In the heart of the Amazon rainforest, an alternative climate conference is taking place that brings together youth activists, indigenous leaders, scientists and forest dwellers. In a region known as Middle Earth, they are building a new alliance and demonstrating that the rainforest is central to life on Earth, even though Brazil backed out of hosting this year's official UN climate talks after the election of Jair Bolsonaro as president
Continue reading...Category Archives: Amazon rainforest
Climate emergency: world ‘may have crossed tipping points’
Warning of ‘existential threat to civilisation’ as impacts lead to cascade of unstoppable events
The world may already have crossed a series of climate tipping points, according to a stark warning from scientists. This risk is “an existential threat to civilisation”, they say, meaning “we are in a state of planetary emergency”.
Tipping points are reached when particular impacts of global heating become unstoppable, such as the runaway loss of ice sheets or forests. In the past, extreme heating of 5C was thought necessary to pass tipping points, but the latest evidence suggests this could happen between 1C and 2C.
Continue reading...Police raid office of Brazil NGO linked to brigade that helped battle Amazon fires
Raid and arrests of four volunteer firefighters were a politically-motivated attack, indigenous associations and campaigners say
The headquarters of an award-winning Brazilian NGO which works with remote communities in the Amazon has been raided by police, who also arrested four volunteer firefighters and accused them of starting wildfires to raise international funding.
At dawn on Tuesday, heavily armed police raided the offices of the Health and Happiness Project, (known by its Portuguese initials as PSA) in Alter do Chão in the Amazon state of Pará, seizing computers and documents.
Continue reading...Amazon deforestation ‘at highest level in a decade’
Almost 10,000 sq kms lost in year to August, according to Brazilian government data
Deforestation of the Brazilian Amazon has hit the highest annual level in a decade, according to new government data which highlights the impact the president, Jair Bolsonaro, has made on the world’s biggest rainforest.
The new numbers, showing almost 10,000 sq kms were lost in the year to August, were released as emboldened farm owners scuffled with forest defenders in Altamira, the Amazonian city at the heart of the recent devastation.
Continue reading...Poorly planned Amazon dam project ‘poses serious threat to life’
Operator faces choice of weakening 14km barrier or potentially devastating a biodiversity hotspot
The biggest hydroelectric project in the Amazon rainforest has a design flaw that poses a “very serious” threat to human life and globally important ecosystems, according to documents and expert testimony received by the Guardian.
The studies suggest engineers failed to anticipate the impact of water shortages on the Pimental dam at Belo Monte, which has been closed and turned into a barrier. This is forcing the operators to choose between a structural weakening of the 14km-wide compacted-earth barrier and a reallocation of water in the reservoir or on the Xingu river, which is home to indigenous communities, fishing villages and some of the world’s most endangered species.
Continue reading...Money and maps: is this how to save the Amazon’s 400bn trees?
Alarmed by the impact of logging, indigenous Peruvians are using satellite mapping to manage their land
The first thing Ramón heard about the deal was the televisions. A number of families from the Asháninka indigenous group had received them from outsiders, in exchange for land. Loggers were interested in the mahogany, oak and tornillo trees that grow to impressive heights in this part of the rainforest around Cutivireni in central Peru.
The loggers had other means of persuasion, besides bribery. They might offer to build a school or a meeting house in exchange for timber. When the work ran over budget, they would demand money – and since the Asháninka had none, they would take more trees to service the debt, according to Adelaida Bustamante, the community treasurer. And if that failed, they used violence. In 2014, four forest defenders from the Asháninka were murdered for their campaign to keep loggers off their land (Ramón asked me not to use his real name).
Continue reading...Forest guardians: the Asháninka of Peru – in pictures
In an area of the Amazon vulnerable to illegal loggers, Cool Earth, a UK-based charity, is working with the Asháninka people to reduce deforestation. Photographer Alicia Canter travelled to Cutivireni in central Peru
Continue reading...Brazilian ‘forest guardian’ killed by illegal loggers in ambush
Paulo Paulino Guajajara was killed by armed loggers in the Araribóia region in Maranhão
A Brazilian indigenous land defender has been killed in an ambush by illegal loggers in an Amazon frontier region.
According to a statement by the Brazilian Indigenous Peoples Association, Paulo Paulino Guajajara was shot and killed inside the Araribóia indigenous territory in Maranhão state. Another tribesman, Laércio Guajajara, was also shot and hospitalised and a logger has been reported missing. No body has yet been recovered.
Continue reading...Pope apologises for theft of Amazon statue from Rome church
Incident at end of Francis’s Amazon synod blamed on conservatives and ‘racists’
Pope Francis has apologised to Amazonian bishops and tribal leaders after thieves stole indigenous statues from a church close to the Vatican and tossed them into the River Tiber in a show of conservative opposition to the first Latin American pope.
Speaking as “the bishop of Rome”, Francis dismissed allegations that the wooden statues of naked pregnant women were pagan symbols and said they had been placed in the church “without any intention of idolatry”.
Continue reading...Rewilding will make Britain a rainforest nation again | George Monbiot
I will take vision and a willingness to confront vested interests, but we can restore our trashed ecosystems
The forests still burn, but the world now looks away. In both the Amazon basin and the rainforests of Indonesia, the world-scorching inferno rages on, already forgotten by most of the media. Intricate living systems, species that took millions of years to evolve, are being incinerated in moments, then replaced with monocultures. Giant plumes of carbon tip us further into climate breakdown. And we’re not even talking about it.
Related: World losing area of forest the size of the UK each year, report finds
Continue reading...Greta Thunberg: ‘We are ignoring natural climate solutions’
Film by Swedish activist and Guardian journalist George Monbiot says nature must be used to repair broken climate
The protection and restoration of living ecosystems such as forests, mangroves and seagrass meadows can repair the planet’s broken climate but are being overlooked, Greta Thunberg and George Monbiot have warned in a new short film.
Natural climate solutions could remove huge amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as plants grow. But these methods receive only 2% of the funding spent on cutting emissions, say the climate activists.
Continue reading...Shocking news: world’s most powerful electric eel found in Amazon
Electrophorus voltai can deliver a jolt of 860 volts, much more than existing record of 650 volts
DNA research has revealed two entirely new species of electric eel in the Amazon basin, including one capable of delivering a record-breaking jolt.
The findings are evidence, researchers say, of the incredible diversity in the Amazon rainforest – much of it still unknown to science – and illustrate why it is so important to protect a habitat at risk from deforestation, logging and fires.
Continue reading...Amazon cowboys: rodeo culture rides high in Brazil – in pictures
Along a forest road in the small town of Monte Negro in Rondônia state, just south of the Amazon basin, cowboys from the area’s vast cattle ranches display their talent at a rodeo. In recent years, Monte Negro has expanded as a key cattle town with a strong cowboy culture
Continue reading...‘Chaos, chaos, chaos’: a journey through Bolsonaro’s Amazon inferno
A 2,000km road and river odyssey in Brazil reveals consensus from all sides: Bolsonaro has ushered in a new age of wrecking
From afar it resembles a tornado: an immense grey column shooting thousands of feet upwards from the forest canopy into the Amazonian skies.
Up close it is an inferno: a raging conflagration obliterating yet another stretch of the world’s greatest rainforest as a herd of Nelore cattle looks on in bewilderment.
Continue reading...Amazon fires are a shameful indictment of our lust for excess
The flames engulfing the world’s biggest rainforest are a human tragedy as well as an environmental one. We are all to blame
The scale of the devastation caused by the wildfires still raging in the Amazon is hard to comprehend. This is a rainforest that provides one-fifth of the world’s oxygen; it is hard not to feel powerless and despairing in the face of the disaster overtaking the region.
But however strong – and bitter – the feeling about this as an environmental catastrophe, we must never lose sight of the fact that it is also a human tragedy.
Continue reading...Amazon fires are ‘true apocalypse’, says Brazilian archbishop
Erwin Kräutler says he expects next month’s papal synod to denounce destruction of rainforest
The fires in the Amazon are a “true apocalypse”, according to a Brazilian archbishop who expects next month’s papal synod at the Vatican to strongly denounce the destruction of the rainforest.
The comments by Erwin Kräutler will put fresh pressure on the Brazilian president, Jair Bolsonaro, following criticism from G7 leaders last month over the surge of deforestation in the world’s biggest terrestrial carbon sink.
Continue reading...Corporations pile pressure on Brazil over Amazon fires
Asset managers, pension funds and companies halt deals and stop buying bonds
Financial pressure is growing on Brazil over fires in the Amazon and the far-right president’s belligerent response to them.
Asset managers, pension funds and companies have issued warnings, halted deals and stopped purchases of government bonds.
Continue reading...Amazon fires show world heading for point of no return, says UN
Biodiversity chief calls for countries to unite to halt rapid degradation of nature
The fires in the Amazon are “extraordinarily concerning” for the planet’s natural life support systems, the head of the UN’s top biodiversity body has said in a call for countries, companies and consumers to build a new relationship with nature.
Related: Brazil: fears for isolated Amazon tribes as fires erupt on protected reserves
Continue reading...Brazil: fears for isolated Amazon tribes as fires erupt on protected reserves
- Fires broke out in 131 indigenous reserves from 15-20 August
- Campaigners say indigenous territories easy targets for loggers
Fires have been reported in protected indigenous reserves of the Brazilian Amazon, raising fears that loggers and land grabbers have targeted these remote areas during the dramatic surge in blazes across the world’s biggest rainforest.
Blazes have been seen on the Araribóia indigenous reserve in Maranhão state – a heavily deforested reserve on the Amazon’s eastern fringes, which is home to about 80 people from an isolated group of Awá indigenous people, described by the NGO Survival International as the world’s most endangered tribe.
Continue reading...Xikrin people fight back against Amazon land-grabbing
Indigenous community under threat from fire, deforestation and Bolsonaro
Threatened by fire, deforestation and invasion, the Xikrin people of the northern Amazon are fighting back.
While the authorities stand idle and the Brazilian president, Jair Bolsonaro, tries to undermine their territorial rights, the indigenous community have taken matters into their own hands by expelling the loggers and ranchers who illegally occupied their land and set fire to the forest.
Continue reading...