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Casi diez años después de iniciar las operaciones de la Central Hidroeléctrica de Belo Monte, Norte Energia, la empresa ...
23/09/2025

Casi diez años después de iniciar las operaciones de la Central Hidroeléctrica de Belo Monte, Norte Energia, la empresa que ganó la concesión, todavía no ha comprado los terrenos para el Territorio Ribereño y el gobierno pareciera no tener fuerzas para hacer que la empresa cumpla la ley.

El Plan Básico Ambiental de Belo Monte prometió restaurar los modos de vida de las poblaciones afectadas. Se le concedió la licencia de operación con la condición de que Norte Energia revisara el tratamiento que se les daba a los Ribereños, garantizándole a esta tradicional comunidad dos viviendas: una casa en el río y otra de apoyo en la calle. Casi diez años después de que la hidroeléctrica empezara a operar, la reparación tampoco ha llegado.

El primer paso de la reparación tiene un nombre: Territorio Ribereño. Un territorio colectivo de 20.300 hectáreas, formado por tres franjas continuas y que en el papel ya está delimitado, zonificado, con los puntos de reocupación de las familias definidos. Una parte de la tierra se encuentra dentro del Área de Preservación Permanente (APP) que se creó a orillas del embalse y que fue parcialmente deforestada por Norte Energia entre 2011 y 2014. La otra franja son las tierras de fondo, las llamadas áreas linderas, que están detrás de la APP, y que, según el Instituto Brasileño de Medio Ambiente y Recursos Naturales Renovables (Ibama), Norte Energia debería adquirir. A pesar de que la Agencia Nacional de Energía Eléctrica haya emitido una Declaración de Utilidad Pública que garantiza que se pueden expropiar estas áreas, la empresa viene posponiendo la compra de las tierras. Y el gobierno federal pareciera no tener fuerzas para hacer cumplir la norma.

Durante once días, SUMAÚMA intentó obtener respuestas del Ministerio de Medio Ambiente y Cambio Climático sobre cómo puede ser que una empresa esté por encima de la ley y del Estado brasileño, cómo puede ser que el gobierno federal no logre que Norte Energia cumpla lo que les debe a los tantos destinos que Belo Monte atravesó. Nadie apareció para explicar por qué todavía no se ha implementado el Territorio Ribereño y por qué Norte Energia sigue sin cumplir lo acordado.

Lea en sumauma.com/es

Almost ten years after the hydroelectric plant became operational, its concessionaire Norte Energia has yet to purchase ...
23/09/2025

Almost ten years after the hydroelectric plant became operational, its concessionaire Norte Energia has yet to purchase land for the “Ribeirinho Territory,” while the government appears to lack the strength to force the consortium to comply with the regulation.

The damming of the Xingu River to drive the turbines of the Belo Monte Hydroelectric Plant also cut off the lives of at least 296 families who were part of the River. That stretch of water became the reservoir for Belo Monte, the largest fully Brazilian owned hydroelectric plant, which fails to produce even 40% of its installed energy capacity and whose operating license expired in 2021.

Belo Monte’s Environmental Master Plan promised to restore the way of life of the affected populations. The plant’s operating license was granted on the condition that Norte Energia review how it had treated the Ribeirinhos, ensuring this traditional community had two homes: one on the River and another in the city, so they could access healthcare and other services. Almost ten years after Belo Monte began operating, they’re still waiting for reparations.

The first step toward such reparations has a name: the Ribeirinho Territory. A collective territory of 20,300 hectares, it is formed of three continuous strips and on paper it has already been drawn up and zoned, and the locations that families will reoccupy have been defined. A portion of the land lies within the Permanent Preservation Area created on the reservoir’s banks, which was partially deforested by Norte Energia between 2011 and 2014. The other strip is the so-called adjacent areas adjoining the Permanent Preservation Area, which, according to Brazil’s environmental protection agency IBAMA, Norte Energia is obligated to acquire.

SUMAÚMA reached out to the Environment and Climate Change Ministry and over eleven days tried to find out how it is possible for a company to put itself above the law and how it could be that the federal government is unable to compel Norte Energia to comply with its obligations to the many destinations affected by Belo Monte. No one showed up to explain.

Read on sumauma.com.

Scientist Paulo Artaxo isn’t wearing rose-colored glasses, nor is he throwing in the towel. This year, the expert in atm...
18/09/2025

Scientist Paulo Artaxo isn’t wearing rose-colored glasses, nor is he throwing in the towel. This year, the expert in atmospheric physics and veteran scholar on the Amazon is one of the members of the Science Council on the Climate, created by the COP30 president. The Council is tasked with providing scientific evidence on key issues for the conference, while also “proactively highlighting other relevant topics”.

A professor with the Physics Institute at the University of São Paulo, Paulo Artaxo was part of the teams that drafted the three last assessment reports from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC. He will also take part in the next report, the seventh, which will be released in 2028 or 2029. In June, he was the first signatory on a letter from over 250 scientists asking President Lula to lead an initiative at COP30 to implement the commitment to gradually eliminate fossil fuels that all of the countries at COP28 signed.

Talking about how forests are being degraded and how trees facing this situation are suffering is one way to emphasize the two measures that must be combined or else it will be impossible to contain climate change: an end to deforestation and a drastic reduction in the burning of oil, gas and coal, which are responsible for over 75% of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide. The first measure is not enough without the second. “Even if deforestation ends, global heating will continue to cause forest degradation,” Artaxo said during an interview on August 14. “Society needs to understand the risks that one economic sector, the oil industry, is putting on the 8 billion-plus people on our planet,” he warned at the Museum of Tomorrow.

Read the interview on sumauma.com/en

It is still night when the first footsteps touch the ground. The sound of hammocks being taken down announces the hunt i...
10/09/2025

It is still night when the first footsteps touch the ground. The sound of hammocks being taken down announces the hunt is about to begin. The Forest is wet with dew, and bleary eyes try to get used to the dark. The Sun is emerging and mist swirls in with the smoke rising from last night’s dying embers. Bodies move, and the growling and howling of the hounds grows louder and louder. Bilibeu has arrived. It is the call of Encantaria, when spirits and humans coexist. Today is the day of the Akroá Gamella. Today is the day of Bilibeu in the Taquaritiua Indigenous Territory, in Viana, Maranhão state, and everything that will be experienced and felt from now until nightfall stirs forth from the memory of a people who persist, resist, and live on.

“It is a time to express abundance, disproving those who have always said we were poor people, like those who have nothing. This ritual is the time for showing we have a lot,” says Kum’tum (pronounced koomTOOM) Akroá Gamella, a member of the Akroá Gamella Leadership Council.

Bilibeu, also known as Bilibreu or Oracio, is a name that comes from ancient times. It is a ritual that intertwines festivities and spirituality, its footsteps inviting enchanted beings and the living to run together. It is a hunt but also an offering. It prepares the body and fertility but is also a celebration. Within this movement, Bilibeu is sustained, as a way of restoring memory, life in community, and its interlacing with fields, rivers, religious rites, and the earth.

For us, the Akroá Gamella, the Bilibeu festival doesn’t begin—it reveals itself; it is a manifestation.

As long as there is Bilibeu, there will be Akroá Gamella. As long as there is Akroá Gamella, Bilibeu will live on.

I, the one telling you about this ritual, am a small part of the Akroá Gamella people

By Énh Xym Akroá Gamella

Read on sumauma.com/en

This report is the first of the second cycle of the Mycelium-SUMAÚMA Co-training Program for Forest-Journalists. We are certain that, after reading the report-testimony of Énh Xym Akroá Gamella, you will understand what Mycelium is and the transformative power it holds.

By Viviane Zandonadi, Xingu River, Altamira, the AmazonI took advantage of the recent time I spent near the Xingu River...
09/09/2025

By Viviane Zandonadi, Xingu River, Altamira, the Amazon

I took advantage of the recent time I spent near the Xingu River to read and write about the book “The Apprentice Tourist”, by Mário de Andrade. Mário and I are two Southeasterners dazzled by Nature and irritated by the mosquitoes and heat, always together in a fold of time. I worked on this text under the spell of my relocation and the proximity of the waters, dodging mosquito bites and the açaí I don’t know how to like. It was delightful—and a bit strange—to voyage with this book in the form of a travel diary. Sailing rivers deep in the Amazon Forest, “The Tourist” narrates an expedition that took place from May to August 1927.

What (and how) would Mário write today about the motorbikes whizzing recklessly down the streets of frenzied Altamira? About the helmetless children, held on by their waists? About the refrigerators, mattresses, and gas tanks piled up on back? Why so many pharmacies? And funeral homes? And potholes? Where have all the trees gone? Would he notice the nice people making life nicer in a city ravaged by ruin? Would he be touched by the great egrets, fake and unfailing, welcoming us at the airport? Would he, like me, feel the hot air squeezing his emotions and squashing his brains as we file down the stairs and take our first steps on the sparkling asphalt upon arrival?

In Altamira, even when I wasn’t jotting words down in my notebook, I read and wrote about “The Apprentice Tourist” and conversed with both.

Read the full text on sumauma.com.

https://sumauma.com/es/o-turista-aprendiz-a-amazonia-na-ponta-da-lingua-de-mario-de-andrade/

Holding the rise in the planet’s average temperature to 1.5 degrees Celsius compared to pre-Industrial levels (1850)—the...
03/09/2025

Holding the rise in the planet’s average temperature to 1.5 degrees Celsius compared to pre-Industrial levels (1850)—the most ambitious target in the Paris Agreement—is probably already unattainable, with the adverb “probably” merely covering the off chance something unexpected happens.

The most optimistic possibility right now is that warming above 1.5C might later be reversed, cooling the Earth back down by the end of this century and returning it to a balance more compatible with the preservation of life.

Even this would require a much bigger effort by human societies, especially the most powerful political and economic sectors, to cut greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and conserve the biomes that absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. And nothing suggests such an effort is underway.

The scenario in which the planet heats up more than 1.5C and then cools down after a time—perhaps decades—is called “overshoot.” Although the word literally means “exceed” in English, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, a scientific body of the United Nations, applies the term to scenarios where an increase above 1.5C is later reversed. With the current path of GHG emissions indicating that global heating cannot be held below 1.5C degrees, the word has become ubiquitous in debates among climate scientists. “Nobody is arguing that the best scenario is a 1.5C rise accompanied by overshoot, but it has become the best possible scenario, because not exceeding 1.5C just isn’t possible anymore,” says Roberto Schaeffer, professor of energy economics at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.

Read the article on sumauma.com

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When the Federal Supreme Court begins the trial against retired Army captain Jair Bolsonaro, three generals, a fleet adm...
02/09/2025

When the Federal Supreme Court begins the trial against retired Army captain Jair Bolsonaro, three generals, a fleet admiral, a lieutenant colonel, and two civilians for five crimes, Brazil will be a different country. For the first time, a former president and top military officials will be tried in a civil court for attempting a coup. They are almost certain to be convicted, given the abundance of evidence collected by the Federal Police and set forth by the country’s Prosecutor General in the indictment.

It is a win – and because those are increasingly rare, as of September 2 we must all stop for at least a minute to understand with all of our feelings, our nerves, and our cells the grandeur of this moment. And, after this, we must gather our children and young people around the dinner table, at schools, in community centers, in squares and parks, on football pitches and in churches, along alleyways and backroads, and tell them how important this achievement is, one that so many generations have fought for decades to attain. This Tuesday, September 2, 2025, Brazilian democracy is proving that no criminal, not even one in uniform, not even one with four stars on their chest, will go unpunished in Brazil.

Again, it must be repeated: this is huge. And we hope this greatness grows with the conviction of Bolsonaro and the generals, with the imprisonment of Bolsonaro and the generals, and without any sort of amnesty for the members of the military and the civilians who tried to overthrow the government by invading and vandalizing the Praça dos Três Poderes, (The Three Powers Square, which is the heart of federal governance and justice in Brasilia) in an attempted coup d’état on January 8, 2023.

In this immense moment, SUMAÚMA hopes this new chapter in Brazil’s history builds paths to extending democracy to those who have not been reached by it, like the poorest people in the peripheries and urban favelas, like Nature itself and her peoples. May the military never again turn its weapons against democracy, in practice or as a threat. May the government project built upon the invasion and violation of the Amazon and all the biomes finally begin to fall.

Deforestation kills. Not just trees, insects, birds, monkeys and other wildlife who die from chainsaws or fires, but als...
01/09/2025

Deforestation kills. Not just trees, insects, birds, monkeys and other wildlife who die from chainsaws or fires, but also local human residents, who suffer from a sharp increase in heat exposure when the cooling forest canopy is removed.

Now for the first time, we know just how murderous that can be thanks to a groundbreaking new study that estimates more than half a million people lost their lives in the tropics over the past two decades as a result of heat-related diseases connected to forest clearance.

SUMAÚMA has always highlighted the fact that deforestation is not just a real estate issue of clearing so many hectares of land; it is death. We broke the news that more than two billion trees are estimated to have been destroyed or affected by fire or land clearance in the Amazon during the presidency of Jair Bolsonaro, along with more than a million monkeys, while roughly 80 million birds lost nests or habitats.

The toll should alarm local populations in deforested areas, especially those who work outside and are most exposed to the sun. It should prompt the governments of Brazil and other tropical nations to redouble their efforts to halt the destruction of the Amazon and other forests in the Congo and Southeast Asia, not just for global environmental or climate reasons, but because it is essential for the health and safety of their populations in the affected areas.

Read the editorial written by Jonathan Watts on sumauma.com

The youth climate movement gained strength in 2018, driven by Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, who began skipping school...
28/08/2025

The youth climate movement gained strength in 2018, driven by Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, who began skipping school every Friday to protest outside the Swedish Parliament. Her actions demanded stronger responses to the climate crisis and quickly gave rise to Fridays for Future, an international mobilization for urgent and systemic climate action.

In 2022, Pakistani activist Ayisha Siddiqa () captured international attention during a speech at Climate Week in New York, when she declared: “to hell with your sustainability, my people are dying”. She was referring to one of the most extreme climate events in Pakistan’s history, a flood that had occurred just months earlier, affecting 33 million people, displacing nearly 8 million, leaving more than 1,700 dead, and submerging one-third of the country.

In this interview with SUMAÚMA, Siddiqa discusses the fractures and contradictions within Fridays for Future caused by the movement’s stance on the genocide in Gaza. In May, she made public her dissatisfaction with a post by German activist Luisa Neubauer* on the subject, demanding an apology for the involvement of Fridays for Future Germany in decisions that, according to her, sought to depoliticize the connection between the climate crisis and Israel’s invasion of Palestine.

Read the full interview on sumauma.com/en

By ()

I am a young Indigenous man from the Xipai people. In the linear time calculations of the non-Indigenous, I am 19 years ...
25/08/2025

I am a young Indigenous man from the Xipai people. In the linear time calculations of the non-Indigenous, I am 19 years old. I had lived my whole life in my village, in Xipaya Indigenous Territory, without ever spending more than a month in a city—until I moved to Altamira, in the state of Pará, where I moved in early 2025 to work at the SUMAÚMA newsroom.There I saw people living their lives without looking at each other, people walking around in a rush, not knowing where they’re going, beyond their immediate destination.

To explain everything that cut through me and transmuted my body into river rapids in a city that was transforming me into a virus, I spent six months listening to a Forest-being in this city that is deforesting itself. It was a listening experience where I could never silence myself completely because it was like screaming and hearing my own echo. I listened to beings who emerge in the dark, who carry shadows on their wings and wonder in their flight. I listened to Moths.

I listened to Moths because they are people too. If you’re not Indigenous, this statement might sound odd, but if you were a member of my ethnic group, at some point in your life you would have heard from an elder or maybe while reading one of my people’s stories: “Armadillos, when they were people…” or “This is the song caterpillars sang when they were people.” The phrase “when they were people” doesn’t mean they are no longer people, only that they’re no longer people in the same bodies as ours, like they were before. Now they’re people in bodies different from ours, with lives different from ours. That’s why I decided to listen to Moth-Persons.

Read Wajã and the Moth’s story at sumauma.com/en

All of you already know COP30 kicks off on November 10, in Belém, and SUMAÚMA’s coverage is in the rivers, in ecosystems...
19/08/2025

All of you already know COP30 kicks off on November 10, in Belém, and SUMAÚMA’s coverage is in the rivers, in ecosystems, and on the ground.

As you may also know, the UN conference is where countries talk about ways to fight the world’s biggest problem, the collapse of the climate. For the first time in 30 years, the coming COP will be held in the Amazon.

Something else you already know is the immense pleasure SUMAÚMA takes in telling stories after paying close attention to what really matters, to the decisions made, the consequences, and the people affected by them. After listening to the Forest and its inhabitants. After listening to the sciences of academia and of traditional peoples.

COP30 started a long time ago at SUMAÚMA and we have been telling its stories from the inside, from the forest-centers and periphery-centers.

So, what’s new? This right here: We’re ready to send the most insightful and provocative coverage of COP30 straight to your e-mail. Our award-winning journalists will provide everything you need to know and discuss. To receive our new newsletter, just subscribe: sumauma.com/en/newsletter/cop30/

Countries fail to include issues in negotiations that are essential to containing the climate’s collapse, such as elimin...
14/08/2025

Countries fail to include issues in negotiations that are essential to containing the climate’s collapse, such as eliminating fossil fuels and pushing for more ambitious national goals to cut planet-heating greenhouse gas emissions.

Read more on sumauma.com/en

By Claudia Antunes

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