The Brazilian Amazon has never lost so many square kilometers in eleven years. Between August 2018 and July 2019, 10,129 square kilometers of jungle were lost, according to the National Institute for Space Research (Inpe).
The combined wealth of America's billionaires, including Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, jumped more than 19% or by half a trillion since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, according to a report published by the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS).
Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon hit a new high in the first four months of the year, according to data released on Friday, a worrying trend after the devastation caused by record fires last year.
Environmentalists in Bolivia warned of a marked increase in forest fires this year that threatens a repeat of the environmental disaster that ravaged much of the Amazon in 2019.
Bolivia registered 15,354 forest fires in the first four months of the year - a 35% increase on the same period last year, the Friends of Nature Foundation (FAN) said.
Brazil plans to deploy its armed forces to fight deforestation and fires in the Amazon jungle, Vice President Hamilton Mourão said on Wednesday; in an effort to protect the world’s largest rainforest where destruction has surged since last year.
Indigenous tribes in Peru's Amazon say the government has left them to fend for themselves against the coronavirus, risking “ethnocide by inaction,” according to a letter from natives to the United Nations and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.
Deforestation in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest rose in March, government data showed on Friday, indicating that illegal loggers and land speculators have not stopped destroying the forest with the onset of the coronavirus outbreak.
Brazil said on Wednesday the first case of COVID-19 had been detected among the Yanomami people, an Amazon indigenous group known for its remoteness and its vulnerability to foreign diseases.
An indigenous woman in a village deep in the Amazon rainforest has contracted the novel coronavirus, the first case reported among Brazil's more than 300 tribes, the Health Ministry's indigenous health service Sesai said on Wednesday
The biggest smartphone conference of the year was just canceled. The organizers of Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, GSMA, announced in a statement on Wednesday that the conference was canceled because of concerns about the coronavirus.