Approximately 8,000 barrels (336,000 gallons) of crude oil spilled from a severed pipeline into the Peruvian Amazon on Tuesday night, according to state-owned oil company Petroperu. In a press release, Petroperu said its Norperuano pipeline was cut by members of the Mayuriaga indigenous community in the Loreto region in an act of “sabotage” and prevented […]
By Claire Asher Populations of two species of river dolphin in the Amazon are halving every decade, according to the results of a twenty-two year survey. The Amazon rainforest is home to the Amazon river dolphin, or Boto (Inia geoffrensis) and the Tucuxi (Sotalia fluviatilis). But the results of a long-term study published in PLoS […]
Maybe you can’t teach an old dog new tricks, but two recent studies revealed that old forests around the world are full of surprises. In Europe, scientists working to complete the first ever map of the continent’s old growth forests discovered there were more of them than previously believed. And in South America, a study […]
Scientists are increasingly realizing the importance of biodiversity for sustaining life on earth. The most comprehensive biodiversity study in a decade, published in March by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), warned that the ongoing loss of species and habitats was as great a threat to our and our planet’s wellbeing […]
By Anna Sophie Gross “The cow is the worst environmental problem in the Amazon, and in the world,” says Greenpeace’s Paulo Adario, speaking out in a new documentary which this April won the One Hour prize at the Film Research and Sustainable Development Festival ((FReDD) earlier this month. In his ground-breaking documentary, Grazing the Amazon, […]
The activist group Avaaz has launched a petition against the Canadian Belo Sun Mining Company’s Volta Grande gold mine in Brazil’s Amazon region, claiming that the company is close to getting the permits it needs for the controversial project, MINING.com reported March 30. The project has already been denied a construction license more than once […]
The Peruvian government announced it will establish a new and enormous national park in the Amazon. Yaguas National Park, located in the northern region of Loreto, consists of 2,147,166 acres of rainforest, a vast river system and is home to more than 3,000 species of plants, 500 species of birds and 160 species of mammals, […]
In the course of writing a book about what free-living animals learn from each other, I find myself on the Tambopata River in southeast Peru. The nearest town is Puerto Maldonado but from there the trip is all upriver. Wheeled vehicles are useless in this forest, and there are none. The surrounding forest has been […]
By Joe Sandler Clarke, Unearthed BP’s plans to drill for oil near a huge coral reef in the mouth of Amazon river have been dealt a further blow after a regulator questioned the company’s environmental risk assessment. Ibama, Brazil’s federal environmental agency, rejected an environmental study from the British oil giant, further delaying the company’s […]