Environmental Defenders

Documentary film: We Fight For This Land: Ka’apor and Quilombola Communities in Brazil (62”, 2024)Directors: Cahal McLaughlin and Siobhán Wills Quilombo and Indigenous Ka’apor communities...

Indigenous groups, ecologists, scholars, and NGOs have spoken out against the idea of biodiversity markets, emphasizing their lack of effectiveness and stressing that the protection of ecosystems should be rooted in local knowledge and community-led governance rather than top-down market solutions.

Today, 21 October 2024, in Cali Colombia, the COP16 conference begins. This will be a platform for promoting the concept of biodiversity credits and biodiversity markets. But what do these terms mean, and what is at stake, especially for Indigenous peoples and local communities? 

Members of the ‘uncontacted’ Mashco Piro tribe left several loggers dead as they defended their ancestral lands in the Madre de Dios region of southeastern Peru, revealing growing tensions between Indigenous rights, conservation efforts, and the political and economic drivers of deforestation in the Peruvian Amazon.  

A year on from the referendum in which Ecuador voted to stop oil extraction in Block 43 of Yasuní National Park, oil drilling continues. In response, the Waorani Nationality of Ecuador organised a summit to create a roadmap towards a future free from fossil fuels in the Ecuadorian Amazon.

Maya K'iché activist Lucía Ixchíu tells the story of her path to political activism, creating solidarity among diverse Indigenous communities in Guatemala; and her life in exile

An Amazonian Indigenous community evades extinction and finds alternatives to extractivism through developing an ecotourism project in the Bolivian jungle.

Wirikuta is the most important sacred place for the Indigenous Wixárika people in the state of San Luis Potosí, Mexico. This place, which is of great importance for biodiversity and culture, is threatened by mining companies. The community has been fighting a legal battle to annul the 78 contracts threatening the site’s existence. They hope the Mexican judicial system will rule in their favour.

Journalists in the Amazon face unique dangers, as the murders of Dom Philips and Bruno Pereira underlined. Amazônia Latitude interviewed a number of journalists working in the Amazon who stress the need for local journalism, 'committed to life'.

Communities of the Intag Valley are engaging in new tactics, using citizen science to resist mining through legal battles. A pioneering organisation, Ecoforensic, is training a growing movement of ‘paraecologists’ to gather the ecological data needed to win legal cases against mining companies – and it’s working.