Water

The favela community of Vale Encantado in Rio de Janeiro are using a biosystem for sewage treatment and solar panels to make their neighbourhood economically and environmentally self-sufficient, while facing down a long-term threat of eviction. 

Honduran environmental defender Berta Cáceres was brutally murdered in 2016 because of her opposition to the construction of the Agua Zarca dam, which threatened indigenous Lenca communities. This podcast series examines her life and death.

Intag communities in Ecuador are resisting development of a copper mine at Llurimagua, proposed by Enami and Codelco. In Peru, residents of Aquia, Ancásh, accuse the Antamina mine of encroaching on their land without consultation.

An attempted assassination, criminalization, and violent eviction in 2014 didn't stop the Peaceful Resistance of La Puya in Guatemala, which won legal action suspending harmful mining activities.

In Guatemala, environmental defenders are criminalised, evicted, beaten, imprisoned and sometimes killed. It is one of the most dangerous places in the world for those who seek to defend their communities, lands and environment.

It's not all plain sailing for mining companies. Communities at Cerro Colorado in Chile have put up stiff opposition to BHP, whose mine threatens water supplies from a key a key aquifer. And peasants in Huamachuco, Peru, staged a massive protest against mining in their province.

The key question of the day was how creativity, imagination and play can help researchers both to carry out and communicate environmental research to the public. How, we asked, can collaborations between researchers and artists deepen our understanding of today’s ecological challenges?

In The Water Defenders: How Ordinary People Saved A Country from Corporate Greed, Robin Broad and John Cavanagh tell the harrowing, inspiring saga of Salvadorans' fight — and historic victory — to save their water, and their communities, from Big Gold.

In Mexico, a university-educated, small-scale peasant farmer came up with an untried innovative solution that not only restores degraded land to productivity, but also greatly enhances soil carbon storage, provides a valuable new crop, and even offers a hopeful diet for diabetics.

At Espinar in Peru and on Chile's Colina river, major international mining companies are once more in the spotlight, suspected of causing pollution, denying responsibility and failing to consult local communities