“With a single stroke of a pen, he can undo all the achievements we have accomplished in these almost four years,” said the Minister of Indigenous Peoples, Eloy Terena, regarding a possible victory of the far-right candidate, Senator Flávio Bolsonaro, for Brazil’s Presidency. “We are very concerned.” With 47.03% of the vote, Flávio topped the first round of the presidential election on Oct. 4, despite voting polls showing current President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva as the favorite for reelection. “If elected, one of the first ministries that will be abolished is the Ministry of Indigenous Peoples,” Terena told Mongabay by phone. “For us, this is a given, because it’s a government that has no commitment to Indigenous peoples.” The candidates face a runoff on Sunday, Oct. 25. The unprecedented Ministry of Indigenous Peoples (MPI) was created by Lula in January 2023, fulfilling a promise to native peoples who supported his candidacy. Sonia Guajajara was appointed minister, the first time an Indigenous person led a ministry. “The creation of the Ministry of Indigenous Peoples has a very great symbolic, but also effective, power, because it is a government that comes precisely after a period in which Indigenous peoples were extremely attacked during Bolsonaro’s administration,” said Terena, who took office in March when Sonia left the ministry to run for reelection as a federal deputy for São Paulo. The unprecedented Ministry of Indigenous Peoples was created by President Lula in January 2023. Sonia Guajajara was appointed minister, marking the first time…This article was originally published on Mongabay

Home of the world’s largest biodiversity, the Brazilian Amazon is one of the main hubs for international wildlife trafficking. Every day, thousands of animals are taken from the rainforest to be sold in other parts of the country and abroad. Despite its key role in this illegal market, there is still a lack of information about wildlife trafficking in the region. ​ Data on animal seizures is scattered at the municipal, state and federal levels. The lack of an integrated system, along with the region’s vast territories and porous international borders, makes it difficult to get a full picture of wildlife trafficking in the rainforest. ​ “Every river you travel on in the Amazon will have traffic incidents,” conservation intelligence specialist Antônio de Carvalho, from the conservation NGO WCS Brazil, told Mongabay in a phone interview. ​ WCS Brazil is currently working on a Global Wildlife Trafficking Observatory, which will rely on artificial intelligence to gather information about wildlife trafficking from news websites and academic researchers. The goal is to support the work of investigators, environmental agents and journalists. ​ “A lot of data on seizures is lost because the seizure is simply carried out and the animals are released right there on the spot, and that doesn’t even make it into official statistics,” Carvalho said. The zebra pleco (Hypancistrus zebra) lives only in a small stretch of the Xingu River, in Pará, and is highly coveted as an ornamental fish. Image courtesy of Birger A. In another attempt to…This article was originally published on Mongabay

An analysis by the London-based group Zero Carbon Analytics (ZCA) supports a claim conservationists have made for decades: Tropical forests are worth more standing than cleared, with the Amazon as the world’s “crown jewel” in this context. According to the ZCA analysis released in July, tropical forests worldwide could hold a median of $714 billion — within a range of $382 billion to $1.176 trillion — in potential commercial value from undiscovered drugs based on flowering plants. The Amazon alone holds around $215 billion, or roughly 30% of the total, the largest share compared with regions such as Southeast Asia and the Congo Basin. Natural compounds are central to medicine. Roughly three in four cancer drugs approved between 1940 and 2014 were derived from or inspired by natural products, and an estimated 99% of the chemical compounds plants produce remain unscreened. In that logic, the Amazon stands out: It “hosts potentially the greatest commercial option value for medicines from flowering plants” of any major forested region, co-author of the ZCA analysis Joanne Bentley-McKune told Mongabay. But deforestation is eroding this value. ZCA estimates that tropical forest clearing since 2001 has already put $86 billion in commercial drug value at risk globally. In the Amazon, the pharmaceutical benefits of some extinct species may be gone forever. “Over the last 20 years, many endemics, or plants that occur nowhere else, might have been lost due to deforestation in Brazil, across different regions,” Bentley-McKune said. The Amazon alone holds roughly 30% of the…This article was originally published on Mongabay