Stories written by Mario Osava
Mario Osava has been an IPS correspondent since 1978, first from Portugal, then from Brazil starting in 1980. He has covered events and processes all throughout Brazil and has recently been engaged in covering major infrastructural projects that reflect opportunities for development and South American integration.
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Indigenous peoples in Brazil have won a new right: a share in the profits of hydroelectric plants that cause them harm when built on or near their lands.
Electricity is essential for the well-being and prosperity of traditional riverside communities in the Amazon, as demonstrated by the experience of the Santa Helena do Inglês community, located on the right bank of the Negro River in northern Brazil.
Almost everything seems new or under construction in the southern Brazilian city of Hortolandia, from its wide avenues and cable-stayed bridge to its large buildings and riverside parks.
It was necessary to repel the "invasion" of mobile phones in Brazilian classrooms, even to spark a debate about the use of technology in education, according to Silvana Veloso, an educator with extensive experience on the subject.
The flow of the igarapé always dropped for three months every year, but now it has been dry for two years in a row, complains Maria Aparecida dos Anjos, looking at the trickle of water that when flooded reaches the stilts of her wooden house, 50 metres away and on a slope of more than 10 metres high.
They look like attempts to copy the moon’s surface, in some cases, as craters multiply in the grasslands. But they are actually micro-dams, barraginhas in Portuguese, which have spread in Brazil as a successful way to store water and prevent soil erosion in rural areas.
Holding this year's presidency of the Group of 20 (G20) large industrial and emerging economies is allowing Brazil to push forward the dream of creating a global biofuels market without the current trade barriers.
“I don't know of a more sustainable technology for the transformation of society than biogas,” said Professor Alex Enrich-Prast, an activist for this energy alternative with a highly diversified and decentralised expansion in Brazil.
A community bakery, family production of fruit pulp, and the recovery of water springs are some of the initiatives of the Energy of Women of the Earth, organised since 2017 in the state of Goiás, in central-western Brazil.
A never-ending battle threatens the indigenous rights that seemed clear and secure in Brazil, until the extreme right emerged in 2018 with a force challenging the civilisational advances set out in the Constitution.
Water shortage is over, springs have emerged or become perennial, small ponds with fish have formed and pastures have become greener and more permanent, all thanks to the ‘barraginhas’, the Portuguese name given in Brazil to micro-dams that retain rainwater and infiltrate it into the soil.
The decade-and-a-half-long battle for life in the so-called Volta Grande (Big Bend) of the Xingu river, a stretch of the river dewatered by the Belo Monte hydroelectric power plant in the Brazilian Amazon, has a possible solution, albeit a partial one.
Hotels and other amenities may be lacking for participants at the 30th Conference of the Parties on Climate Change (COP30), in this northern Brazilian city in late 2025, but the bottom line is they will have a unique experience in the Amazon.
With barely 10 years in operation, the port of Açu is now the second in Brazil in cargo transport and seeks to become an industrial and energy transition hub. But so far it has contributed little to local development, causing environmental and social damage.
Osmir da Silva Rubez refuses to join the drip system, and is the only one among the 51 families living in the Mandacaru Public Irrigation Project in Juazeiro, a municipality in the state of Bahia, in the Northeast region of Brazil, to maintain the furrows that carry water to their crops.
“I feel like a mother who lost her son to drugs, to vice, destroying himself,” says Lucineide da Silva, 56, mother of eight children and grandmother of 11.
Coastal erosion has been aggravated by climate change and has already destroyed more than 500 houses in the town of Atafona in southeastern Brazil. Movements led largely by women are working to combat the advance of the sea and generate economic alternatives.
Biogas sounds like redemption, the conversion of the sinner. Its production involves extracting energy from filth, from the most disgusting environmental pollution, and at the same time avoiding the worsening of the global climate crisis.
A bakery, fruit pulp processing and water pumped from springs are empowering women farmers in Goiás, a central-eastern state of Brazil. New renewable energy sources are driving the process.
Alice went for eight weeks without Portuguese language classes after starting her first year of high school on Feb. 5 in this Brazilian city. Her chemistry teacher taught only two classes and disappeared. But the worst part is the classroom without air conditioning in the heat of more than 35 degrees Celsius some days during the southern hemisphere summer.
Brazil is counting on biofuels to assert itself as an energy powerhouse in the near future, as a decisive supplier of low-carbon jet fuel, a requirement of the climate crisis.
The electrification of automobiles has tended to curb the strong ethanol and biodiesel agribusiness developed in the country since the 1970s. But demand for sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) now offers the possibility of significant new expansion for many decades to come.