Amazon Monitoring

- Mongabay examined four REDD+ projects in Pará state and found that all were developed in partnership with sawmill owners with a long history of environmental fines.- The projects were developed by Brazil’s largest carbon credit generator, Carbonext, a company linked to a major fraud involving REDD+ projects and illegal loggers in Amazonas state.- According to experts, REDD+ projects may have become a new business opportunity for individuals who have profited from deforestation for decades.

- Scientists captured the first-ever camera collar footage of wild Andean bears, revealing unprecedented behaviors, including canopy mating and cannibalism.- The research team, led by Indigenous researcher Ruthmery Pillco Huarcaya, successfully tracked a male bear for four months in Peru’s challenging cloud forest terrain.- The footage challenges previous assumptions about Andean bears being solitary vegetarians and shows them behaving more like other bear species.- While the bears face mounting threats from climate change and human conflict, researchers are combining scientific study with community education to protect them.

- Oil and gas companies have the ability to become a significant source of climate financing, a new study in Climate Policy argues.- The study looked at oil and gas profits from 2022, when the Russian invasion of Ukraine spiked energy prices across the globe, boosting realized companies’ earnings by 65%, or around $495 billion.- If governments had imposed an additional 30% tax on the profits of private oil and gas companies, it would have raised $147 billion, the study said.- Climate financing was the focus of the COP 29 climate conference, which only managed to come up with $300 billion in annual support for developing countries.

- In addition to being a shaman, Davi Kopenawa is a shaman and a political leader active in denouncing the gold miners who illegally invaded the Yanomami Indigenous Land, in the Brazilian Amazon.- The Yanomami, who inhabit Brazil’s largest Indigenous Land, still face a humanitarian and health crisis, worsened by the invasion of 70,000 illegal miners. Increased under the Jair Bolsonaro government, the invasion brought diseases and contaminated rivers with mercury. - In this interview, Kopenawa criticizes the environmental and social impacts of administrations led by politicians such as Jair Bolsonaro and Donald Trump.

- Xingu Indigenous Park and Capoto/Jarina Indigenous Territory in Brazil cover an area larger than Belgium.- The Indigenous territories are still largely covered in primary forest, and a haven for wildlife in a region considered an agricultural powerhouse.- Satellite data show Xingu Indigenous Park lost 15% of its primary forest cover, and Capoto/Jarina Indigenous Territory lost 8.3% of its forest cover, between 2002 and 2023.- Indigenous groups fear proposed transportation projects will bring a fresh wave of deforestation and open up their territories to invaders.