Pan Amazonian News Today

Regulating land tenure is not the only power available to the state for influencing how people use land. Land-use planning and land-use zoning are two closely related mechanisms that Pan Amazonian nations wield to foster sustainable development on their forest and agricultural frontiers. Like policies governing infrastructure, agriculture and land tenure, these technical programmes have […]

Highway infrastructure initiates the deforestation process, but it is almost always accompanied by some sort of agricultural activity. Depending upon circumstances, deforestation can proceed rapidly or slowly, lead to large or small forest clearings, and create forest remnants of different sizes and configurations. Agricultural production models vary from huge ranches and plantations spanning tens of […]

The macroeconomic hypothesis that infrastructure investments stimulate economic growth assumes that these physical assets overcome a logistical or systemic constraint on production. In practice, this requires for individual projects to be the subject to an objective feasibility analysis, are priced fairly, and have been approved after the full evaluation of their social and environmental impacts. […]

The increasing presence of Chinese companies in South America has become an issue of concern among social and political analysts. Security specialists argue they are a geopolitical threat to the interests of the United States and other Western nations, while supporting authoritarian governments that undermine democratic traditions. Environmental advocates attest that companies from China are […]

More than half of Indigenous environmental defenders and leaders killed for safeguarding their ecosystems, their homes, and their family on the planet are Amazonians. This violence stems from a new stage of extractivism, one that will lead toward essential ecosystems failing, histories disappearing and the Amazon ultimately reaching its tipping point. All told, degradation and […]

The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines infrastructure as the ‘underlying structure’ of a country – specifically, the physical installations needed to ensure that its economy functions for the benefit of society. Modern infrastructure is made of steel and concrete and is ubiquitous in an advanced economy; typically, it is taken for granted by the people who depend […]

The commitment to environmental governance in the 1990s was preceded by a civil society movement to create national parks and wildlife refuges. In the first half of the twentieth century, the Amazonian nations created a dozen or so national parks, thanks largely to the efforts of farsighted and passionate individuals with political influence. In most […]

A tropical rainforest is composed of thousands of species of long-lived trees, each with a natural history characterized by unique morphological, physiological and reproductive attributes. Very little was known about the ecological processes within these plant communities in 1980 when ecologists began to establish long-term studies to document their composition, structure and function. In one […]

The economies of nations are traditionally evaluated by their gross domestic product (GDP), a metric that measures the total economic output of a nation. The GDP of the Pan Amazon was approximately $US 270 billion in 2017, a modest number in a global economy valued at $US 80 trillion in the same year. By way […]

The Amazon, home to the largest tropical forest on the planet, is an irreplaceable natural asset with enormous biodiversity and a critically important component in global carbon and water cycles. The Pan Amazon, which includes the full watershed and the rainforests of the Guiana Shield, is a geopolitical territory spanning nine nations that have been […]