CUARIRENDA, Bolivia In October 2020, residents of a Mennonite colony began clearing a road through the forest in the Cordillera province of the Bolivian department of Santa Cruz. By November, the road spanned about 5 kilometers (3 miles) and ended at the Parapetí River. Satellite imagery from Planet Labs Inc and data from the […]
Forest fires in Bolivia’s Santa Cruz department razed an area twice the size of Jamaica in the first 10 months of 2021, officials said, with more than half of the affected land falling inside protected areas. “The affected areas in Santa Cruz total 2,463,731 hectares [6,088,011 acres] so far,” Adita Montaño, the departmental director of […]
SAN IGNACIO DE VELASCO, Bolivia On Feb. 12, 2021, Bolivian conservationists joyfully celebrated the creation of the Bajo Paraguá Municipal Protected Area. Located in the municipality of San Ignacio de Velasco in the Bolivian department of Santa Cruz, the new reserve was established to protect 983,006 hectares (2.4 million acres) of Amazonian and Chiquitano […]
Forest fires in Bolivia are showing no sign of abating, with blazes sweeping through ecosystems like the Amazon rainforest, Chaco scrubland, Chiquitanía savanna, and Pantanal wetland. With almost 1 million hectares (2.5 million acres) burned to date this year, experts are warning of a repeat of the devastation of recent years. In 2019, fires tore […]