Fabio Teixeira

Companies with Brazilian forest concessions would be allowed to generate carbon credits under a bill passed by Congress this week that marks a "first step" in regulating the country's voluntary carbon market.

Private firms have shown little interest in a government program that leases publicly owned forests for sustainable logging, but the legislation could boost the concessions' appeal with investors by generating an additional revenue stream.

Oséias Mendes da Costa, a chatty 44-year-old, has dedicated his life to coffee in Minas Gerais state - Brazil's largest producer of the crop - where he worked for more than 10 years at a cooperative of coffee growers.

Now, he's striving to make coffee production greener.

Alongside the Brazilian Amazon's vast soy and cattle ranching economy - a major driver of deforestation - sits an older, more sustainable system of families and cooperatives producing forest products including the palm fruit açaí, rubber and pharmaceutical ingredients.

That "bioeconomy", with its legions of small producers, including Indigenous communities, receives just a fraction of the flood of investment pouring into expanding soy and cattle.

Short-staffed, stripped of its powers and led by a police officer, Brazil's Funai Indigenous affairs agency became a symbol of Jair Bolsonaro's dismantling of Amazon protections.

Now, as President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva seeks to reverse his predecessor's policies and rebuild Funai, staff say he must act quickly to address widespread exhaustion and frustration among the agency's depleted workforce.

When Maria discovered she was unexpectedly pregnant after a one-night stand in her home country of Malta, she knew she did not want a baby and would need to find a way to bypass the European island nation's total abortion ban.

An online search led her to Women on Web, a Dutch nonprofit telemedicine service that provides abortion pills around the world. After paying 130 euros ($135), Maria - who asked not to be identified by her real name - got the medication by mail.

Rubber tapper Manoel Magno, 71, walks through the jungle surrounding his house on the Amazon River island of Cotijuba, inspecting the trees like a father might his children.

Using knowledge passed down through the generations, over the past five decades he has sown dozens of rubber trees and cultivated more robust hybrid varieties.

Every day Magno treks through the hot and humid rainforest alone, selecting trees and making shallow cuts on their bark to bleed out latex, which he collects in small buckets.

With traditional Christmas dinner costing almost twice as much as 2021's festive spread, María Magdalena Luna has decided to forgo turkey and the usual glut of gifts for family this year.

After months of enduring the highest levels of inflation in two decades, Latin American households like Luna’s are bracing for a prohibitively expensive Christmas.

As Brazil prepares for leftist President-elect Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva to replace far-right leader Jair Bolsonaro in January, voters are asking: How many of the incumbent's environmental policies could Lula undo? And how long might it take?

The answers, green experts say, could be plenty - and not long.

In Brazil's state of São Paulo, one otherwise ordinary town is known for its extraordinary landfill facility - the largest in the country - which produces renewable energy but has also generated staunch opposition from citizens and councillors.

The site near Caieiras is home to a large biogas power plant, which converts methane - a potent greenhouse gas produced by rotting garbage - into electricity, preventing it from being released into the air and so avoiding planet-heating emissions.

Brace for a new Brazil - a much greener one, too.

No sooner had Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva Lula won the presidency on Sunday than he signaled a U-turn by Brazil on climate change, vowing to save the world's biggest rain forest after years of decimation.