SUMAÚMA Journalism (2025)

09/07/2025

The possibility of sudden catastrophic change has been largely neglected in United Nations reports on the climate crisis, which allows politicians to carry on with business as usual. That must change in Belém.

Read the article written by Jonathan Watts (.jonathan) on sumauma.com

08/07/2025

Alcoa World Alumina Brasil, the local arm of the US-based multinational, wants to dig up the soil to extract bauxite, the ore that yields aluminum. And Alcoa is in a hurry because the bauxite mines it already operates in the area will run out in a few years, according to their projections. That’s why, per an investigation opened by the Federal Public Prosecutor’s Office, there are indications the US multinational could try to override the will of the traditional Ribeirinho communities, though the company denies this.

In November 2024, the transnational corporation delivered a proposal to the people of Juruti Velho. It offered $14,800 to explore for bauxite on 45 hectares of the Serra do Uxituba. The money would be given to the Association of Communities in the Region of Juruti Velho (Acorjuve), an organization that represents the 71 communities in the area and around 10,000 individual residents. The search for the ore would mean digging 593 holes, which on their own would already pose a great risk to Nature.

But all 71 communities said “no” and rejected the mining company’s offer. “First [we’d] set fire to their projects and then leave,” Dona Maria joked, imagining the company arriving in her backyard.

Dona Maria and those who resist alongside her know what it would mean to allow Alcoa into the Serra do Uxituba. Decades ago, they witnessed destruction that eroded the lives of other Ribeirinhos not far away.

This article is part of the Unsustainable series, a collaboration between SUMAÚMA and King’s College London.

Read the full story by Hyury Potter, with photos by João Laet, at sumauma.com

02/07/2025

Shortly before Covid-19, Africa faced a terrifyingly deadly epidemic about which there is very little literature — apart from scientific studies and newspaper reports. It was caused by the Ebola virus. Just as with Covid, a bat was also identified as the source of the disease. Roads, cities and even entire countries were closed off… Véronique Tadjo wanted to write about it. Although born in Paris (1961), Tadjo grew up in Côte d’Ivoire, a country that was not directly affected by Ebola but felt the impact of the measures taken by neighboring nations.

Until then, Tadjo had enjoyed Africa’s diverse Nature without fear. “My father is from the south of the country, so I know the forest. I am fascinated by the abundance of life there. However, at heart, I am drawn to the desert. I like how understated it is. It seems like there is nothing there, but in reality, there is a whole invisible world.” In 2014, that world trembled in the face of Ebola.

Tadjo travels frequently and has lived in several cities. Today she lives between London and Abidjan, but she considers Côte d’Ivoire her true home. “It is my reference point and my source of inspiration. London is my writing city, where I go to be alone and write.” In any case, in 2014 she was teaching at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa, where there is a highly regarded virology department. “I attended conferences and information sessions on Ebola.” As the epidemic spread, she moved to the United States for a few months, where she continued to pay close attention to “media coverage, which included many in-depth reports.” When she returned to Côte d’Ivoire, she had a wealth of information and a clear idea of what she wanted to write.

Read the full interview by Gabi Martínez with Véronique Tadjo in the LiterNatura column at sumauma.com.

01/07/2025

Ahead of the climate summit in Belém, Pará, traditional media have been reporting on the Belo Monte Hydroelectric Plant, on the Xingu River. Beyond their generally positive tone, with little or no space for contradictions, nearly all of their stories were produced after reporters were invited to the power plant at the expense of its operator, Norte Energia.

FSB, the firm that handles the company’s communications, is the same firm used by the Mines and Energy Ministry, by the Office of the President’s Communications Secretary, and by various other federal government agencies. The media offensive lays bare the relationships between a private company, the government, and the press.

Belo Monte was the most controversial project to come out of the federal government’s Accelerated Growth Program. Its first turbine was inaugurated by Dilma Rousseff (Workers’ Party), and the last was inaugurated by Jair Bolsonaro (Liberal Party), in a rare consensus between the center-left and the far right. The renewal of Belo Monte’s license, which expired in 2021, is currently under consideration by Brazil’s environmental regulator, Ibama.

The recent wave of reports and articles on Belo Monte caught the attention of experts at Instituto Socioambiental, a non-governmental organization that has monitored and gathered every piece of news the Brazilian and international press have released on the hydroelectric plant. Luísa Pontes Molina, a senior analyst at Instituto Socioambiental who holds a PhD in social anthropology from the University of Brasília, said that from late 2023 to now, Norte Energia has made a noticeable effort to put stories favorable to the plant and the company in outlets that have large audiences.

Read more on sumauma.com

By Rubens Valente ()

26/06/2025

Sensitive listening between fish and fisher reveals more than a way of life: it is also a strategy for survival amid climate collapse. Ancestral techniques for counting Pirarucu intertwine with scientific knowledge, both pointing in the same direction — the Pirarucu, and the communities that depend on it, are adapting — or they won’t survive.

To understand this adaptation — of both fish and people — in late April 2025, SUMAÚMA visited the Amanã Sustainable Development Reserve, in the Médio Solimões region, and also traveled along the Tefé River, a tributary of the Solimões that connects diverse ecosystems. For over a week, the team visited communities, listened to fishers, resource managers, local leaders and scientists, explored protected areas, and collected stories about how climate change has reshaped the way of life along the river.

Read the article by Maickson Serrão () at sumauma.com

This article is the result of a collaboration between SUMAÚMA, journalists and researchers, with support from Instituto Serrapilheira and the Latin American Center for Investigative Journalism (CLIP), exploring how the loss of biodiversity in the Amazon affects a wide range of ecosystem services the region provides to the continent.

25/06/2025

By Claudia Antunes, Bonn, Germany

The heated discussions took up a lot of time for the Brazilian negotiators who came to Germany to try to make progress on the documents related to the climate emergency that are set to be approved in November at the COP30. Complaints about how hard it is to find lodging in Belém and the prices hotels and property owners are charging have united countries both poor and rich – a rare feat at the UN – not to mention international social and environmental organizations.

Lodging costs have been a problem before at the COP, like in 2021, in Glasgow, Scotland. Yet the Brazilian delegation was told that prices in Belém are three times higher than the average for past conferences which could make it infeasible for countries with fewer monetary resources and for civil society activists.

At an open meeting on June 19 in Bonn, European Union representative Katarzyna Wrona of Poland complained that lodging in Belém costs five times more than the daily stipend the UN provides to make it easier for delegates to participate. “We have other conditions [in Europe], but we’re all public servants,” Wrona said.

The assistance provided by the United Nations varies according to the country and the city, but in the case of Belém it amounts to US$ 145. Meanwhile, per night rates in Pará’s capital currently range from US$ 700 to US$ 1,400, according to the accounts heard at the meeting. This would put the price per person to stay at the COP30 for all 12 days of the meeting at between US$ 8,400 and US$ 16,800. The Brazilian press is reporting even higher prices.

25/06/2025

Juma Xipaia, a leader from the Middle Xingu who has survived six assassination attempts, is the protagonist of a documentary produced by her and to awaken consciousness in the Global North about the Amazon emergency.

In this conversation with Wajã Xipai — Juma’s cousin and a reporter for SUMAÚMA — the chief of the Kaarimã Village, located in the Xipaia Indigenous Territory, speaks about the film Yanuni, her role as a secretary at the Ministry of Indigenous Peoples, and the challenges of being a woman, a mother, a leader, and an Indigenous person navigating between the Forest and the world that is destroying it.

The world premiere of Yanuni took place on June 14 at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York City, United States. The film then went on to be shown in the United Kingdom. There is still no scheduled release date for Brazil.

17/06/2025

Alice Oliveira, 13, and Esthefany Leal, 12, were born and live in the Vila Praia Alta Community, along the banks of the Tocantins River, in the state of Pará. They know every inch of the area. They know how much care is needed to catch a peacock bass, the fish that are usually found in the lakes that form in the rocky outcrops along the river. They have learned that fishing activities follow the moon’s rhythm and the best place for planting is the floodplains, which are fertile areas that form when the river recedes.

They also tell stories they’ve heard from their elders, like the one about Nego d’Água – an entity they say inhabits the depths of Pedral do Lourenção, a set of rocky formations on that stretch of the Tocantins River. This is where he approaches fishers and asks for fish. If he is denied, an angry Nego d’Água will overturn their vessel. Alice gets excited when talking about the creature, but her tone soon shifts. Enthusiasm turns to sadness: “If they really do this project, he’ll have to find somewhere else to live. If there’s time, that is.” Their concern regards not only the story their ancestors tell about this entity – it also has to do with the concrete threat lurking around their houses, their community, the river and its animals and, ultimately, their very existence.

On May 26, Brazil’s environmental agency, Ibama, granted an installation license authorizing the National Department of Transportation Infrastructure to begin what they call the “clearance” of the rocky outcrop known as Pedral do Lourenção – a project that will blow up these rock formations to then remove them, widening and deepening the river so bigger boats can pass through. It is part of a project to expand the Tocantins-Araguaia Waterway, a river route aimed at expanding capacity to ship soybeans through Pará’s ports, allowing this product, which is a major driver of Amazon Deforestation, to more easily reach other countries.

SUMAÚMA traveled the Tocantins River over the last few months and visited Pedral do Lourenção. We heard stories of the many lives that inhabit the river and whose existence is now threatened.

Read on sumauma.com

10/06/2025

“A few years from now, when evil cools and the dust of chaos settles – if it ever cools and if it ever settles – what will we tell our children of this brutally tragic moment in history?” Sidarta Ribeiro () asks in his column Thought Seedings.

“How do we justify to those inheriting the planet that it was human civilization itself which violently destroyed it, through action or omission, until nothing good was left anymore on its surface? One possible start to an explanation for so much apathy, so much inertia, so much cowardice, so much incapacity for a creative collective response is the delirious insomnia that is making us sicker and sicker.”

Read more on sumauma.com/en

09/06/2025

Howler, episode 59.

By , .jonathan e

04/06/2025

In a scenario where renewal of the Belo Monte hydropower plant’s operating license is pending an environmental analysis and conflicts have arisen with communities and federal agencies over how much water from the Xingu River can be dammed or released, Norte Energia, the consortium that owns the concession for the dam, has launched a media offensive to try to convince the general public of its relevance. The company invited journalists to visit plant facilities in Pará state, in the Amazon - but their tour didn’t include contact with the lives of those most heavily affected by the dam.

An article published in Folha de S.Paulo in early May says that despite the “roughly 1.4 billion dollars spent on social and environmental mitigations, twice the initial forecast and even including paying for public works,” Belo Monte “is still being criticized by environmentalists.” The news daily cites data strategically favorable to the hydropower plant, which entered operations about ten years ago, but little is said about ensuing problems or unfulfilled agreements. A report issued by Brazil’s environmental watchdog Ibama in 2024, for example, indicates that Norte Energia made good on just over half of the compensatory measures it had committed to in 2021 to mitigate damages along the downstream stretch of the river known as the Volta Grande do Xingu.

SUMAÚMA - based in Altamira, the vital center of Belo Monte - was monitoring the hydropower plant’s impact on the lives of human and more-than-human peoples in the region even before our news platform launched in September 2022. Complementing the dozens of articles SUMAÚMA has published on the topic, this report compiles technical information, documents, and personal accounts from people who go to bed and wake up every day missing the river and grappling with fish mortality, surging violence, and various other consequences of the project. People who are not “environmentalists” but whose lives were bound to the rhythm of the Xingu and whose homes were flooded as animals around them drowned, the fish they knew developed deformities, and the breeding grounds of new more-than-human lives became graveyards.

Read on sumauma.com

02/06/2025

There is no greater theft from the poor than the loss of clean water, fresh air, fertile soil, abundant nature and a stable climate.

That should be the mantra of every 21st century leader who claims to care about social justice. It was also the hope for President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, when he won a third term in 2022 on pledges to care for the disadvantaged, to step up climate action and to protect the rainforest and Brazil’s other biomes.

Last week, however, the Workers Party leader betrayed those promises with an abject surrender to extractivist business and a Congress-controlled by agribusiness interests. His administration overturned expert advice by giving a green light to oil exploration by Petrobras off the coast of the Amazon.

This capitulation will be bad for the climate and potentially devastating for nature. But even worse could follow if Congress has its way with a new law that would castrate the environmental licensing authority of the federal government.

Read the editorial written by Jonathan Watts (.jonathan) on sumauma.com

https://sumauma.com/en/lula-flerta-com-a-devastacao/

SUMAÚMA Journalism

09/07/2025

08/07/2025

02/07/2025

01/07/2025

26/06/2025

25/06/2025

25/06/2025

17/06/2025

10/06/2025

09/06/2025

04/06/2025

02/06/2025

Address

Website

Alerts

Contact The Business

Shortcuts

Share