The Pan Amazon nations have constitutions that were reformed or rewritten in the last decades of the twentieth century. Previous versions either ignored nature or incorporated a simple clause assigning…
Last year, the Amazon saw some of the highest rates of deforestation in over a decade, due to a combination of cattle ranching, agriculture, mining and road projects that cleared…
From the outset, academics realised that the development programmes being deployed across the Amazon in the 1960s and 1970s would bring irreversible harm. Attempts to promote conservation were a natural…
Starting in the 1990s, ecosystem ecologists and atmospheric scientists in the Brazilian space agency embarked on a sophisticated collaboration with NASA and other international research institutions; their goal was to…
A tropical rainforest is composed of thousands of species of long-lived trees, each with a natural history characterized by unique morphological, physiological and reproductive attributes. Very little was known about…
In the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries, scientists affiliated with institutions in the Northern Hemisphere organized most expeditions into the Amazon. These botanists, zoologists and anthropologists were…
The economies of nations are traditionally evaluated by their gross domestic product (GDP), a metric that measures the total economic output of a nation. The GDP of the Pan Amazon…
Politics is idiosyncratic to each country, but trends in economic policies span borders. The political economy of the Pan Amazon is the legacy of strategic development plans that began in…
The Pan Amazon spans approximately 825 million hectares, of which approximately ninety million hectares have been lost to deforestation; this corresponds to ~13% of the original forest cover. At first…
Why do people clear forest? To anybody who has lived on the forest frontier, the answer is as simple as it is obvious: it is essential to the livelihoods of…
The Amazon, home to the largest tropical forest on the planet, is an irreplaceable natural asset with enormous biodiversity and a critically important component in global carbon and water cycles.…
Drug trafficking, logging, oil palm plantations, oil spills, highways, illegal fishing, expanding Mennonite communities — in the Peruvian Amazon, there’s no shortage of threats against Indigenous peoples or their lands.…
Peru has attracted millions of dollars in forest conservation projects over the years, has a series of international agreements and targets to protect forests and has 254 public and private…
While his early days as a Boy Scout brought him closer to nature and introduced him to a number of outdoor activities during his childhood in the U.S., it was…
Today, Mongabay launches a digital version of the book, A Perfect Storm in the Amazon, by Timothy J. Killeen, an academic and expert who, since the 1980s, has studied the…
MEXICO CITY — As climate change continues to choke off rainfall, many parts of the Amazon are facing a higher probability of dying off from drought than previously thought. A…
Protected areas and Indigenous territories in the Amazon Rainforest experienced just one-third the amount of primary forest loss as non-protected areas, according to a new report. The Monitoring of the…
Jacobo, a Mennonite farmer who preferred only his fist name be used, had just begun to explain why he left Belize to settle in the Peruvian town of Tiruntá when…
A carbon credit program in a prominent national park in Peru appears to have failed at preventing significant deforestation, raising questions about whether officials in charge of the program inflated…
Illegal deforestation, wildcat mining, drug trafficking, and lethal violence: Name your scourge and the Amazon Basin seldom disappoints. But as an unusual compact between police officers, prosecutors, environmental protectors, and…
When Teresa Chang first saw the plot of land that now makes up the Amotape Dry Forest Private Conservation Area in the Tumbes municipality of northern Peru, she was horrified.…
Ancient forest fires seem to have played a role in enhancing resistance to drought in the Amazon, a recent study suggests. The research, published in Frontiers in Forests and Global…
A new legislative proposal, criticized by opponents as a step backwards in recognizing the rights and protections of uncontacted and recently contacted Indigenous people, is currently under debate in Peru’s…
While investigating the feeding interactions of the Andean condor (Vultur gryphus) in Peru, researcher Victor Gamarra-Toledo found something that concerned him — plastics featuring in the scavenger bird’s diet. And…
Since late 2021, a highly pathogenic avian influenza virus of the type H5N1 has wreaked havoc on wild and captive birds across Asia, Africa, Europe and North America, killing millions.…
Some of the last remaining carbon sinks in the Amazon Rainforest are largely managed by Indigenous people, a new report from the World Resources Institute says. In areas of the…
A resplendent rainbow fish, a frog that looks like chocolate, a Thai tarantula, an anemone that rides on a back of a hermit crab, and the world's largest waterlily are…
On an iron grill, six catfish are almost ready to eat. Hilda Rodríguez crouches to move the firewood and stoke the fire. She flips over the inguiris — green bananas…
Earlier this month, faced with a third impeachment attempt, former Peru President Pedro Castillo announced that he would be suspending congress, writing a new constitution and ruling by decree. But…
UCAYALI, Peru — Mennonites, an ultra-conservative religious group, are illegally converting pristine forests in the Peruvian Amazon into agricultural land. They are not only threatening biodiversity but also encroaching on Indigenous…