Researchers from France and Brazil are meeting this week in Belém, in the State of Pará, to launch a new season of the Amazon Connections Seminar addressing the planet’s future from scientific, cultural, and political perspectives. The gathering will span until Aug. 29 at the Emílio Goeldi Museum in Belém, the host city of COP30, as part of the bilateral agenda held each year in two seasons—one in each country.
During his recent trip to Brazil, former US Vice President Al Gore said that his country's stance on the climate crisis was schizophrenic, changing from one view to another, depending on who ruled. In his first term in office, between 2017 and 2021, Donald Trump withdrew the US from the Paris Agreement, whose main objective is to limit global warming to 1.5°C. But then came Joseph Biden, and the country returned to the agreement, only to pull out yet again with Trump's second term.
Weather forecasters in southern Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina foresee stormy conditions early this week due to an extratropical cyclone expected to bring severe havoc to the region.
Over the past 12 months, deforestation in Brazil’s Cerrado biome dropped by 20%, while the Amazon saw a 4% rise in alerts. In the Amazon, alerts covered 4,495 square kilometers—up from 4,321 km² in the previous period. Despite the uptick, this figure represents the second-lowest level recorded in the historical data series.
By Gwynne Dyer - Some big changes arrive with a bang, but usually they sort of sneak in and you barely notice them at first. Last week’s big change saw the creation of the world’s first climate-change visas. It’s a way of giving potential climate refugees some hope and some dignity, and it would certainly be an improvement on the current migration mess.
A forum of Academies of Science of the BRICS bloc in Rio de Janeiro issued a declaration this week proposing the creation of a network of member countries to implement climate solutions, focusing on energy transition technologies and the development of joint artificial intelligence programs.
Greenland experienced a melting rate 17 times faster than average last month due to record-high temperatures, while Iceland saw temperatures exceed 26°C, the European Copernicus Observatory reported this week.
Brazil topped the world last year in forest fires, accounting for 42% of the global loss of primary tropical forests. The extreme heat of the year, exacerbated by climate change and El Niño, intensified fires, which destroyed more forest than agribusiness activities for the first time. The worst drought ever recorded contributed to a sixfold increase in fire-related deforestation compared to 2023.
The Global Footprint Network (GFN) monitoring ecological developments reported that Chile has exhausted its annual natural resources by May 17, 2025, technically known as an overshoot, thus becoming the first South American country to do so this year. If global consumption mirrored Chile's, 2.7 Earths would be needed to sustain it, the organization argued.
Brazil's Environment and Climate Change Minister Marina Silva Thursday highlighted the BRICS group's potential to lead a just global ecological transition. She made those remarks during the bloc's 11th ministerial meeting in this regard, where issues like desertification, ecosystem preservation, plastic pollution, and climate action aligned with the UN's Agenda 2030 were discussed.