About 7,900 square kilometers (3,050 square miles) of forest was cleared in the Brazilian Amazon between August 2017 and July 2018, the worst annual deforestation rate in a decade, according to government data. That’s a 13.7 percent jump from the same period last year. As Greenpeace Brazil noted, approximately 1.185 billion trees cut down in […]
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, […]
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 […]
Amazon has a new frontier it’s looking to tackle: your garden. The tech company recently received a patent for a new service that would let users upload photos of their vegetable gardens then receive a variety of recommendations from Amazon including recipes for the specific veggies they’ve planted, gardening tools they might need, and even […]
The World Wildlife Fund announced Friday that the Program for Protected Areas of the Amazon (ARPA), a joint venture with the Brazilian Ministry of the Environment, has reached the goal of protecting a network of conservation units of at least 60 million hectares in the Amazon. This effort represents the conservation of 15 percent of […]