Andre Cabette Fabio

A new U.S.-backed initiative to disrupt illicit financial flows from nature crimes such as illegal logging and mining in the Amazon rainforest has been welcomed by security experts, but the effort could be hampered by lawlessness and state weakness.

Launched by U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen in July, the plan is to boost cooperation in South America to tackle an illicit industry worth billions of dollars that is leaving a trail of destruction in the Amazon rainforest.

Brazil is positioning itself as a leader in the global transition towards clean energy, with hydropower as its top source of electricity, wind and solar growing rapidly, and renewables fuelling a quarter of its transport.

But Brazil has also invested heavily in fossil fuels, and the government plans to turn the country from world's seventh biggest oil producer into its fourth by 2030.

More than 1.3 million hectares of natural vegetation have burned in South America's Pantanal this year already, with images of incinerated jaguars, monkeys and caimans flooding social media.

The burnt area amounts to nearly 9% of the Pantanal, the largest tropical wetland in the world, according to data released last week by the Laboratory for Environmental Satellite Applications from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. 

First the floods - now the fires. 

With hundreds of thousands left homeless after unprecedented floods soaked the south, Brazil is now facing a record run of wildfires, a nation caught on the frontline of climate change.

As drought and floods wreak havoc across Brazil, farmers are feeling the effects of the climate emergency but despite poor harvests and rotting crops, they are fighting to protect their right to fell more trees and convert grasslands.

The southern Rio Grande do Sul state offers a clear example of the damage wrought by consecutive disasters: after prolonged droughts, analysts were predicting a record soybean harvest this year but instead the area was hit by devastating floods in June.

From the vast Amazon rainforest that unfurls across nine South American territories to the tropical forests that shelter mountain gorillas in the Democratic Republic of Congo and orangutans in Indonesia, forests are key to human life.

But these rich resources are under threat from deforestation driven by mining, land-grabbing, animal grazing and deadly wildfires. And that's bad news for humans and the planet as rainforests are key to reining in runaway climate change.

Five of the world's top banks are failing to implement effective policies to protect the Amazon when financing oil and gas extraction in the region, a report said this week, accusing the financial giants of "greenwashing".

Produced by environmental advocacy group Stand.earth and the Coordinating Body of Indigenous Organizations of the Amazon Basin (COICA), the report urged the banks to stop financing oil and gas extraction to help protect 80% of the world's largest rainforest by 2025.

REALIDADE, Brazil - Behind a narrow border of trees, a crop duster sprays clouds of agrochemicals onto the vast soy fields stretching out on both sides of the BR-319 highway that cuts deep into Brazil's Amazon rainforest.

As the road's asphalt wears thin further north, timber trucks zig-zag to avoid the many potholes along the key transport artery, which spans 885 km (550 miles) and has come to symbolise the tension between infrastructure projects and environmental protection in the world's largest rainforest.

In November, Pedro and two of his sons rushed to the river and sank their mining boat under the brown water to hide it from officials patrolling the Amazon area as Brazil's government cracks down on wildcat gold miners.

Wooden barges like theirs, equipped with suction hoses and other mining machinery, are used to dredge for gold in the region's rivers - a polluting and largely illegal activity that President Luís Inácio Lula da Silva wants to stamp out.

Clothing factories that supply H&M and Zara are buying cotton linked to environmental destruction and land-grabbing in Brazil's Cerrado - a biodiversity hotspot where deforestation is soaring, research by the Earthsight nonprofit has found.

While global concern has focused on the impact of beef and soy farming in the Amazon, deforestation alerts in Brazil's lesser-known Cerrado tropical savannah jumped 44% in 2023, data from the National Institute for Space Research (INPE) shows.