Andre Cabette Fabio

Labouring in a workshop near Brazil's rainforest, a group of women snips, sews and paints fabric with traditional patterns for their fashion collective, using industrial machines bought with money from the first Amazon community fund fully run by Indigenous people.

The Ateliê Derequine Indigenous fashion collective, founded in 2020 to produce masks against COVID-19, dresses models and takes part in runway shows in Brazil's industrial metropolis of Manaus, providing jobs and a platform for Indigenous rights campaigns.

Under a blue April sky in Brasilia, the skyline is cut by sculptural, air-conditioned modernist buildings. The structures are surrounded by parking lots and curving, broad avenues with concrete sidewalks.

Brasilia was purposely built here, a modernist push by governments in the 1950s and 1960s largely to help occupy the country's vast interior.

At Brazil's largest Indigenous gathering in the nation's capital this week, filmmakers are illustrating how cinema and social media can spotlight their culture and struggles as they demand protection for land rights.

On a recent rainy evening, about two dozen film enthusiasts sat on stands alongside a projector, watching as Amazon filmmaker Takumã Kuikuro displayed a ritual of the Fulni-ô people.

Brazil is bracing for the "high risk" that wildfires will ravage the Amazon rainforest and Pantanal wetlands in 2025 after the country faced a record drought last year, leaving many regions vulnerable and susceptible to renewed flames.

Even though much of Brazil is in the middle of the rainy season, most of the country faced drought at the beginning of the year, data from Brazil's National Water Agency showed. 

At the mouth of the Amazon River, Brazil's most promising oil frontier is at the centre of a dispute between environmentalists and South America's largest company.

Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva is pressuring the government's environment agency Ibama to drop its objections to allowing state-controlled oil energy Petrobras to drill for oil in the Equatorial Margin region, off the northeast coast.

Peruvian Indigenous leader Francisco Hernández Cayetano travelled hundreds of miles along the Amazon river basin this month to tell communities working for a decade on a project to protect the forest there was no money left.

The initiative is one of hundreds of conservation projects put in limbo by a Jan. 20 executive order signed by U.S. President Donald Trump that froze billions of dollars in foreign aid for 90 days.

As Brazil sets the legal basis for its carbon trade, environmentalists are doubtful on whether it will be able to lower the country's emissions - the sixth largest in the world according to the EU Emissions Database.

The rules do not put a limit on emissions from farming, the country's top carbon polluting sector, which accounts for about 74% of the country's emissions.

Overhunting, ecosystem destruction and climate change caused by human emissions are all contributing to a rapid decline of global biodiversity.

A new report released by the World Wildlife Fund, an NGO, highlights what humanity is losing as a result.

Amid all the bad climate news, the Amazon rainforest - the world's largest tropical forest - is finally teasing out some hope.

Fewer of its trees were felled this year in Brazil and governments are finally taking on some of its worst exploiters, helping preserve a key weapon in the fight against climate change.

As the world reaches record-breaking temperatures, three quarters of its land has become permanently drier over the last three decades, harming agriculture, nature and incomes, according to new U.N. figures.

Most of the shift is a result of human induced climate change, according to the report by the U.N. Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) released at global COP16 talks on desertification in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, which were due to wrap up on Friday.