Brazilian Environment and Climate Change Minister Marina Silva stepped down on April 1, ending a 39-month stint at the helm of an agency she said had to be “rebuilt in terms of political, ethical, technical, administrative and operational capacity.” Left unsaid was the backstory—the ministry’s hollowing-out from 2019 to 2022 under the right-wing presidency of Jair Bolsonaro. Bolsonaro lost his 2022 reelection bid to current President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who appointed Marina Silva environment minister on Jan. 4, 2023, three days after his inauguration. It was not her first stint as Brazil’s top green-policy official. When Lula served two consecutive presidential terms from 2003 to 2011, Silva headed the environment ministry during the first four-year term and part of the second. Silva said on April 4 that she plans to run for one of two senate seats representing São Paulo state that...
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A member of the provincial legislature of Tierra del Fuego, Argentina, has filed a lawsuit seeking to reverse the repeal in December of a four-year-old law banning salmon farming in the southern Patagonian province. Pablo Villegas filed suit with the province of Tierra del Fuego’s Supreme Court on March 20, demanding the repeal be declared unconstitutional. At issue is the provincial legislature’s recent decision to overturn a law, enacted in June 2021, that blocked plans for commercial salmon farming in local waters. The 2021 prohibition was approved amid concern that salmon farming would pose an unacceptable coastal-pollution threat. But on Dec. 15, 2025, the province’s 15-member, unicameral legislature approved the ban’s repeal in a vote of 8 to 7, with support coming from libertarian Argentine President Javier Milei’s Liberty Advances party and the province’s center-left governor, Gustavo Melella. Melella touted salmon farming as a strategic...
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In Amambay, a northeastern department of Paraguay on the border with Brazil, the Paĩ Tavyterã people are denouncing the incursion of illegal loggers onto the ancestral lands they call Yvy Pyte. Leaders of the Paĩ Tavyterã, one of Paraguay’s six main Guaraní Indigenous groups, say outsiders entered their territory in March with chainsaws, tractors and trucks. The intruders cut and hauled timber near the protected area of Jasuka Venda, or Cerro Guasu, a densely forested hill they consider sacred, damaging the infrastructure of a local school in the process. “They are stripping the forest bare right before our eyes,” said community representatives, who filed a complaint endorsed by a dozen indigenous, environmental and social organizations. The complaint prompted a crackdown by the Specialized Environmental Unit of the Public Prosecutor’s Office—led by Prosecutor Reinalda Palacios and Indigenous expert Digna Morilla—as well as personnel from the National Forestry Institute (Infona...
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