topic: Cattle Pasture

topic: Cattle Pasture

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A cattle ranch is the unlikely scene for saving a fox found only in Brazil
- The hoary fox is the only canine endemic to both the Cerrado biome and Brazil; it’s now trying to survive among cattle pastures and soy plantations.
- Other threats resulting from human contact include road accidents, conflicts with domestic dogs, and various diseases.
- Seeking to protect the species, the Raposinha do Pontal Project combines research, conservation and community engagement on a cattle farm in Goiás state, southern Brazil.

In Bolivia’s flooded savannas, ranching aims to boost grasslands conservation
- In the northeastern department of Beni, non-governmental efforts to develop sustainable practices among cattle ranching communities have increased.
- The local ecosystem, a mix of floodable savanna, gallery forests and wetlands, provides a haven for the critically endangered blue-throated macaw, which depends on a local palm for nesting and food.
- But the palm species has been at risk from cattle that exhaust nutrients and degrade local soils, undermining tree development.
- In the last few years, Asociación Civil Armonia has been working with ranchers to implement rotational grazing, fencing and use different cattle breeds to improve sustainability.

Controversial study finds cattle and wildlife can co-exist in Kenya’s Maasai Mara

The Loita Forest is an important migration corridor for elephants moving between the Rift Valley and the Maasai Mara.

A new study conducted in Kenya is challenging the conventional wisdom that cattle are inherently bad for wildlife, reports Mongabay’s Ashoka Mukpo. In contrast to previous research, the recent study found that a limited number of cattle — grazing illegally in one portion of Kenya’s Maasai Mara National Reserve (MMNR) — had a negligible effect […]
Can cattle and wildlife co-exist in the Maasai Mara? A controversial study says yes
- Conventional conservation wisdom has held that cattle herds managed by Indigenous Maasai in East Africa compete with wildlife for grazing land and degrade protected areas like Kenya’s Maasai Mara and Tanzania’s Ngorongoro.
- But a new research study shows that, in a small study patch of the Maasai Mara, cattle herds didn’t cause a decline in forage quantity or quality, nor did wildlife steer away from areas where cattle had grazed.
- The finding has drawn criticism from other researchers, who question its methodology and say the overwhelming evidence points to the need for restrictions on cattle grazing inside these protected areas.
- The study authors say they hope their findings spark new thinking about how pastoralists like the Maasai can be seen as potential conservation partners rather than excluded as they’ve been for decades.

New datasets identify which crops deforest the Amazon, and where
- Spatial Production Allocation Model (SPAM), the Atlas of Pastures and Amazon Mining Watch have released or updated satellite data and visualization tools this year that show what crops are grown in the Amazon, where cattle ranching overlaps with other kinds of land use and how much of the rainforest is being cleared for mining.
- Amazon Conservation’s Monitoring of the Amazon Project (MAAP) compiled the data into one report this month, creating an “overall estimate” of land use across the nine Amazon countries.
- Some of the crops are well-known drivers of deforestation, such as soy, but lesser-discussed crops are also present in the region, such as rice and sorghum.

Indonesian palm oil, Brazilian beef top contributors to U.S. deforestation exposure
- A new report reveals that the United States imported palm oil, cattle products, soybeans, cocoa, rubber, coffee and corn linked to an area of tropical deforestation the size of Los Angeles between October 2021 and November 2023.
- Palm oil from Indonesia was the largest contributor to deforestation, followed by Brazil due to cattle grazing.
- The report by Trase, commissioned by Global Witness, found that the U.S. continues to import deforestation-linked commodities while awaiting the passage of the FOREST Act, which aims to prohibit imports of products linked to illegal deforestation.
- Experts emphasize the need for action from companies, governments, financial institutions and citizens to stop commodity-driven forest loss, urging support for smallholders, increased transparency in supply chains, and the passage of the FOREST Act in the U.S.

Brazil’s cattle industry could suffer major losses without climate policies, report says
- Domestic beef production in Brazil could drop by 25% by 2050 as governments and the private sector look to step up climate change and forest conservation strategies, according to a new report from Orbitas, an initiative from Climate Advisers.
- Deforestation from cattle ranching could lead to hotter, drier conditions that worsen cattle health. It could also reduce soil productivity needed for growing animal feed, the report said.
- The industry has to invest in new technological and management techniques in order to prevent major losses.

A mobile solution for Kenyan pastoralists’ livestock is a plus for wildlife, too
- The use of mobile bomas, or corrals, to keep livestock safe from predators has shown a wide range of benefits for both pastoral communities and wildlife in Kenya’s Maasai Mara.
- The bomas reduce the risk of disease and predation among livestock, while allowing for the regeneration of degraded grazing land, which in turn draws in more wild herbivores to the area.
- The increased wildlife presence has led to a rise in wildlife tourism, valued at $7.5 million annually in the 2,400-hectare (6,000-acre) Enonkishu Conservancy.
- Observers warn of potential downsides, however, including food insecurity as community members abandon farming in favor of more lucrative tourism work, and a rise in human-wildlife conflict as the area’s wildlife population grows.

EU bill and new green policies spur progress on Brazil’s cattle tracking
- Brazilian banks have created new rules for releasing credit to meatpackers and slaughterhouses in Amazonian states in which their clients must implement traceability and monitoring systems by 2025 to show that their cattle didn’t come from illegal deforestation.
- Even the powerful Brazilian Agriculture and Livestock Confederation (CNA) recognizes the cattle tracking demand and proposes a traceability model to the federal government.
- A new study shows that existing cattle companies’ zero-deforestation commitments have reduced Brazilian Amazon deforestation by 15% and that the devastation could be halved by scaling up the implementation of supply chain policies.
- The ideal animal tracking model is individual, but experts defend a middle-of-the-road solution to reduce illegal deforestation based on cross-referencing from inter-ranch cattle transport data and the Rural Environmental Registry (CAR).

How the Amazon’s ‘greatest devastator’ sold cattle to a Carrefour supplier
- Arrested by Brazilian Federal Police, cattle rancher Bruno Heller and relatives have already received over $5 million in environmental fines. He is also suspected of land grabbing.
- Heller transported cattle from a family farm fined for environmental violations to two other properties free from environmental implications — this maneuver is an indication of the so-called “cattle laundering.”
- A Frialto Group meatpacking plant confirmed that it slaughtered 249 animals for the Heller family. The facility supplies Carrefour, but the French retail company states that the meat from animals raised by Heller did not reach its supermarkets.

What drives and halts tropical deforestation? Analyzing 24 years of data
- Researchers conducted a meta-analysis of 320 studies covering a period of 24 years, to identify the key drivers of tropical deforestation.
- Deforestation is driven largely by agriculture and cattle ranching, building roads, expanding cities into forests, and population growth.
- Factors halting deforestation include steeper, less accessible terrain, stronger protections for parks and reserves, Indigenous land management, commodity certification programs, and payments for ecosystem services.
- Researchers say they hope the study can be “a resource to guide policies and management toward actions that help reverse deforestation.”

Even community stewardship can’t save rangeland beset by legacy of misrule
- Land degradation, changing vegetation patterns, and depleting soil quality threaten rangeland across Africa, including Namibia.
- The Community-Based Rangeland and Livestock Management (CBRLM) program, funded by the U.S. and implemented by a German consultancy, supported herders in northern Namibia to manage communal rangeland.
- However, the intervention didn’t improve livestock health or herders’ incomes, while rangeland quality actually worsened.
- While community management failed to deliver the desired results, evaluators say program design flaws were also to blame, in particular issues of land tenure and barriers to creating a livestock market.

Virtual fences can benefit both ranchers and wildlife
- Virtual fencing manages livestock using GPS-linked collars to train animals to stay within a set boundary, similar to an invisible dog fence.
- Coupled with the removal of existing barbed-wire fencing, it could open up whole landscapes for wildlife by removing injurious barriers for migratory herds, reducing mortality from fence strikes for numerous bird species, and protecting sensitive habitats from trampling by cattle.
- Virtual fences are easily moved with a tap on an app, and can be used to improve pasture management through rotational grazing, reduce wildfire risk, and other benefits.
- These systems are cheaper than building and maintaining physical fences, and are already in use in the U.S., U.K., Australia and Norway.

Despite lawsuit, Casino Group still sells beef from Amazonian Indigenous territory
- A new investigation shows that farms located in the Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau Indigenous Territory in the Brazilian Amazon supplied two JBS meatpacking plants that sell beef to brands of the French supermarket giant.
- In most cases, animals were not transferred directly from ranches in the Indigenous land to JBS, but went through different farms before arriving at slaughterhouses, when it was no longer possible to differentiate between cattle from the Indigenous land and others.
- This maneuver is known as ‘cattle laundering’ and aims to hide any potentially illegal origin of the animals.
- Casino said its suppliers are required to detail the supply route and that it directly rechecks all farms, but it’s up to meatpackers to monitor indirect suppliers; meanwhile, the meatpacker says it has no control over indirect suppliers.

Climate emergency may channel millions in resources toward corn-based ethanol in the Amazon
- An agribusiness magnate from the U.S., who is already the biggest producer of corn-based ethanol in Brazil, plans to leverage “green” investments from governments and banks to meet negative carbon emissions using an unproven method.
- His company is trying to implement in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso a copy of his Midwest Carbon project, an initiative that plans to capture 12 million tons of carbon in ethanol plants and store them in North Dakota, below ground.
- Even though the company alleges that it is rigorously controlling the environmental practices of its corn suppliers in Brazil, an investigation found that the local executives are themselves connected to illegal deforestation in Mato Grosso.

Drying wetlands and drought threaten water supplies in Kenya’s Kiambu County
- Prolonged drought in Kenya has caused a water crisis, threatening local livelihoods and biodiversity; one of the badly affected areas is Kiambu County, a region normally known for its high agricultural productivity.
- Human activities such as dumping, encroachment and overgrazing coupled with dire effects of climate change exacerbate the degradation of wetlands, worsening the water crisis.
- Scientists say that conservation efforts must center around local communities to ensure the restoration of natural resources and combat the impacts of climate change.

Deforestation ‘out of control’ in reserve in Brazil’s cattle capital
- Forest destruction has ravaged Triunfo do Xingu, a reserve earmarked for sustainable use that has nonetheless become one of the most deforested slices of the Brazilian Amazon.
- Fires burned swaths of the reserve in recent months and forest clearing has surged, with satellite images showing even the most remote remnants of old-growth rainforest were whittled away last year.
- Advocates say the forest is mainly giving way to cattle pasture, although illegal mining and land grabbing are gaining ground.
- The destruction, facilitated by lax environmental regulation, is placing pressure on nearby protected areas and undermining agroforestry efforts in Triunfo do Xingu, advocates say.

To cut emissions from cattle ranching, beef up the soil, study says
- A pilot project funded by the World Bank in Colombia’s Vichada municipality found that land management techniques paired with the implementation of a tropical grass species increased carbon storage in the soil by more than 15%, while also avoiding the need for cyclical burning of the savanna.
- Improving the productivity of inefficient ranching practices can boost profits for ranchers while combating growing food insecurity in Colombia, say the authors of a recent study documenting the pilot project.
- The study comes amid relative silence at the COP27 climate summit about the role of livestock in climate change: A quarter of all global emissions come from the livestock industry, yet serious measures to reduce or improve these systems are not being discussed enough, experts say.
- Scientists not involved with the pilot project have welcomed the findings but note that biodiversity indicators also need to be measured to compare the improved pastures to natural savanna.

Growing soy on cattle pasture can eliminate Amazon deforestation in Brazil
- Expanding soy cultivation into underutilized cattle pastureland would help prevent massive deforestation and carbon emissions compared to the current practice of clearing new forest for farmland, a new study says.
- Experts say that Brazil, the world’s No. 1 soy producer and beef exporter, has enough pastureland lying unused that would allow soy production to increase by more than a third without any further deforestation.
- Researchers warn that if Brazil continues with its current method of soy cultivation, it would end up clearing 5.7 million hectares (14 million acres) of Amazon rainforest and Cerrado savanna into cropland over the next 15 years.
- Environmentalists have welcomed intensifying agriculture as a solution to deforestation, but have raised concerns about the potential for increased pesticide use, biodiversity loss, and the expansion of cattle ranching into forested areas.

Beef is still coming from protected areas in the Amazon, study shows
- According to a new study, 1.1 million cattle were bought directly from protected areas and another 2.2 million spent at least a portion of their lives grazing in protected areas and Indigenous territories.
- Researchers compiled public records on cattle transit, property boundaries and protected area boundaries between 2013 and 2018. The study period ended in 2018 because, “at the start of 2019, this critical information became less available,” the lead author said.
- Under Brazil’s current President Jair Bolsonaro, who was elected at the start of 2019, the country has seen policies weakening various environmental protections and monitoring agencies, and deforestation has reached its highest levels in 15 years.
- Around 70% of deforestation in the Amazon has been linked to cattle ranching. Meat producers have made commitments to stop sourcing from illegally deforested lands, but a lack of information about where cattle are grazing has allowed many companies to escape accountability.

Kenyan hunter-gatherers forced to farm now face increased evictions from their forest
- The Indigenous Sengwer people in Kenya’s Embobut Forest have gone through a drastic change in livelihood, from hunting-gathering to herding and commercial farming in the forest, leading to tensions with forestry officials.
- The Kenya Forest Service (KFS) says the practices are key drivers in the loss of 13,782 hectares (34,056 acres) of forest cover in the past 37 years, and has tightened its monitoring of the forest, leading to mass evictions and fines for those who choose to stay.
- The Embobut Forest is part of the Sengwer’s ancestral lands and was turned into a protected area in the 20th century, leading to a settlement ban; British colonial officials also forced hunting peoples to become farmers, giving the Sengwer little alternatives for land and livelihood, locals say.
- Other tribal groups and pastoralists are drawn to the forest by droughts elsewhere and commercial possibilities as the demand for meat grows.

Maasai protesters shot, beaten as Tanzania moves forward with wildlife game reserve
- Tanzanian police officers and authorities have shot and beaten about 31 Maasai villagers, including children, during early June protests over the demarcation of ancestral land for a trophy hunting and safari game reserve. One Maasai man and one police officer have been killed.
- At least 700 Maasai villagers from Tanzania’s Loliondo division of Ngorongoro have fled across the border to Kenya, seeking humanitarian and medical aid.
- According to government spokesperson, Gerson Msigwa, authorities were sent to demarcate the land, not pursue evictions. The government will take legal action against people who interfere with the demarcation process or incite hostility between pastoralists and security forces, he says.
- Human rights groups say the Tanzanian government and authorities are violating a 2018 East African Court of Justice (EACJ) injunction on the land dispute by intimidating, harassing and attacking villagers.

Foreign capital powers Brazil’s meatpackers and helps deforest the Amazon
- To conquer the world market, Brazil’s Big Three beef packers — JBS, Marfrig and Minerva — invited in foreign capital. Today, all three are transnationals, with the original Brazilian founders owning only minority shares in their own companies.
- Foreign investors, including asset management companies and pension funds, now own large stakes, which means that ordinary citizens in the United States and elsewhere are helping fund Amazon deforestation through their investments.
- The three Brazilian families behind the Big Three have remarkable rags-to-riches histories, though with the speed of their expansion and dominance greatly assisted by the Brazilian government, keen to produce “National Champions.”
- The companies expanded rapidly abroad, but their presence in the U.S. means they are now subject to greater scrutiny from authorities and NGOs. However, most small-scale investors, including working people, have no awareness they’re investing in the destruction of the Amazon, one of the world’s most crucial carbon sinks.

Conflict over resources in Kenya hits deadly highs with firearms in play
- Increased droughts, floods and invasive species are fueling violent conflicts between pastoralists over livestock in Kenya’s central Baringo county, the intensity of which is exacerbated by the proliferation of illegal firearms in the region.
- Firearms trafficked from civil conflicts in the Horn of Africa have made their way into the hands of pastoralists who now see it as the only way to defend themselves and their cattle during raids and conflicts over grazing land.
- In 2021, there were 16 deaths from 19 livestock raids; in the first four months of 2022, there have been 39 fatalities from 24 violent clashes, half of them due to livestock raids.
- Violent conflicts in Baringo are linked to insecurity in neighboring counties, and drought along with politics only heighten the precarious situation.

Pasture replaces large tract of intact primary forest in Brazilian protected area
- Satellites have detected forest clearing within the Triunfo do Xingu Environmental Protection Area (APA) this year, a legally protected area of Brazil’s Amazon rainforest.
- Despite its status, 35% of the primary (or old-growth) forest within the APA was lost between 2006 and 2021, making it one of the most deforested slices of the Brazilian Amazon.
- The APA was created in 2006 to serve as a buffer for vulnerable surrounding areas, such as the Apyterewa Indigenous Territory and the massive Terra do Meio Ecological Station, but deforestation has spilled over into both.
- Deforestation in the region is largely driven by cattle ranching, but land grabbing and mining have also increased in recent years, with invaders emboldened by the rhetoric and policies of the current government.

Training on pasture recovery is a win-win for Brazil’s cattle ranchers and forests
- A recent study found that providing Brazilian cattle ranchers with customized training in sustainable pasture restoration could bring long-term economic and environmental benefits.
- Trained ranchers saw an increase in cattle productivity and revenue, and a reduction in carbon dioxide emissions over a period of two years.
- Researchers say that recovering degraded pastures could help stop deforestation for agriculture by allowing farmers to increase cattle numbers without needing more land.
- Despite government-led programs that promote sustainable agriculture, experts say pasture recovery is not yet being fully prioritized.

Indigenous group defends uncontacted relatives from cattle onslaught in the Gran Chaco
- The Gran Chaco, a dry forest that stretches across Paraguay, Bolivia, and Argentina, is one of the fastest-disappearing ecosystems on the planet, having lost 20% of forest cover between 2000 and 2019, according to a recent study.
- The Chaco is home to the Ayoreo-Totobiegosode, one of the only known “uncontacted” Indigenous groups in South America outside of the Amazon; in early 2021, members of this group approached a camp of their contacted relatives to express their concerns about escalating forest destruction.
- The contacted Ayoreo-Totobiegosode have been engaged in a legal battle for their traditional homelands for nearly 30 years, and although Paraguay designated this region as a protected area in 2001, several cattle-ranching companies have obtained land titles within the region, with deforestation continuing.
- Last month, the tribe made further appeals to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights requesting the official title to their traditional lands.

‘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.”

From teak farms to agroforestry: Panama tests reforestation strategies
- Panama is racing to restore 50,000 hectares (124,000 acres) of forest by 2025 to meet its carbon emissions reduction targets under the Paris climate agreement. The nation’s public and private sectors have embarked on various forest restoration and reforestation efforts to meet that goal.
- The government is currently financially incentivizing teak plantations, an industry that proponents say is a win-win for the economy and environment, but which critics say pushes out native tree species, reduces biodiversity, and can indirectly even contribute to further deforestation.
- A long-running research project overseen by the Smithsonian Institute is studying agroforestry and other innovative techniques to help determine which ones offer the best ecological, social and economic silviculture outcomes.
- Included in this groundbreaking work is research into restoring tropical forests on land degraded by cattle, efforts to improve forest hydrology, and silviculture techniques that could replace teak with other more eco-friendly high value trees.

Pay or punish? Study looks at how to engage with farmers deforesting the Cerrado
- Businesses and countries are renewing their commitments to reducing deforestation in supply chains, but disagreements still exist over what the most effective, efficient and equitable tools are to make that happen.
- In the Brazilian Cerrado, the world’s most biodiverse savanna, soybean production is one of the key industries driving rampant deforestation and conversion of native vegetation.
- While some observers favor the “carrot” approach of paying farmers not to deforest, others advocate for a “stick” approach that would cut market access for farmers who deforest.
- A new study says that in the case of the Cerrado, just using a stand-alone policy that pays farmers not to deforest would be expensive, inefficient and inequitable, and that some measure of market exclusion is also needed.

Getting African grasslands right, for people and wildlife alike: Q&A with Susanne Vetter
- Africa’s vast grasslands are well known for their iconic wildlife, but far less appreciated for the other ecosystem services they provide, including sequestering immense amounts of carbon and supporting millions of people practicing the ancient occupation of livestock herding.
- Susanne Vetter, a plant ecologist at Rhodes University in South Africa, studies the roles not only of plants but also of people in these landscapes.
- Through her work she has gained a rosier view of pastoralism, and its ability to coexist with wildlife, than many conservationists and policymakers hold.
- Mongabay recently interviewed Susanne Vetter via email about common misconceptions of African grasslands and the pastoralist communities who depend on them.

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.

‘Rampant forest destruction’ wracks reserve as cattle ranching advances in Brazilian Amazon
- The Terra do Meio Ecological Station comprises some 3.37 million hectares in the Brazilian Amazon state of Pará, and is home to hundreds of species – including some that are threatened with extinction.
- But despite its protected status, Terra do Meio has come under growing pressure, with satellite data showing deforestation doubling in 2021.
- Environmentalists say the destruction within Terra do Meio is being driven by illegal loggers, cattle ranchers and land speculators spilling over from the neighboring Área de Proteção Ambiental (APA) Triunfo do Xingu, a sustainable use reserve that has become the most deforested slice of the Brazilian Amazon in recent years.
- Pending legislation could make it even easier to legalize illegitimate land claims, providing hope to land speculators and cattle ranchers that they could soon receive land titles for land they have deforested and occupied illegally.

Slashed forest protections ignites land grabbing frenzy in Brazilian Amazon
- Earlier this year, Rondônia’s legislative assembly voted to pass a law that reduced the extent of Guajará-Mirim State Park by roughly 50,000 hectares and reduced another nearby reserve to a sliver.
- The move effectively removed protections from nearly a quarter of the park, and critics say it “gave a free pass” to outsiders to move in, deforest and lay claim to land.
- Rondônia’s top court annulled the law in November, ruling the reduction of the park’s limits to be unconstitutional.
- But sources say the invasions into the park are continuing, and are inching closer to vulnerable Indigenous and traditional communities in neighboring reserves.

Young forests can help heal tropical aquatic ecosystems: Study
- Microbial communities are important indicators of ecological degradation in the tropics, often reflecting levels of disturbance and contamination in rivers and streams.
- In an attempt to monitor the ecological condition of various streams in central Panama, researchers at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) assessed the impact of various land usages, such as cattle pasture and secondary forest, on microbial diversity and community structure.
- In less than a decade, researchers say, reforested land allows bacterial communities to recover, highlighting the importance of reforestation for overall ecosystem recovery.

New study helps cattle ranchers monitor ecological impact on U.S. rangelands
- A new study lays out 20 indicators that could prove useful to U.S. cattle ranchers trying to better quantify the ecological impact of their operations on rangeland ecosystems.
- In recent years, ranchers have expressed confusion about the benefits of ecological regulatory programs, pointing to the need for a uniform methodology for understanding cattle ranching’s impact on the environment.
- Some of the indicators include soil stability, water quality, diversity of native plants and bird diversity, soil compaction, ground cover, plant productivity, rancher satisfaction with livelihood, capacity to experiment and community health, among others.
- While this study doesn’t instruct ranchers on how or why to apply these 20 indicators, they lay the groundwork for future studies that could instruct ranchers on how to best monitor their operations.

Indigenous lands under siege as buffalo frenzy grips the Amazon
- Deforestation is rising in Autazes, a municipality in the Brazilian state of Amazonas, according to satellite data and local sources.
- Indigenous leaders say the clearing is now encroaching on the 18 Indigenous reserves that lie scattered across Autazes, some of which are still awaiting full demarcation.
- Most of the razed lots are being turned into grazing pastures for herds of domestic water buffalos, which thrive in the floodplains that characterize the region.
- Indigenous community members say that in addition to clearing forest for pasture, buffalo farming is polluting their water sources and roaming buffalos are invading communities’ subsistence farms.

Timmermans vs. Bolsonaro: Will the EU get deforestation off our dinner plates? (commentary)
- The European Commission is drafting a plan to address deforestation linked with commodity supply chains.
- But Nico Muzi, Europe Director of global environmental group Mighty Earth and member of the EU Commission Expert Group on protecting and restoring the world’s forests, argues the measure has a significant loophole for soy-based animal feed and leather from Brazil.
- “The leaked plan has several major loopholes that would substantially and unnecessarily weaken its impact even as deforestation in Brazil surges,” Muzi writes. “Even while the law would protect parts of the Amazon rainforest, it would still allow big agriculture companies like Cargill to continue to drive large-scale deforestation right next door in Brazil’s Cerrado savanna and Pantanal wetlands and export the products of that destruction to Europe.”
- The views expressed are those of the author, not necessarily Mongabay.

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.

Oil palms alone can be damaging; with other crops, the benefits abound
- Intercropping in oil palm plantations can reduce deforestation, increase biodiversity, and boost farmers’ income, all without hurting palm oil yields, new research suggests.
- The approach has been adopted by smallholders, but large companies are still reluctant to implement it.
- Integrating livestock like cattle with oil palm plantations also produces a number of benefits, such as reducing the need for fertilizers and herbicides.

Deforestation sweeps national park in Brazil as land speculators advance
- Between January and early September, 3,542 deforestation alerts have been confirmed in primary forest within Campos Amazônicos National Park, according to satellite data, representing a 37% jump over the average amount of forest loss for the previous five years.
- Much of the occupation of the Campos Amazônicos park is happening through illegitimate land claims, fueled by hopes that protections on the park may be loosened in the future, environmentalists say. Even though the park is under federal protection, this hasn’t stopped invaders from falsely registering slices of it as their property.
- Environmentalists warn the social and environmental impacts could be devastating. Campos Amazônicos wraps around the Tenharim do Igarapé Preto Indigenous Reserve, which was until recently under attack by illegal miners who descended on the territory in search of cassiterite; sources say the fresh incursions into Campos Amazônicos could put the area back at risk.
- The park also holds one of the most striking enclaves of cerrado in the Amazon rainforest, housing stretches of shrubs, grasslands and dry forest typical of the savanna biome. Campos Amazônicos is also part of the Southern Amazon Conservation Corridor that represents one of the best-preserved stretches of the rainforest.

Old and new solutions pave way to net-zero emissions farming, studies show
- Agriculture and food account for one-third of global greenhouse gas emissions, making these sectors critical in efforts to address our current overshoot of the climate planetary boundary. They are also having profound impacts on freshwater, biodiversity and biogeochemical cycles.
- New and emerging technologies could pave the way to net-zero emissions agriculture in the next two decades, using robotics, electric vehicles, improved crop varieties and distributed monitoring, according to a new study. Precision agriculture could cut emissions by 71% and help build soil carbon stores.
- A second study reports that microbial protein cultivation powered by solar panels could achieve up to 10 times higher protein yield per unit of land than staple crops like soybeans, reducing greenhouse gas emissions from land conversion and synthetic fertilizers.
- A third report shows that Europe could feed a projected population of 600 million by 2050 with organic farming alone, by reducing consumption of animal products to around 30% of our diet, implementing crop rotations, and reconnecting livestock and cropping systems via use of manure.

Soy and cattle team up to drive deforestation in South America: Study
- Between 2000 and 2019, the production of soybean in South America has doubled, covering an area larger than the state of California.
- Soybean farms are typically planted in old cattle pastures, and as soy encroaches, pasture is forced into new frontiers, driving deforestation and fires.
- Although soy was found to be largely an indirect driver of deforestation, policies addressing deforestation have to consider multiple commodities at once, such as the relationship between beef and soy.
- Increased commitments by companies to source from “zero-deforestation” supply chains are a promising strategy, but in order to work, the market needs to be more transparent.

Beef industry causes deforestation in Colombia’s Chiribiquete National Park
- A recent investigation by the Environmental Investigation Agency found that some Colombian supermarkets may be selling beef from cattle raised in Chiribiquete National Park.
- There are large gaps in the traceability of the beef produced in Colombia.
- The Colombian Agricultural Institute is responsible for vaccinating all 28 million head of cattle in Colombia and has important information that could help authorities design effective strategies to prevent cattle ranching in natural protected areas.

Bigger is badder when it comes to climate impact of farms in the Amazon
- A 20-year analysis of satellite data shows significant temperature differences in agricultural lands in southern Amazonia, depending on farm size.
- Extensively deforested commercial farms are up to 3 °C (5.4 °F) warmer than adjacent forests, while on smaller farms this difference is 1.85 °C (3.3 °F).
- Management practices that try to balance productivity with the maintenance of essential ecosystem services, such as the water cycle, will be crucial to preserving the Amazon’s remaining forests, the study’s authors say.

On the Mongolian steppe, conservation science meets traditional knowledge
- Rangelands and the pastoralists who rely on them are an overlooked and understudied part of global conservation.
- Tunga Ulambayar, country director for the Zoological Society of London’s Mongolia office, says she wants to change this by complementing the scientific understanding with pastoralists’ traditional knowledge of nature.
- “There is no university teaching that kind of traditional knowledge, but if we really aim to care about these regions and their resources, even from an economic perspective, we need this knowledge,” she says.
- Ulambayar also notes that pastoralism, widely practiced in less industrialized countries, is increasingly recognized as an efficient system of resource management and a resilient culture.

Illegal clearing for agriculture is driving tropical deforestation: Report
- In a new report, NGO Forest Trends found that at least 69% of tropical forests cleared for agricultural activities such as ranching and farmland between 2013 and 2019 was done in violation of national laws and regulations.
- The actual amount of illegally deforested land is immense during that period – 31.7 million hectares, or an area roughly the size of Norway.
- The study notes that if tropical deforestation emissions tied to commercial agriculture were a country, it would rank third behind China and the U.S.
- Forest Trends president Michael Jenkins said that when governments view forests like Indigenous peoples do – far more valuable standing than clear cut – conservation at scale is possible.

‘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.

Settlers invading, deforesting Colombian national parks ‘at an unstoppable speed’
- Colombia’s Tinigua National Natural Park is experiencing one of the highest levels of deforestation of any such protected area in the country, and has lost more than a quarter of its primary forest since 2002.
- Sources say this deforestation is happening due to settlers who are illegally invading and establishing roads, settlements and farms in protected forest – and clearing it in the process.
- Other national parks and Indigenous territories in the Colombian Amazon are also experiencing incursions.
- Sources say they are happening at such a scale that the government has been unable to effectively stop it.

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.

Drugs and agriculture cause deforestation to skyrocket at Honduran UNESCO site
- Honduras’ Río Plátano Biosphere Reserve occupies a large portion of the country’s eastern region.
- However, despite official protection and recognition as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, Río Plátano is plagued by deforestation; satellite data show the biosphere reserve lost 13% of its primary forest cover between 2002 and 2020.
- Deforestation shot up in 2020, nearly doubling the amount of forest loss over 2019. 2021 may be another rocky year for the biosphere reserve, with satellite data showing several “unusually high” spikes of clearing activity so far this year.
- Sources say deforestation in the reserve is being driven by logging, agriculture and the drug trade.

Cattle-driven clearing continues in Brazil’s Triunfo do Xingu protected area
- Triunfo do Xingu Environmental Protection Area lies in the ecologically rich Xingu Basin in the Brazilian Amazon and spans some 1.7 million hectares (4.2 million acres) — an area more than half the size of Belgium.
- Despite its protected status, the area has been heavily deforested, losing 476,000 hectares (1.18 million acres) of humid primary forest between 2006 and 2020, according to satellite data from the University of Maryland (UMD), a 32% decrease in total forest cover.
- 2020 saw the highest amount of forest loss since the creation of the protected area, nearly 70,000 hectares (173,000 acres) — an area nearly the size of New York City; preliminary data show clearing of Triunfo do Xingu’s forests has continued into 2021, with “unusually high” levels of deforestation detected the week of March 15.
- Deforestation in the region is largely driven by cattle ranching, and sources say the invasions of Triunfo do Xingu are aided by its remoteness as well as lax enforcement of environmental regulations.

Human impact on South America expanded by 60% since 1985
- Humanity’s impact on South American ecosystems expanded by 268 million hectares (1 million square miles) — an area of land the size of Kazakhstan or Argentina — since 1985, finds an analysis published in Science Advances.
- Using satellite imagery to detect change in land cover, a team of researchers from the University of Maryland and other institutions found that 713 million hectares (2.75 million square miles), or 40% of South America’s landmass, had been impacted by human activity by 2018.
- The study found that the area of natural tree cover in the region decreased by 16% during the period, whereas pasture use rose 23%, cropland use 160%, and plantation extent 288%. Conversion to cattle pasture accounted for the largest share of natural tree cover loss in the region.

New palm oil frontier sparks scramble for land in the Brazilian Amazon
- Cultivation of oil palm has surged in Brazil’s northern state of Roraima over the last decade, fueled by an ambitious push towards biofuels.
- While palm oil companies operating in the area claim they do not deforest, critics say they are contributing to a surge in demand for cleared land in this region, driving cattle ranchers, soy farmers and land speculators deeper into the forest.
- As the demand for land increases, incursions near and into Indigenous lands that neighbor palm oil plantations are also on the rise.
- Indigenous rights activists say that in addition to the loss of forest, they’re worried about the pesticides that palm oil plantations are doused with and the runoff from processing mills, which frequently end up in soil and water sources, and that encroaching outsiders may introduce COVID-19 to vulnerable communities.

Beef giant JBS vows to go deforestation-free — 14 years from now
- JBS, a giant company implicated in multiple cases of large-scale forest clearing in Brazil, recently made a commitment to achieve zero deforestation across its global supply chain by 2035. Environmentalists argue this pledge is grossly insufficient.
- In a new Soy and Cattle Deforestation Tracker, JBS scores just a single point out of 100. Its nearest competitors, Minerva and Marfrig, have scores of 46/100 and 40/100 respectively.
- Tagging and tracking systems to ensure transparency along the entire beef supply have long been proposed, but JBS has resisted disclosing its full list of suppliers.
- Under present conditions, Brazil is losing forest cover at the fastest rate in more than a decade, and this deforestation is driven largely by the meatpacking industry.

Deforestation rises in Colombia’s Chiribiquete National Park as cattle invade
- Chiribiquete National Park is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and the largest continental protected area in Colombia, comprising more than 4 million hectares (40,000 square kilometers or 17,000 sq miles) of land in the Colombian Amazon.
- For the past several years, the Colombian Amazon has been hit harder by deforestation than any other region in the country, according to the Institute of Hydrology, Meteorology, and Environmental Studies (IDEAM).
- Satellite data from the University of Maryland registered an “unusually high” number of deforestation alerts in Colombia’s Chiribiquete National Park in January.
- A report by the Monitoring of the Andean Amazon Project (MAAP) revealed that over 1,000 hectares inside Chiribiquete National Park were deforested between September 2020 and February 2021.

Seven financial firms key to rooting out deforestation, report finds
- Exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and index funds are some of the most popular investment tools available, popular among individual and institutional investors alike.
- Just a handful of asset management firms control between 60% and 70% of these funds, according to a recent report from the financial think tank Planet Tracker.
- Planet Tracker’s analysis found that $9.3 billion from ETFs is invested in a set of 26 companies engaged in the soybean trade and linked to deforestation.
- The report concludes that the financial firms in which ETFs and index funds are concentrated are critical in addressing financial support for deforestation.

Protesters hold back military takeover of Balkans’ largest mountain pasture
- A 2019 decree by the government of Montenegro sets forth the country’s intention to set up a military training ground in the highland grasslands of Sinjajevina in the northern part of the country.
- But the pastures of Sinjajevina have supported herders for centuries, and scientists say that this sustainable use is responsible in part for the wide array of life that the mountain supports; activists say an incursion by the military would destroy livelihoods, biodiversity and vital ecosystem services.
- A new coalition now governs Montenegro, one that has promised to reevaluate the military’s use of Sinjajevina.
- But with the country’s politics and position in Europe in flux, the movement against the military is pushing for formal designation of a park that would permanently protect the region’s herders and the environment.

Colombian and Ecuadorian Indigenous communities live in fear as drug traffickers invade
- The Siona Indigenous group inhabits communities in two Indigenous territories: Buenavista in Colombia and the smaller Wisuyá in Ecuador.
- Both territories have seen increasing deforestation in recent years, which sources attribute to oil extraction, logging and the clearing of land for illicit crops – mainly coca, which is used to make cocaine.
- Armed groups control the trade and processing of coca and sources say those who oppose them face violent reprisal.

Cocaine production driving deforestation into Colombian national park
- Catatumbo Barí National Natural Park protects unique, remote rainforest in northeastern Colombia.
- Satellite data show the park lost 6.2% of its tree cover between 2001 and 2019, with several months of unusually high deforestation in 2020.
- Sources say illegal coca cultivation is rapidly expanding in and around Catatumbo Barí and is driving deforestation as farmers move in and clear forest to grow the illicit crop, which is used to make cocaine.
- Area residents say armed groups are controlling the trade of coca in and out of the region, and are largely operating in an atmosphere of impunity.

Brazil beef giants linked to illegal Amazon deforestation
- Brazil’s biggest beef companies have been directly linked to more than 17,000 hectares (42,000 acres) of illegal deforestation in the Amazon state of Pará.
- According to an investigation by Global Witness, JBS, Marfrig and Minerva bought cattle from a combined total of 379 ranches between 2017 and 2019 where illegal deforestation had taken place.
- The firms also failed to monitor 4,000 ranches in their supply chains that were connected to large areas of deforestation in the state, investigators found.
- Brazil has the second-largest cattle herd in the world, which is the leading driver of deforestation emissions in Latin America.

Fueled by impunity, invasions surge in Brazil’s Indigenous lands
- After a decade-long struggle, Apyterewa was officially demarcated as a protected Indigenous territory in 2007, exclusively for the use of the Paracanã people who’ve called it home for generations.
- But despite these protections, Apyterewa has lost about 5% of its forest cover since 2007 as outsiders continue to move in and clear land for pasture, mines and timber.
- Deforestation seems to have picked up pace in recent months: satellites detected 83,445 deforestation alerts between Aug. 24 and Nov. 16, with several weeks registering “unusually high” levels of forest loss.
- Civil society advocates blame the Bolsonaro administration for the surging deforestation in Apyterewa and other protected areas: “We have a scenario of a weakening of the environmental agencies, which has been really profound,” said Danicley de Aguiar, an Amazon campaigner with Greenpeace. “It’s as if we threw a knife in the heart of Brazil’s environmental policy.”

Paraguay whistleblowers allege illegal deforestation cover up
- Senior officials at Paraguay’s Environment Ministry are allegedly helping cover up illegal deforestation by the country’s cattle industry.
- Last month, London-based NGO Earthsight reported that major European automakers, including Jaguar Land Rover and BMW, were using leather linked to illegal deforestation in Paraguay.
- Damning new testimony by current and former ministry employees suggests that in many cases environmental impact assessment applications are made long after the land in question has been cleared.

In Bolivia, more than 25% of major fires this year burned in protected areas
- More than 120 major fires have been detected in Bolivia since March, more than a quarter of them in protected areas, including Noel Kempff Mercado National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and Copaibo Municipal Protected Area, where an area of forest half the size of New York City has burned this year.
- Most of this year’s major blazes, 54%, were detected in savanna in the department of Beni, while more than 38% burned in forests, both in the Amazon rainforest and the dry forests of Chiquitano, according to the nonprofit MAAP.
- This year, there have been more fires detected but they have burned less area compared to last year’s devastating blazes. Nevertheless, the fires have been severe enough for Bolivia’s interim president to declare a state of emergency in mid-September.
- “We have some weeks (maybe more) when more fires might occur and it is difficult to predict the final impact for this year,” researchers from Bolivian nonprofit ACEAA say.

Automakers fuelling deforestation, dispossession in Paraguay’s Gran Chaco: report
- Major European automakers including Jaguar Land Rover and BMW use leather linked to illegal deforestation in Paraguay forests home to one of the world’s last uncontacted tribes.
- A report by London-based NGO Earthsight released last week following a years-long undercover investigation revealed links to illegal clearances of forest in the Chaco region of Paraguay.
- The forests of the Gran Chaco, a lowland region straddling Bolivia, Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil, are home to at-risk fauna such as jaguars and giant anteaters, whose populations have been devastated by cattle ranching and soybean cultivation.

How Morgan Stanley is linked to deforestation in the Amazon
- Investigation shows new cases of illegal deforestation among suppliers of Marfrig and Minerva, in which the bank holds major stakes
- Increasing deforestation in the Amazon in 2020 has prompted banks and funds to promise changes in investments that affect the region.
- But some investors with strong influence in the Amazon have resisted the calls for reform, including Morgan Stanley, a shareholder in two of the three largest beef producers in Brazil.

Amazon meatpacking plants, a COVID-19 hotspot, may be ground zero for next pandemic
- The COVID-19 pandemic has shown that slaughterhouses are among the outbreak hotspots for the disease because of the low temperatures and crowded production lines.
- But slaughterhouses are also ideal locations for the emergence of new viruses due to the contact between humans and the blood and entrails of cattle.
- Nearly a third of cases where diseases spread from animals to human beings occurred because their natural environments were invaded and destroyed, which puts Brazil’s beef industry, centered in the Amazon, at particularly high risk.
- Yet despite the economic fallout from the pandemic, the financial market keeps ignoring this risk and supporting the beef companies most exposed to deforestation in the Amazon.

BlackRock silent on livestock in latest global warming policy
- In July, BlackRock, the world’s largest investment fund manager, said it would take concrete action against at least 53 companies for their inaction regarding global warming and place 191 others under observation.
- But the announcement left out one of the major drivers of global warming: the meat industry, which is the main cause of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon.
- In May, Blackrock became the third-biggest shareholder in JBS, the world’s largest meatpacker, which was at the centre of a series of allegations this year of illegal deforestation in its supply chain.

Europe’s richest countries importing Brazilian beef linked to millions of tons of emissions: Report
- Millions of tons of emissions are embedded in Europe’s Brazilian beef imports each year, equivalent to the annual footprint of between 300,000 and 2.4 million EU citizens, according to a new report by London-based NGO Earthsight.
- Though global emissions are expected to see a record fall this year due to the coronavirus pandemic, Brazil is set to defy the trend, with a predicted rise of between 10% and 20%. Deforestation and cattle ranching account for more than half of the country’s emissions.
- Two companies, Brazil’s JBS and Italy’s Silca, were found to be responsible for almost a quarter of the estimated emissions documented by Earthsight, while just eight firms were responsible for more than half of all imported emissions.

Brazil green recovery plan could boost economy, add jobs, cut emissions: Report
- If Brazil shifts to a low carbon economy, carbon emissions would be cut by a third while also creating jobs, benefiting economic growth and infrastructure, according to a recent report by the World Resources Institute.
- Brazil’s post-COVID-19 economic recovery plan could provide an opportunity to implement long-term solutions across multiple sectors that could reduce carbon emissions and Amazon deforestation.
- Study authors hope that the economic benefits of the plan will push the current Jair Bolsonaro administration to adopt a green agenda, even if conservation is not a priority.
- “Climate denial is at a peak, but cost-benefit will be the leading decision-maker, whether or not it benefits the environment.… Due to post-COVID-19 economic recovery plans, we have a window of opportunity that will close in a year and a half or less.” — World Resources Institute Climate Policy Director Carolina Genin.

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.

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.

All talk, no walk: ‘Green’ financiers still support Amazon beef industry
- Regulatory initiatives to promote responsible investment are falling short, even in Europe, where the most rigid rules haven’t been able to prevent investors continuing to pump money into the Brazilian beef industry.
- In the U.S., similarly, financial giants like BlackRock tout their green investment credentials while still investing hundreds of millions of dollars in the top three meatpackers buying cattle from the Amazon.
- In Brazil, investment guides, manuals and recommendations by various market groups, along with rules issued by the central bank, have had little effect on the flow of investments into meatpackers JBS, Marfrig and Minerva.

Paper maze and lack of transparency cloak investment in companies involved in Amazon deforestation
- Lack of transparency prevents individual investors from knowing where their money is going to and allows majors investors to cloak their contributions to meatpackers who operate in the Amazon.
- Despite a Brazilian Central Bank law, brokers ignore environmental risk assessment when suggesting clients to invest in meatpackers.
- Meatpacking and retail companies use dozens of subsidiaries and even tax havens to hide the origins of their investments.

Investigation links meat giant JBS to Amazon deforestation
- An investigation by The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, The Guardian and Reporter Brasil has uncovered evidence that a driver working for the world’s largest meatpacker, JBS, was involved in transporting cattle from a farm that has been fined for forest destruction to another farm that directly supplies JBS.
- Photographs from the social media account of the truck driver appear to show him in a convoy bearing the JBS logo transporting “skinny” cattle from Fazenda Estrela do Aripuanã, a ranch in the northwest of Mato Grosso state that has previously been fined for illegal deforestation, to another farm that directly supplies JBS.
- JBS said it was investigating the incident; it added that the driver worked for an “independently-run transport service.”

World’s biggest meatpacker JBS bought illegally grazed Amazon cattle: Report
- Brazil’s meatpackers have long been accused of “laundering cattle,” a process in which young calves are fattened on newly and illegally deforested lands within indigenous reserves and on other conserved tracts, then transferred to “legal ranches” where no deforestation has occurred, before being sold to meat processors who turn a blind eye.
- The Brazilian government has abetted this illicit accounting sleight of hand by not requiring tagging and tracking cattle from birth, and allowing incomplete accounting records. So laundered beef is sold to China, the European Union and other nations, as well as to Brazilian consumers, all unaware of the Amazon deforestation connection.
- Now Amnesty International has documented cases in which they allege that JBS, the world’s biggest meat processor, bought cattle illegally reared on the Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau indigenous reserve and the Rio Jacy-Paraná and Rio Ouro Preto extractive reserves in Rondônia state, epicenter of 2019’s Amazon fires and of Brazilian deforestation.
- JBS has denied the charges, but has often had such allegations made against it in the past.

Where there’s cattle ranching and soybean farming, there’s fire, study finds
- Most of the fires in the Amazon rainforest last year were associated with industrial agriculture, according to a study cross-referencing NASA satellite data with corporate supply chains.
- Researchers transposed the satellite imagery of fire alerts with the locations of the largest meatpacking plants and soybean silos in the region.
- Of the 981,000 fire alerts that occurred in Brazil between July and October last year, half were in meatpackers JBS and Marfrig’s “potential buy zones” and in the areas surrounding Bunge and Cargill’s soybean silos.
- The study doesn’t aim to make a direct link between the companies and the fires, but rather to show the proximity of the fires within the regions in which they work.

‘On the edge’: Endangered forest cleared for marijuana in Paraguay
- The Upper Parana is also one of the world’s most endangered forests. The ecoregion has been almost entirely cleared in Brazil, and Argentina holds the largest remaining areas of connected habitat. In Paraguay, studies estimate less than 10% remains, mostly as fragmented forest islands scatted across a largely unprotected, denuded landscape.
- Agriculture is the driving force of deforestation in Paraguay, with much of the country’s forests cleared legally to make way for cattle, soy, corn and sugar cane fields over the past half-century.
- But clearing for illicit marijuana cultivation is also taking a toll on the eastern Paraguay’s forests. According to the National Anti-Drug Secretariat (SENAD), 81,871 kilos (180,494 pounds) of marijuana were seized and 797 parcels were destroyed in Paraguay’s portion of the Upper Parana Atlantic Forest between 2015 and 2020. Investigation by Mongabay and La Nación found marijuana farms carved out of several national parks and reserves in eastern Paraguay.
- Government officials and NGO representatives say to more enforcement is needed on the ground, and that those found guilty of environmental crimes should be given harsher sentences.

Brazilian meatpacker expands with World Bank funding but fails to reduce impacts in the Amazon
- In 2013, the World Bank’s private sector arm, the International Finance Corporation, injected $85 million into Minerva.
- The money was for expansion of the meatpacker’s operations in Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay and Colombia, granted on the condition that an environmental and social action plan be implemented in all those countries.
- The IFC understood that Minerva’s activities represented environmental and social risks, including deforestation, child labor, forced labor and land conflicts.
- Seven years later, the company has become Latin America’s leading beef exporter, but continues to face criticism over the uncertain origin of its products.

Concerned for the future, indigenous Nicaraguans lament lost habitats
- Last week we published an investigation detailing the companies importing beef from Nicaragua and the industry’s links to deforestation and land grabbing in the country’s indigenous autonomous regions.
- This article provides a glimpse of life in the indigenous regions and how people there are coping with an influx of settlers and cattle ranching.
- Mongabay visited Nicaragua’s South Caribbean Coast Autonomous Region in October last year.

Colombian farmers, ranchers join businesses to turn the tide on Amazon deforestation
- Campesinos and cattle ranchers in Colombia’s Amazon are joining forces with businesses and research institutions to tackle deforestation in the region.
- Deforestation in Colombia’s Amazon for 2018 was approximately 200,000 hectares (494,000 acres), nearly the size of Luxembourg.
- In Caquetá, Colombia’s second-biggest cattle region, which produces 1.7 million liters (450,000 gallons) of milk per day and represents 22,500 ranchers, a zero deforestation agreement has been signed by the region’s cattle ranchers’ committee, the government, unions, civil society organizations, top chefs, and restaurants.
- A 20-year study by the Amazonian Scientific Research Institute SINCHI shows how agroforestry, silvopastoralism and enrichment can preserve the fragile Amazonian soils while also being highly profitable, with returns on investment ranging from 10% to 16% and net earnings of $13,200 per hectare after 20 years.

Nicaraguan beef, grazed on deforested and stolen land, feeds global demand
- A Mongabay analysis shows major multinational companies including Nestlé and Cargill are at risk of sourcing Nicaraguan beef from indigenous regions consumed by settler occupation and mass deforestation. Both companies admit they can only trace the origin of their Nicaraguan beef back to the slaughterhouses, not the ranches.
- More than 100 indigenous people living in the country’s autonomous indigenous regions have been killed, kidnapped or injured since 2015 amid conflicts ignited by settler migration and land grabbing.
- Nicaragua is one of the world’s most heavily deforested countries, having lost about a fifth of its forest cover since 2000. Its indigenous regions were particularly badly hit, with deforestation rates as high as 27% over the same period.
- Lawyers allegedly rubber-stamp land sale documents that have no legal basis, further compounding invasions of indigenous territories. Meanwhile, researchers have identified locations of scales and intermediaries serving ranchers occupying a biosphere reserve and indigenous land.

In the Amazon, a farmer practices the future of sustainable cattle ranching
- A cattle farmer in Tefé, Brazil, has turned his ranch into a new standard for ranching in the forest — one that’s more profitable and more productive, while using less land.
- This type of farming eliminates the need for clearing new areas of forest for new pasture, a practice that has made cattle ranching one of the major drivers of deforestation in Brazil.
- Under the rational grazing system, cattle are grazed in a fenced-off plot of pasture, then rotated to another plot to allow the soil and vegetation in the previous plot to recover.
- Using land that has already been degraded and abandoned is one solution recommended for raising cattle in the Amazon region; there are an estimated 50 million hectares (125 million acres) of such land in Brazil that could be used for this purposed.

Brazil’s ‘land-grabbers law’ threatens Amazonia (commentary)
- “Land grabbers” are large operators who illegally claim government land in Amazonia and usually later subdivide it for sale to ranchers. This is an important factor in Brazil’s rapid deforestation.
- Illegal invasion of government land by both small and large actors has been stimulated by two previous “land-grabbers’ laws.” Now a vote is imminent on a proposed third law that goes further, granting titles on the strength of mere “self-declarations.”
- The coronavirus pandemic is being used as cover to allow measures such as this to be put into effect without question. This is a strategy for gutting environmental controls that Bolsonaro’s environment minister put forth explicitly in a ministerial meeting, a recording of which was released by court order on 22 May.
- This post is a commentary. The views expressed are those of the author, not necessarily Mongabay.

The unknown Cerrado and its colossal biological relevance (commentary)
- Following the International Day for Biological Diversity, a leader of the Partnership Fund for Critical Ecosystems draws attention to the environmental importance of the most biodiverse tropical savanna on the planet.
- In the Cerrado, cradle of Brazilian waters and habitat for 5% of the world’s biodiversity, the rate of deforestation is 2.5 times that of the Amazon.
- This post is a commentary. The views expressed are those of the author, not necessarily Mongabay.

As bioethanol demand rises, biodiversity will fall in Cerrado, study says
- An area half the size of Switzerland in Brazil’s savanna-like Cerrado biome could see its biodiversity plummet as sugarcane farms expand to meet global demand for bioethanol, a new study says.
- Researchers calculated that some parts of the Cerrado could see up to 100% loss of mammalian species richness; endangered animals like the maned wolf will be the most affected.
- The Atlantic Forest and the Pantanal wetlands will also be affected, largely a result of growers of other crops moving into those areas as sugarcane farms take over their current areas.
- The study authors say there’s still a chance to mitigate those impacts by increasing agricultural productivity, protecting natural areas, and developing second-generation bioethanol made from a mix of sugarcane and eucalyptus.

Some ranchers and conservationists agree: Grazing and logging can save birds
- Landowners and the National Audubon Society have partnered over the past six years to restore rangeland from Texas to the Dakotas.
- The conservation ranching program targets bird species in peril in 13 states.

Cattle put Paraguay’s Chaco biome at high risk, but report offers hope
- Cattle production is the largest driver of tropical forest loss worldwide, with devastating impacts for climate, biodiversity and people.
- Paraguay has one of the highest rates of deforestation in the world, largely due to the rapid expansion of cattle ranching, especially in the western Gran Chaco region — a highly biodiverse and sparsely populated dry forest ecosystem.
- Experts predict that if the current rate of expansion continues in the Chaco, the forest and other native vegetation there could disappear within decades.
- As Paraguay considers new global markets into which to expand, and implements a new forest monitoring platform, a new report suggests that the country has a unique opportunity to shift towards large-scale sustainable cattle production, greatly reducing deforestation.

Brazilian meat giant JBS expands its reach in China
- Brazilian meatpacker JBS has agreed to supply WH Group, a Hong Kong-based meat processor with access to retail outlets across China, with beef, pork and poultry products worth around $687 million a year beginning in 2020.
- Investigations have shown that JBS sources some of its beef from producers who have been fined for illegal deforestation in the Amazon.
- The push for cattle pasture drives most of the deforestation in the Amazon, while soybean plantations to supply pig and chicken feed have replaced large tracts of the wooded savannas of the Cerrado.

Making a thriller out of Belo Monte hydro dam: Q&A with filmmaker Sabrina McCormick
- The construction of the controversial Belo Monte hydroelectric dam in the Brazilian Amazon is the narrative engine that drives Sequestrada, the first full-length film by U.S. cinematographer and sociologist Sabrina McCormick.
- The film, which came out in December on various streaming platforms, tells the story of Kamudjara, an indigenous girl, amid the expectations about the profound social and environmental changes that the construction will bring.
- In this interview with Mongabay, the director speaks about her creative process, her experience filming in the Amazon and perceptions about the social and cultural aspects, as well as the indigenous people’s sense of belonging to the forest.
- A former climate and environmental adviser to the Obama administration, McCormick also stresses the importance of blocking the advance of power generation models based on projects like Belo Monte.

Escalating firestorms could turn Amazon from carbon sink to source: Study
- A new study finds that the Brazilian Amazon could be moving from being a carbon storehouse to a carbon source — putting the regional and global climate at great risk. Intensifying wildfires could contribute to that shift happening by mid-century.
- Researchers used models to show that an increasingly hot, dry Amazon climate, coupled with deforestation, could trigger wildfires burning up to 16% of the rainforest in Brazil’s Southern Amazon by 2050, releasing up to 17 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide.
- The team’s models indicated that Amazon fires will likely continue intensifying before 2030, due to more frequent heat and drought conditions caused by global warming, and as rampant deforestation due to agribusiness expansion dries out the understory and creates more flammable forest edges.
- Of great concern, the study also found that over time, fires won’t just impact edge areas, but intact forest, deep inside indigenous reserves and other conserved areas. Reduced sources of fire ignition and fire suppression could decrease the likelihood of burning, especially if accompanied by a decrease in global carbon emissions.

Belo Monte boondoggle: Brazil’s biggest, costliest dam may be unviable
- The controversial Belo Monte mega-dam in Pará state has done significant socio environmental harm to the Xingu River and the indigenous and traditional people living beside it. Now it appears the dam may not be able to produce the electricity totals promised by its builders — an eventuality critics had long warned about.
- Project designers appear to have seriously misestimated the Xingu River’s flow rates and fluctuations between wet and dry seasons, while also not accounting for reductions in flow due to deforestation caused by rapidly expanding cattle ranches and soy plantations far upriver in Mato Grosso state.
- Climate change-induced droughts are also decreasing Xingu River flows and generating capacity. In 2013, an important Brazilian Panel on Climate Change report warned that global warming could drop water levels all across the Amazon basin, putting hydropower in serious jeopardy.
- As deforestation due to agribusiness and mining spreads across the basin, now driven by the development-friendly policies of Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, the future for Amazon hydroelectric dams, their generating capacity and investment potential looks increasingly bleak.

Bolsonaro’s Brazil: 2019 brings death by 1,000 cuts to Amazon — part one
- While the media focused in 2019 on Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro’s incendiary remarks, or on the Amazon fires, he has quietly instituted new policies likely to aid land grabbers and do great harm to Amazon forests, indigenous and traditional peoples. “Death by 1,000 Cuts” parts 1 and 2 reviews those policies.
- Executive decree MP 910 issued December 11 legalizes large-scale land grabbing. The large-owner loophole built into the new decree allows land speculators to register large swathes of public lands that they grabbed before December 2018, using the illegal deforestation they accomplished as proof of their “occupation.”
- MP 910 could transfer 40-60 million hectares of public land to private owners who would then be authorized to legally deforest a fifth of that land, about 10 million hectares, experts say. MP 910 is likely to trigger high rates of conflict and deforestation. Congress must approve MP 910 in 120 days to make it permanent.
- The agriculture ministry also chose to make secret part of its ranching database, thwarting Visipec, an NGO-designed tool for tracking cattle raised on calving ranches where major deforestation occurs. Other administrative measures benefit big agribusiness over small family farms, and muzzle civil society voices.

Brazil investigates agribusiness bribes to judges for favorable land rulings
- Brazil’s Federal Police have launched an investigation, dubbed “Operation Far West,” to crack down on an alleged massive land grab by an agribusiness collective in western Bahia, one of Brazil’s largest soy producing regions.
- The case centers on alleged corruption involving judges, lawyers and farmers, who stand accused of conspiring to secure favorable court rulings to legitimize the grabbing of some 800,000 hectares (2 million acres) of land from local communities.
- Sérgio Humberto Sampaio, one of the judges involved, was responsible for a ruling that benefitted the Estrondo megafarm collective over traditional communities, by reducing the area claimed by the communities from 43,000 to 9,000 hectares (106,000 to 22,000 acres) in 2018.
- Agribusiness mogul Walter Horita, one of Estrondo’s main tenants, is also cited in the investigation for allegedly paying millions in bribes and overseeing the movement of 22 billion reais ($5.2 billion) between 2013 and 2019, with 7.5 billion reais ($1.8 billion) unaccounted for.

Brazil sugarcane growth can meet biofuel need and not drive deforestation: study
- Sugarcane crop production in Brazil may need to expand by up to 5 million hectares by 2030 to meet a rising demand for ethanol biofuels, according to computer models that compared the impact of different economic, social, and policy scenarios on increased ethanol production.
- The recent study found that sugarcane ethanol demand by 2030 would increase by between 17.5 and 34.4 million metric tonnes. This demand could be met without new deforestation by intensifying ranching practices and converting existing Brazilian cattle pastures to sugarcane.
- However, in a move that surprised many experts, President Jair Bolsonaro this month revoked a decree limiting sugarcane cultivation in the Amazon and Pantanal biomes, leaving the decision about how to meet rising ethanol demand in the hands of the sugarcane industry.
- Experts say that even with the end of state regulation, sugarcane expansion into the Amazon and Pantanal is unlikely due to poor agricultural conditions and lack of infrastructure there, along with the industry’s need to maintain its positive environmental reputation in international markets.

Deforestation preceded fires in ‘massive’ area of Amazon in 2019
- Deforestation watchdog Monitoring of the Andean Amazon Project found that 4,500 square kilometers (1,740 square miles) of the Brazilian Amazon was deforested between 2017 and 2019 and then burned.
- The team’s analysis revealed that 65 percent of that deforestation occurred in 2019 alone.
- The research points to the need for policymakers to address deforestation as well as fires.

Brazil’s ‘coconut breakers’ feel the squeeze of Cerrado development
- These coconut breakers rely on the babassu palm and its harvest of oil-rich nuts for their traditional sustainable livelihood.
- Many of these women live on the edge of the Matopiba region, dubbed by some as “the world’s last agricultural frontier” which has seen an almost 300 percent increase in soy expansion over the last two decades, most of which came at the expense of native forests and vegetation.
- In recent years, industrial agribusiness has moved in fast, privatizing and fencing the commons, converting the babassu palm groves to soy and eucalyptus plantations and cattle ranches, and making it harder for the coconut breakers to access the palm from which they derive their living, and their social and cultural identity.
- In addition, the women say they have been increasingly exposed to threats, intimidation, and physical and sexual violence by farmers and other male agribusiness workers. But the coconut breakers are determined to defend their palm groves at any cost, and to resist the enclosure of the commons.

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.

‘Witnessing extinction in the flames’ as the Amazon burns for agribusiness
- The vast and biodiverse Triunfo do Xingu protected area in the Brazilian Amazon lost 22 percent of its forest cover between 2007 and 2018, with figures this year indicating the rate of deforestation is accelerating.
- The surge in deforestation, driven largely by cattle ranching, is part of a wider trend of encroachment into protected areas across the Brazilian Amazon under the administration of President Jair Bolsonaro, according to conservationists.
- With the widespread clearing slicing up the larger protected area into smaller fragments of forest, human rights advocates worry that it will become increasingly difficult for forest-dependent indigenous communities to survive within it.
- The deforestation is likely to have a far-reaching impact on the biodiversity of the region, which is home to countless species of plants and animals not adapted to living in areas with higher temperatures and less vegetation.

Brazilian beef industry plays outsized role in tropical carbon emissions: report
- Roughly 2.6 gigatons of carbon dioxide were released annually between 2010 and 2014 due to growth in tropical agriculture and tree plantations, say researchers; 40 percent of those deforestation-related emissions stem from Brazil and Indonesia, with oilseeds — especially palm oil and soy — accounting for most emissions in Indonesia.
- The research shows that cattle ranching in Brazil is the leading driver of deforestation emissions across Latin America. Brazilian meatpacking giant JBS presents the highest deforestation risk of the nation’s leading companies, followed by other major firms including Minerva and Marfrig. Most beef raised in Brazil is consumed domestically.
- The deforestation problem arises because monitoring linked to ranches is only done with the final slaughterhouse supplier, while most forest loss is taking place at the ranch where the animals originate, or at other ranches to which animals are sold, before being “laundered” at a last ranch.
- The solution: barcode tag animals from birth, so livestock can be traced from source, through multiple sales, to the slaughterhouse, tracking deforestation along the way. But political will has been lacking, say analysts, under past administration and especially under President Jair Bolsonaro.

As the Amazon burns, Colombia’s forests decimated for cattle and coca
- The environmental corridor that connects the Amazon, the Orinoquía and the Andes mountain range is in danger as a result of the ongoing deforestation.
- Tinigua National Natural Park lost 16,000 hectares (39,500 acres) between 2017 and July 2019, almost all of it primary forest, while the other parks also lost significant amounts of forest.
- The analysis identifies the main cause of the deforestation as the conversion of forests to pastures for land grabbing and livestock ranching, by invaders taking advantage of the scant government presence in the region.

Expand or Intensify? Balancing biodiversity and rising food needs: study
- A recent study shows that for a given rise in food production, the impact of cropland expansion on biodiversity is many times greater than that for cropland intensification. This is because expansion can be expected to occur in those regions with the highest existing levels of biodiversity, mainly in Central and South America, a new study finds.
- Researchers estimated crop expansion and intensification potential for 17 major agricultural crops using socio-economic data as well as data on biophysical constraints. This information was overlaid with spatial data on biodiversity, specifically endemism richness to determine how each strategy would impact biodiversity in different locales.
- Worldwide, there is a major gap between the amount farms are producing and potential yields that could be achieved if plants were grown in an optimal way on minimal land. Closing this yield gap by 28 percent through land use intensification would increase production equal to expanding cropland area by 730 million hectares.
- In the future, we need to not only protect biodiversity on uncultivated wildlands, but also make the very most economically and ecologically of our existing croplands, encouraging biodiversity there as well, while maximizing food production.

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.

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.

Rainforest destruction accelerates in Honduras UNESCO site
- Powerful drug-traffickers and landless farmers continue to push cattle ranching and illegal logging operations deeper into the Río Plátano Biosphere Reserve, a UNESCO World Heritage site, in eastern Honduras.
- Satellite data show the Río Plátano Biosphere Reserve lost more than 10 percent of its tree cover between 2001 and 2017, more than a third of which happened within the last three years of that time period. Preliminary data for 2019 indicate Río Plátano is experiencing another heavy round of forest loss this year, with UMD recording around 160,000 deforestation alerts in the reserve between January and August, which appears to be an uptick from the same period in 2018.
- Local sources claim the government participates in drug trafficking, and those involved in the drug business are allegedly the same people who are involved in illegal exploitation of the land for cattle ranching and illegal logging of mahogany and cedar.
- Deforestation in Río Plátano means a loss of habitat for wildlife and a loss of forest resources for indigenous communities that depend on them. But another threat is emerging: water resources are becoming increasingly scarce as forests are converted into grasslands.

Deforestation drops in Brazil’s Atlantic Forest, but risks remain: experts
- A joint report from the Brazilian National Institute for Space Research (INPE) and NGO Fundação SOS Mata Atlântica based on satellite imaging shows an annual reduction of 9.3 percent in deforested areas in the Mata Atlântica, the country’s most endangered biome.
- The cleared area in 17 Atlantic Forest states between October 2017 and April 2018 totaled 11,399 hectares (28,167 acres), which is 1,163 hectares (2,874 acres) less than over the same period a year earlier.
- However, intense pressure from agribusiness and the real estate market continues placing the Mata Atlântica’s ecosystems under threat, risks that include ongoing deforestation, losses in biodiversity, and potential extinction of species, experts warn.

New initiative aims to jump-start stalled drive toward zero deforestation
- Over the past decade there has been a rise in corporate zero-deforestation commitments, but very few companies have shown progress in meeting their goals of reducing deforestation in their supply chains by 2020.
- The Accountability Framework Initiative, launched by a group of 14 civil society organizations, is the latest tool to help companies make progress, and hold them accountable, on their zero-deforestation commitments.
- The Accountability Framework Initiative is expected to be especially important for markets like Europe, where demand for crops like soy has been linked to rising deforestation in places like the Brazilian Cerrado.

Colombia registers first drop in deforestation since 2016 FARC peace deal
- Colombia lost 198,000 hectares (489,269 acres) of forest in 2018, according to a report released by the country’s meteorological institute IDEAM. This reduction represents a 10 percent drop compared to 2017 when 220,000 hectares (543,632 acres) were lost.
- Despite slight annual progress, rates of deforestation in Colombia remain stubbornly high, with a sustained increase compared to the low rates the country boasted five years ago.
- While the landmark 2016 FARC peace agreement has opened up parts of Colombia’s remote areas formerly off limits to science, exploration and tourism, it also created a power vacuum exploited by illegal armed groups and wealthy landowners.
- The report points to extensive cattle ranching, coca cultivation related to cocaine production, illegal mining and timber harvesting, unpermitted road construction, burns and extension of the agricultural frontier as the greatest contributors to tropical forest loss in the South American country.

Saving Guatemala’s vanishing macaws: Q&A with veterinarian Luis Fernando Guerra
- The northern subspecies of the scarlet macaw (Ara macao cyanoptera) has disappeared from much of its former range in Mexico and Central America due to habitat loss and wildlife trafficking. Researchers estimate there are between 150 and 200 scarlet macaws remaining in Guatemala.
- Fire, used to clear land for agriculture, is the biggest driver of habitat loss in Guatemala. So far this year, NASA satellites have detected more than 40,000 fires in Guatemala, many occurring in scarlet macaw habitat.
- The Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) is trying to protect Guatemala’s macaws through a program that monitors nest sites and places lab-hatched chicks in adoptive nests.
- Mongabay caught up with WCS Lead Medical Veterinarian Luis Fernando Guerra as he was working in the field in Laguna del Tigre National Park to chat about his work and the outlook for scarlet macaws.

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.

’Livestock revolution’ triggered decline in global pasture: Report
- Since 2000, the area of land dedicated for livestock pasture around the world has declined by 1.4 million square kilometers (540,500 square miles) — an area about the size of Peru.
- A new report attributes the contraction to more productive breeds, better animal health and higher densities of animals on similar amounts of land.
- The report’s authors say that technological solutions could help meet rising demand for meat and milk in developing countries, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, without reversing the downward trend.

Climate change threatens to water down Cerrado’s rich biodiversity: Study
- The new study by researchers in Brazil shows that climate change will lead to local extinctions of several mammal species throughout the Cerrado, the vast tropical savanna biome.
- Immigration of species from other biomes, including the Amazon and the Atlantic Forest, will be higher than regional extinctions. But because these species are commonly found, it will still lead to an overall loss in biodiversity in most regions of the Cerrado.
- The widespread erosion of differences between ecological communities is one of the main drivers of loss of biodiversity and ecosystem services.
- Future distributions of species based on climate change must be considered in conservation decisions and the development of protected areas in the Cerrado, the researchers say.

New report examines drivers of rising Amazon deforestation on country-by-country basis
- A new report examines the “unchecked development” in the Amazon that has driven deforestation rates to near-record levels throughout the world’s largest tropical forest.
- The main drivers of deforestation vary from country to country, according to the report, a collaborative effort by the Inter-American Dialogue and the Andes Amazon Fund.
- While the causes of Amazonian forest destruction vary, one thing that is common throughout the region is a lack of adequate resources for oversight and enforcement of environmental regulations. And “signs suggest this problem is only growing,” according to the report.

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.”

The heat is on: Amazon tree loss could bring 1.45 degree C local rise
- A new modeling study finds that largely unrestricted “business-as-usual” Brazilian Amazon and Cerrado deforestation could result in the loss of an estimated 606,000 square kilometers of forest by 2050, leading to local temperature increases of up to 1.45 degrees Celsius, in addition to global rises in temperature.
- Under a Brazil Forest Code enforcement model, researchers predict deforestation would be limited to 79,000 square kilometers, with reforestation occurring over 110,000 square kilometers, leading to an average local increase of just 0.02 degrees Celsius.
- Researchers say loss of tree cover must be halted and reforestation program begun to protect people and wildlife, and curb regional warming.
- Reptiles and amphibians would be especially vulnerable to deforestation-triggered temperature rises and loss of humidity.

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.

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.

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.

Indonesia’s threat to exit Paris accord over palm oil seen as cynical ploy
- A top Indonesian minister says the country may consider pulling out of the Paris climate agreement in retaliation for a European policy to phase out palm oil from biofuels by 2030.
- Luhut Pandjaitan, the coordinating minister for maritime affairs, says Indonesia, the world’s biggest producer of palm oil, can follow in the footsteps of the United States, which has declared its withdrawal from the climate pact, and Brazil, which is considering doing the same.
- The threat is the latest escalation in a diplomatic spat that has also seen Indonesia and Malaysia, the No. 2 palm oil producer, threaten retaliatory trade measures against the European Union.
- The EU says its policy is driven by growing consumer concerns about the sustainability of palm oil, which in Indonesia is often grown on plantations for which vast swaths of rainforest have had to be cleared.

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 fails to give adequate public access to Amazon land title data, study finds
- Brazil possesses vast tracts of public lands, especially in the Amazon, which exist in the public domain. Traditional peoples, landless movements, quilombolas (communities established more than a century ago by Afro-Brazilian slave descendants), and other homesteaders have the legal right to lay claim to these lands.
- It is the job of state land tenure agencies to keep track of these public lands, regulating the allocation of land and property rights to secure protection for individuals and communities against forcible evictions, and to monitor against illegal deforestation, large illegal land grabs and other illicit activities.
- However, a recent study found that none of eight Amazonian states met all the mandated transparency criteria. Active transparency indicators (data accessible on the internet or via public documents) were missing 56 percent of the time. Passive transparency indicators (data available on request) fared poorly as well.
- The inefficiency of land tenure agencies in providing land titling information contributes to numerous land conflicts, and increases insecurity in the countryside. The lack of transparency also enhances the possibility of fraud. When the poor are deprived of rightful land title data, the wealthy often have the upper hand if land disputes go to court.

Companies to miss 2020 zero-deforestation deadline, report says
- Major companies around the world with a self-imposed deadline of ending tropical deforestation in their supply chains by 2020 won’t meet the target, a report released for International Forest Day says.
- The “Forest 500” report is an annual assessment of the zero-deforestation commitments made by 350 companies involved in four commodities — cattle, palm oil, soy and timber — and the 150 financial institutions bankrolling them.
- Those commodities are responsible for the bulk of agricultural expansion in Latin America and Southeast Asia. Agricultural expansion, in turn, is responsible for most of the deforestation in these regions.
- The report calls on the companies it assesses to do more to ensure their actions match their rhetoric on ending deforestation, regardless of the unlikelihood of meeting the 2020 deadline.

Brazil’s New Forest Code puts vast areas of protected Amazon forest at risk
- A still controversial 2012 update to the Brazilian Forest Code that reduced the area required for legal reserves on rural private properties is endangering more than 15 million hectares (57,915 square miles) of Amazon forest, an area roughly the size of the U.S. state of Georgia, according to a recent study.
- Under the 2012 New Forest Code changes, Amazon states that have protected at least 65 percent of their territory as conservation units or indigenous reserves can reduce the percentage of native vegetation required to be conserved on private lands, which could lead to even larger increases in Amazon forest loss in those states.
- The updated 2012 code also pardoned illegal deforestation that occurred prior to 2008, leading to concerns among conservationists that such amnesties give private landowners a greenlight to clear native vegetation on their properties with impunity. Some analysts expect more deforestation pardons in the future.
- Rather than changing Brazil’s laws, say experts, what is needed to curb Amazon deforestation is a sea change in Brazilian culture – ceasing to prioritize industrial agribusiness above conservation and other socioeconomic goals. Such a shift seems unlikely under President Bolsonaro, except via international market forces.

Kenya: Maasai herders work to keep themselves and wildlife roaming free
- Government-run parks cover too little of Kenya’s territory to sustain the country’s wide-ranging wildlife populations, nearly two-thirds of which depend on open rangeland that indigenous herders also use.
- Today, herders and wildlife must navigate pastures that are increasingly crowded, fragmented, and fragile. Livestock numbers have increased dramatically, while wildlife populations have declined precipitously.
- The South Rift Association of Landowners (SORALO), a collective of Maasai-owned group ranches spanning 10,000 square kilometers (3,800 square miles), formed to protect the free movement of both people and wildlife on its terrain.
- While SORALO’s monitoring suggests its efforts are yielding results, South Rift communities face an extraordinarily complex future, and the goal of coexistence between herders and wildlife does not come easily.

Cerrado farmer shot amid escalating conflict with agribusiness
- Mongabay video exclusive: Long simmering land disputes between traditional communities and large-scale agribusiness in Brazil’s Cerrado savanna biome appear to be intensifying. In January, cellphone video showed a geraizeiro, a small-scale farmer, wounded by security agents at the Agronegocio Estrondo plantation in Bahia, Brazil.
- The shooting occurred when the farmer tried to recover a small herd of cattle that the plantation was holding inside a corral on what it claimed was its property. In recent years, Estrondo and other large plantations have laid claim to largely undeeded Cerrado uplands where traditional settlements had long legally grazed their livestock.
- Even more recently, Estrondo and other plantations have laid claim to lowlands near rivers in order to tap the streams for irrigation, again taking advantage of the lack of land deeds, and this time encroaching on traditional rural settlements whose land rights are protected under Brazilian law.
- Outrage against Estrondo by locals heightened after the grower allegedly destroyed a village cell tower; erected fences staffed with armed guards blocking roads to the local market town; and constructed deep ditches, high berms and even a watchtower to defend the lands the firm has claimed. Legal action is ongoing to diffuse the situation.

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.

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.

Amazon soy boom poses urgent existential threat to landless movement
- Brazil’s 1988 constitution and other laws established the right of landless peasants to claim unused and underutilized lands. Thousands, with the support of the landless movement, occupied tracts. At times, they even succeeded in getting authorities to set up agrarian reform settlements.
- Big landowners always opposed giving large tracts of land to the landless but, until roads began penetrating the Amazon making transport of commodities such as soy far cheaper, conflict over land was less intense.
- As new Amazon transportation projects are proposed – like the planned Ferrogrāo (Grainrail), or the BR-163 and BR-319 highway improvements – land thieves increasingly move in to steal the land, with hired thugs often threatening peasant communities, and murdering leaders.
- An example: a landless community leader named Carlos Antônio da Silva, known as Carlão, was assassinated by armed gunmen last April in Mato Grosso state. The rise of Jair Bolsonaro, who has repeatedly threatened the landless movement with violence, has residents of Amazon agrarian reform settlements deeply worried.

‘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.

‘There are no laws’: Cattle, drugs, corruption destroying Honduras UNESCO site
- Poverty and political violence are driving Hondurans into Rio Platano Biosphere Reserve, a UNESCO World Cultural and Natural Heritage site holding some of the region’s largest tracts of old growth rainforest.
- Local conservation and agroforestry organizations say the settlers are contributing to deforestation in the reserve. However, research indicates illegal ranching is the biggest deforestation driver in the area.
- Locals say many illegal cattle ranchers maintain ties to the drug business. They claim government corruption and apathy are also contributing to the situation.
- An investigation found criminal groups are able to operate with impunity in Honduras because of an ineffective justice system and corrupt security forces.

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.

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.

Honduras aims to save vital wildlife corridor from deforestation
- Honduras has pledged to remove livestock from the Río Plátano Biosphere Reserve, a UNESCO World Heritage site that’s home to jaguars, tapirs and macaws.
- The reserve is found in the Moskitia region’s rainforests, around 30 percent of which have been cleared in the past 15 years, largely due to cattle and livestock ranching.
- Conservation groups hailed the move as one that would benefit both Honduras and the world because of the region’s biodiversity and carbon stocks.

China increasingly involved in Brazil’s ambitious Amazon rail network
- Brazilian commodities producers have long dreamed of a railroad network crisscrossing Amazonia and the Cerrado, able to cheaply move crops and minerals from the nation’s interior to South America’s coasts. But factors, including lack of investment, political instability and difficult terrain, have foiled those hopes – until now.
- In recent years, Brazil and China have developed mutual interests: Brazil produces soy and other food crops that China needs to feed its 1.3 billion population. As a result, China has increasingly gotten involved in potentially investing in and helping build a number of Brazilian railroads. And Brazil is actively seeking that help.
- Today, China has moved actively toward including Brazil in its global Belt and Road initiative, a plan to improve worldwide transportation and other infrastructure, in order to provide the Chinese with needed commodities.
- However, railroad construction has so far been slow to get underway. How last month’s election of far-right President Jair Bolsonaro will impact Brazil-China relations is yet to be seen. While Bolsonaro has at times come out strongly against Chinese influence in Brazil, others within his administration may seek to actively court the Chinese.

Deforestation-linked Brazilian beef still flowing into international markets: report
- More than 200 million cattle live and graze in Brazil, bringing US $123 billion into the country’s economy annually. However, 80 percent of new deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon is caused by the conversion of forest to cattle pasture.
- While international beef retailers have worked to decouple their markets from cattle-driven deforestation, a recent report shows that a lack of traceability and transparency of the cattle supply chain continues to thwart their efforts.
- A major loophole: cattle are owned over their lifetimes by several ranches. But current policies only require slaughterhouses to assure that no deforestation occurred on the ranch from which the livestock was purchased. So ranchers who cause illegal deforestation “launder” cattle, by selling them to ranchers who don’t.
- Experts say that Brazil needs to adopt Uruguay’s digital traceability system whereby every cow is electronically tagged at birth and tracked along the entire supply chain. But they say Brazil lacks the political will to establish a similar system, primarily because the government is dominated by the agribusiness lobby.

Call to protect dwindling wilderness ‘before it disappears forever’
- Just 23 percent of wilderness on land and 13 percent of wilderness at sea remains, according to new maps of global human impacts.
- Five countries — Russia, Canada, Australia, the United States and Brazil — contain 70 percent of the remaining wilderness.
- The authors of the suite of studies argue that wilderness protection should move to the forefront of the conservation agenda.

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.

Hunting, agriculture driving rapid decline of jaguars in South America’s Gran Chaco
- New research finds that one-third of critical jaguar habitat in the Gran Chaco, South America’s largest tropical dry forest, has been lost since the mid-1980s.
- According to the study, led by researchers at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (HU Berlin) and published in the journal Diversity and Distributions this week, deforestation driven by agricultural expansion — mainly for soy and cattle production — has caused the steep decline of jaguar habitat in the region.
- Meanwhile, the conversion of jaguar habitat into cropland and pastureland gives hunters easier access to the forest. Thus overhunting and persecution by cattle ranchers has also become one of the chief causes of the big cat’s shrinking numbers, the study found.

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.

Colombia: Govt rushes to save national park from rampant deforestation
- Reports find more than 3 percent of Tinigua’s forest cover was cleared between February and April 2018. Officials worry the situation will worsen in the near future.
- The Secretary of Environment of the Colombian region of Meta says that the government and other entities are preparing combat deforestation.
- Tinigua Park is the only place in Colombia that connects the Orinoquía, the Andes and the Amazon. The park serves as a corridor for animals such as jaguars, mountain lions and brown woolly monkeys.

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.

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.

New film shines light on cattle industry link to Amazon deforestation
- Approximately one fifth of the Amazon rainforest has already been cut down, and nearly 80 percent of this deforestation is attributable to the cattle industry, says a new nearly hour-long documentary, “Grazing the Amazon.”
- Many ranchers are outspoken in their justification for deforestation, possibly because they feel safe from prosecution under Brazilian law because of the bancada ruralista, the powerful agribusiness lobby that has a huge influence in congress and on the Temer administration.
- One of the major problems driving deforestation is “cattle washing,” illicit techniques for raising cattle on newly deforested land by falsifying records, or shifting the cattle from illegal pasture to legal pasture, before sending them to slaughterhouses. Better recordkeeping could help to illuminate and limit this practice.
- Government and/or banking sanctions and incentives are also badly needed to motivate cattle ranchers to move away from deforestation, and to support already proven techniques for sustainable livestock production in the Brazilian Amazon.

Cerrado: abandoned pasturelands fail to regain savanna biodiversity
- A new study has found that abandoned pasturelands in the Brazilian Cerrado do not regain their former biodiversity even after as much as 25 years. The Cerrado biome once covered 2 million square kilometers, but its rapid conversion by agribusiness means that less than half the region’s native vegetation remains.
- Researchers sampled 29 Cerrado pasture tracts that had been abandoned for between 3 and 25 years and found that native plants and animals largely didn’t return. Up to a quarter century after abandonment, restored savannas continued to lack 37 percent of their original species.
- Brazil’s Forest Code requires that at least 20 percent of private rural Cerrado property not be cultivated. However the new study suggests that the code may not be fully achieving its goal of protecting and restoring native species if the conserved land is degraded pasture, since native vegetation will not come back.
- The scientists suggest that one way of boosting biodiversity would be to use fire as a land management tool. Fire is a naturally occurring process in the Cerrado. Its artificial suppression allows trees to grow up, reducing biodiversity. So the reintroduction of fire could help restore native grasses as well as other species.

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.

Cerrado Manifesto could curb deforestation, but needs support: experts
- The Cerrado Manifesto, issued in 2017, calls for a voluntary pledge by companies to help halt deforestation and native vegetation loss in the Cerrado. The Brazilian savannah’s native vegetation once covered 2 million square kilometers that has been reduced by soy, corn, cotton, and cattle production by more than half.
- A Manifesto Statement of Support (SoS) has been signed mostly by supermarkets and fast food chains, including McDonalds, Walmart, Marks & Spencer and Unilever. However, commodities firms such as Cargill, Bunge, and ADM, all active in the Cerrado, have yet to sign the SoS. Experts say big traders must join in to make the initiative effective.
- The Cerrado Manifesto is a call to action, and is somewhat akin to the 2006 Amazon Soy Moratorium, which some say was effective in cutting deforestation due to the direct conversion of forests to soy plantations. Critics of the Manifesto say that its top down approach should also include major incentives to farmers to not clear native vegetation.
- One concern is that the Manifesto and other deforestation mechanisms could force good actors out of the Cerrado, creating a vacuum into which entities unsupportive of environmental reform might enter. Among entities of concern is China, which already buys a third of Cerrado soy. China has not signed the Manifesto.

Cerrado: Traditional communities accuse agribusiness of ‘green land grabbing’
- The Cerrado savannah includes many traditional communities. Among them are the geraizeiros who arrived in Western Bahia as much as 200 years ago. For those many years, they occupied small communal villages, and farmed, grazed, and harvested surrounding native lands held by the Brazilian government.
- Typically lacking legal deeds to these lands, the geraizeiros have increasingly come into conflict with agribusiness expansion. Company-run plantations have, according to local people, laid claim to the natural lands, fenced them off, placed guards, then converted native vegetation to soy, corn and cotton monocultures.
- Another conflict: in the Cerrado, a percentage of a land owner’s property must be kept in its natural state, as a Legal Reserve. However, these reserves needn’t be contiguous with croplands. As a result, say local people, agribusiness is laying claim to natural lands that the geraizeiros have long used sustainably for their livelihoods.
- Conflict continues to escalate. The Cerrado states of Maranhão, Tocantins, Piauí and Bahia – known collectively as Matopiba – saw a 56 percent increase in reported land conflicts (400 in total) over the five year period, 2012-2016. In contrast, the national increase over the same period was 21 percent.

Cerrado: appreciation grows for Brazil’s savannah, even as it vanishes
- The Brazilian Cerrado – a vast savannah – once covered two million square kilometers (772,204 square miles), an area bigger than Great Britain, France and Germany combined, stretching to the east and south of the Amazon.
- Long undervalued by scientists and environmental activists, researchers are today realizing that the Cerrado is incredibly biodiverse. The biome supports more than 10,000 plant species, over 900 bird and 300 mammal species.
- The Cerrado’s deep-rooted plants and its soils also sequester huge amounts of carbon, making the region’s preservation key to curbing climate change, and to reducing Brazil’s deforestation and CO2 emissions to help meet its Paris carbon reduction pledge.
- Agribusiness – hampered by Brazilian laws in the Amazon – has moved into the Cerrado in a big way. More than half of the biome’s native vegetation has already disappeared, as soy and cattle production rapidly replace habitat. This series explores the dynamics of change convulsing the region.

Analysis: the Brazilian Supreme Court’s New Forest Code ruling
- Last week Brazil’s Supreme Court rejected a legal challenge by environmentalists, upholding the constitutionality of most, though not all, of Brazil’s New Forest Code – legislation crafted in 2012 by the powerful bancada ruralista agribusiness lobby in Congress.
- The 2012 code is weaker than the old Forest Code, which was approved in 1965, but never well enforced.
- Many environmentalists have expressed concern that the high court ruling endorses legislation that prioritizes the economic importance of industrial agriculture over basic environmental protections.
- Conservationists also say that the decision rewards those who have illegally infringed on environmental laws at a time when pressures on forests are growing more intense, especially in the Amazon. This story includes a chart that provides a detailed analysis of the environmental pros and cons of the Supreme Court decision.

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.

Drought-driven wildfires on rise in Amazon basin, upping CO2 release
- Despite a 76 percent decline in deforestation rates between 2003 and 2015, the incidence of forest fires is increasing in Brazil, with new research linking the rise in fires not only to deforestation, but also to severe droughts.
- El Niño, combined with other oceanic and atmospheric cycles, produced an unusually severe drought in 2015, a year that saw a 36 percent increase in Amazon basin forest fires, which also raised carbon emissions.
- Severe droughts are expected to become more common in the Brazilian Amazon as natural oceanic cycles are made more extreme by human-induced climate change.
- In this new climate paradigm, limiting deforestation alone will not be sufficient to reduce fires and curb carbon emissions, scientists say. The maintenance of healthy, intact, unfragmented forests is vital to providing resilience against further increases in Amazon fires.

Cattle invade Colombian national park
- An analysis of satellite data shows incursions into La Paya National Park in southern Colombia.
- The data indicate La Paya lost around 9,500 hectares of rainforest between 2001 and 2016.
- Researchers say satellite imagery show evidence that these clearings are being used for cattle pasture.
- Conservationists worry deforestation will continue to rise with the demobilization of Colombia’s FARC rebel group, whose presence in the country’s forests kept logging and agriculture at bay for decades.

Maps tease apart complex relationship between agriculture and deforestation in DRC
- A team from the University of Maryland’s GLAD laboratory has analyzed satellite images of the Democratic Republic of Congo to identify different elements of the “rural complex” — where many of the DRC’s subsistence farmers live.
- Their new maps and visualizations allow scientists and land-use planners to pinpoint areas where the cycle of shifting cultivation is contained, and where it is causing new deforestation.
- The team and many experts believe that enhanced understanding of the rural complex could help establish baselines that further inform multi-pronged approaches to forest conservation and development, such as REDD+.

Zero-deforestation pledges need help, support to meet targets, new study finds
- The study’s authors reviewed previous research to understand the impact that zero-deforestation commitments are having on reducing the loss of forests.
- Nearly 450 companies made 760 such commitments by early 2017.
- These pledges can reduce deforestation in some cases, but in others, they weren’t effective or had unintended effects, according to the study.
- The authors advocate for increased public-private communication, more support for smallholders, and complementary laws that support these pledges.

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.

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.

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.

Trending tree cover loss spikes again in Queensland
- A government analysis of Landsat satellite imagery found that 395,000 hectares (976,000 acres) of tree cover was cleared between 2015 and 2016 — nearly a 33 percent bump over the same time period in 2014-2015.
- Forty percent of that clearing — some 158,000 hectares (390,000 acres) — occurred in the Great Barrier Reef catchment.
- The latest year’s clearing is the highest rate in a decade and represents the sixth consecutive year in which rates in Queensland have risen.

Pandas losing ground to hungry livestock in Chinese nature reserve
- A new study finds that a 9-fold uptick in livestock near Wanglang National Nature Reserve has diminished giant panda habitat by more than a third.
- More than half of the panda’s range is protected in China, but overlap with grazing livestock, which eat bamboo leaves, maybe putting pressure on the country’s national symbol.
- The study’s authors call for investment in alternative livelihoods, in sectors such as tourism and forest management, to steer people away from livestock rearing.

A lingering ‘legacy’: Deforestation warms climate more than expected
- Tropical deforestation results in the release of not only carbon dioxide but also methane and nitrous oxide, leading to greater-than-anticipated warming of the global climate.
- The study compared emissions from land conversion with those from burning fossil fuels for energy and other sources.
- The researchers found that tropical deforestation at current rates could cause a 1.5-degree Celsius rise in global temperatures by 2100.

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.

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.

Charcoal and cattle ranching tearing apart the Gran Chaco
- The year-long probe of Paraguay’s charcoal exports by the NGO Earthsight revealed that much of the product was coming from the Chaco, the world’s fastest-disappearing tropical forest.
- Suppliers appear to have reassured international supermarket chains that it was sustainable and that they had certification from international groups such as FSC and PEFC.
- But further digging by Earthsight revealed that the charcoal production methods used may not fit with the intent of certification.
- Several grocery store chains mentioned in the report have said they’ll take a closer look at their supply chains, and the certification body PEFC is reexamining how its own standards are applied.

Big mammals flourish as Cerrado park’s savanna comes back
- The study examined a state park in the Brazilian Cerrado, which contains land used in recent decades for eucalyptus plantations, cattle ranching and charcoal production.
- The researchers used camera traps, recording the dry season presence of 18 species of large mammals.
- In a subsequent analysis, they found that the number of large mammals found in the ‘secondary’ savanna was similar to numbers found in untouched regions of the Cerrado.

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.

Is intensification of beef production really a solution to Amazonian deforestation?
- Beef production has become a major driver of tropical deforestation, responsible for as much as 65 percent of rainforest destruction caused by the global agricultural commodities trade in the first decade of the 21st century, according to a 2015 study.
- One proposed means of slowing the rate at which forests are being destroyed to create pastureland for cattle in the Amazon and other tropical regions is intensification, or the adoption of technologies and practices that allow for the production of more beef on less land.
- “Based on a historical comparison between the US, a fully intensive system, and Brazil, one moving in that direction, we suggest that cattle ranching will intensify as a result of conservation investments (reductions in capital and land subsidies) rather than intensifying in order to produce conservation results,” the researchers write in the article.

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.

If Brazil okays Terra Legal changes, land grabbers win, Amazon loses, say environmentalists
- Provisional Measure (MP) 759, now converted into a bill called the Conversion Law Project (PLC) 12/16, would significantly alter the successful Terra Legal program, introduced originally in 2009. President Temer has until 22 June to sign the bill or veto it.
- The original program enabled peasant families to gain ownership of their small land plots. The new version introduces multiple loopholes to allow big, wealthy land owners to use the program, threatening small land owners and the environment, especially the Amazon.
- Analysts say the new law, if passed, will allow another 20 million hectares (77,200 square miles) of the Amazon biome and 40 million hectares (154,440 square miles) of the Cerrado (savanna) to be legally cleared.
- The bill ups the acreage claimable via the Terra Legal program, ends a rule allowing peasant families to delay paying for plots until the land is supported by adequate infrastructure, allows one farmer to acquire multiple plots, and ends a rule allowing peasant families to pay far less for their land than big farmers.

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.

Rebel road expansion brings deforestation to remote Colombian Amazon
- The 138-kilometer road was carved illegally through rainforest and used by the FARC rebel group to transport coca, from which cocaine is produced.
- Officials from city governments have begun a project to widen and pave the road, saying it will help communities transport agricultural goods to markets.
- Conservationists decry the move, citing research finding road expansion opens “a Pandora’s box of environmental evils” that includes land-grabbing, illegal road development and accelerated deforestation.
- A Colombian governmental agency recently ordered all construction on the road stop until further environmental studies could be performed and greater restrictions applied. However, an official said construction activity has not ceased.

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.

Indigenous groups, Amazon’s best land stewards, under federal attack
- According to 2014 data for Legal Amazonia, 59 percent of that year’s illegal deforestation occurred on privately held lands, 27 percent in conservation units, 13 percent in agrarian reform settlements, and a mere 1 percent on indigenous lands — demonstrating that indigenous land stewards are the best at limiting deforestation.
- Indigenous groups control large reserves in the Amazon and have the constitutional right to more, but land thieves and agribusiness are working to prevent recognition of new indigenous territories — forested territories that, if protected, could sequester a great deal of climate change-causing carbon.
- While President Lula failed to live up to indigenous expectations, the Dilma and Temer governments, heavily influenced by the agricultural lobby, showed much greater hostility to indigenous needs and demands. Indigenous groups plan a mass protest on April 24-28 to make their grievances known to the Temer government.
- “The Brazilian economy has become increasingly dependent on agribusiness [with] political repercussions.… People [aren’t] against the Indians because they are Indians or because they have too much land. The problem is that the Indians have lands these political actors want.” — Márcio Meira, former head of FUNAI, Brazil’s Indian affairs agency.

Forest fragmentation may be releasing much more carbon than we think
- Many tropical forests around the world have been severely fragmented as human disturbance split once-contiguous forests into pieces. Previous research indicates trees on the edges of these fragments have higher mortality rates than trees growing in the interiors of forests.
- Researchers used satellite data and analysis software they developed to figure out how many forest fragments there are, and the extent of their edges. They discovered that there are around 50 million tropical forest fragments in the world today; their edges add up to about 50 million kilometers – about a third of the way from the earth to the sun.
- When they calculated how much carbon is being released from tree death at these edges, they found a 31 percent increase from current tropical deforestation estimates.

Three new frog species found in disappearing Atlantic Forest
- The new species are of the Chiasmocleis genus of humming frogs. They spend most of their life underground, coming out only a few weeks a year for “explosive breeding.”
- The frogs look similar to species already known to science, but have distinct genes and minute physical differences that researchers used to set them apart.
- They were found in the Atlantic Forest, which has been heavily degraded by agriculture. As little as 3.5 percent of the biome may remain today.

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?

The two sides of Indonesia’s Baluran National Park
- A recent commentary piece by Dr. Erik Meijaard provides a comprehensive view of the current situation and conservation actions undertaken in Baluran National Park as compared to time he spent there in the 1990’s
- However, as so often happens with this beautiful park, the focus remained on the well-known part that has earned it the nickname ‘Africa of Java,’ the area surrounding the Bekol savannah in the southeastern reaches of the park.
- If one were to slice the park horizontally in two, right through mount Baluran, and compare the northern and southern parts, a sharp contrast would become visible, a contrast of mooing and ringing bells.
- This post is a commentary. The views expressed are those of the author, not necessarily Mongabay.

Camera traps proving to be powerful tool for studying endangered species in remote locations
- The only known population of the Sira curassow, a large bird in the Cracidae family listed as Critically Endangered on the IUCN Red List, resides within the Sira Communal Reserve, a chain of isolated and high-elevation outcrops of the Peruvian Andes.
- Any monitoring technique that can potentially allow closer study of the Sira curassow (Pauxi koepckeae) is of critical importance in order to inform management strategies for the preservation of the species.
- The authors of a study published earlier this month in the journal Endangered Species Research say that the discovery that camera traps are such an effective tool for detecting the Sira curassow makes it possible to perform a robust assessment of the bird’s distribution and population size for the first time.

Latin America palm oil production doubled since 2001 without massive uptick in deforestation
- A study published earlier this month in the journal Environmental Research Letters by researchers with the University of Puerto Rico looks at the types of land being converted to oil palm plantations in Latin America.
- Much of the land that has been turned over to palm oil production was originally cleared by ranchers so they could graze their cattle on it, according to the study.
- If palm oil continues to replace pastures instead of forests, the authors of the study suggest, Latin America may be well positioned as a regional producer of sustainable palm oil.

‘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.

‘Racing against time’ to save the taguá and its vanishing Chaco home
- Taguá are one of three peccary species living in the Americas and are the only ones found nowhere else but the Gran Chaco.
- Scientists say that the Chaco is disappearing at an alarming rate – with nearly a million hectares of tree cover loss as recently as 2008 – due in large part to soy cultivation and cattle ranching.
- The destruction of the taguá’s habitat, along with hunting, have caused its numbers to drop, say scientists, far below the estimated 5,000 alive during the 1990s.

Companies need to do more to avoid deforestation, study finds
- The Carbon Disclosure Project tabulated the responses of 187 companies about their approaches to avoiding deforestation.
- More than $900 billion in revenues is at risk from the decreased productivity and damaged reputations that accompany deforestation, according to the CDP’s report.
- Board-level involvement in the issue gives companies a statistically better shot at finding ways to avoid deforestation and the problems it poses to their businesses.

Cattle driving big forest loss in Peru’s ‘under-appreciated’ Amazon
- Despite having some of Peru’s highest levels of deforestation, its Central Amazon is often overlooked by conservationists and NGOs.
- Cattle grazing in the area has ramped up over the past decade, leading to a deforestation hotspot almost the size of Connecticut that lost a quarter of its tree cover over 15 years.
- Deforestation is infiltrating protected areas and the ranges of threatened, endemic species.
- Recent data indicate 2016 tree cover loss rates may be more than triple those of 2015.

Declining pastureland around the globe presents significant conservation opportunity
- Some 62 million hectares of pasture (about 153 million acres, an area three times the size of the UK) has been abandoned around the world over the past 15 years — the first significant decline in recorded history.
- Pastureland shrunk in 65 countries, but at the same time production from grazing animals actually increased by 35 percent.
- Independent Joseph Poore argues that we could seize the opportunity afforded by the decline in pastureland to restore natural habitat through reforestation and reestablishment of natural grasslands.

Is intensification helping the cattle industry go Amazon deforestation-free?
- In 2013, there were close to 60 million head of cattle in the Brazilian Amazon — nearly 200 percent more than in 1993.
- Between 1993 and 2013, more than 300,000 square kilometers (116,000 square miles) of forest, an area about the size of Italy, was cleared in the Brazilian Amazon.
- Intensification can boost yields by four or five hundred percent — but some conservationists are wary of placing too much focus on one solution to deforestation.

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