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A study conducted by researchers at the University of São Paulo (USP) in Brazil and reported in an article published in Nature Communications shows that the Cerrado, Brazil’s savanna biome, is experiencing the worst drought for at least 700 years. Here’s why. The effects of global warming have been particularly intense in the central region of the country, where the rise in temperatures is about 1 °C higher than the 1.5 °C global average. This has produced [...]

Although the rate of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon fell in 2023, the region is faced by another challenge in the shape of fire affecting the native vegetation that has so far been spared destruction. An article published in the journal Global Change Biology warns that wildfires in old-growth forests rose 152% last year compared with 2022, despite a drop of 16% in the total number of fires throughout the Amazon and a 22% drop in deforestation. In an analysis of satellite images, [...]

The Brazilian government is discussing the creation of an “agricultural development zone” at the confluence of three states in the Amazon region – Amazonas, Acre and Rondônia (hence the proposed acronym AMACRO). Meanwhile, deforestation in the region continues, with the planned zone accounting for 76.5% of deforestation in the three states between 2018 and 2022, warns an article published in the journal Perspectives in Ecology and Conservation. According to the [...]

The social and environmental impact of the Belo Monte dam and hydroelectric power plant in Pará state, Brazil, has been called a “disaster” by researchers, environmentalists and several media outlets. The damage has again been highlighted recently in an inspection report issued by the Brazilian Institute for the Environment and Renewable Natural Resources (IBAMA), an agency of the Ministry for the Environment and Climate Change. The inspectors detected silting and erosion [...]

A major bivalent COVID-19 vaccine induces production of neutralizing antibodies against the coronavirus that circulated at the start of the pandemic as well as subvariants of omicron, albeit less abundantly, according to a Brazilian study reported in the Journal of Medical Virology. The study confirmed the vaccine’s effectiveness and its importance to control of the disease, while also showing that, more than three years after the first application of a COVID-19 vaccine in Brazil, the [...]

The theories offered by the dominant literature in political science today to try to explain the sources of the political polarization that has endangered democracy around the world are adequate for the United States and Europe, but do not make sense for the countries of Latin America. For this reason, greater collaboration among political scientists is needed to identify other, more plausible hypotheses for the phenomenon that the region is also experiencing. The assessment was made by [...]

A study reported in the journal Acta Ethologica recorded the use of ultrasound by amphibians for the first time in South America. It also describes the first documented case of the use of ultrasound for defense against predators, in a distress call of ear-piercing intensity to many animals, but inaudible to humans. “Some potential predators of amphibians, such as bats, rodents and small primates, are able to emit and hear sounds at this frequency, which humans can’t. One of [...]

In São Paulo, Brazil’s largest metropolis, the city center is considered a tree failure hotspot, with the largest proportion of failures in the city occurring in that area. The main predictors of tree failure are the condition of the wood, constriction of the roots by the sidewalk, and drastic pruning, concludes a study recently published in the journal Urban Forestry & Urban Greening. The authors analyzed data for 456 tree failures in the central area of São Paulo, [...]

Statistics made available in January 2024 show that while deforestation in the Amazon fell by half in 2023, it increased 43% in the Cerrado, the Brazilian savanna. A research group at the State University of Campinas’s Institute of Biology (IB-UNICAMP) in Brazil dedicated to ecological studies on the Cerrado have already highlighted the urgency of combating destruction of the biome. However, it is not enough to defend what remains: restoration is also needed. Restoration presents a [...]