Amazon Monitoring

Brazil designated a refuge twice the size of Manhattan near the Amazonian city of Manaus in June 2024 to protect the pied tamarin, South America’s most endangered monkey. But almost one year later, the 15,000-hectare (37,000-acre) reserve is still being implemented institutionally, and conservationists say it falls short of what the species needs to survive.

- Prosecutors in Brazil’s Amapá state have warned of an illegal gold mine operating just 1 kilometer (0.6 miles) from second-highest known tree in the Brazilian Amazon — an 85-meter (279-foot) red angelim.- Illegal gold miners have been moving into Amapá in the wake of federal raids on mining hotspots in other parts of the Brazilian Amazon, including the Yanomami and Munduruku Indigenous territories.- A surge in the gold price has fueled the miners’ destructive potential and their capacity to open new areas in highly isolated places.

- An ongoing Brazilian government operation launched in February has removed between 1,000 and 2,000 illegal head of cattle from the Arariboia Indigenous Territory in the Amazon Rainforest.- In June 2024, Mongabay published the results of a yearlong investigation, revealing that large portions of the Arariboia territory have been taken over for commercial cattle ranching, in violation of the Constitution; the project received funding and editorial support from the Pulitzer Center’s Rainforest Investigations Network.- “Your report is very similar to what we’re actually finding in the field. It showed an accurate reality and this helped us a lot in practical terms,” Marcos Kaingang, national secretary for Indigenous territorial rights at the Ministry of Indigenous Peoples, told Mongabay in a video interview.- The investigation also revealed details that authorities said they hadn’t been aware of, including the illegal shifting of the territory’s border markers, Kaingang said: “We brought it up as an important point in our discussions and we verified that the [markers] had in fact been changed.”

- The aguaje, a tropical palm tree that grows in peatlands and other wetland areas in tropical South America, produces oval-shaped fruits that can be consumed raw or processed to make beverages, soap, oils and other products.- The discovery of its market potential in the 1990s led to destructive harvesting and genetic degradation as people filed to palm swamps in the Peruvian Amazon to collect the fruits.- Sustainable harvesting techniques, such as climbing the aguaje tree to collect the fruit instead of cutting it down, have taken hold in local communities that previously cut down the trees.- Transportation, the lack of phone and internet connections, the impact of climate change on ecological processes and the lack of a secure market to sell aguaje fruits remain a challenge for communities.

- As REDD projects around the world face setbacks, restoration projects in the Amazon are flourishing as a means of reviving market confidence in forest-based carbon credits.- In Brazil, the golden goose for restoration, this business model has attracted companies from the mining and beef industries, banks, startups, and big tech.- Federal and state governments are granting public lands to restoration companies to recover degraded areas.- Restoration projects require substantial investments and long-term commitment, face challenges such as increasingly severe fire seasons, and deal with uncertainty over the future of the carbon market.