Brazil

Brazil’s president-elect, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, was greeted with applause and cheers when he addressed the U.N. climate conference in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, on Nov. 16, 2022. As he had in his campaign, Lula pledged to stop rampant deforestation in the Amazon, which his predecessor, Jair Bolsanaro, had encouraged. Forests play a critical role in slowing climate change by taking up carbon dioxide, and the Amazon rainforest absorbs one-fourth of the CO2 absorbed by all the land on Earth. These articles from The Conversation’s archive examine stresses on the Amazon and the Indigenous groups who live there. 1. Massive losses The Amazon rainforest is vast, covering some 2.3 million square miles (6 million square kilometers). It extends over eight countries, with about 60% of it in Brazil. And the destruction occurring there is also enormous. From 2010 to 2019, the Amazon lost 24,000 square miles (62,000 square kilometers) of forest – the equivalent of...

Leer en español ou em português The Ashéninka woman with the painted face radiated a calm, patient confidence as she stood on the sandy banks of the Amonia River and faced the loggers threatening her Amazonian community. The loggers had bulldozed a trail over the mahogany and cedar saplings she had planted, and blocked the creeks her community relied on for drinking water and fish. Now, the outsiders wanted to widen the trail into a road to access the towering rainforests that unite the Peruvian and Brazilian border along the Juruá River. María Elena Paredes, as head of the Sawawo Hito 40 monitoring committee, said no, and her community stood by her. She knew she represented not just her community and the other Peruvian Indigenous communities, but also her Brazilian cousins downstream who also rely on these forests, waters and fish. Roads beget more roads. The Interoceanic Highway, shown here, allowed logge...