Infrastructure projects designed to open the western Amazon for investment are to blame for deforestation in parts of Peru, Colombia and Bolivia - rather than coca production, researchers said on W

The Amazonian tropical forests have been disappearing at a fast rate in the last 50 y due to deforestation to open areas for agriculture, posing high risks of irreversible changes to biodiversity and ecosystems. Climate change poses additional risks to the stability of the forests. Studies suggest “tipping points” not to be transgressed: 4° C of global warming or 40% of total deforested area. The regional development debate has focused on attempting to reconcile maximizing conservation with intensification of traditional agriculture.

The Amazon News Network has been in operation for nearly a decade, with the mission of providing news and information to unify people living all across the Amazon region of Brazil.

RIO DE JANEIRO (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Forest fires raging in northeast Brazil are forcing indigenous people out of their traditional territories and threatening uncontacted tribes, an indig

A wildfire burning in the Peruvian Amazon that has charred some 20,000 hectares (49,421 acres) of rainforest and destroyed crops planted by indigenous communities was raging toward a national park

A scorecard released today by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) graded 13 global fast food, retail, and food manufacturing companies based on a variety of criteria, including whether or not t

A Brazilian judge has suspended the operating license of the controversial Belo Monte dam in the Amazon because the Norte Energia consortium, the dam’s builder and operator, failed to meet a key co

Ecuador began drilling for oil on Wednesday near an Amazon nature reserve known as Yasuni, a site that President Rafael Correa had previously sought to protect from development and pollution under

Climate change threatens ecosystems worldwide, yet their potential future resilience remains largely unquantified. In recent years many studies have shown that biodiversity, and in particular functional diversity, can enhance ecosystem resilience by providing a higher response diversity. So far these insights have been mostly neglected in large-scale projections of ecosystem responses to climate change. Here we show that plant trait diversity, as a key component of functional diversity, can have a strikingly positive effect on the Amazon forests’ biomass under future climate change.

Human activities have taken a heavy toll on our environment. But there may be some hope, researchers say.

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