Amazon Rainforest & Deforestation Watch Thread

[wjfox]

Why are humans so f***ing self-destructive??

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Brazil passes ‘devastation bill’ that drastically weakens environmental law

President has 15 days to approve or veto legislation that critics say will lead to vast deforestation and destruction of Indigenous communities

Thu 17 Jul 2025 12.25 BST

Brazilian lawmakers have passed a bill that drastically weakens the country’s environmental safeguards and is seen by many activists as the most significant setback for the country’s environmental legislation in the past 40 years.

The new law – widely referred to as the “devastation bill” and already approved by the senate in May – passed in congress in the early hours of Thursday by 267 votes to 116, despite opposition from more than 350 organisations and social movements.

It now goes to the president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who has 15 working days to either approve or veto it.

Even if he vetoes the legislation, there is a strong chance that the predominantly conservative congress will overturn that, triggering a likely battle in the supreme court, as legal experts argue that the new law is unconstitutional.

“Either way, its approval is a tragedy,” said Suely Araújo, public policy coordinator at the Climate Observatory civil society group, arguing that the legislation would, among other serious consequences, drive large-scale deforestation and heighten the risk of human-caused climate disasters.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/ ... mental-law

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Study links Afro-descendant communities to less deforestation, more biodiversity

22 Jul 2025

A new study finds that Afro-descendant communities in four Amazonian countries are linked to lands with high biodiversity and 29-55% less deforestation compared with protected and unprotected areas.

More than 130 million people in Latin America identify as Afro-descendant peoples (ADP), descendants of those forcibly brought to the Americas during the slave trade.

“What we try to do here is shed light on [communities] that have been cultural and environmental stewards of their lands for hundreds of years,” Sushma Shrestha, lead author of the study and a social scientist at Conservation International’s Moore Center for Science, told Mongabay in a press conference.

The study combined spatial analysis of forests, wildlife and ADP communities with historical land management data to examine the conservation impacts of ADP in Brazil, Ecuador, Colombia and Suriname. In these regions, ADP communities have recognized management rights to nearly 10 million hectares (24 million acres) of land.

Although legally recognized ADP lands in the study area cover just 1% of the total region, researchers found they disproportionately support high levels of biodiversity compared with protected areas and unprotected control sites. More than half these lands fall within the top 5% of the most biodiverse regions globally, overlapping with habitat for more than 4,000 species of terrestrial vertebrates, 9% of which are listed as threatened on the IUCN Red List, the researchers note. These lands also contain significantly higher rates of irrecoverable carbon — carbon that if released by land use change will take decades to recover.

https://news.mongabay.com/short-article ... diversity/



Image credit: An Afro-descendent community in Ecuador. Image courtesy of Conservation International.

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[caltrek]

A Major Agreement to Protect the Amazon is Falling Apart After 20 Years
By Frida Garza
January 21, 2026

Introduction:

(Investigate Midwest) Nearly 20 years ago, a Brazilian lobbying group for soy trading and processing companies signed onto a historic conservation deal known as the Amazon soy moratorium. The voluntary agreement prohibits members from buying soybeans grown on lands deforested after July 2008. Proponents of the deal say that it has been highly effective at protecting forest land without impeding soy production over the last two decades. Under the moratorium, growing soy on other lands — like those cleared before 2008, or pasture or savannah lands — is still fair game, and reports indicate that production on such lands in the Amazon has quadrupled since 2006. Now, amid changing political headwinds, the deforestation agreement is in danger.

On January 1, a new law eliminating the tax benefits for members of the moratorium took effect in Mato Grosso, the Brazilian state that produces the most soybeans in the country. These tax benefits functioned separately from the moratorium; nevertheless, following the new law, the lobbying group for soy traders — including multinational firms like Cargill, Bunge, ADM, and others — announced its plan to leave the moratorium, which experts say will put more of the Amazon rainforest at risk of deforestation. Without participation from these major corporations, the agreement risks becoming largely toothless — and exacerbating growing challenges faced by agricultural producers today.

The exodus of agrifood groups from the moratorium is “entirely self-defeating,” said Glenn Hurowitz, founder of Mighty Earth, an environmental advocacy group focused on conservation. For 20 years, “these companies’ commercial success has relied on the soy moratorium,” argued Hurowitz. “Gutting it is probably going to create a lot of marketing and market access challenges for them.”

In recent years, there has been growing criticism of the conservation deal as privileging those same multinational corporations over Brazil’s own agricultural producers. Soy farmers and cattle ranchers have long opposed the moratorium, saying it hampers their business. (Raising beef is reliant on soybean production, as one of the major uses of soy globally is animal feed.)

Read more here: https://investigatemidwest.org/2026/01 ... 0-years/

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How China's evolving consumer habits may protect the Amazon rainforest

Chinese meat importers pledge to buy deforestation-free Brazilian beef, challenging industry assumptions

May 9, 2026

When Xing Yanling posted on WeChat about her visit to the Brazilian Amazon in April, she described to her friends in China the unforgettable sensation of being “enveloped by tens of thousands of shades of green.”

Xing is no ordinary tourist. She leads the Tianjin Meat Industry Association, representing importers responsible for around 40% of China's ​beef purchases from Brazil.

Under her leadership, Tianjin’s members have committed to buying 50,000 metric tons of deforestation‑free certified Brazilian beef by the end of the year, in what may be an early sign that China, one of the most powerful ‌forces in global commodity trade, is willing to pay more for greener supply chains. The figure amounts to 4.5% of what Brazilian beef exporters are expected to sell to China this year.

The pledge challenges a long-held assumption among Brazilian farmers: that China, the world’s largest importer of beef and soy, cares only about price.
It comes as China’s government is sending signals that it wants to act on the environmental impact of trade while protecting its domestic industry.

https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/ ... cover/m1/4