Amazon

Weather disasters and their underreported transboundary impacts on Amazonian communities
In the Amazon, climate and land use change are expected to intensify risks from weather disasters, posing major challenges to people and ecosystems. Yet, how weather disasters already affect the peoples of Amazonia remains understudied. To quantify regional impacts, we compiled and analyzed reports on weather disaster category, frequency, human, and economic impacts from 2013 to 2023 across five Amazonian countries. We counted 12,541 disaster reports, affecting up to >3 million Amazonians and >100,000 pieces of public infrastructure in a single year. There were disproportionate concentrations of landslides in the Amazon-Andes of Ecuador, and fires associated with agricultural management and sometimes land grabbing in the Orinoco-Amazon ecotone of Colombia and along the southern Arc of Deforestation of Bolivia and Brazil. We argue that weather disaster impacts in the Amazon are underreported because: 1) data from four Amazonian countries could not be obtained, 2) cross-country reporting was not standardized and 3) it varied such that virtually all heatwave and most drought data came from Brazil, despite published evidence that both disaster types are present throughout the region. Disaster impacts are already significant, underscoring the need for transboundary policies on land use, local adaptation strategies for communities and infrastructure, and coordinated regional efforts to share and update weather disaster management plans. Developing consistent, accessible, and interoperable datasets across the region is fundamental to building a comprehensive understanding of weather-related disasters in the Amazon and to informing effective public policies that strengthen prevention, response, and adaptation efforts.. These findings and recommendations provide a basis for discussing regional climate hazards at CoP30 in Belém do Pará, Brazil, in November.
Criminal control shapes options for Amazon forests
Transnational crime networks trafficking cocaine and gold are increasingly active in the Amazon. How international demand, trafficking, and impacts have changed, however, remain underexplored. We show that, annually, cocaine metabolite concentration in European sewage increased by 17% since 2011, while in the Brazilian Amazon cocaine seizures and gold royalties recently rose by ~50%, and forest loss in Peru since 2004 grew by 31% for every tenfold increase in coca cultivation with high recent losses (2019–2023). During this period, transnational networks of violent non-state actors (VNSAs) consolidated control over borders and triple borders, fostering environmental degradation. We also explore scenarios of relaxed cocaine prohibition and falling demand and find neither necessarily curbs conservation impacts because policy gradients between countries can increase crime or bifurcate markets into legal and illegal portions (as with gold), and traffickers can build on their economies of scope to pivot to other products (as they do with gold). Instead, opening options for non-criminal social control is essential for Amazon conservation, which requires much greater coordination and investment, even under relaxed prohibition scenarios. Therefore, robust, transnationally coordinated environmental law enforcement and sustainable, legal economic alternatives are indispensable to protect Amazonian peoples and ecosystems.