Pará, in the heart of the Amazon, was the highest carbon emitter state, with 12.3 percent of the national total (due almost exclusively to deforestation and poorly managed industrial agriculture), followed by Mato Grosso state (9.6 percent of national emissions), which has converted much forest to soy production.
- Experts say that this emissions trend could be reversed through sustainable forestry and more efficient agricultural practices. However, the dominance of the elite ruralist faction in Congress and in the Temer administration is preventing progress toward achieving Brazil’s carbon pledge.

Indigenous lands at risk, as Amazon sellout by Brazil’s Temer continues (commentary)
- Brazilian president Michel Temer has twice survived National Congress votes to initiate impeachment against him on extensive corruption charges.
- Temer did so by selling out the environment, particularly the Amazon, to the ruralists who largely control the assembly.
- Among the concessions made or promised to ruralists are presidential decrees to allow agribusiness to rent indigenous lands, forgiving unpaid environmental fines owed by landowners, and ending any enforcement of restrictions on labor “equivalent to slavery.”
- This post is a commentary. The views expressed are those of the author, not necessarily Mongabay.

Brazilian police nab Amazon timber thieves who faked forest credits
- Federal Police arrested and fined participants in an illegal logging and forest credit fraud scheme operating in Pará, Santa Catarina, Paraná and Mato Grosso states.
- The timber thieves were aided in this crime by gaps in the government’s licensing program and poor control of the timber production chain in Pará and Mato Grosso; lapses which authorities are now moving to correct.
- The timber thieves cut rare ipê trees on the Amazon’s Cachoeira Seca indigenous reserve, then used falsified records and a variety of companies to move the timber to other states and export the wood, used for expensive decking in the U.S., Argentina, Panama, France, Germany, the UK, United Arab Emirates and South Korea.
- Fines for illegal timber harvesting are only R$ 5,000 (US$ 1,587) per hectare; and for failing to submit proper reports, between R$ 1,000 and R$ 100,000 (US$ 317 to US$ 31,700), insignificant amounts that do little to deter a crime that can yield very high profits for perpetrators. These fines have not been increased since 2008.

Two scientists and a NASA astronaut just biked across the Brazilian Amazon and want to tell you about it
- On Sept 26, two scientists and a NASA astronaut completed TransAmazon +25, a bike trek across the Brazilian Amazon.
- What makes this trip particularly interesting is that one of the cyclists, Osvaldo Stella, a mechanical engineer with the non-profit Amazon Environmental Research Institute (IPAM) in Brazil who works with small-scale farmers and other landowners to preserve and restore forests, did the same ride 25 years ago.
- Stella was accompanied on the journey by Paulo Moutinho, a co-founder and senior scientist at IPAM and a Distinguished Policy Fellow at the Woods Hole Research Center in the USA; as well as Chris Cassidy, an astronaut with the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and Navy SEAL.
- “Gold mining, deforestation, and pastures covered many of the areas that were covered with forest 25 years ago,” Stella told Mongabay. ”The cities are larger but have not changed much in their overall appearance. One more sign that the current economic model generates much impact to the environment but little improvement in the quality of life of the people.”

Temer guts Brazil’s slavery law, to the applause of elite ruralists
- Brazil has about 155,000 people working in conditions analogous to slavery, many used by elite ruralists who have become wealthy via environmental crime. Slave labor, for example, is often used in the Amazon to keep illegal deforestation and illicit agribusiness hidden and off the books.
- President Temer has issued a decree — known as a portaria — narrowing the definition of slavery. Holding people in economic servitude, in conditions analogous to slavery, is no longer illegal. Now slaves must be held against their will, and two government officials must catch the slaveholder in the act.
- The easing of the slavery law, experts say, is Temer’s way of rewarding the bancada ruralista, the agribusiness lobby, which includes about 40 percent of the Congress and continues to support Temer and to reject on-going rounds of corruption charges against the president.
- Outrage over the weakening of the slavery law is widespread in Brazil and abroad. NOTE: this story was updated on 10-25-17 to report that Brazil’s Supreme Court (STF) has temporarily suspended implementation of Temer’s slavery decree until an STF ruling can be made.

Birdwatching poised to take flight in Colombia, study reveals
- A new study identifies 67 communities with high potential for developing birdwatching ecotourism in Colombia.
- The country is home to more than 1,900 bird species, including 443 rare birds ‘highly valued by bird watchers.’
- The authors present ecotourism as an alternative to mining and logging as rural communities look for ways to develop economically after a decades-long conflict.

Amazon deforestation linked to McDonald’s and British retail giants
- British fast food restaurants and grocery chains, including Tesco, Morrisons and McDonald’s, buy their chicken from Cargill, which feeds its poultry with imported soy, much of it apparently coming from the Bolivian Amazon and Brazilian Cerrado — areas rapidly being deforested for new soy plantations.
- A decade ago, Cargill and other global commodities companies agreed to stop buying soy from the Brazilian Amazon and established a Soy Moratorium in the region.
- But a recent study showed that Cargill and other companies simply began sourcing their soy purchases from nearby areas, including the Bolivian Amazon and Brazilian Cerrado, a vast area of savanna, part of which is included in Brazil’s definition of Legal Amazonia.
- That shift has resulted in rapid deforestation in both areas; a Mighty Earth report revealed that U.S. soy distributor Cargill is a major soy buyer there. Efforts to extend the soy moratorium to the Bolivian Amazon and Brazilian Cerrado have long been opposed by Cargill, despite calls to do so by NGOs, scientists and the Brazilian environment minister.

Brazil: a world champion in political and environmental devastation (commentary)
- Brazil, the fifth largest country in the world is heir to a fabulously rich heritage in its natural wealth and natural wonders.
- It is also heir to a corrupt colonial tradition that today still rewards the nation’s wealthiest most privileged elites, as they overexploit forests, rivers, soils and local communities in the name of exorbitant profits.
- These vast profits are made via intense deforestation, cattle ranching, mining, agribusiness, dam and road building and other development, with little or no regard for the wellbeing of the environment or the people.
- Brazil’s landed elites, known today as ruralists, are well protected by state and federal governments, and remain largely exempt from prosecution for crimes against the environment and public good. This post is a commentary. The views expressed are those of the author, not necessarily Mongabay.

Indigenous victory: Brazil’s Temer decrees 1.2 million Amazon reserve
- In a rare recent victory for Brazil’s indigenous people, President Temer has established the 1.2 million hectare Indigenous Territory of Turubaxi-Téa along the Middle Negro River in Amazonas state.
- While NGOs and indigenous groups applaud the move, they note that the region has not been claimed by the Temer-backed ruralists, agribusiness and mining interests, who have aggressively disputed indigenous claims to ancestral lands in the southern Amazon region.
- Two weeks ago, Temer reversed a decree establishing the 532-hectare indigenous Territory of Jaraguá in São Paulo state, ancestral home to 700 Guarani Indians. As a result, the indigenous group has now been squeezed into a reserve covering just 1.7 hectares.
- Brazil also just established the 5,200-hectare Indigenous Territory of Tapeba, near Fortaleza, the capital of the northeastern state of Ceará. These indigenous victories do not seem to indicate a shift away from Temer’s wave of initiatives undermining indigenous land rights.

Zero tolerance of deforestation likely only way to save Amazon gateway
- In a new paper, conservationists urgently call for a policy of zero deforestation and sustainable agroforestry in Maranhão, one of Brazil’s poorest states, before its remaining Amazon forests are lost.
- The region’s forests are home to unique and endangered species, including the jaguar (Panthera onca), Black bearded saki (Chiropotes satanas), and kaapori capuchin (Cebus kaapori), one of the world’s rarest primates.
- It is also inhabited by some of the most vulnerable indigenous groups in the world, including uncontacted indigenous communities.
- Though 70 percent of remaining forest lies within protected areas, illegal logging and slash-and-burn agriculture are persistent problems, threatening already fragmented wildlife habitat and forcing indigenous tribes off ancestral land.

Intact forests crucial to Amazon ecosystem resilience, stable climate
- Three recent South American studies emphasize the importance of intact forests to healthy habitat and a stable climate — both locally, and at a great distance.
- The first study found that forest integrity is crucial for habitat stability and resilience. Degradation makes it harder for Brazil’s Caatinga forest to recover from intensifying drought due to climate change. Protected forests are more resilient against drought.
- Another study showed that intense land use change in central Brazil and northern Argentina has resulted in the dry season becoming warmer across South America, with changes in Amazon plant productivity 500 kilometers from the disturbed area.
- A third study’s modelling found that major future deforestation anywhere in the Amazon will dramatically reduce rainfall in the Amazon’s southwest — accounting for about 25 percent of the Amazon basin — and the La Plata basin.

Brazil’s Indians on the march in last ditch effort to stop land theft
- Last week, indigenous organizations and civil society bodies demonstrated widely against what they see as the Brazilian government’s on going moves to reduce Indian land rights, and to demand the government open a dialogue with indigenous representatives.
- Of greatest concern is President Temer’s recommendation to approve the “marco temporal” a 1988 cut-off date for Indian occupation of traditional lands.
- Critics say the marco temporal is designed to deny indigenous land rights guaranteed under Brazil’s 1988 constitution, while legalizing claims of land thieves and wealthy elite ruralists who have long hungered for control of Indian lands.
- Brazilian Supreme Court rulings that will help determine the legality of the marco temporal are expected this Wednesday, 16 August.

Brazil’s Temer threatens constitutional indigenous land rights
- President Temer, influenced by the rural lobby in congress whose votes he needs to not be tried by the Supreme Court on corruption charges, has okayed new criteria meant to delegitimize indigenous land boundary claims, legal experts say.
- One rule rejects any indigenous demarcation of land where Indians were not physically present on a traditional territory in 1988, which would disqualify many legitimate claims.
- Another allows government to undertake “strategic” public works, such as dams and roads, without indigenous consent, violating the International Labor Organization’s 169 Convention, signed by Brazil.
- The administration also introduced a bill likely to be passed by congress that reclassifies 349,000 hectares (1,347 square miles) of Jamanxim National Forest in the Amazon, gutting protections, allowing economic activities — logging, ranching, farming and mining — and legitimizing land grabs there.

Study links most Amazon deforestation to 128 slaughterhouses
- A new study by the NGO Imazon finds that just 128 slaughterhouses process 93 percent of cattle raised in the Brazilian Amazon. The areas of influence supplying the herds to those plants coincide with where the most Amazon deforestation occurs.
- The total pasture area, or zone of influence, corresponding to the 128 slaughterhouses provided an 88 percent match with the deforested area that occurred in the Amazon between 2010 and 2015.
- Based on a probability map created by the study, a 90 percent match was also found between the 128 slaughterhouse zones of estimated cattle supply and the Amazon areas projected to have a higher risk of new deforestation in future.
- The study adds weight to the idea that the most effective deforestation enforcement strategy is not to regulate the Amazon’s 400,000 ranchers and farmers, but for government to enter into effective deforestation enforcement partnerships with the slaughterhouses.

Soy King Blairo Maggi wields power over Amazon’s fate, say critics
- Brazil’s Blairo Maggi made a fortune with vast Mato Grosso soy plantations in Legal Amazonia. Today, Amaggi Group, the family company, dominates the nation’s agribusiness sector — profiting from farm commodities, and the roads, railways, and industrial waterways that transport them.
- Maggi rose through Brazilian politics, becoming Mato Grosso’s governor, a senator, and today, the Temer administration’s agriculture minister. He is also a leader of the bancada ruralista, the agribusiness lobby, that dominates Brazilian government.
- Once known as the Soy King, Maggi has often pushed anti-environmental agribusiness policies, including those resulting in major Amazon deforestation, ending indigenous land demarcation, and harmful infrastructure projects putting biodiversity at risk. He has also, paradoxically, worked to end illegal logging and to reduce deforestation.
- On Monday, 17 July, Maggi will meet with the Trump administration to urge the U.S. to lift its ban on Brazilian beef, a ban prompted by scandal involving a corrupt federal meat inspection service overseen by his ministry. Maggi was recently accused of corruption by federal Lava Jato investigators. He continues to shape Amazon policies.

Temer signs law that could see millions of acres lost in the Amazon
- MP 759, signed into law this week by President Temer, and little noticed by the media, significantly alters Brazil’s Terra Legal program, introduced in 2009 by President Lula — a program that has already been hijacked by land thieves, critics say.
- The new law introduces further multiple loopholes to allow land thieves, who have illegally occupied and cleared vast areas of public land in the Amazon, to legalize their land holdings, and to do so both easily and cheaply.
- MP 759, among other things, increases the land claimable via Terra Legal from 1,500 to 2,500 hectares; allows wealthy land thieves to go on paying very little for land; and offers what in practice is an amnesty for land grabbers who illegally seized public lands between 2004 and 2011.
- With government regulatory and enforcement agencies hard hit by massive budget cuts, analysts fear that the passage of MP 759 will result in an alarming increase in rural violence, which is already running at very high levels.

Norway vexed as Brazil sends mixed message on Amazon forest protection
- Last week, Brazil’s President Michel Temer fully vetoed MP 756, and partially vetoed MP 758, two provisional measures which he himself introduced and which Congress approved that would have cut conserved Amazon lands by 600,000 hectares (2,316 square miles).
- Almost simultaneously, Brazil’s environmental minister, José Sarney Filho, announced urgent plans for the administration to introduce a new bill to Congress to dismember the same conservation units described in the vetoed MP 756.
- Also last week, Norway gave a stern warning to Temer on his visit to Oslo, telling him that Brazil could lose millions of dollars from the Amazon Fund if Brazil’s deforestation rates continue rising.
- 7,989 square kilometers of Brazilian rainforest were lost between August 2015 and 2016. A rise in annual Amazon deforestation to 8,500 square kilometers would reduce Norway’s funding to Brazil to zero. Brazil defended itself, claiming preliminary annual data shows a recent leveling off of its deforestation rate.

Brazil evicts 80 rural peasant families, awards land thieves parcel
- 80 families, hopeful of being granted land in the Amazon state of Pará, have instead been ordered by a Brazilian court to vacate their camp located on the parcel in just two weeks.
- The land will then be turned over to members of the Vilela family, notorious convicted land thieves, illegal forest fellers and members of the wealthy Brazilian rural elite.
- The judge’s decision has been called into question. Eliane Moreira, Justice Prosecutor in the Pará Public Ministry, has long criticized authorities for allowing land thieves to use the environmental register to legitimize land grabs, something the judge has now endorsed.
- It will be very difficult for the peasant families to appeal the decision, as they don’t have the resources to hire a lawyer and cover other legal expenses.

Brazil on verge of legitimizing Amazon land theft on a grand scale, warn NGOs
- Brazil’s president has until 22 June to approve or veto two bills (PLC 4 and PLC 5) turning over more than 600,000 hectares (2,317 square miles) of federally protected Amazon forest to illegal loggers, illegal miners and land thieves.
- The measures, initiated by Temer and already approved by Congress, are seen as a reward to the bancada ruralista (rural lobby of agribusiness and mining) for its aid in bringing Temer to power through the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff in 2016.
- Large portions of the Jamanxim National Park and of the National Forest of Jamanxim would have their protections downgraded to an Area of Environmental Protection, where logging, mining and private property are allowed.
- Mongabay recently went to the region to observe conditions there: we found major illegal mining operations underway within federal conservation units and interviewed miners who have been exploited by mine “owners” under conditions analogous to slavery.

Brazil assaults indigenous rights, environment, social movements
- The Temer administration and Congress, dominated by the increasingly militant bancada ruralista agribusiness lobby, are encouraging violence, say critics, as attacks reach record levels against the landless peasants of the agrarian reform movement and against indigenous groups fighting for land rights assured by the 1988 Constitution.
- In May a Parliamentary Commission of Enquiry, dominated by the bancada, recommended prosecution of 67 people, many of them serving in the federal government, who the commission claims have allegedly committed illegal acts by supporting indigenous groups and their land claims.
- Also in May, Congress approved MPs (administrative orders), handed down by Temer, removing 486,000 hectares of the National Forest of Jamanxim and 101,000 hectares of the National Park of Jamanxim from protection, likely allowing land thieves to claim these formerly protected Amazon areas for private ownership, ranching and mining.
- The Chamber of Deputies also rushed through MP 759, giving real estate ownership rights to hundreds of thousands of small land owners illegally occupying land in Brazil. Critics say the MP is also a massive gift to wealthy land thieves. Another bill, now on hold, could gut environmental licensing rules for infrastructure and agribusiness projects.

Temer seeks to privatize Brazil’s deforestation remote sensing program
- Brazil’s Ministry of the Environment, in a surprise move at the end of April, tried to privatize much of the remote sensing deforestation work that, until now, has been successfully carried out by INPE, the federal National Institute for Space Research. So sudden was the move that INPE’s head learned of it from a journalist.
- Under the plan, private companies would take over monitoring for Amazonia, the Cerrado (where Brazilian deforestation is most intense), and indigenous reserves (under attack by the Temer administration). Experts view the move as a bow to the powerful agribusiness lobby, which wants more control of Amazonia, the Cerrado and indigenous preserves.
- The hurried maneuver was met with shock from experts inside and outside the government, with charges that the 8-day bid process was absurdly short, and with some calling the proposal incompetent. Critics suggest the privatization bid process may have been designed to turn over deforestation remote sensing to a foreign company.
- Vocal protests from 6,000 experts led the Ministry of the Environment to shelve privatization for now; though the measure could still be revived. A concern of experts was that the company engaged would have played a key role in assessing whether or not Brazil was meeting its carbon reduction commitments under the Paris Climate Agreement.

Brazil agribusiness company accuses ally Temer in secret bribe taping
- The world’s largest meat processor, Brazil’s JBS has been rocked by scandal. In March, investigations revealed the company had bribed federal officials to turn a blind eye to tainted meat, and had also illegally raised 59,000 head of cattle on illegally deforested Amazon lands. JBS is a key backer of the bancada ruralista agribusiness lobby.
- Now, JBS owners the Batista brothers, in a plea bargain with federal investigators, have produced a tape in which Brazil’s president, Michel Temer, in conversation with one of the JBS owners, apparently enthusiastically endorses the use of bribes by the company. Temer claims the recording has been altered.
- Temer has consistently done the bidding of the agribusiness lobby, which brought him to power a year ago. He has worked to reverse indigenous land rights gained under the 1988 constitution, and to dismember conservation units, with up to 1.2 million hectares of forest to be turned over to land thieves who illegally seized federal lands.
- There are calls for the president to resign, though Temer has refused to step down. Legislation to dismember Amazon conservation units was recently approved by Brazil’s Assembly and is headed for the Senate, which has until 29 May to approve the bills, a timeline which is looking extremely tight considering current events.

Big animals can survive reduced-impact logging — if done right
- Employing camera traps to survey Amazonian mammals in Guyana, researchers found that large mammals and birds did not see a lower population of target species in reduced-impact logging areas as compared to unlogged areas. For some species, like jaguars and pumas, population numbers actually rose.
- The research was conducted in an unusually managed swath of forest: Iwokrama. Spreading over nearly 400,000 hectares (close to 990,000 acres) – an area a little smaller than Rhode Island – Iwokrama Forest is managed by the not-for-profit Iwokrama organization and 16 local Makushi communities.
- Looking at 17 key species in the area – including 15 mammals and two large birds – the researchers found that populations didn’t change much between logged and unlogged areas, a sign that Iwokrama’s logging regime is not disturbing the area’s larger taxa.

Peru lost more than 1 million hectares of Amazon forest over a period of 15 years
- 1.8 million hectares of Amazonian forests were lost between 2001 and 2015 with peaks of loss occurring in 2005, 2009 and 2014.
- The main causes of forest loss are deforestation and soil degradation, small and medium scale agriculture, large-scale agriculture, pasture for livestock, gold mining, coca cultivation and road construction, according to a MAAP report.
- Deforestation hotspots are concentrated in Peru’s central Amazon, in Huánuco and Ucayali, but there are also other important hotspots located in Madre de Dios and San Martín, according to a MAAP.

Amazon’s fate hangs on outcome of war between opposing worldviews
- The battle for the Amazon is being fought over two opposing viewpoints: the first, mostly held by indigenous and traditional people and their conservationist allies, sees forests and rivers as valuable for their own sake, and for the livelihoods, biodiversity, ecological services and climate change mitigation they provide. For them the forests need protection.
- The second worldview holds that Amazon forests are natural resources to be harvested and turned into dollars, an outlook largely held by wealthy landowners, land thieves, loggers, cattle ranchers and farmers. For them the forests are there to be cut down, and the land is there to be used for economic benefit.
- The bancada ruralista agribusiness lobby now has overwhelming political power in the Brazilian Congress and the Temer administration, which are pushing a raft of bills and administrative actions to take away indigenous land rights, dismember conservation units, gut environmental licensing laws and defund environmental protection agencies.
- The great fear is that the collision of the two worldviews in the wilds of the Amazon will result in escalating lawlessness and bloodshed against indigenous and traditional people, along with significant environmental destruction. The loss of Amazon ecosystems could be catastrophic for humanity, as the region’s forests are crucial for global carbon storage.

Brazil moves to cut Amazon conservation units by 1.2 million hectares
- Under the cover of Brazil’s current political crisis, the Congress — dominated by the bancada ruralista agribusiness lobby — is pushing forward measures to dramatically slash the size of conservation units in Pará state in the eastern Amazon, removing conservation protection from 1.2 million hectares (2.9 million acres) of forest.
- The moves, yet to be approved by the full Congress, would reduce Jamanxim Flona (National Forest) by 480,000 hectares, Nascentes da Serra do Cachimbo Biological Reserve by 180,000 hectares, the National Park of Jamanxin by 344,000 hectares, and the Itaituba II National Forest by 169,000 hectares.
- The dismembered portions of the conservation units would be re-designated as Areas of Environmental Protection (APAs), where private land ownership, agriculture and forest clearing is allowed. Brazilian agribusiness — wealthy ranchers and farmers — are likely to benefit significantly from the shift, while forests and biodiversity would suffer.
- Some of the conservation units have received significant funding from foreign donors, including the European Union and the World Bank. The congressional measures must now go for approval to the lower Chamber of Deputies and then to the Senate. Both measures must be approved by the end of May or lose validity. Approval seems likely.

Deforestation has become big business in the Brazilian Amazon
- Agamenom da Silva Menezes, is typical of modern Amazonian real estate operators: he is a wealthy individual who openly works with those who make a living by illegally laying claim to, deforesting and selling public lands for a high price. Lawlessness in the region means such land theft is rarely punished.
- Agamenom and others like him use militias, hired thugs, to intimidate landless peasant farmers as well as less powerful land thieves who try to claim Amazonian forests. The land is then deforested and sold to cattle ranchers, with each tract of stolen federal land bringing in an estimated R$20 million (US$6.4 million) on average.
- In March, the Temer government slashed by over 50 percent the budget of the Ministry of the Environment, responsible for both IBAMA, the federal environmental agency, and the Chico Mendes Institute of Biodiversity Conservation (ICMBio), which oversees Brazil’s conservation units.
- As a result, land thieves are likely to get bolder in their theft, deforestation and sale of public lands to cattle ranchers and others. Without a major shift in federal forestry policy and a dramatic improvement in enforcement, land theft and deforestation are likely to worsen across the Amazon basin.

Amazon land speculators poised to gain control of vast public lands
- In the Brazilian Amazon, the paving of highways makes adjacent forests far more attractive to land thieves, resulting in major deforestation. The Sustainable BR-163 Plan of 2006 created vast swathes of protected land — eight new conservation units — to prevent land theft and deforestation from happening near the vulnerable BR-163 highway in Pará state.
- From the start, land speculators wanted to get their hands on one of those units, the National Forest of Jamanxim, known as “Flona Jamaxim.” They’ve occupied large areas of the Flona, making it one of Brazil’s conservation units with the most serious illegal forest clearing. Illicit activities there helped turn the region into a very violent place.
- The rise of the agribusiness-friendly Temer administration in August 2016 emboldened the land speculators. Working with the bancada ruralista, the agribusiness lobby, they got Temer to pass interim measures in December 2016, dismembering Flona Jamanxim, reclassifying 305,000 hectares, and allowing land thieves to keep the land they had seized.
- Other conservation units are being targeted: in January 2017, the government announced plans to slash conservation units in Amazonas state — dismembering the Biological Reserve of Manicoré, National Park of Acari, and National Forests of Aripuanã and Urupadi, and more. If approved, one million hectares will lose environmental protection.

Crime and not enough punishment: Amazon thieves keep stolen public land
- Land grabbing and illegal ranching (even on public lands) has long been, and still is, big business in the Brazilian Amazon. Last year the Brazilian government launched its most ambitious crackdown ever. And some of the criminals caught up in the federal police net were members of Brazil’s richest families.
- In June 2016, federal law enforcement pounced on a gang of land thieves. Antônio José Junqueira Vilela Filho, known as AJ Vilela, and Ricardo Caldeira Viacava, among others, were charged with clearing public lands — 300 square kilometers (74,132 acres) of forest, in total — an area 5 times larger than Manhattan, and of using slave labor to do it.
- One of the gang’s innovations was to use sophisticated technology to work out just how much forest they could clear without being detected by monitoring satellites. Unfortunately for the offenders, they were spotted by Kayapó Indians who had their own sophisticated monitoring system (called radio!); they reported the crime to federal police.
- But by October 2016, AJ Vilela was out of jail and awaiting trial. And unofficial reports from Pará state, gathered there by Mongabay in November, say that the gang is carrying on as before, illegally raising cattle on the public lands they illegally deforested. Question: why hasn’t the land been reclaimed by the government?

Big data timber exchange partners with FSC in Brazil
- BVRio pulls together data on the pricing, supply chain and certification of timber and wood products through its Responsible Timber Exchange.
- Since opening in November 2016, the exchange has fielded more than 400 offers for 5 million cubic meters of timber.
- The partnership with the Forest Stewardship Council is aimed at bolstering the market for certified forest products.

Forests provide a nutritional boon to some communities, research shows
- The new study, across 24 countries, shows a wide range in the variability of how communities use forests for food.
- The nutrients provided by wild fruits, vegetables, game and fish are critical to the nutritional health of some communities and should play a role in decisions about land usage.
- Land-use decisions should factor in the importance of forest foods to some communities, say the authors.

Birds wanted: Recovering forests need avian assist
- Clearing swaths of rainforests can permanently drive away or kill off birds that are important partners in the regeneration of the forest, the study finds.
- The study surveyed 330 sites in the Brazilian Amazon, turning up 472 species of birds.
- The analyses demonstrate that recovering forests don’t have the diversity of birds needed to ensure their survival.
- The authors say that their findings point to a need to preserve standing forests, even if they’re heavily degraded.

‘Revolutionary’ new biodiversity maps reveal big gaps in conservation
- The research uses the chemical signals of tree communities to reveal their different survival strategies and identify priority areas for protection.
- Currently, the Carnegie Airborne Observatory’s airplane provides the only way to create these biodiversity maps. But the team is working to install the technology in an Earth-orbiting satellite.
- Once launched, the $200 million satellite would provide worldwide biodiversity mapping updated every month.

‘Last frontiers of wilderness’: Intact forest plummets globally
- More than 7 percent of intact forest landscapes, defined as forest ecosystems greater than 500 square kilometers in area and showing no signs of human impact, disappeared between 2000 and 2013.
- In the tropics, the rate of loss appears to be accelerating: Three times more IFLs were lost between 2011 and 2013 as between 2001 and 2003.
- The authors of the study, published January 13 in the journal Science Advances, point to timber harvesting and agricultural expansion as the leading causes of IFL loss.

Guyana’s government still dealing with fallout over controversial logging company
- The Guyanese government has put a significant focus on cleaning up the failed operations of Baishanlin.
- In September 2016, the Guyana Forestry Commission announced in a statement that it would repossess all of Baishanlin’s 627,072 hectares of forestry concessions.
- A review of Baishanlin’s financial statements reported through a 2015 forensic audit on the Guyana Forestry Commission raised concerns about the company’s ability to operate in the future due to continued losses.

Environmental official murdered in Brazilian Amazon
- Luiz Alberto Araújo, head of the Altamira municipal government environmental department in the state of Pará, was gunned down in an execution-style killing last Thursday. 448 environmentalists were killed in Brazil between 2002-2013 — half the total murdered worldwide.
- Araújo provided information this year that helped lead to the arrest of a major illegal logging operation led by Antonio José Junqueira Vilela Filho, known as Ajj.
- Ajj ran his operation near Altamira for ten years, often only cutting valuable understory trees, and leaving the tallest behind to fool satellites and avoid detection. His operation kept loggers in slave-like conditions. Ajj was fined US$37 million, the largest such fine ever in the Amazon.
- Last February, Araújo’s team collected tons of dead fish secretly buried near the newly completed Belo Monte mega-dam, near Altamira. Norte Energia, the company operating the dam, was fined US$11 million for the 16.2 tons of fish illegally killed during the flooding of the dam’s reservoir.

Brazil pledges to cut carbon, but government policies say otherwise
- Brazil’s Paris Agreement target calls for a carbon emissions reduction of 37 percent by 2025, and 43 percent by 2030, compared to 2005 levels. These reductions are dependent on the nation’s ability to meet its forestry goals. Brazil’s vast forests are vital for carbon storage and for curbing the worst impacts of climate change.
- However, Brazil’s government is moving to relax environmental licensing regulations in order to fast track large-scale infrastructure projects, including industrial waterways, dams, highways and railways; and is pursuing a major agribusiness expansion — all of which could work to increase carbon emissions.
- In addition, new studies show that Brazil will likely fall well short of the billions in funding needed to meet the country’s ambitious forestry goals which were declared in 2015, just before the Paris Climate Summit.
- The continued curbing of Amazon deforestation is key to Brazil’s achievement of its Paris carbon cut targets, but recent news from the Amazon is bad: after years of decreased deforestation rates, forest loss in the Amazon is again on the upswing.

Interpol issues notice about illegal timber trading operation in Brazil
- The notice, issued on August 30, stems from an investigation by the Brazilian Federal Police that uncovered a technique employed by illegal timber traders in the country.
- The method in question involves obtaining fraudulent forest management plans that declare a higher density of a high-value timber species within a timber concession than actually exists on the ground, allowing criminals to harvest timber from unauthorized areas and report it as if it was legal — in other words, to launder their illegal timber.
- The Brazilian environmental agency IBAMA first notified the country’s federal police of suspected illegal logging activities carried out by a sustainable forest management project called JOVINO VILHENA – Fazenda Esmeralda, based in Santarém, Para State, Brazil, on February 6 of last year.

Raging Amazon forest fires threaten uncontacted indigenous tribe
- Small groups of Guajajara Indians, the Awá’s neighbors in the Amazon, reportedly battled the blaze for days without the assistance of government agents until Brazil’s Environment Ministry launched a fire-fighting operation two weeks ago.
- Some 50 percent of the forest cover in the territory was destroyed by forest fires started by loggers in late 2015, and the Environment Ministry has warned that the situation is “even worse this year.”
- Despite illegal loggers having destroyed more than 30 percent of the forest in Awá territory, the land contains some of the eastern Amazon’s last remaining patches of rainforest.

Using Big Data to combat the illegal timber trade in Brazil
- BVRio’s analysis found that more than 40 percent of the forest management operations in the Brazilian states of Pará and Mato Grosso between 2007 and 2015 were at medium to high risk of having involved severe breaches of the law.
- Only 10 percent of the cases examined by BVRio showed no indications of irregularities.
- BVRio is already looking to expand its Big Data tracking system to tropical forest countries in West Africa and Southeast Asia, starting with Ghana and Indonesia.

Olympics to begin amid rising violence against Brazil’s indigenous people
- Indigenous leaders and human rights advocates held a press briefing on August 4, the day before the Olympic Games’ opening ceremony in Rio de Janeiro.
- They highlighted new data showing that 33 indigenous people and 23 environmental activists had been killed in Brazil this year.
- They pointed to government turmoil and the erosion of protections for activists and indigenous communities as factors in the violence.

Arara Indians in Brazilian Amazon finally given right to their land
- Before the 1970’s, groups of Arara Indians lived a nomadic life in the Amazon rainforest along the Iriri River and had little contact with the modern industrialized world.
- Brazil’s military government pushed a highway through the heart of Arara territory and invited in settlers from northeastern Brazil who violently colonized what had been the Indians’ homeland.
- The Arara people were decimated by the road and by the invasion, and impacted yet again with the building of the Belo Monte mega-dam.
- This Spring, Brazil established the Indigenous Territory of Cachoeira Seca, covering 733,688 hectares (2,833 square miles) as a safe haven for the remaining Arara to rebuild their lives and culture. But illegal loggers still threaten their existence, and it remains to be seen if the new government of Michel Temer will actively protect the territory.

Proposed Amazon dam attracts illegal loggers, threatens local farmers
- Dam construction in remote parts of the Amazon is historically proceeded by increased lawlessness as illegal loggers and squatters flock to the project site to cut timber and make land grabs from longtime farmers and other settlers.
- The proposed São Luiz do Tapajós hydropower plant on the Tapajós River has seen a rapid uptick in criminal activity, as loggers and squatters try to force residents from their lands, and make homesteaders take part in illegal logging schemes.
- Federal and state law enforcement is overstretched in the region, with just 60 personnel to cover an area three times the size of Florida. So the homesteaders are poorly protected from threats and violence.
- Rapid development of dams, canals, roads, railways and ports is aimed at turning the Tapajós basin into a major soy and grain transportation hub — a transformation likely to uproot the region’s long time small landholders.

Illegal logging “mafia” arrested in Peru
- A joint action by the Ucuyali public prosecutor’s office and a specialized environmental police force arrested 19 members of the gang, including two police officers and two regional forestry officials with Ucuyali’s Dirección General de Fauna y Flora Silvestre.
- Nearly 70,000 Peruvian Sol (a little over $20,000) were seized in the joint action, along with two trucks and a trailer loaded with illegal timber.
- This is the first time that Peru has used laws against organized crime to combat the extraction and trade of illegal timber.

Report from the Amazon #2: Newly created conservation unit could push long-time residents from their lands
- The recently created Estaçāo Ecológica da Terra do Meio (EsecTM, Terra do Meio Ecological Station) covers 3.4 million hectares (over 13,000 square miles), between the Amazon basin’s Xingu and Iriri rivers, and was created to discourage land grabs and violence. But the preserve has accidentally threatened the livelihoods and homes of families living there.
- The Altamira Public Prosecutor is working to protect the lands of this small group of beiradeiros. She sent a fact-finding team upriver to determine if the families’ small-scale economic activities are negatively impacting the ecosystem, or if, as some scientists suspect, their lifestyle has reshaped and even benefited the environment.
- If the 15 families are doing negligible harm, the prosecutor will ask the local judge to allow them to stay. A favorable decision could reverberate throughout the Amazon. It would legally challenge environmental protection as the sole land use priority inside Brazil’s ecological stations and other preserves, and recognize value of low impact human use there.

New deforestation hotspot threatens southern Peru’s tremendous biodiversity
- An incredible array of species — which Mongabay once called a “shocking wildlife bonanza” — call the threatened forests of the Lower Piedras River home.
- According to an assessment by the Monitoring of the Andean Amazon Project (MAAP), an area along the lower Las Piedras River near the community of Lucerna experienced a “sharp increase” in deforestation starting in 2012.
- In the 4 years between 2012 and 2015, MAAP discovered that deforestation skyrocketed to 472 hectares (1,166 acres).

Next big idea in forest conservation? Quantifying the cost of forest degradation

Innovation in Tropical Forest Conservation: Q&A with Dr. Phillip Fearnside Pasture meets gallery forest in the Brazilian Amazon. Photo by: Rhett A. Butler. How much is a forest really worth? And what is the cost of forest degradation? These values are difficult to estimate, but according to Dr. Phillip Fearnside, we need to do a […]
Mother of God: meet the 26 year old Indiana Jones of the Amazon, Paul Rosolie

Flying over the endless forest of the West Amazon, while searching for short-eared dogs. From so high up it was possible to see just how much forest there really is, and how much there is still to save. Photo courtesy of: Paul Rosolie. Not yet 30, Paul Rosolie has already lived a life that most […]
Brazil begins evicting illegal settlers from hugely-imperiled indigenous reserve

Months after closing sawmills on the fringes of an indigenous reserve for the hugely-imperiled Awá people, the Brazil government has now moved into the reserve itself to evict illegal settlers in the eastern Amazon. According to the NGO Survival International, Brazil has sent in the military and other government agents to deal with massive illegal […]
Brazil’s military takes on illegal loggers to protect nearly-extinct tribe

Brazil has launched a military campaign to evict illegal loggers working from the fringes of an indigenous reserve home to the Awá people, reports Survival International. Inhabiting the Amazon rainforest in northeastern Brazil, only around 450 Awá, also known as Guajá, survive today, and around a quarter of these have chosen voluntary isolation. The Brazilian […]
Amazonian students help monitor threatened frog populations

The 2013 Zoos and Aquariums: Committing to Conservation (ZACC) conference runs from July 8th—July 12th in Des Moines, Iowa, hosted by the Blank Park Zoo. Ahead of the event, Mongabay.com is running a series of Q&As with presenters. For more interviews, please see our ZACC feed. Forest bromeliad treefrog (Osteocephalus cabrerai). Photo by: Marcy Sieggreen. […]
Featured video: Earth Day message from indigenous tribes in the Peruvian Amazon
A new video by Alianza Arkana includes an Earth Day message from the indigenous peoples in the Peruvian Amazon who are facing the existential threats of logging and fossil fuel development on their traditional lands. Alianza Arkana, which means ‘Protection Alliance,’ advocates for indigenous people in Peru within the legal system, develops community-based projects, and […]
Illegally logged trees to start calling for help

River and forest abuts vast soy field in the Brazilian Amazon. Photo by: Rhett A. Butler. Illegal loggers beware: trees will soon be calling—literally—for backup. The Brazilian government has begun fixing trees with a wireless device, known as Invisible Tracck, which will allow trees to contact authorities after being felled and moved. Here’s how it […]
Forests, farming, and sprawl: the struggle over land in an Amazonian metropolis

An interview with Karimeh Moukaddem, a part of our on-going Interviews with Young Scientists series. Typical farmhouse outside of Parauapebas. Photo by: Karimeh Moukaddem. The city of Parauapebas, Brazil is booming: built over the remains of the Amazon rainforest, the metropolis has grown 75-fold in less than 25 years, from 2,000 people upwards of 150,000. […]
Evidence of ‘isolated’ indigenous people found in Peru where priest is pushing highway

View Larger Map Evidence of indigenous people living in “voluntary isolation” in a remote part of the Amazon has been found where an Italian Catholic priest is campaigning for Peru’s government to build a highway. The discovery is controversial because the priest has questioned the existence of the isolated people, sometimes referred to as uncontacted, […]
Experts: sustainable logging in rainforests impossible

Logging in Gabon, Central Africa. Photo by Rhett A. Butler. Industrial logging in primary tropical forests that is both sustainable and profitable is impossible, argues a new study in Bioscience, which finds that the ecology of tropical hardwoods makes logging with truly sustainable practices not only impractical, but completely unprofitable. Given this, the researchers recommend […]
Over 700 people killed defending forest and land rights in past ten years

José Cláudio Ribeiro da Silva speaking at a TEDx Amazon in 2010, just a few months before he and his wife were assassinated for their activism. On May 24th, 2011, forest activist José Cláudio Ribeiro da Silva and his wife, Maria do Espírito Santo da Silva, were gunned down in an ambush in the Brazilian […]
U.S. car manufacturers linked to Amazon destruction, slave labor

Illegal charcoal kilns in the municipality of Tucuruí. Photo by: Marizilda Cruppe/Greenpeace. According to a new report by Greenpeace, top U.S. car companies such as Ford, General Motors, and Nissan are sourcing pig iron that has resulted in the destruction of Amazon rainforests, slave labor, and land conflict with indigenous tribes. Spending two years documenting […]
Can loggers be conservationists?

Sawmill in Indonesia. Photo by: Rhett A. Butler. Last year researchers took the first ever publicly-released video of an African golden cat (Profelis aurata) in a Gabon rainforest. This beautiful, but elusive, feline was filmed sitting docilely for the camera and chasing a bat. The least-known of Africa’s wild cat species, the African golden cat […]
Featured video: How to save the Amazon
The past ten years have seen unprecedented progress in fighting deforestation in the Amazon. Indigenous rights, payments for ecosystem services, government enforcement, satellite imagery, and a spirit of cooperation amongst old foes has resulted in a decline of 80 percent in Brazil’s deforestation rates. A new video Hanging in the Balance by the Skoll Foundation […]
U.S. gobbling illegal wood from Peru’s Amazon rainforest

Logged wood off the Ucayali River in Peru. Photo by Toby Smith/EIA. The next time you buy wood, you may want to make sure it’s not from Peru. According to an in-depth new report by the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA), the illegal logging trade is booming in the Peruvian Amazon and much of the wood […]
Climate change could increase fires, logging, and hunting in rainforests

Forest fire in the Peruvian Amazon. Photo by: Rhett A. Butler. The combined impacts of deforestation and climate change will bring a host of new troubles for the world’s tropical rainforests argues a new study in Trends in Ecology and Evolution. Drying rainforests due to climate change could lead to previously inaccessible forests falling to […]

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