FINANCE: Prickly Peru Gas Project Gets Key Loan

The Inter-American Development Bank approved key financing Wednesday for a Peruvian bid to become an exporter of gas, over the objections of environmentalists and indigenous people's advocates.

CLIMATE CHANGE: Brazil Announces Voluntary Fund to Protect Amazon

In the context of the United Nations Conference on Climate Change in Bali, Indonesia, Brazil has announced the creation of a voluntary fund to protect the Amazon jungle region, and its decision to adopt national targets to curb deforestation.

PERU: Opening Up Indigenous Land to Foreign Investors

Peruvian President Alan García plans to introduce in Congress a draft law that would facilitate the purchase by foreign investors of communally owned land in rural indigenous villages.

CLIMATE CHANGE: Forests Could Cool or Cook the Planet

A two-degree Celsius rise in global temperatures could flip the Amazon forest from being the Earth's vital air conditioner to a flamethrower that cooks the planet, warns a new report released at the climate talks in Bali, Indonesia Friday.

CLIMATE CHANGE: Latin America Wants Rich Nations to Foot the Bill

Latin American governments will call for greater commitments from industrialised countries to curb climate change and to provide financial support for developing countries to deal with its effects.

BRAZIL: Biofuel Revolution Reaches Airline Industry

Biokerosene has the potential to take off on the international market faster than other alternative fuels, even though it is among the newest and faces stricter quality standards because it is to be used in aviation.

AGRICULTURE: Costly Prosperity

Many of the people who are now complaining that biofuels are driving up agricultural prices fought in the past against the "deterioration of the terms of exchange," or the devaluation of commodities with respect to manufactured goods, as a key factor in underdevelopment.

WORLD SOCIAL FORUM: Highlighting the Amazon’s Diversity

The international council of the World Social Forum met this week in the northern Brazilian city of Belem to plan the next steps to be taken by global activists, including the eighth edition of the WSF, to be held in January 2009 in Brazil’s Amazon region.

BRAZIL: Stiff Sentence for Killer of US-Born Nun Upheld

The 27-year sentence handed down to the hired killer who murdered U.S.-born nun and activist Dorothy Stang in 2005 was upheld by a court in Brazil.

ENVIRONMENT-LATAM: Ethical Development to Cool Off the Planet

Brazilian Environment Minister Marina Silva suggested an ethically and politically sustainable development model at a conference in this southeastern Brazilian city that has brought together national and international authorities and experts, business leaders and researchers to discuss solutions to fight climate change in the region.

CLIMATE CHANGE: Forests Join the Carbon Market

With deforestation as the second leading source of climate-changing greenhouse gas emissions, experts are focusing the discussion on the viability of compensating countries for protecting their forests.

LATIN AMERICA: Nine Roads Through the Virgin Wilderness

In the name of development and integration, roads, bridges, dams, gas pipelines, ports and other infrastructure works are expanding in South America. But many of the projects are trampling roughshod over protected areas that preserve unique ecosystems and vulnerable native cultures.

BRAZIL: Amazon Logging Means Short-Lived Prosperity

Devastation, violent land conflicts and rapid - but short-lived - economic growth are the traces left by deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon over the last 30 years, according to a new study.

HEALTH: Guyana Catches Herbal Fever

A quiet but perhaps long overdue debate is taking place in this small English-speaking South American republic over the growing power and influence alternative medical practitioners, some of whom have recently been forced to officially back away from claims about special powers to heal everything from HIV/AIDS to various forms of cancer.

ECUADOR: Support Grows for Letting Sleeping Amazon Oil Lie

The innovative offer by the government of Ecuador to refrain from exploiting its largest oil reserve, in exchange for international compensation for nature conservation, is attracting increasing support.

GUYANA: From Lush Jungle to Muddy Moonscape

Late last month, three Guyanese cabinet ministers flew to a southwestern jungle community near Brazil to probe reports that an unscrupulous group of gold and diamond miners had plundered the area so recklessly that roads simply disappeared and the area's water system had crumbled under the weight of heavy machinery.

ENVIRONMENT: Satellites Show Logging Decline in Peru’s Amazon Region

Rainforest conservation policies are reducing the rate of deforestation in the Peruvian Amazon, but roads are unquestionably the drivers of change, new satellite data reveal.

BRAZIL: Amazon Fruit Gatherers Face Biofuel Dilemma

The babaçú, an abundant native palm tree in the eastern Amazon and in the north and northeast of Brazil, has great potential for the production of "biodiesel" and biomass fuel, but the women who make their living from gathering its fruit fear the loss of their traditional source of income.

BRAZIL: In Search of Sustainable Ethanol

To curb international criticism of its cane alcohol industry, the Brazilian government announced that it will ban new sugarcane fields in the Amazon region and in the vast Pantanal wetland.

BRAZIL: Steel and Eucalyptus Heat Up Eastern Amazon

Brazil's Environment Ministry entered a minefield when it proposed a sustainable forest district to contain deforestation in the steel-making centre of Carajás, one of the most devastated and violent areas in the Amazon.

BRAZIL: New Lives for Victims of Slave Labour

José Alves has held on, for memory’s sake, to what is left of the old bicycle that took him hundreds of kilometres throughout Brazil’s eastern Amazon jungle region as he "hunted for work to improve my life." His need for a job led him to fall victim to slave labour - not once, but several times.