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 […]