The consensus strategy for saving the Amazon is based on a set of five self-reinforcing policies: (1) create protected areas and recognize Indigenous reserves; (2) improve governance to combat illegal…
The current development trajectory of the Pan Amazon is uncertain. The ongoing investment in protected areas and Indigenous territories has created a solid foundation for conservation of the region’s biodiversity.…
Environmental economics views the environment as a form of natural capital: land, water and biodiversity are viewed as assets that mediate the flow of goods and services from ecosystems toward…
The explosive growth of protected area networks was accompanied by the simultaneous recognition of the territorial rights of Indigenous people, an ongoing process that has yet to conclude. There are…
For 38 years, Colombian-based NGO Fundación Proyecto Tití has successfully run a reforestation program to protect the critically endangered cotton-top tamarin and its tropical dry forest habitat in northwestern Colombia.…
When Mauricio Velasco Castro graduated from culinary school in Bogotá, he didn’t look for a job in one of Colombia’s fine dining restaurants or for an internship abroad. Instead, he…
The commitment to environmental governance in the 1990s was preceded by a civil society movement to create national parks and wildlife refuges. In the first half of the twentieth century,…
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…
Colombia has nearly 60 million hectares (147.5 million acres) of natural forest covering over half its territory, much of it in the Amazon basin. As a “megadiverse” country, possessing around…
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…
Harvard-trained ethnobotanist and host of the popular podcast Plants of the Gods, Mark Plotkin is no stranger to psychedelic plants. But many people across the world, particularly in countries where…
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…
This investigation is a collaboration between the Latin American Center for Investigative Journalism (CLIP), NBC News, Mongabay and El Espectador, with support from the Pulitzer Center’s Rainforest Investigations Network. Conservation…
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…
The takeover of a polluting landfill in Colombia was supposed to help clean up the area for residents falling sick from exposure to toxic chemicals, but years later they say…
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…
Mayra Parra presses play on her laptop, and the video on the screen comes to life for the Perez family in the town of Abriaquí, Colombia. As a spectacled bear…
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.…
For the Indigenous peoples of Colombia’s lower Caquetá River, the lakes of Puerto Caimán form a huge maloca, a cultural and spiritual hub. This watery habitat is home to the…
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…
A recent study by the Amazonian Scientific Research Institute Sinchi in Colombia built several possible scenarios for the future of the Colombian Amazon by 2040. Experts who collected information during…
An innovative new study featuring the methodological use of machine learning algorithms, published in Nature magazine, has revealed that more than 3 million hectares (7.4 million acres) of Amazonian Rainforest…
*This report is part of a journalistic collaboration between Mongabay Latam and Vorágine, a Colombian news source. Juana* seems nostalgic when she talks about the work she used to do…
The town of San José del Fragua is just over an hour's drive from Florencia, the capital of the department of Caquetá, in southern Colombia. On one side of the…
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…
