Investigation uncovers ties between financial institutions and three Brazilian firms connected to environmental destruction
British-based banks and finance houses have provided more than $2bn (£1.5bn) in financial backing in recent years to Brazilian beef companies which have been linked to Amazon deforestation, according to new research.
Thousands of hectares of Amazon are being felled every year to graze cattle and provide meat for world markets.
Continue reading...Fears Jair Bolsonaro’s ‘land grabbers decree’ may be pushed forwards after new rule allows land-grabbing on indigenous reserves
As the coronavirus pandemic eats its way into the Amazon, raising fears of a genocide of its vulnerable indigenous tribes, the government of the far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, and its supporters are dismantling rules shielding protected reserves. Key environment officials have been sacked, and environmentalists and indigenous leaders fear the pandemic is being used as a smokescreen for a new assault on the rainforest.
They say a presidential decree awaiting congressional approval and new rules at the indigenous agency Funai effectively legalise land grabbing in protected forests and indigenous reserves.
Continue reading...Open letter by photojournalist Sebastião Salgado and global figures warns disease could decimate indigenous peoples
Brazil’s leaders must take immediate action to save the country’s indigenous peoples from a Covid-19 “genocide”, a global coalition of artists, celebrities, scientists and intellectuals has said.
In an open letter to the Brazilian president, Jair Bolsonaro, figures including Madonna, Oprah Winfrey, Brad Pitt, David Hockney and Paul McCartney warned the pandemic meant indigenous communities in the Amazon faced “an extreme threat to their very survival”.
Continue reading...Chevron’s treatment of Steven Donziger branded ‘an exceptionally bad case of intimidation’
Twenty-nine Nobel laureates have condemned alleged “judicial harassment” by Chevron and urged the release of a US environmental lawyer who was put under house arrest for pursuing oil-spill compensation claims on behalf of indigenous tribes in the Amazon.
The open letter signed by scientists, authors, environmentalists and human rights activists said the treatment of lawyer Steven Donziger, whose movements have been restricted for more than 250 days, was one of the world’s most egregious cases of judicial harassment and defamation.
Continue reading...New study finds ocean ecosystems likely to collapse in 2020s and land species in 2040s unless global warming stemmed
Wildlife species will die out and natural ecosystems collapse in the near future if the climate crisis goes unchecked, scientists have warned, as new research shows that the natural world is at far greater risk from climate breakdown than previously thought.
Catastrophe could strike this decade for some species, as key temperature thresholds are crossed. Instead of the anticipated gradual decline of species, there are likely to be a series of sudden collapses.
Continue reading...Findings from Bolivia show plants were domesticated in region shortly after last ice age
The Amazon basin was a hotspot for the early cultivation of plants, with inhabitants having munched on squash and cassava more than 10,000 years ago, researchers have revealed.
The team say the new findings from Bolivia offer direct evidence such plants were grown in south-west Amazonia, meaning the region has a claim to join the Middle East, China, south-west Mexico and north-west South America as locations where wild plants were domesticated shortly after the last ice age. The team say the discovery chimes with other clues.
Continue reading...Fewer law enforcement officials going into the field open door for land invasions, indigenous communities and NGOs warn
The coronavirus pandemic is weakening Brazilian state protection for the Amazon rainforest and its people ahead of this year’s fire season, according to indigenous communities and international NGOs.
Fewer law enforcement officials are going out into the field and monitoring missions are being scaled back, opening the door for more land invasions and forest clearance, they warn.
Continue reading...Positive test for 20-year-old woman from Kokama tribe comes amid fears virus could devastate remote communities
An indigenous woman in a village deep in the Amazon rainforest has contracted the novel coronavirus, the first case reported among Brazil’s more than 300 tribes, the Health Ministry’s indigenous health service Sesai has said.
The 20-year-old from the Kokama tribe tested positive for the virus in the district of Santo Antonio do Iá, near the border with Colombia, 880km (550 miles) up the Amazon river from the state capital Manaus, Sesai said in a statement on Wednesday.
Continue reading...UK prime minister’s refusal to criticise Amazon fires and sharp rise in deforestation praised by Brazilian ambassador
Boris Johnson was personally thanked by the Brazilian government for refusing to support European action over the Amazon fires, according to documents obtained by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism.
As the rainforest burned last summer – fuelled by a sharp rise in deforestation that critics blame partly on President Jair Bolsonaro’s agenda – Johnson criticised a threat by the French president, Emmanuel Macron, to block the EU’s Mercosur trade deal with Brazil.
Continue reading...As evangelical Christians use their influence with Brazil’s government to cast their net ever wider, indigenous people vulnerable to common diseases face a growing threat
A radical group of evangelical Christian missionaries set on converting every last tribe on Earth has raised fears that deadly diseases – and even the coronavirus – will spread in the Brazilian Amazon. The group has based its newly bought helicopter right beside a reserve with the world’s highest concentration of isolated indigenous groups, who have little resistance to common illnesses.
There are more than 100 isolated indigenous groups in Brazil, all highly vulnerable to common diseases such as measles and flu, and 16 of them live in the same reserve in the Javari Valley, a vast, remote area the size of Austria. Covid-19 could wipe out any of them.
Continue reading...Amazon could turn into source of CO2 in atmosphere by next decade, research suggests
Tropical forests are taking up less carbon dioxide from the air, reducing their ability to act as “carbon sinks” and bringing closer the prospect of accelerating climate breakdown.
The Amazon could turn into a source of carbon in the atmosphere, instead of one of the biggest absorbers of the gas, as soon as the next decade, owing to the damage caused by loggers and farming interests and the impacts of the climate crisis, new research has found.
Continue reading...Brazil’s far-right president Jair Bolsonarohas lashed out at Pope Francis after the pontiff pleaded for the protection of the Amazon rainforest, and attacked the environmental group Greenpeace as “rubbish”.
“Pope Francis said yesterday the Amazon is his, the world’s, everyone’s,” said Bolsonaro, who has often railed against international criticism of his environmental policies as an attack on Brazilian sovereignty.
Continue reading...Celibacy issue dividing church as it seeks to address shortage of clerics in remote areas
Pope Francis has decided against opening up the Roman Catholic priesthood to married men – a move that will please traditionalists but dismay those who argue that easing the celibacy rule would tackle a shortage of clerics.
Instead, an “apostolic exhortation” from the pontiff has focused on environmental damage after bishops from the Amazon highlighted the destruction of the region’s rainforests and exploitation of Indigenous people at a Vatican summit last year.
Continue reading...In Brazil’s largest indigenous reserve thousands of saplings have been planted as an alternative to profits from illegal gold mining
The villagers walk down the grassy landing strip, past the wooden hut housing the health post and into the thick forest, pointing out the seedlings they planted along the way. For these Ye’kwana indigenous men, the skinny saplings, less than a metre high, aren’t just baby cacao trees but green shoots of hope in a land scarred by the violence, pollution and destruction wrought by illegal gold prospecting. That hope is chocolate.
Continue reading...Project part-funded by Global Greengrants Fund UK provides economic incentive to protect forest
From space, the Amazon rainforest resembles a giant dark-green lung veined with blue rivers that is steadily succumbing to the disease-like spread of grey fires, orange roads and square-cut farms. What the satellite images cannot show is how most of the remaining bands of verdant, healthy foliage are defended on the ground by forest dwellers who act as antibodies to drive out malignant invaders.
Among the most impressive of these is the Tapajós-Arapiuns Extractive Reserve in the state of Para in northern Brazil, where residents are trying to bolster their economic resistance with a series of new agro-forestry and solar power projects.
Continue reading...The big cats’ resourceful new behaviour was recorded by a WWF study on a remote island off the coast of Brazil
A thriving population of jaguars living on a small, unspoilt island off the coast of the Brazilian Amazon has learned to catch fish in the sea to survive, conservationists have found.
The Maracá-Jipioca Ecological Station island reserve, three miles off the northern state of Amapá, acts as a nursery for jaguars, according to WWF researchers who have collared three cats and set up 70 camera traps on the remote jungle island.
Continue reading...Destruction of the world’s largest tropical rainforest in November more than doubled the same period last year
Deforestation in Brazil’s Amazon jumped to the highest level for the month of November since record-keeping began in 2015, according to preliminary government data published.
Destruction of the world’s largest tropical rainforest totalled 563 square kms in November, which is more than double the area in the same month last year, according to the country’s space research agency INPE on Friday.
Continue reading...Erisvan Soares Guajajara’s body was found with knife wounds in Maranhão region
A 15-year-old indigenous boy has been murdered in Brazil on the edge of a heavily-deforested indigenous reserve in the state of Maranhão, on the fringes of the Amazon.
The murder, the fourth from the Guajajara tribe in recent weeks, came as a wave of racist abuse against indigenous people swept social media in the state.
Continue reading...Brazil’s far-right president Jair Bolsonaro has derided Greta Thunberg after the teenage climate activist added her voice to growing international condemnation of a surge of anti-indigenous violence in the Amazon.
Related: Amazon indigenous leaders killed in Brazil drive-by shooting
Continue reading...Stingless insects also improve livelihoods of rainforest’s people, say environmentalists
Under an Amazonian canopy of guava and Xylopia trees, Neida Pereira lifts the lid of a beehive, gently lowers an unprotected hand into the swarm, and smiles as she lifts it out unscathed but covered in pollinators and honey.
For the 49-year-old educator and environmentalist, the stingless Amazonian insects are the greatest ally she has found in a decades-long campaign to halt the destruction of the rainforest and improve the livelihoods of its people.
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