Petrobras announced on Thursday (29) its third oil discovery at the Morpho well, in the Foz do Amazonas basin, about 150 kilometers off the coast of the state of Amapá, in Brazil's far north. The state-controlled company said drilling and geological data collection at the block are complete. It is the company's first ultra-deepwater drilling campaign in the region, under a water column of 2,886 meters, the distance from the sea surface to the ocean floor.The two earlier discoveries at the same well had been disclosed in August and early October 2026. According to Folha de S.Paulo, Petrobras said the finds correspond to three different reservoirs at different depths, but has not yet detailed the volume or quality of the oil found."Our technical persistence allowed three discoveries to be made in the same well, which makes us even more optimistic about the exploratory potential of the Equatorial Margin," Petrobras chief executive Magda Chambriard said in a statement. The Equatorial Margin is the stretch of Brazil's northern coastline, from Amapá to Rio Grande do Norte, where sedimentary basins share geology with neighboring Guyana.Global oil majors circle the regionThe global oil industry is watching the Foz do Amazonas closely, betting on a new producing frontier similar to the one that turned Guyana into an oil exporter in recent years. U.S. companies ExxonMobil and Chevron have already begun exploratory work in the area, hiring seismic surveys from contractors SLB and Shearwater, the first step in the search for reserves. ExxonMobil operates five concessions in the Foz do Amazonas; Chevron operates nine. In October, Brazil's oil regulator ANP approved the delimitation of 501 new exploratory blocks along the equatorial margin, although offering them to the market still depends on studies by other branches of the government.With work finished off Amapá, the rig that drilled the Morpho well will move to the Potiguar basin, off the coast of Rio Grande do Norte, where it will begin drilling at the Mãe de Ouro site. To assess the extent of the Foz do Amazonas finds, Petrobras plans to drill three more wells, already licensed by Ibama, Brazil's federal environmental agency. Extreme depth and strong ocean currents slowed the operation: drilling at Morpho began nearly a year ago.

Lawyer Vinicius Domingues Borba, announced as the next environment secretary of the state of Pará, was cited by Ibama, Brazil's federal environmental enforcement agency, in 2021 on accusations of destroying 346.7 hectares of native forest in the Xingu River basin, an area equivalent to 484 soccer fields. The infraction notice carried a fine of R$ 3.4 million (about US$ 630,000). The case was revealed on Thursday (29) by the newspaper Folha de S.Paulo, based on agency documents.According to the Ibama inspection report obtained by the newspaper, the clearing to create pasture took place between June 2019 and July 2021 on a farm between the municipalities of Altamira and São Félix do Xingu. The property sits inside the Triunfo do Xingu Environmental Protection Area, a type of conservation unit that allows restricted economic use, on the edge of the Terra do Meio Ecological Station, one of the Amazon's most important blocks of protected forest. The deforested area was spotted in satellite images and inspected on the ground by Ibama agents in August 2021.Reached by Folha, Borba said in written messages on Monday (26) that the infraction "was annulled by the Federal Court, and there is currently no active embargo or infraction notice in my name." Ibama told the newspaper the same day that a 2021 court order only suspended the requirement to pay the debt. The case is still before the courts, the agency said, and the administrative process awaits instruction and judgment. In July, at the request of state prosecutors, the court ordered the Civil Police to carry out new investigative steps.A second fine, tied to an operation on indigenous landBorba was also fined R$ 20,500 in 2023, accused of obstructing environmental enforcement and inciting the population against Ibama agents. According to the agency's report, the lawyer spread "erroneous information," in person and on social media, about Operation Eraha Tapiro, which removed cattle herds from inside the Ituna-Itata Indigenous Land, between the municipalities of José Porfírio and Altamira. After his actions, Ibama says, inspectors began to observe "heightened tempers" among local residents. That process is in the report-drafting phase, and the debt has not been paid.The case highlights the challenge of the office Borba is set to lead. Pará, the state that hosted the COP30 climate summit in Belém, concentrates some of the largest deforestation hotspots in the Amazon, and the Xingu region is among the areas under the most pressure from cattle ranching. The state's environmental policy is central to Brazil's climate targets, which depend on curbing deforestation to meet international commitments and keep access to markets that demand traceability, such as the European Union.The enforcement chain that caught the clearing remains active on the case: the area was detected by satellite, inspected in the field by Ibama, and is now the target of new police diligences requested by prosecutors. Borba was announced for the next state government, which takes office in January under governor-elect Daniel Santos, the winner of the Pará gubernatorial race, according to the local press.

Less than a week before COP31, the UN climate conference that opens in November in Antalya, Turkey, the new national climate plans submitted by countries point to a cut of just 6% in global greenhouse gas emissions by 2035. The assessment, which consolidates the nationally determined contributions (NDCs, the climate pledges each country files under the 2015 Paris Agreement), falls far short of what is needed: limiting global warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels would require a 60% reduction, according to G1.Even if every pledge is fully delivered, the emissions trajectory remains incompatible with the 1.5°C limit. The analysis says emissions would need to fall about 43% by 2030 compared with 2019 levels, and 60% by 2035. Under current commitments, projections show average global temperatures rising by as much as 3.2°C this century, G1 reports.The review of NDCs will be one of the main items on the Antalya agenda. The expectation, Folha de Curitiba reports, is that the conference will pressure governments to present more ambitious commitments for the post-2030 period, because current plans fall short of what science recommends. Experts quoted by the outlet warn that the window to avoid the worst impacts of climate change is closing.Record greenhouse gas levelsThe warning about weak pledges came out on the same day the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), a UN agency, reported that the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere hit a new record in 2025: 426.8 parts per million, about 153% of the pre-industrial level of 1750. The 2.8 ppm increase in one year was larger than the average of the past decade. Methane and nitrous oxide also reached unprecedented levels, at 267% and 126% of pre-industrial levels respectively, according to InfoMoney. The WMO will present the data to negotiators at COP31 and warns that a strong El Niño could push concentrations even higher this year by drying out vegetation and making it harder for natural carbon sinks, such as tropical forests, to absorb emissions."Every additional part per million matters because it traps extra heat. In practice, we are overloading the ocean and the atmosphere," said Ko Barrett, WMO deputy secretary-general. "This means heatwaves, tropical cyclones and storms are intensifying faster than our historical references have prepared us to face."The figures arrive one year after Brazil hosted COP30 in Belém, at the edge of the Amazon in Pará state, where countries were pressed to file more ambitious targets for 2035. Brazil holds the rotating presidency of the climate conferences until COP31 opens and arrives in Antalya handing over a set of commitments that remains insufficient: the cuts promised so far add up to one tenth of what would be needed over a decade. What is at stake in November is whether governments turn the NDC review into real cuts or let the gap between promise and practice keep growing.

Nearly all of the world's shallow-water coral reefs are now classified as critically endangered and face a high risk of collapse within the next 50 years, according to the first global assessment of these ecosystems by the IUCN Red List of Ecosystems, a scientific risk framework run by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. The report, published on Thursday (22), divided reefs into 127 tropical and subtropical ecoregions and found that 96% of them, or 122 regions, sit at the most severe risk level. They include Australia's Great Barrier Reef, the Coral Triangle in the western Pacific, the Mesoamerican Reef in the Caribbean and the reefs of Florida in the United States.More than 250 experts took part in the work, which identified heat stress driven by climate change as the main threat. Excessive heat causes bleaching, a process in which corals expel the symbiotic algae that supply most of their food; if the stress persists, the coral falls ill and dies. Without the additional warming projected from greenhouse gas emissions, mainly from burning oil, gas and coal, the share of critically endangered reef ecosystems would be 24%, according to The New York Times reporting carried by Folha de S.Paulo. One region, the Western Galapagos Islands, is already considered collapsed.Under the IUCN definition, collapse means the near-total or complete loss of live hard corals, to the point where the reef can no longer sustain itself. The tropical and subtropical belt assessed includes the reef ecosystems of the Brazilian coast, from the reef at the mouth of the Amazon River to the Abrolhos Bank off Bahia state. The classification is based on the currently estimated climate trajectory, and the researchers stress that the reefs are not yet lost.What is at stakeShallow reefs cover less than 1% of the ocean floor but provide habitat for about a quarter of marine species at some point in their life cycle. Hundreds of millions of people depend on them for subsistence fishing and coastal protection. "If coral reefs collapse, we lose one of the most extraordinary ecosystems on Earth and we risk the food, the livelihoods and the lifeline of coastal communities around the world", Sarah Bedolfe, a senior marine scientist at the NGO Oceana who was not part of the assessment, told Mongabay.What can still be doneFor Marcos Valderrábano, programme manager of the Red List of Ecosystems at IUCN, the biggest lever is cutting emissions and demanding urgent climate action from governments. He says it is also necessary to improve the overall health of corals so they can recover after heat waves: reduce pollution on reefs, protect remaining corals and fight the overfishing of species such as parrotfish and grouper, which makes reef recovery harder. "None of this replaces emissions cuts, and we should not pretend that it does", he told Mongabay.

The world's largest tropical rainforest has become a source of carbon for the atmosphere. Between 2010 and 2024, the Amazon released, on average, 1.17 billion metric tons of CO2 per year more than it absorbed, according to a study published in the journal Nature by researchers at Inpe, Brazil's National Institute for Space Research, with funding from Fapesp, the Sao Paulo state research foundation, and other Brazilian and international institutions.Fire is the main driver of the imbalance. Burning emitted about 1.47 billion tons of CO2 per year over the period, almost five times the forest's estimated absorption capacity of 300 million tons a year. The work analyzed 15 years of atmospheric measurements of carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide and was led by climate scientist Luciana Gatti, head of Inpe's Greenhouse Gas Laboratory, alongside 32 other researchers.Smoke-filled years outweigh dry yearsBy grouping the measured years, the team showed that human activity explains emissions better than climate. In the wetter years with less deforestation (2011 to 2014, 2017 and 2018), the average balance was 408 million tons of CO2 per year. Between 2019 and 2022, when deforestation and degradation advanced under a relatively stable climate, the figure jumped to 1.58 billion tons. In hot, dry years with intense human activity (2010, 2015, 2016, 2023 and 2024), it reached 1.8 billion tons, according to data reported by Agencia Brasil.Climate stress still acts as an amplifier: droughts increase the carbon released by deforestation and fires. Over 46 years of data, average annual rainfall in the region fell 8%, and peak rainfall in the dry season, from August to November, dropped 20%. Average temperature rose 1.13 °C across the year and 1.81 °C in the dry season, the study found."The main message of the research is shocking: the Amazon's problem is human action. We are losing the forest because the region's development model has been based on destruction. We need public policies that value the standing forest," Gatti told Agencia Fapesp.Smoke over ManausThe scientific warning arrives in the middle of a critical fire season. Inpe has recorded more than 41,300 fire hotspots in the Amazon through October, 58% of them concentrated in September and October, against 43,100 in all of 2025. Smoke blanketed Manaus, the two-million-person capital of Amazonas state, and other municipalities, forcing school closures, overloading the health system with respiratory illnesses and prompting an environmental crime investigation over suspected deliberate burning. In Autazes, about 110 kilometers from Manaus, areas of dense forest burned this month. In Acre state, the cities of Cruzeiro do Sul and Marechal Thaumaturgo are also living under smoke.There are signs of a response. Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon fell 41.8% in one year, according to data reported by Agencia Brasil, and the MapBiomas monitoring project recorded the lowest forest loss in 41 years. The federal government has stepped up firefighting brigades in Para state, and illegal deforestation entered the presidential runoff debate, with candidate Flavio Bolsonaro (PL) promising to end it by 2029. For the study's authors, a drastic cut in burning, combined with zero deforestation and forest restoration, can still push back the so-called tipping point, the threshold beyond which the forest loses its ability to recover. The reversal of the Amazon's role in the carbon cycle weighs on global climate goals: without the tropical sink, the effort to contain warming grows for every country.

Senator Flávio Bolsonaro (PL), son of former president Jair Bolsonaro and candidate in Brazil's presidential runoff, said on Friday night (23) that he intends to end illegal deforestation in the country by 2029 and wants federal environmental agencies to operate without what he called "ideological locks". He made the statements in an interview with journalist Renata Lo Prete on Jornal da Globo, right after the final runoff debate against President Lula (PT) at the Globo studios in Rio de Janeiro, according to G1.Asked whether he would keep the current administration's environmental protection policies, the candidate committed to ending illegal deforestation by 2029 but did not guarantee the continuity of the actions now under way. In the same interview, he said the current government took no initiative to fight fires in the Amazon and defended deploying the Armed Forces in the region."This issue is sometimes much more criminal than environmental, and the Armed Forces will work to fight crimes in the Amazon. The Air Force, for example, will be reequipped with technology to fly over the area and inspect it, and the police will be called in to arrest the people who are doing the illegal deforestation", the candidate said.Pressed on the enforcement work of Ibama, Brazil's federal environmental agency, and ICMBio, the institute that manages federal conservation units, Flávio said both bodies "unfortunately are not being effective" and stated that under his government they "will respect the law". As an example of enforcement he would review, he cited the region of Altamira and the municipalities crossed by the Transamazonica highway in Pará state, where he claimed Ibama is "taking over the property" of settlers who were encouraged to occupy the area decades ago. "They will stop persecuting, for example, the people who live there in Pará", he said.A forest under scientific warningThe candidate's promises come at a moment of heightened alarm over the forest's health. A study published Wednesday (21) in the journal Nature by researchers at Inpe, Brazil's space research institute, with funding from the São Paulo research foundation Fapesp, calculated that the Amazon released 1.17 billion tons of CO2 more than it absorbed per year on average between 2010 and 2024, Folha de S.Paulo reported. Fires accounted for roughly 1.47 billion tons of annual emissions, far above the forest's absorption capacity, estimated at 300 million tons a year.The pattern is repeating now in Manaus and across Amazonas state: Inpe has already counted more than 41,300 fire hotspots in the Amazon in less than ten months of 2026, 58% of them in September and October alone, against 43,100 in all of 2025. The smoke forced schools in Manaus to suspend classes, strained the health system with respiratory cases and prompted an environmental crime investigation into suspected deliberate burning.For the study's authors, reversing the imbalance requires drastically cutting fires, ending deforestation and restoring degraded areas, or the forest risks reaching a tipping point. "The main message of the research is shocking: the Amazon's problem is human action. We need public policies that value the standing forest", climate scientist Luciana Gatti, head of Inpe's Greenhouse Gas Laboratory and lead author of the paper, told Folha.Flávio and Lula face off in the presidential runoff this Sunday (25). The TV Globo confrontation was the last debate between the two before the vote and was marked by personal attacks, as reported by G1 and BBC Brasil.

Brazil's National Institute of Meteorology (Inmet) placed parts of Paraná, Santa Catarina and Rio Grande do Sul under a red alert, its highest danger level, for this Saturday (24), the day before the second round of the presidential election. An extratropical cyclone forming off the southern coast is expected to bring more than 100 millimeters of rain, wind gusts above 100 km/h and hail, according to the institute.In Santa Catarina, the red warning covers the North, the Serra, the Itajaí Valley and the West. In Paraná, it applies to the Southwest, Southeast, West, Center-South and Center-East regions. In Rio Grande do Sul, the highest-risk area is the state's Northwest. Around those zones, Inmet has issued an orange alert for other parts of the three states and a yellow warning for the rest of the region. According to ND Mais, 273 of Santa Catarina's 295 municipalities are under the orange alert, and the entire state is covered by some level of warning.The event results from the combined action of the cyclone, organizing over the southwestern South Atlantic, a cold front positioned between Rio Grande do Sul and Santa Catarina, and low-pressure areas between northern Argentina, Paraguay and southern Bolivia, according to Inmet. In the orange-alert areas of Santa Catarina, the forecast calls for 30 to 60 millimeters of rain per hour or up to 100 millimeters over the day, with gusts between 60 km/h and 100 km/h.Rain on election SundayOn Sunday (25), when polling stations operate from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., heavy rain is expected to continue in Paraná, with thunderstorms throughout the day, and during the early hours in Santa Catarina, mainly on the coast and in the Itajaí Valley, according to the private forecaster Climatempo. In Rio Grande do Sul, rain should be lighter and passing, as a colder, drier air mass moves in and pushes temperatures down: Florianópolis should range from 15°C to 19°C, Curitiba from 11°C to 20°C and Porto Alegre from 15°C to 18°C. "We expect heavy rain, with lightning and strong winds," Climatempo meteorologist César Soares told G1. The company projects gusts of up to 90 km/h on Saturday in the region, while Inmet estimates winds above 100 km/h in the red-alert areas.Risks and guidanceAccording to Inmet, the conditions may cause power outages, falling trees, flooding and crop damage across the three states. Civil Defense and the institute advise residents not to shelter under trees during gusts, to avoid parking near transmission towers and billboards, and to unplug electrical appliances during storms. In an emergency, Civil Defense can be reached at 199 and the Military Fire Department at 193.Brazil's South has faced a string of extreme weather events in recent years, including the historic flood that hit Rio Grande do Sul in May 2024. Reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) indicate that global warming increases the intensity of extreme rainfall in South America. Faced with this pattern, Inmet and state civil defense agencies have been issuing alerts earlier and earlier, as they did this weekend, to give residents time to protect themselves.

Extreme weather events linked to El Niño have knocked down more than 290 power transmission towers across Brazil since late July, most of them in the South region and some in the Northeast, according to the ONS, the agency that operates the country's national power grid. The figures were presented on Wednesday (21) in Rio de Janeiro by the agency's board, which expects storms to get worse in the coming months, as reported by Folha de S.Paulo.ONS operations director Valter Cardeal said 191 towers on 230 kV and 500 kV lines fell between July 26 and Wednesday, plus more than one hundred 138 kV structures. According to the agency's director-general, Márcio Rea, the towers now in service were not designed for current wind speeds: "In the past, a heavy rainstorm brought winds of 90 to 100 kilometers per hour. Today they reach 250 km/h," he said. Rea described the phenomenon as air currents that descend in opposite directions and collide near the ground: "It is like an explosion. It even twists the towers."Rio Grande do Sul at the epicenterThe most severe case hit the far south of Rio Grande do Sul state. On August 6, an extratropical cyclone brought down towers on the high-voltage line that supplies Santa Vitória do Palmar and Chuí, on the shores of the Mirim Lagoon; two of them fell into the lagoon itself. More than 60 workers were mobilized for the rebuilding, and utility CEEE Equatorial said the storm hit about 34 of the 72 municipalities in its concession area, with gusts up to 132 km/h. In August, Cardeal had already told Valor Econômico that the collapse of around 20 towers in Chuí left the region without power for five days and blocked local wind farms from delivering their output.The problem goes beyond that single episode. According to the ONS, Brazil is facing a frequency of tornadoes and extratropical cyclones not seen before: eight tornadoes have been recorded this year in Paraná state alone, and the agency says it has "lost count" of those in Rio Grande do Sul and Santa Catarina. The national transmission network spans about 186,000 kilometers, and older towers were designed for winds up to 160 km/h, Cardeal said at an industry workshop in August. Rea told Folha he asked tower manufacturers about reinforcing the structures, but the answer was that it would take nine times more steel, at a prohibitive cost. "That is not the way to go," he said.What is being doneWith no immediate structural fix, the ONS has been sending storm forecasts to transmission companies so they can keep crews on alert. Cardeal argues the system has absorbed the impacts: "The system is resilient, the load shedding was very small, I would say insignificant." In August, ONS board chair Solange Ribeiro told Valor the sector needs closer cooperation between companies, Civil Defense and distribution utilities, plus investment in more resilient networks recognized in power tariffs: "Investments designed for the climate of the past, alone, will not solve the problems of the future."The same rains that topple towers have, on the other hand, filled the reservoirs of Brazil's hydro-dependent grid at the start of the rainy season. According to the Ministry of Mines and Energy, reservoirs in the national interconnected system ended September at 61% of capacity, against 56% in the same month of 2025. The ONS projects 56.7% by the end of October, with the South reaching 88.2%, where water flowing into the dams is at 228% of the historical average. As a result, thermal plants, which generate more expensive power and are switched on when hydro reservoirs run low, should be needed only at peak consumption hours. "The water tank is full," Rea said, with one caveat: forecasts point to even stronger storms in the coming months.

Daniel Vorcaro, the former banker who owned the failed Banco Master, asked former Central Bank director Paulo Sérgio Neves de Souza to have the monetary authority pressure Caixa Econômica Federal, Brazil's giant state-owned bank, after technicians at its investment arm Caixa Asset were pushed out for opposing a R$ 500 million purchase of Master financial bills. The revelation comes from Folha de S.Paulo, which obtained messages exchanged between the two men on July 12, 2024. "Can't the Central Bank ask Caixa to take a position?", Vorcaro wrote, according to the report. He then said he had already spoken to someone inside the state bank and suggested the wording of a statement: "They should issue a release saying they filed a criminal complaint over the leak of the report and that the report does not represent Caixa's opinion." One minute later, Paulo Sérgio replied: "We have already called on Caixa to include [the leak of internal information] in the investigation." About the damage the news could do to Master, Vorcaro summed it up: "The harm will be immense." In the same exchange, the banker said Master had lost a R$ 400 million sale of ten-year financial bills to Amapá, money that would come from the pension fund of the northern state's public servants. "It was already signed, approved by the committee," he wrote. According to Folha, the investment ended up sliced into smaller pieces: on that same July 12, 2024, the five members of the investment committee of Amprev, the Amapá state pension fund, unanimously approved R$ 200 million in Master. On July 19 they approved another R$ 100 million, and on July 30 a further R$ 100 million, completing the R$ 400 million. What was at stake Had the purchase gone through, Caixa would today be among the creditors of Master, liquidated by the Central Bank on November 18, 2025, because financial bills (long-term bank bonds) are not covered by the FGC, Brazil's deposit guarantee fund. The goal of the deal, the report says, was to ease Vorcaro's bank liquidity crunch: with R$ 500 million in hand, Master could pay short-term obligations, while the bills sold to the state bank would only mature in ten years. Three Caixa Asset employees lost their posts in July 2024 after recommending against the transaction. The episode remains under scrutiny on several fronts. Federal labor prosecutors opened an inquiry in March into the demotion of the three managers, identified as Leonardo Silva, Mariangela Fraga and Daniel Gracio, according to Jovem Pan. In October 2025, the TCU, Brazil's federal audit court, fined former Caixa Asset director Igor Macedo Laino R$ 10,000 for trying to push the purchase through; the case rapporteur, Antonio Anastasia, found that "relevant information" about Master had been omitted to "bias the decision-making." In a statement to Jovem Pan, Caixa said Caixa Asset "has absolute autonomy and governance" and does not retaliate against employees. Master's collapse has already forced the FGC to begin paying R$ 40.6 billion in guarantees to creditors, the largest rescue in the fund's history. Reached by Folha, Paulo Sérgio's defense said the former director "never protected Daniel Vorcaro's interests and never received any undue or unlawful advantage because of his position." His lawyers argue he oversaw small and mid-sized banks in São Paulo and that dealings with Caixa were handled by the team that supervised the state bank. According to the defense, Paulo Sérgio accessed the Caixa Asset report only to check whether it contained findings relevant to the supervision of Banco Master. The Central Bank and Vorcaro's defense did not comment.

Brazil's greenhouse gas emissions fell 6% in 2025, to 2.06 billion tonnes of CO2 equivalent, the lowest gross volume in eight years. The figures come from the 14th edition of Seeg, the emissions estimate system run by the Observatório do Clima, a network of Brazilian civil society groups, released on Wednesday (21). The drop was driven by falling deforestation across all biomes, above all in the Amazon rainforest and the Cerrado savanna, according to Agência Brasil and Capital Reset.It was the third consecutive annual decline, after 7.5% in 2023 and 12.7% in 2024. Together, the three cuts reduced gross emissions by 26% over the period and reversed the upward cycle recorded between 2019 and 2022, when forest clearing in the Amazon surged. "The last three years reversed a trend of more than a decade of rising emissions", said David Tsai, Seeg coordinator at the Institute for Energy and Environment (Iema), at a press conference.Forests drive the decline; energy and waste keep risingLand use change, the category that covers deforestation, accounted for 39% of gross emissions, at 814 million tonnes, down 15% from 2024. On a net basis, the sector's contraction reached 48%, to 162 million tonnes, the lowest in Seeg's historical series. Agriculture was nearly flat, down 0.1% to 626 million tonnes and 30% of the total: a 6.45% rise in crop farming emissions was offset by a decline from livestock.Outside the forests, the math still does not add up. The energy sector, which includes transport, grew 1.2% to 427 million tonnes, pushed by higher diesel and gasoline consumption on the roads and by gas-fired power plants, which raised electricity generation emissions by 6%. Waste posted the largest proportional increase, 3.6% to 96 million tonnes, tied to population growth and disposal in landfills and open dumps. Industrial processes edged up 0.2%, to 94 million tonnes.After discounting carbon removals, 650 million tonnes in 2025, from regrowing secondary vegetation and protected areas such as Indigenous lands and conservation units, Brazil's net emissions totaled 1.41 billion tonnes, down 9% from 2024 and the lowest since 2012.The result left Brazil 85 million tonnes short of meeting its 2025 climate target under its first NDC (Nationally Determined Contribution, the country's pledge under the Paris Agreement), which set a ceiling of 1.32 billion net tonnes. For 2030, the second NDC, submitted in 2025, requires cutting emissions to a range between 850 million and 1.05 billion tonnes. Preliminary Observatório do Clima data point to negative net land-use emissions in 2026, of minus 24 million tonnes, while the federal government regulates Brazil's new carbon market."The drop in emissions from deforestation is a major victory, but if the other sectors do not start cutting their emissions now, it will become hard to meet the next NDC targets", Tsai warned, according to Agência Brasil.

Brazil's main waterways in the Amazon and the Pantanal have been placed on alert for cargo and passenger transport because of drought, according to a Ministry of Ports and Airports report obtained by Folha de S.Paulo. The document, prepared by the National Waterways and Navigation Secretariat with data from September 30, shows the Madeira river in Rondônia below the reference level for imposing navigation restrictions, the Tapajós river in Pará close to 3 meters deep at critical points, and persistent extreme drought in the Paraguai river basin in the Pantanal wetlands.On the Madeira, the gauge at Porto Velho (RO) read 3.07 meters on September 30, after dropping 1.37 meters during the month. The 4-meter mark is the reference for the start of restrictions, and 2 meters for a full halt to navigation. For now, the alert does not amount to a formal emergency declaration or a suspension of traffic. The waterway, which links Porto Velho to the Amazon river, carried 12.1 million tonnes of soybeans and corn in 2025 and is also the route by which fuel and essential goods reach riverside towns in Rondônia and Amazonas states. Despite the drop, the current level is well above the 49 centimeters recorded on the same day in 2024, and the forecast points to levels near the historical median, with recovery starting in October.On the Tapajós, the report cites depths of 3.15 meters at Itapaiúna and 2.99 meters at Monte Cristo, two critical navigation points in Pará. At Itaituba, the level was 2.40 meters after a 1.91-meter fall in the month; at Santarém, 2.63 meters, down 2.10 meters. Both stations are forecast to stay below the historical median. The waterway receives at the Miritituba terminals, in Itaituba, the grain that arrives by truck along the BR-163 highway, mostly from Mato Grosso, and ships it by barge to export ports. According to the ministry, the Tapajós moved 2.38 million tonnes in the first two months of 2026, 86% of it soybeans and corn, plus fertilizers and liquid bulk.Dredging canceled as agribusiness pressesThe risk of restrictions on the Tapajós corridor has drawn pressure from the farm sector. In August, groups mobilized by the Congressional Agribusiness Caucus estimated that the lack of river dredging could cause an impact of up to R$ 850 million (roughly US$ 160 million) on the production chain. The fear is that part of the cargo would shift to trucks, raising the cost of moving the Center-West harvest to export markets. In September, Dnit, the federal transport infrastructure agency, canceled a R$ 74.8 million dredging tender for the Tapajós after a technical review and dialogue with Indigenous peoples and traditional communities opposed to work on the river.Rio Negro falls, Solimões rises, Paraguai stays in extreme droughtIn Manaus, the Rio Negro station recorded 18.80 meters on September 30, after falling 5.21 meters in one month, 1.72 meters below the historical median, though still above the 13.14 meters of the same day in 2024. The Negro and Solimões rivers form the passenger and small-cargo route across Amazonas state, and the report warns that sandbanks could restrict passage on stretches of both rivers, including between Manaus and Coari. On the Solimões, the picture is more favorable: Tabatinga read 3.47 meters and Coari 6.70 meters, both above the median and in the normal range, with Tabatinga rising 41 centimeters in the last week of September.In the Pantanal, the main concern is the Paraguai river, whose basin faces persistent extreme drought. At Cáceres, in Mato Grosso, the level was 77 centimeters on September 30, against a historical median of 1.42 meters for the date, and three important stretches of the river were at the lower end of the normal range. Forecasts of below-average rain in parts of the Amazon over the coming months sharpen the focus on these routes, which both supply cities and riverside communities and carry grain and ore to export markets, tying the regional dry spell directly to Brazil's logistics costs in global commodity trade.

Brazil's federal government announced on Saturday (17) the deployment of five additional aircraft and the mobilization of military personnel and federal police to reinforce the fight against forest fires in Amazonas state. With the reinforcements, the fleet assigned to operations in the state grows from 11 to 16 aircraft, according to the Ministry of Environment and Climate Change. The package also includes R$ 14 million (about US$ 2.6 million) from the National Civil Defense for logistics, protective and firefighting equipment and the hiring of two aircraft, plus a base of the SUS National Force, the emergency arm of Brazil's public health system, in Manaus, scheduled for Tuesday (20).The expansion came on a day when the smoke itself hindered the response. According to Ibama, the federal environmental agency, low visibility on Saturday grounded firefighting aircraft at the two airports used in Manaus, and the agency said it expected conditions to improve before flights could resume. The state capital recorded air quality classified as dangerous by the IQAir platform in the morning, a result of fires in the interior of Amazonas and in neighboring states.Fleet and personnelAmong the new aircraft is a second military KC-390, able to drop up to 19,000 liters of water per flight, joining another plane of the same model already in operation with a capacity of 12,000 liters. Helicopters will drop water and carry crews and equipment to hard-to-reach areas. Since federal support operations began on October 9, about 600,000 liters of water have been dropped on the fire fronts in 260 flight hours, according to Folha de S.Paulo.On personnel, the Ministry of Justice and Public Security had announced on Thursday (15) the dispatch of 29 more firefighters and nine vehicles by October 21, which will raise the ministry's presence in Amazonas to 160 professionals, including 120 contracted firefighters and 40 agents of the National Force, a federal public security contingent. The Federal Police and the Federal Highway Police are also part of the mobilization, and the government pledged to step up investigations into reports of deliberately set fires, without disclosing how many cases are under review or naming suspects.A delegation of ministers arrives in Manaus on Sunday (18) to coordinate the reinforced operations: João Paulo Capobianco (Environment and Climate Change), Wellington César Lima e Silva (Justice and Public Security), José Múcio Monteiro (Defense) and Waldez Góes (Regional Development).The federal escalation tracks the worsening situation in the state. On October 10, the Amazonas state government declared an emergency in 36 municipalities, a measure recognized hours later by the Ministry of Regional Development, a required step to unlock federal funds. On the health front, the Environment Ministry says the SUS National Force base is preventive: so far, according to the ministry, Manaus health services have not been overwhelmed by the smoke.The crisis unfolds at the peak of the Amazon fire season, when blazes in the interior of Amazonas and in neighboring states concentrate smoke over the capital and expose the public health dimension of the problem. The federal government has not given a forecast for bringing the fires under control, and the number of additional agents to be sent has yet to be defined.

Brazil's federal government announced on Saturday (17) the deployment of five additional aircraft to reinforce firefighting operations in Amazonas state, raising the total number of planes and helicopters in action there from 11 to 16. The announcement came on the same day Manaus, the state capital, once again posted the worst air quality index among Brazilian capitals, according to the international monitoring platform IQAir: 657 points at 8:40 a.m., a level classified as hazardous.Among the new aircraft is a second KC-390, a military transport plane able to drop up to 19,000 liters of water per run. It joins another KC-390 already in operation, with a 12,000-liter capacity, plus helicopters assigned to water drops, crew transport and logistics in hard-to-reach areas. According to the federal government, since support operations began on October 9, about 600,000 liters of water have been dropped over the state in 260 flight hours. Ibama, the federal environmental agency, counts 317 fires extinguished since the start of the season.Monitoring figures help size up the crisis. After a peak of 494 new fire hotspots on October 10, Amazonas had 188 active fires as of Friday (16), according to the Queimadas dashboard run by the National Institute for Space Research (Inpe). The task force in the state includes 330 firefighters coordinated by Ibama and ICMBio, the federal conservation agency, supported by 32 land vehicles and eight boats, according to the Ministry of Environment and Climate Change.Money, police and healthThe package includes about R$ 14 million (roughly US$ 2.6 million) committed by the National Civil Defense for emergency actions, including logistics, protective equipment and the hiring of two additional aircraft. On Friday (16), a decree published in the official gazette authorized a single transfer of R$ 14.3 million to Amazonas, with a 180-day deadline for execution. The document, however, does not detail the actions or state expressly whether the funds will go to fighting the wildfires.Federal Police, Federal Highway Police and Armed Forces personnel will also be mobilized, with troop numbers still to be defined. The highway police are expected to patrol secondary roads and support Ibama operations, and the government promised to step up investigations into deliberately set fires. Environment Minister João Paulo Capobianco told Agência Brasil that the fires result from intentional human action and that federal, highway and state civil police are already investigating their origin. Ane Alencar, science director at the Amazon Environmental Research Institute (Ipam), sees signs of land grabbing in satellite images: the hotspots are concentrated in 19 municipalities near Manaus, in forested areas on public land not yet designated for any social or environmental use.On the health front, the Health Ministry will set up a decentralized base of the National Force of the SUS, Brazil's public health system, in Manaus, scheduled for Tuesday (20). It will be the fourth such base opened in the country this year, under federal planning for the impacts of the 2026/2027 El Niño. So far, according to the government, the smoke has not overloaded the health system. Even so, the Amazonas Civil Defense issued a severe-risk alert and recommended mask use, and the Manaus city government told residents to keep doors and windows shut and avoid outdoor exercise.The climate context adds pressure to the response. El Niño, the warming of tropical Pacific waters that makes rainfall irregular, is expected to intensify its effects on the central-northern Amazon in the coming months, according to Alencar. On Sunday (18), ministers Capobianco (Environment), Wellington César Lima e Silva (Justice), José Múcio Monteiro (Defense) and Waldez Góes (Regional Integration) arrive in Manaus to monitor the fires and coordinate the expansion of federal actions with the state government.

Smoke from wildfires burning in the interior of Amazonas state and in neighboring states pushed the air quality in Manaus, the largest city in the Brazilian Amazon, to the "hazardous" level on Saturday morning (17), the worst real-time reading among Brazilian state capitals. At around 6 a.m., the international monitoring platform IQAir recorded 441 points on the city's air quality index, with a concentration of fine particulate matter (PM2.5) of 295.9 micrograms per cubic meter (µg/m³). That is 59.2 times the World Health Organization guideline, which recommends an annual average of no more than 5 µg/m³ for the pollutant. The second most polluted capital in the ranking, Porto Velho in Rondônia, registered 65 points at the same time.Data from Selva, the environmental monitoring system run by the Amazonas State University (UEA), confirmed the deterioration. At 6:55 a.m., all monitored points in Manaus were rated "péssimo" (very bad), the most critical band on the system's scale, which considers air quality good between 0 and 25 µg/m³. In the Coroado neighborhood, on the city's east side, the concentration reached 457.7 µg/m³, according to G1.Conditions were even worse in the countryside. Selva recorded 750.5 µg/m³ in Maués, a town on the Maués-Açu river, and 731.1 µg/m³ in Urucurituba, along the Amazon river, at around 7:16 a.m. Autazes reached 607.3 µg/m³, Itacoatiara 475.8 µg/m³ and Manaquiri 468.5 µg/m³ in the same period.Residents describe worst smoke episode yetOn social media, Manaus residents described a strong smell of smoke, burning eyes even indoors, difficulty breathing and reduced visibility. Several posts called Saturday the worst day in a series of smoke episodes that has hit the city for weeks. "Manaus, October 17, 2026. It is so hard to breathe, a thick smoke has spread across the whole city", one user wrote on X. There was also criticism of the authorities' response, with one resident writing that "those in government are not taking the issue as seriously as they should".According to Agência Brasil, the smoke covering Manaus comes from fires in the interior of Amazonas and in the states of Rondônia, Pará and Mato Grosso. Particles can stay suspended for days and travel long distances on the wind, and the lack of rain in the region keeps pollutants trapped in the atmosphere. Children, the elderly, pregnant women and people with pre-existing conditions are the most vulnerable groups, because exposure worsens respiratory and cardiovascular problems.State of emergency and federal responseOn October 10, the Amazonas state government declared a state of emergency in about 36 municipalities because of the fires. On Friday (16), when Manaus was already leading the pollution ranking among capitals, the city hall suspended in-person classes in the municipal school network and UEA halted academic activities at all units, in the capital and the interior.The Health Ministry has identified 12 municipalities that need support for their health services and sent teams from the Força Nacional do SUS, a federal unit that reinforces Brazil's public health system in crisis situations, to assess the care network alongside state and municipal authorities. The ministry is also monitoring oxygen consumption and supply capacity at health units, including the special indigenous health districts. On the firefighting front, Ibama, the federal environmental agency, said it has extinguished 303 fire hotspots in Amazonas since operations began, backed by 11 aircraft, including six Air Tractor planes and a KC-390 provided by the Defense Ministry to drop large volumes of water.

Deforestation in Brazil's Legal Amazon fell 42% in the latest measurement cycle to 3,335 km², the lowest figure since 1988, when the National Institute for Space Research (Inpe) began tracking forest loss by satellite. In the cerrado, the vast tropical savanna that covers much of central Brazil, the loss of native vegetation dropped 24% to 5,516 km², also the floor of that biome's series, which began in 2013. The numbers come from Prodes, the country's official deforestation monitoring system, and were released on Friday (16). They cover the period from August 1, 2025 to July 31, 2026, the reference window Brazil uses for this count.The Amazon result sits 27% below the previous record of 4,571 km² in 2012, according to Folha de S.Paulo. The Legal Amazon, a region spanning nine states, had not posted such a low rate in nearly four decades. In the cerrado it was the third straight annual decline; G1 described the figure as the lowest since 2001.What is behind the dropBetween 2022 and 2026, clearing fell by a combined 71% in the Amazon and 48% in the cerrado, a period in which the Environment and Climate Change Ministry was led by Marina Silva during President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva's third term. Experts cited by Folha point to the deforestation control plans launched in 2023, the rebuilding of staff and budgets at enforcement agencies, and financial restrictions on deforesters, such as blocking their access to rural credit."This historic achievement belongs to the Brazilian people. As the main source of greenhouse gas emissions in Brazil, deforestation translates into ever more intense and frequent climate extremes, causing floods, landslides, heat waves and droughts," said Marina, who left the ministry to run for a Senate seat and was not elected.Even at the series' lowest point, the bill remains heavy: combined, the two biomes lost some 8,851 km² of native vegetation in one year, an area almost six times the size of the city of São Paulo. Images published by Folha show a freshly cleared plot in Autazes, in Amazonas state, photographed this month: a reminder that clearing continues, even at a slower pace.The announcement came with an investment in monitoring itself. Also on Friday, Inpe confirmed it will receive R$147.6 million from the Amazon Fund (Fundo Amazônia) for the SIM-Biomas project, which will use artificial intelligence to merge Prodes with Deter, the rapid-alert system, and extend daily monitoring to the Caatinga, the Atlantic Forest and the Pampa, G1 reported. The institute, based in São José dos Campos (São Paulo state), feeds the emissions inventories Brazil submits under the Paris Agreement, tying each spared square kilometer in the country's North to global climate goals.

Nasa warned on Thursday (15) that the drought associated with El Niño is already making the Amazon more vulnerable to wildfires and that the biome may face a long and severe fire season. According to the US space agency, satellites have begun detecting considerable increases in smoke and fire across the region, with direct effects in Manaus, the capital of Amazonas state, where smoke drove air quality to very poor levels and forced the suspension of classes at schools and universities and of outdoor activities.According to Nasa scientist Douglas Morton, the fire recorded near Santarém, in western Pará state, and around Manaus is part of a cascade of wildfires that sweeps across the tropics in El Niño years. The agency's note cites a study by Morton on the pattern of droughts and large fires seen during the 2015-16 El Niño, repeated in 2023, when the Amazon went through a historic drought that lowered rivers, dried up waterways, isolated riverside communities and hit the local economy, which depends heavily on river transport."Now, in the Amazon, we are seeing the second domino of this chain reaction fall," Morton said, as quoted by Folha de S.Paulo. The first domino, Nasa notes, was the wave of fire that has choked parts of Indonesia since August, with hundreds of homes destroyed by flames in October.For November and December, the researcher expects even more fire in Roraima, in northern Pará, in Amapá and in areas of neighboring countries such as Venezuela, Guyana and Suriname.Firefighting and enforcement on the groundWhile satellites map the advance of the flames, the response on the ground was reinforced this week. Two aircraft from Prevfogo, the fire prevention and combat unit of Ibama, Brazil's federal environmental agency, arrived on Thursday in Itacoatiara, in the interior of Amazonas, and began operating in the Rio Urubu region, where a fire has been active since late August. According to the fire monitoring panel of Censipam, the federal center that manages the Amazon protection system, the area linked to that blaze exceeds 3,000 hectares, and the flames have already spread into part of the Paraná do Arauató Indigenous Land, traditional territory of the Mura people, G1 Amazonas reported. Hotspots are also still being detected in Vila de Lindóia and in the Sauim-de-Coleira Sustainable Development Reserve, near the community of Novo Remanso.Enforcement has responded as well. Itacoatiara's municipal environment secretariat has fined 15 people suspected of setting forest fires, with penalties totaling more than R$ 300,000 (about US$ 56,000), and the cases were referred to the Amazonas state prosecutor's office and the Civil Police. The state also received reinforcement of 29 firefighters and nine vehicles from the National Force, a federal public security contingent, while an Amazonas Civil Defense aircraft operates in the region, using Itacoatiara's airport as a support base.In Manaus, the smoke began to ease after a week that pushed the city to the top of Brazil's worst air quality ranking. On Friday morning (16), the city's air quality index stood at 85, rated moderate, according to G1. A meteorologist interviewed by the outlet noted that Manaus has faced cycles of intense smoke for a decade, and that severity depends on the number of fires and on the lack of rain and atmospheric conditions that keep pollutants from dispersing.

The Brazilian Amazon lost 693,000 hectares to deforestation in 2025, the lowest figure since MapBiomas, a network of universities, NGOs and tech companies that maps land cover from satellite images, began its historical series in 1985. The number comes from the network's annual report, released on Wednesday (14) and reported by G1. Of the total cleared last year, 639,000 hectares (92%) was native vegetation, while 54,000 hectares was secondary vegetation already altered by human activity.According to Bruno Ferreira, a researcher at the Imazon institute who works with MapBiomas, 2025 saw the smallest destruction of native vegetation in the entire series, counting forests, grasslands, savannas and secondary growth. The result tracks the downward trend recorded by Prodes, the official satellite monitoring program run by Brazil's space agency, Inpe. "The reduction seen in recent years happens in a context of resuming and strengthening prevention and control policies, with enforcement operations, satellite monitoring and land-use planning," Ferreira told G1. He cautions, however, that the overlap does not allow crediting any single measure.Roads, pasture and mining keep pressing the biomeThe record low does not erase the accumulated damage. Between 1985 and 2025, the Amazon lost 54.7 million hectares of native vegetation, and the area converted to human use grew 492%, reaching 74.6 million hectares. Farming and ranching now occupy 65.3 million hectares, 15.5% of the biome. Pasture alone covers 50.8 million hectares after growing 556% in four decades, and it was the first recorded use in 77% of deforested areas. Mining jumped from 32,000 hectares in 1985 to 440,000 in 2025, with nearly half of that area opened in the last ten years.The study crossed MapBiomas maps with road databases from the national transport infrastructure department (DNIT) and OpenStreetMap, including side roads outside the official network. Within five kilometers of roads, farming and ranching occupy 40.2% of the land, equivalent to 63 million hectares; within 20 kilometers, the share drops to 26.7%. According to Ferreira, new roads open access to once isolated areas and can link deforestation frontiers, illegal logging and irregular occupation.Protected areas, which include Indigenous lands, conservation units and quilombola territories (communities founded by descendants of people who escaped slavery), still hold 98% native vegetation cover. Around those territories, however, farming and ranching grew 561% since 1985 and already occupy 31% of the surrounding belt. "Protected areas play a fundamental role in conserving the biome, working as a kind of barrier against the transformation of the landscape," said Ives Brandão, of the MapBiomas Amazon team.Amazon deforestation is Brazil's main source of greenhouse gas emissions, which makes the biome's figures sensitive for foreign markets that import beef and soy and demand supply chain traceability. MapBiomas produces its mapping from Landsat satellite images at 30-meter resolution, processed on Google Earth Engine. Researchers interviewed say that holding the downward trend depends on continuing enforcement, satellite monitoring and protection of the territories that still concentrate standing forest.

Scientists have begun a new monitoring phase for marine wildlife along the coast of Amapá and northern Marajó Island in Pará, according to reporting by regional news outlet G1. Field expeditions started on September 21, roughly 130 kilometers from Poço Morpho, an offshore drilling prospect near the Amazon River mouth where a fresh petroleum discovery was announced in early September. The field operation fulfills an environmental licensing mandate set by federal environment agency Ibama for seismic surveys in the sensitive equatorial margin. The Marine Tetrapod Characterization and Monitoring Project brings together teams from the Amapá Institute of Scientific and Technological Research (Iepa) and the Federal Institute of Amapá (Ifap), under coordination by Pará based nonprofit Instituto Bicho d'Água. Biologists and veterinarians are evaluating whales, dolphins, sea turtles, and marine birds. Their primary scientific focus centers on acoustic waves emitted during seismic profiling, a technique oil companies use to map subsea geology. Because marine mammals rely on echolocation and acoustic cues to navigate, researchers are testing whether exploration pulses displace animals or trigger strandings. Field patrols and baseline records Every 15 days, field crews survey the shoreline of Goiabal beach in the municipality of Calçoene to look for stranded animals. The team conducts necropsies and gathers tissue samples to test animal health. The program also examines freshwater river dolphins that venture near estuaries, analyzing specimens for heavy metal contamination such as mercury. Alongside coastal patrols, scientists hold workshops with artisanal fishers and local residents, distributing emergency phone numbers so coastal settlements can report grounded mammals immediately. Project coordinator Cláudia Funi explained that regulatory requirements tied to petroleum exploration provide critical funding for northern marine biology, an area historically overlooked by federal science budgets. Speaking to G1, Funi pointed out the role of mandatory industry offsets: A large share of marine and coastal studies in the country exists because of resources of this nature. This is very important for science to learn more about the diversity of fauna in the region. Between July 2024 and April 2026, an earlier phase of the monitoring program documented unprecedented marine encounters in the Amazon basin. Researchers examined a 14-meter Bryde's whale carcass on Viçosa Island in Pará, as well as the first recorded pygmy sperm whale stranding on the Amazon coast, a 3-meter specimen on Goiabalinho beach in Amapá. As Brazil balances international climate commitments against the push to tap new fossil reserves, systematic field tracking provides the empirical baseline needed to assess environmental risks along the equatorial shelf.

Eight audio messages sent by local ranchers in the Xingu River basin, in Pará, threaten a coordinated invasion of the Apyterewa Indigenous Territory if Senator Flávio Bolsonaro wins Brazil's presidential runoff scheduled for October 25. The recordings, reported on Monday (12) by the newspaper Folha de S.Paulo, were handed to federal intelligence agencies and triggered an alert among regional protection bodies.The protected reserve in southern Pará is home to the Parakanã people, a group that had recent contact with non-Indigenous society and remains particularly vulnerable to external pressure and infectious diseases. According to Folha, the voice notes circulated via WhatsApp among local residents, warning of an immediate takeover after the ballots close. Federal investigators are also examining whether a recent wave of wildfires inside the reserve was set intentionally by local landholders.Tension in Apyterewa reflects how Brazil's political contest links directly to international commodities markets and global climate targets. Located in one of the most pressured agricultural frontiers of the Amazon, the territory has long suffered from illegal clear-cutting to create illicit cattle pastures, a practice facing tightening scrutiny from overseas agricultural buyers demanding deforestation-free supply chains. In previous years, illegal settlers went as far as building a small town inside the reserve, known as Vila Renascer.Federal authorities previously expelled unauthorized cattle ranchers through joint operations led by the National Indian Foundation (Funai), environmental agency Ibama, and the Federal Highway Police, whose officers faced armed ambushes during enforcement missions. While the eviction process concluded successfully, irregular monitoring and campaign rhetoric promising to halt land titling have encouraged former invaders to attempt a return.Indigenous representatives and rights groups are calling on the federal government to establish permanent security outposts along Xingu access points throughout the election period. Federal authorities continue evaluating intelligence reports and considering preventive security deployments to deter incursions and prevent violent confrontations on voting day.

Brazil's Federal Public Prosecutor's Office (MPF) has filed a civil public action against Shell Brasil seeking more than R$ 541 million (roughly US$ 100 million) in damages over the floods that hit the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul between April and May 2024 and left 183 people dead. The court document was obtained by AFP on Friday (9) and reported by Folha de S.Paulo.According to Exame magazine, which also reviewed the filing, the claim is split into two equal parts of R$ 270.5 million: one for environmental and collective moral climate damages, the other for material damages. The MPF argues that Shell Brasil's liability should be proportional to its parent company's contribution to global warming, estimated at about 2% of all historical worldwide greenhouse gas emissions, linked to the exploration, production and sale of fossil fuels.The torrential rains of 2024 caused historic flooding across the state. Cities in the Porto Alegre metropolitan area, such as Canoas, were submerged, around 500,000 people were displaced and material damage reached unprecedented levels, AFP reported."This civil public action seeks the environmental and climate civil liability of the defendant company for material and collective moral damages resulting from the extreme climate event that hit the state of Rio Grande do Sul between April and May 2024," the MPF states in the filing.The NGO Instituto Preservar is a co-plaintiff in the case. "The costs of climate damage should not fall only on society and on those who lost everything in the tragedy. Major polluters, which contribute significantly to greenhouse gas emissions and climate change, must also answer for the losses they help cause," Thales Miola, a lawyer for the institute, told Exame.According to Maria Antonia Tigre, of Columbia University's Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, this is the first time a prosecutorial body like the MPF has sued a major oil company over a climate catastrophe. The move adds to a global wave of litigation against oil giants: the British-based Shell already faces a lawsuit in the United Kingdom brought by victims of a typhoon in the Philippines.In an email sent to AFP, Shell Brasil said it "has not received official notification of the mentioned lawsuit."

The government plan of senator Flávio Bolsonaro (PL), who is contesting the presidential runoff, proposes an environmental licensing system that could authorize projects even without an impact assessment, the elimination of powers of federal environmental agencies and the authorization of gas extraction through hydraulic fracturing, the controversial underground technique known as fracking. The information was reported by Folha de S.Paulo, which obtained the proposal and published the story on Friday (9).According to the newspaper, the document calls for reviewing the role of three federal agencies: Ibama, Brazil's environmental protection and enforcement institute; ICMBio, which manages federal conservation units; and Funai, the agency responsible for Indigenous peoples. The proposal echoes speeches the senator himself made during the year: he defended ending "environmental shackles", called Ibama and ICMBio a "zealous empire", pledged to bring licensing decisions "into the Presidency" and promised not to demarcate Indigenous lands, repeating the policy of his father, former president Jair Bolsonaro (PL), now in prison for leading the coup plot. Flávio's campaign, contacted by the newspaper since Tuesday (6), did not respond to requests for comment.An agenda aligned with CongressThe environmental priorities of the program follow the path already taken by Brazil's Congress in recent years, which approved an agenda criticized by environmentalists: the new licensing law passed in 2025, which created the Special Environmental License (LAE) with a priority review of up to one year for projects chosen by the federal government; looser rules on pesticide use; the marco temporal, a legal thesis restricting the demarcation of Indigenous lands; and a package of bills that together reduce 555,000 hectares of preservation areas and Indigenous territories. In 2026, lawmakers also advanced a bill that limits Ibama's enforcement powers against environmental crimes.Returning to the Chamber of Deputies as a newly elected federal deputy, former environment minister Marina Silva (Rede) told Folha that the outlook worsens under a possible Flávio Bolsonaro government:"It is a highly worrying scenario. Both because of the risk that regulatory frameworks could be demolished, as happened in Argentina, and because of the subservient posture toward Donald Trump's interests, even more so in a possible Bolsonaro government. This will hurt Brazil's economic, social and environmental interests."Climate left out of the textThe proposal never mentions the terms "global warming" or "climate change", not even in reference to the recent heat waves in Brazilian cities, Folha notes. The text also ignores climate disasters such as the floods in Rio Grande do Sul, which hit 5.5 million people and caused R$ 319.1 billion in losses to agribusiness, and the droughts in the Amazon, where water scarcity affects thousands of families, river transport and power generation. Neither Flávio's plan nor that of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT) mentions El Niño, a phenomenon that could reach unprecedented strength and impact in the coming period.Flávio and Lula face each other in the runoff after the PL senator finished the first round ahead, with 47.03% of the vote against 45.16% for the PT candidate, according to results compiled by g1. On the environmental agenda, what is at stake is the structure of the agencies that police deforestation, protect conservation units and serve Indigenous peoples, at a time when Brazil faces increasingly costly climate losses, from the flooded South to the drought-stricken Amazon basin.

New renewable energy capacity installed in Brazil fell 27% from 2024 to 2025, a retreat that dragged down clean energy expansion across Latin America for the first time in more than a decade. The figures come from a report by BloombergNEF (BNEF), Bloomberg's energy research unit, obtained exclusively by the newspaper Folha de S.Paulo.Brazil remains the regional leader in absolute terms, adding 17 GW in 2025, but that is well below the 24 GW installed the year before. Counting wind, solar and battery systems together, Latin American countries added 26 GW last year, a 23% drop from the 34 GW of the previous cycle. For 2030, BNEF projects only 13 GW of new annual installations in Brazil, suggesting the country will not return to its 2024 pace this decade.The main driver is oversupply. During hours of strong sun or wind, clean generation exceeds demand and the ONS, Brazil's national grid operator, must order plants to shut down to keep the grid stable, a practice known as curtailment. In June, the operator activated an unprecedented emergency plan of forced cuts. According to Vinicius Nunes, a BNEF analyst in São Paulo, Brazil lost on average 26% of its solar generation and 19% of its wind generation in 2025 to these interruptions, an estimated loss of R$ 7 billion (about US$ 1.3 billion), according to figures reported by Bloomberg.The decline spans every segment. New wind projects totaled 2 GW in 2025, half the 4 GW of 2024, and BNEF forecasts only 0.4 GW for 2027. Large solar plants, such as those installed in Janaúba, in the north of Minas Gerais state, added 3 GW last year, down from 7 GW in 2024. Small rooftop photovoltaic systems slipped from 13 GW to 12 GW, and the firm projects further declines in coming years as incentives are cut.Batteries take center stage"Brazil needs to move faster on regulation and on price signals, so the market reacts and adapts the system quickly," Rafael Rabioglio, BloombergNEF's head for Latin America, told Folha. He says companies in the sector were frustrated that the federal government's capacity reserve auction, held in March, came before the battery auction, now expected in December."We see some companies redirecting their efforts to the battery auction, which is the big demand of the moment. Discussions of purely wind or solar generation projects, without any storage, have become increasingly rare," Rabioglio says. The report projects that storage systems will surpass 1 GW in Brazil in 2028, driven first by commercial, industrial and residential projects on the consumer side. The government hopes the first battery auction will secure 2 GW of capacity, and companies such as Tesla, Petrobras and Huawei have already shown interest, according to Bloomberg reporting published by InfoMoney.The contrast with neighbors is stark. Chile faced the same curtailment problem and answered with rapid battery expansion. Mexico, which added only 1.1 GW of wind and solar in 2025, is expected to install 8.5 GW in 2030, spurred by President Claudia Sheinbaum's reform to boost renewable investment. Peru hit a record for new installations in 2025, Argentina awarded 667 MW in its first storage auction and solar power keeps growing in Colombia.For Bárbara Rubim, chair of the board of Absolar, Brazil's photovoltaic solar industry association, the numbers confirm what the sector has been warning about."Brazil has not lost sun, demand or technological competitiveness. It has lost predictability. This is a problem of economic efficiency and energy security: installing new generation is not enough if the country cannot transport, store and use that energy when it is needed."Rubim notes that the challenge grows with the arrival of data centers, green hydrogen projects, new energy-intensive industries and transport electrification, all of which depend on a system able to absorb the energy Brazil already knows how to produce. BNEF expects only a gradual recovery in investment toward the end of the decade.

Brazil's federal government has told the Supreme Federal Court (STF) that paying court-ordered debts known as precatórios without case-by-case technical audits could reach R$ 255.3 billion in 2026, and asked the court to suspend indemnity lawsuits over prices in the sugar and ethanol sector. The filing by the Advocacia-Geral da União (AGU), the government's legal office, was submitted in Brasilia and reported by G1 on Thursday (Oct. 8). It also asks that payments, withdrawals and transfers of amounts tied to precatórios already issued in these cases be frozen.Precatórios are payment orders that force the government to settle debts once a lawsuit has ended with no further appeal possible. At the center of the dispute are compensation claims filed by sugar and ethanol mills over losses they attribute to the price-fixing policy of the former Sugar and Alcohol Institute (IAA), a state agency that regulated the sector in the 1980s and 1990s.The AGU's argumentThe AGU argues that the understanding the STF has already set for the liquidation and execution phases, under which "proof of the actual economic loss, through a technical expert review in each concrete case" is indispensable to establish the federal government's civil liability, must also be extended to the indemnity lawsuits themselves. In the agency's view, the court's full bench should standardize the thesis, and until that happens all sugar and ethanol sector cases in which the controversy remains open should be suspended.According to the calculation sent to the court, continuing the executions and allowing precatórios to be issued and paid without individual technical review could generate an impact of R$ 255,310,838,187.56 on federal coffers in 2026. The survey covered only sugar and ethanol sector cases already in the liquidation, execution or execution-challenge phases, leaving out lawsuits still in earlier stages.Gilmar Mendes, Fux and the Banco Master trailThe request was filed in a case whose rapporteur is Justice Gilmar Mendes, who has already sent the debate over the need for expert audits to the full bench. Justice Luiz Fux asked for more time to analyze the referral of that decision in a trial before the court's Second Panel. Mendes has said that "mills won convictions against the federal government over prices fixed by the former Sugar and Alcohol Institute in the 1980s and 1990s based on generic studies, without the individual expert review required by the STF's understanding".Precatórios from the sugar and ethanol sector have drawn renewed scrutiny from the government and the judiciary since suspicions emerged that these credits were used in schemes involving Banco Master, the bank at the center of a billion-real fraud investigation in Brazil. One hypothesis under investigation is that the bank bought judicial credits against the government at steep discounts, booked the assets at far higher values and used them as collateral to raise funds in the market. With the AGU's request, the final word on suspending the payments now rests with the STF's full bench, which must decide whether each mill will have to prove, case by case, the loss it claims to have suffered.

The southern Brazilian state of Paraná has recorded 9 tornadoes, more than 153,000 people affected and 6 deaths between June and September, the first four months of the current El Niño. The phenomenon was confirmed in early June by NOAA, the US agency that monitors it, and its latest report classifies the event as "very strong". The figures come from the state Civil Defense, which logged more than 450 incidents tied to gales, hail and heavy rain, according to a survey published by G1. The worst may still be ahead: October is historically the month with the most extreme weather events in the state.The monthly series shows the escalation. Incidents went from 48 in June and 42 in July to 139 in August and 223 in September, when spring began in the Southern Hemisphere, a season that already tends to bring storms to southern Brazil. "The forecast has been confirmed, from the rise in temperature in the equatorial Pacific, which confirms this El Niño, to our own situation in the South of the country, where spring already brings this scenario. And it will be intensified because of El Niño," Colonel Ivan Ricardo Fernandes, executive coordinator of the Paraná Civil Defense, told G1.What is happening in the Pacific explains the countdown in Paraná. In its September 10 discussion, NOAA's Climate Prediction Center recorded sea surface temperature anomalies above +3.0°C in the eastern equatorial Pacific and estimated a greater than 90% chance of a "very strong" El Niño through the Northern Hemisphere fall and winter. For the October to December quarter, the agency sees a 75% probability of a historic event, stronger than anything on record since 1950. In practice, the abnormal ocean warming shifts rainfall toward Brazil's South Region, where gales, hail, floods and landslides become more frequent.Piraí do Sul, the epicenterThe strongest tornado of the period hit Piraí do Sul, a town of 24,000 people in the Campos Gerais region, on August 8. Rated F3 on the Fujita scale, with gusts estimated between 253 km/h and 332 km/h, it uprooted trees, destroyed rural homes and damaged barns and poultry sheds. At least 500 people were affected and one was injured, according to Civil Defense. Leandro Ferreira Lúcio lost both of the family's houses: the one he lived in and the one he was building. City hall donated construction materials, but he cannot afford the labor."To start building I even got a donation from a friend, but the bigger problem is the labor, because I have no means to continue, to pay. We are very worried, and there were other winds here recently that caused damage again... it is something you do not expect," he told G1.Those later winds, above 100 km/h, hit 16 families in the municipality. Among them is the family of Andréia Ferreira, whose house had its structure compromised. Until she can rebuild, the family is living in a masonry counter that once housed a store, with help from friends and neighbors.There is an institutional response under way. The Paraná state government says it has been preparing for the phenomenon since the first half of the year, and the state Civil Defense runs 24-hour monitoring with meteorologists from Simepar, the state weather institute, along with a public alert system. In Piraí do Sul, students and professors from the State University of Ponta Grossa (UEPG), who study tornadoes in the state, went to the school of the affected rural community, more than 30 kilometers from downtown, to teach children and teenagers how to recognize the phenomenon and protect themselves. With spring lasting until late December and forecasts pointing to intensifying storms, Civil Defense projects new events in the coming weeks.

A new cold front linked to an extratropical cyclone forming near Uruguay has placed all three states of Southern Brazil on high alert for severe storms, hail, and tornadoes. The warnings were issued by the Rio Grande do Sul Civil Defense, Santa Catarina state weather service Epagri/Ciram, and the National Institute of Meteorology (Inmet), as reported by Folha de S.Paulo.In Rio Grande do Sul, rainfall is expected to reach up to 100 millimeters within 24 hours on Thursday, with cumulative totals surpassing 150 millimeters through Friday. State authorities warned of wind gusts reaching 90 km/h across northern and western areas, as well as along the border with Uruguay, creating atmospheric conditions ripe for hail and tornadoes.The heavy rainfall poses an immediate threat to river basins across Rio Grande do Sul. Flooding risks are highest along the Uruguay River, spanning from the northwest to the western border. Meanwhile, state emergency teams are closely monitoring rising water levels on the Caí, Sinos, Taquari, Ibicuí, and Ibirapuitã rivers, though none of those five basins are currently forecast to spill their banks.As the low-pressure system intensifies, bad weather is spreading northward. In Santa Catarina, Epagri/Ciram issued alerts for destructive winds and hail in northern and western municipalities. By Friday and Saturday, the storm system is projected to cover almost the entirety of Paraná state, where Inmet issued severe storm warnings.The frequent recurrence of extratropical cyclones and violent convective storms over the Southern Cone is tied to sharp thermal clashes between tropical air masses and polar fronts, intensified by warming patterns across the South Atlantic. State and municipal civil defense agencies have mobilized emergency response units and activated cell broadcast warnings, urging residents in flood-prone and rural communities to secure shelter and avoid crossing swollen roadways.

Brazilian fuel distributors imported 9.6 billion liters of diesel between January and August 2026. The data was reported by Folha de S.Paulo from records compiled by the National Agency of Petroleum, Natural Gas and Biofuels (ANP), against a backdrop of global energy market strain linked to conflict in the Middle East.The import volume sustains heavy freight traffic moving agricultural commodities from the Center-West grain belt to maritime terminals in Santos, São Paulo, and Paranaguá, Paraná. Private distributors turned to international suppliers to meet domestic consumption that state-controlled oil company Petrobras cannot fully supply with its current refining footprint.Global supply pressure and domestic freightRelying on foreign diesel ties Brazilian freight costs to price shocks caused by the war involving Iran. Higher import costs filter down to agricultural cooperatives in Mato Grosso and delivery fleets across major metropolitan hubs, raising operational expenses throughout national supply chains.On the energy and environmental front, large-scale fossil diesel imports clash with national targets to expand biodiesel blending mandates. Industry analysts note that boosting biofuels production and modernizing rail networks would reduce supply vulnerabilities, though distributors continue to rely on immediate cargo purchases overseas to prevent localized fuel shortages.

An unprecedented drought associated with El Niño is destroying crops and killing herds across Central America's Dry Corridor, a strip of land that crosses parts of Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua and Costa Rica. One of the measures used to track Pacific Ocean warming indicates the current El Niño is the strongest since 1900, according to the UK Met Office, in a report by BBC News Brasil republished by Brazilian outlets Folha de S.Paulo and G1. In the community of Las Chácaras, in the Department of Choluteca in southern Honduras, 61-year-old farmer Juan Estanislao Muñoz says he has never seen anything like it. "I am 61 years old and never, in my life, have I seen a drought like this. There will be no harvest, there will be nothing," he told the BBC. "I have a cow, but now she is not eating grass, she is eating dirt, leaves... Cattle here are dying of thirst and hunger." The Dry Corridor is home to more than 10 million people. Over 70% of its rural population lives in poverty and more than one million children suffer stunted growth caused by malnutrition, according to the UN. Millions of families depend on subsistence farming, planting corn and beans in two cycles a year, the first from May to August and the second from August to December. The first 2026 harvest has already been lost in several communities, and the second depends on rains that have not arrived. The hunger numbers Lena Savelli, the UN World Food Programme's regional director for Latin America, visited Choluteca and described to the BBC a river that once supplied entire families and is now "simply a path full of dirt and stones". In Honduras alone, the number of food-insecure people could rise from 1.4 million to 1.9 million because of the drought, an increase of about 500,000 people. Across Central America, the WFP estimates 4.2 million people could fall into food insecurity because of El Niño. In Latin America and the Caribbean, at least 16 million more people could lack sufficient food and, globally, the phenomenon could push the number of people in acute food insecurity from 225 million to 274 million. In coordination with Central American governments, the WFP has been distributing anticipatory aid since March to more than 400,000 people in the Dry Corridor, with cash payments equivalent to US$150 a month and bags of food. The goal is to keep families from going into debt, cutting meals to a minimum or selling their cattle. "Now that the drought is hitting hard, we are providing cash assistance to more than 470,000 affected people in Central America, to cover their most urgent needs," Savelli said. El Niño is a natural oscillation that occurs every two to seven years, warms the surface of a vast stretch of the Pacific and alters wind and rainfall patterns around the planet. Combined with climate change, the phenomenon is worsening water scarcity in an already vulnerable region. In Guatemala, concern over the lack of rain led residents of Santo Domingo Xenacoj, in the Department of Sacatepéquez, to hold a procession in August to pray for rain.

Brazil's oil and gas regulator, the ANP, approved on Friday (2) the delimitation of 501 new exploratory blocks in the country's Equatorial Margin, an offshore stretch running from the coast of Amapá state to Rio Grande do Norte. The blocks cover about 380,000 square kilometers, an area the size of Japan, spread across five sedimentary basins: Foz do Amazonas, Pará-Maranhão, Barreirinhas, Ceará and Potiguar. Offering these areas to investors, however, has not been confirmed and still depends on reviews by other branches of the government.The blocks, grouped into 11 new sectors, only became possible because in 2025 the UN Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf granted Brazil sovereignty over roughly 360,000 square kilometers of additional seabed in the region, beyond the 200 nautical miles (370 kilometers) previously recognized, according to O Globo. The additional area has been nicknamed the Amazônia Azul (Blue Amazon) for its potential in natural and mineral resources. "With the conclusion of Brazil's claim, the area over which the country exercises sovereign rights to explore the natural resources of the seabed and subsoil has been expanded," the ANP said in a statement.The announcement came on the same day that state-run Petrobras confirmed a second oil discovery at the Morpho well in the Foz do Amazonas basin, the first in ultra-deep waters off the coast of Amapá. The basin is the company's main bet for renewing Brazil's reserves. According to Folha de S.Paulo, there are currently 51 exploratory blocks under active concession in the Equatorial Margin: 29 in Foz do Amazonas, nine in Barreirinhas, nine in Potiguar and five in Pará-Maranhão. The industry sees the region as the leading candidate to succeed the pre-salt fields, which are expected to enter production decline in the next decade, according to O Globo.Any auction still needs environmental reviewThe agency stressed that mapping out blocks does not mean automatically taking them to auction. In its statement, the ANP said:"Any eventual designation of blocks for bidding will depend on specific analysis and must follow the applicable regulatory process, including the assessments and opinions required for that purpose, from the ANP and other bodies involved."In practice, a future offering requires input from the Mines and Energy Ministry and the Environment Ministry, plus approval from the CNPE, the national energy policy council, Folha reports. The ANP said the socio-environmental analysis behind the new boundaries took the region's conservation units into account and found no overlaps that would make the proposed blocks unworkable. The agency also adjusted the limits of three existing sectors to match the new continental shelf, without affecting contracts in force, since the new areas have not yet been tendered.Environmental organizations oppose expanding the oil frontier in the Equatorial Margin and see a contradiction with President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva's pro-sustainability rhetoric, Folha reports. The region, home to sensitive coastal ecosystems from Amapá to Rio Grande do Norte, has become the main arena of the clash between Brazil's hydrocarbon policy and its climate agenda. Next week, the ANP will hold two auctions of exploratory areas, with 13 blocks in the pre-salt and hundreds of blocks elsewhere in the country.

Commercial banks Bradesco, HSBC, Itaú, and Santander have won a federal tender under the Eco Invest Brasil program to manage nearly R$ 50 billion (about $9.2 billion) in green funds and decarbonization loans, according to reporting by Folha de S.Paulo. The financial package pairs R$ 13.2 billion in public capital from the Climate Fund (Fundo Clima) with R$ 36.75 billion in private funding commitments.The auction was run by the National Treasury Secretariat under the Ministry of Finance alongside the Ministry of the Environment and Climate Change (MMA). The final results await official ratification from the program executive committee. Six banks submitted 23 competing proposals during the September 15 session, in which state-owned Banco do Brasil and Citibank also participated without securing any segments.Sector Breakdown and Regional FocusBradesco won three separate tracks and secured the largest public allotment, drawing R$ 7.5 billion in state capital and pledging R$ 21 billion in private funds, reaching R$ 28.5 billion. These funds will support green fertilizer plants, alternative proteins, and green chemistry across the São Francisco river basin and the agricultural heartland of the Center-West, where farming operations remain heavily reliant on imported fossil-based fertilizers.HSBC took the track for green fuels, biogas, and biomethane with R$ 5.2 billion in combined capital (R$ 1.6 billion public and R$ 3.6 billion private), aimed at sugarcane and ethanol refineries in São Paulo and Goiás. Santander won the segment for critical mineral processing, batteries, and electric mobility in mining corridors across Minas Gerais and Bahia, managing R$ 6.5 billion. Itaú took industrial automation and artificial intelligence with R$ 9.75 billion (R$ 2.5 billion public and R$ 7.25 billion private).Leveraging Sovereign Debt for DecarbonizationThe public share is financed through sustainable sovereign bond sales carried out by the National Treasury in overseas capital markets, directly linking Brazilian economic transition to global climate obligations under the Paris Agreement. The program operates through two channels: R$ 27 billion for early-stage and mid-stage innovation equity funds, and R$ 22.95 billion in corporate credit facilities.While the MMA reports that previous Eco Invest auctions have attracted over R$ 140 billion in approved proposals, capital deployment on factory floors and agricultural fields still depends on completing private fundraising and selecting recipient firms in the next phase.

An extratropical cyclone is keeping southern Brazil on alert for extreme rain this week, days after a hailstorm affected 9,517 people and damaged about 2,200 homes in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil's southernmost state. The state Civil Defense released the tally on Sunday (27); it records no deaths or missing persons.Santiago, in the state's central region, was the hardest hit municipality, with 5,000 residents affected and about 1,000 properties damaged. On Saturday (26), hail fell in such volume that it covered the city's streets in white. In Alegrete, on the western border, 2,000 people were affected and 700 homes damaged, while Capão do Cipó and Catuípe recorded 820 and 800 people affected, according to Folha de S.Paulo. The storm entered the state through the western border on Saturday afternoon, with hail in Barra do Quaraí and a severe storm in Uruguaiana early in the evening. Outlets diverge on injuries: Folha reported one person injured, ten left homeless and twenty displaced, all in Alegrete; G1, citing the same agency tally, said no one was injured.Up to 300 mm of rain and risk of new floodsThe concern now is the days ahead. According to Folha, a low-pressure area between northern Argentina and Paraguay is pushing warm, moist air toward Rio Grande do Sul, and Inmet, Brazil's national weather institute, along with private forecaster Climatempo and the Civil Defense, has kept alerts in place since Friday (25). MetSul Meteorology projects 100 mm to 200 mm of rain through the end of Tuesday (29) in a band running from the west to the highlands, with 200 mm to 300 mm possible in some municipalities; news portal iG cited a risk of up to 270 mm. On Wednesday (30), a cyclone over the Atlantic is expected to push in dry, cold air and drive the instability away. MetSul lists the basins of greatest concern, including the Ibirapuitã, Santa Maria, Vacacaí, Ibicuí, Jacuí, Taquari, Caí, Sinos and Gravataí rivers. The firm notes that in the storm wave of September 21, which left six dead in the state, four victims died from excess rain in the Serra Gaúcha highlands.What authorities are doingThe Rio Grande do Sul Civil Defense warned of large hail and gusts above 90 km/h in the Campanha plains and in the western, Missões, northwestern, northern and central regions. On Sunday night, alert notices remained active on the agency's website. According to Diário Gaúcho, the state has already sent 30 high-risk emergency alerts to mobile phones this year via cell broadcast, three times more than in all of last year. In Santiago, residents lined up to collect tarps, and the Civil Defense asked them not to climb onto roofs for repairs. In Porto Alegre, the state capital, the municipal Civil Defense asked the regional electoral court to remove wind banners, the cloth panels used in campaign advertising, until Tuesday because of forecast winds of up to 70 km/h that could cause accidents.The picture repeats an unusual spring. An exceptionally warm air mass over the center of the continent, with highs of 40°C to 45°C in Brazil's Center-West and Southeast, is feeding the storm clouds over the South, according to MetSul, which links the pattern to a record-strength El Niño in the Pacific. Inmet forecasts above-average rain in the South and Southeast in October.

Brazil's national weather service, the Inmet, has issued a red alert, the highest level on a scale that runs from yellow to orange to red, for the first heat wave of spring, in force from Saturday (26) through Wednesday (30). The warning covers all of Mato Grosso do Sul, Paraná and São Paulo, plus parts of Mato Grosso, Rio de Janeiro and Minas Gerais. Temperatures could reach 41°C in Cuiabá on Sunday (27) and Monday (28), 40°C in Campo Grande on Monday and 32°C in the city of São Paulo on Sunday, the agency said.How the heat reaches the Center-SouthOne driver of the warming is a low pressure system set to intensify between northern Argentina and western Paraguay, pushing hot air toward southern Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina, Inmet meteorologists said. High above, a zone of high pressure over parts of the Center-West, Southeast and South pushes air down, where it compresses and heats further. The result is what forecasters call a heat dome: an atmospheric lid that traps warm air over the same region and blocks cooler air masses. As long as the pattern holds, temperatures should stay high.In São Paulo, where the alert was activated on Thursday (24), Saturday starts cloudy with a low of 16°C in the metropolitan area, according to the city's climate emergency management center (CGE). Sun breaks through during the day and lifts the high to 32°C, with relative humidity near 45% and no rain expected. The coast stays milder thanks to the sea breeze: Santos ranges from 17°C to 26°C and Guarujá from 20°C to 22°C, weather service Climatempo forecasts. The interior of the state should be the hottest area.Spring under El NiñoSpring, which began on September 22 and runs to December 21, marks the transition from the dry to the rainy season in central Brazil. Inmet said the season will be influenced by El Niño, the periodic warming of the tropical Pacific that shifts rain patterns worldwide. The institute expects the moisture flow from the Amazon to strengthen and feed rains over the Center-West and Southeast, and warns of heavy rain, wind gusts, lightning and possible hail in the South. At the other end of the country, northern Piauí and northwestern Ceará face a drier than normal stretch. Average temperatures should top 28°C in the North and Northeast and in parts of the interior, a setup that favors more heat waves, thermal discomfort, changes in soil moisture and fast-forming severe storms, according to the agency.Forecasts released in early August by the CPC/NOAA, the US climate prediction center, put the odds of a very strong El Niño between September and November above 90%. The event earns the label "super El Niño" when Pacific sea surface temperatures run more than 2°C above the historical average, a threshold crossed only four times in about 150 years: 1877-78, 1982-83, 1997-98 and 2015-16. NOAA researchers caution that stronger episodes raise the probability of severe impacts, though they do not guarantee them. A joint bulletin by Inmet, CPTEC/Inpe and Funceme, the Ceará state meteorology foundation, forecasts above-average rain in the South, especially Rio Grande do Sul, and in parts of São Paulo and Mato Grosso do Sul, and drier than normal conditions in the North, the Northeast and parts of the Center-West and Southeast.Heat waves tend to push up electricity use as air conditioning runs harder. For now the power sector has room to spare: the regulator Aneel set the green flag, the no-surcharge level of Brazil's tariff flag system on power bills, for October, ending five months of extra charges, Agência Brasil reported. The Inmet red alert runs through Wednesday (30).

Petrobras confirmed on Wednesday that the drillship NS-43 will leave the Santos Basin, where it works on the Búzios field, to drill three new wells off the coast of Amapá, in Brazil's far north. The wells sit in block FZA-M-59, in the Foz do Amazonas Basin, at the mouth of the Amazon River, where the state company has already found oil at the Morpho well, about 175 kilometers from the state's shoreline.Before sailing north, the vessel will have its hull cleaned to remove biofouling, the organisms fixed to the steel. Ibama, Brazil's environmental agency, authorized the three neighboring wells, named Manga, PAD Morpho and Crotalus, on September 4. Petrobras chief engineering officer Renata Baruzzi, speaking at the Rio Oil & Gas trade fair in Rio de Janeiro, said drilling at Morpho should finish in October and the adjacent wells should start in January, once the NS-43 arrives.Petrobras announced the oil find at Morpho on August 14 and is still assessing the quality of the crude, according to news site g1. If results confirm the area is commercially viable, production could begin within seven years, and the company would have to request a new environmental license from Ibama to develop the fields, the newspaper Folha de Pernambuco reported.The Equatorial MarginBlock FZA-M-59 lies in the Equatorial Margin, a 2,200-kilometer stretch of the Brazilian coast running from Rio Grande do Norte to Amapá, formed when South America and Africa drifted apart. Petrobras has set aside US$ 2.5 billion for the region between 2026 and 2030. Of the five Brazilian basins in this margin, only Potiguar, in Rio Grande do Norte, currently produces oil.The push mirrors moves next door. On the same geological trend, Guyana has accumulated discoveries since 2015 estimated at nearly 11 billion barrels of recoverable oil equivalent in the Stabroek block alone, run by ExxonMobil, and Suriname has confirmed reserves in block 58. Folha de Pernambuco notes that if the Amazon mouth potential is confirmed, the find could be compared to the pre-salt discovery of 2006.

The so-called Super El Niño may cause roughly 451,000 additional deaths worldwide by February 2027 compared with a normal year, according to a projection published in September by the Climate Impact Lab at the University of Chicago. Brazil ranks fifth among the most affected countries, with an estimated 13,300 excess deaths. According to CNN Brasil, about 8,000 of those deaths would be concentrated between December and February, when the Southern Hemisphere summer adds its own heat to the phenomenon.The global ranking is led by Nigeria, with 31,400 projected deaths, followed by Indonesia (19,300), Sudan (17,500) and India (15,800). The news site Metrópoles reports that the African Sahel should add 66,800 deaths and Southeast Asia another 19,400 across the Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand and Cambodia. For scale, the global total is about 65 times the 6,800 people killed or missing in Nepal's recent flash floods. The study computed the relationship between temperature and mortality across 24,378 regions of the world, comparing forecast temperatures with the 1996 to 2025 average. The figures are projections of excess mortality, not a count of deaths that have already occurred.El Niño is an abnormal warming of equatorial Pacific waters that shifts rain and heat patterns around the planet. g1 reports that the event is intensifying fast, that days of scorching heat should increase 44% over a normal year and that the peak is expected at the end of 2026. CNN Brasil adds that the global average temperature should run 1.2°C above normal in the coming months. Climate scientist Theodore Keeping of Imperial College London says the phenomenon alters local climate patterns, which affects food production and can determine whether populations face floods or extreme heat stress. "It is a risk multiplier, and we expect to see health impacts around the world," said Teresa Zakaria, head of the risk reduction, humanitarian operations and climate change unit at the World Health Organization. Threats listed by g1 include heat illness, respiratory problems, malnutrition, cholera and mosquito-borne diseases such as malaria and dengue.Brazilian farm country is already feeling itIn Brazil the effects are already concrete. The national weather service Inmet puts the odds above 90% that the event will be classified as very strong between September and November, just as the rainy season begins. In southern Minas Gerais state, one of Brazil's main coffee regions, a hailstorm hit the city of Varginha and its neighbors on September 15, dropping 22.6 millimeters of rain in a single hour. The Association of Rural Unions of Southern Minas (Assul) estimates some 200 farms were hit, with initial losses of at least 50 million reais. Climatologist Ruibran dos Reis, regional director of weather firm Climatempo in Belo Horizonte, says El Niño has been established since mid-May and equatorial Pacific waters are already 2.7 degrees above normal, which he says may have influenced the storm.Authorities and farm groups are still measuring the damage. The cooperative Cooxupé told Metrópoles Minas that field teams are assessing losses, and a survey by the state farm agency Emater-MG cited in the report shows southern Minas accounted for 66% of climate losses recorded in rain-fed coffee. In July, the farm group Faemg/Senar calculated that only 30% of the coffee harvest had been completed in the region. In Belo Horizonte, the civil defense began training for the 2026/27 rainy season, Metrópoles reports. The scene echoes Keeping's warning: the same erratic rains battering the coffee belt squeeze the food production on which markets and consumers worldwide depend.Many of the deaths can be preventedPart of the projected deaths can be avoided with adaptation measures, according to Michael Greenstone, co-founder of the Climate Impact Lab and a professor at the University of Chicago. "This report allows decision makers to see exactly where emergency action can be taken now to save tens of thousands of lives in the coming months," he said. The report lists options such as heat early-warning systems, cooling centers and hydration stations, protection for outdoor workers and stronger health systems."For a long time we have been able to predict the impacts of temperatures on crops, and now we can predict the impact of the worst possible scenario: death."Greenstone said at the report's release, as quoted by Metrópoles. Researchers describe the Super El Niño as a postcard from the future: temperatures expected in the coming months approach levels that global warming would only reach two decades from now. g1 and CNN Brasil place the central projection window between June 2026 and February 2027, while Metrópoles reports the lab extends the calculation over nine months, to mid-2027, and the report itself acknowledges that effects on mortality may continue past the analyzed period, especially in regions that enter summer in the following months.

The Taquari and Caí rivers reached their flood peak on Tuesday (22) in the valleys of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil's southernmost state, and the surge is now flowing into the Guaíba, the broad waterway that runs past the state capital, Porto Alegre, where it pushed past the 2-meter mark on the first night of spring. According to MetSul Meteorologia, a private weather firm, the Taquari stabilized at 24.3 meters in Lajeado on Tuesday afternoon, while the Caí peaked at 14.3 meters overnight in São Sebastião do Caí, more than 4 meters above flood stage. MetSul projects the Guaíba will keep rising between Wednesday (23) and Friday (25), peaking between 2.35 and 2.55 meters.The storm that crossed the state between Sunday (20) and Monday (21) left four people dead and 3,145 out of their homes, according to state Civil Defense figures compiled by Brasil de Fato. The survey counts 527,669 people affected in 137 municipalities with human or material damage, plus 21 houses destroyed and 1,978 that lost their roofs. Firefighters recovered in Caxias do Sul the bodies of a 4-year-old boy swept away inside a car by flash flood, and of a man dragged by the water as he tried to clear a storm drain; the search continues for the boy's mother, 43. The fourth death was a motorcyclist who hit a fallen wire in Pelotas.Alert in the capitalPorto Alegre's Civil Defense issued a high-risk alert for a possible rise of the Guaíba, in effect from 8 a.m. Wednesday (23) to 10 a.m. Friday (25), Sul 21 reported. Streets on the city's islands begin to flood when the river reaches 2.00 to 2.10 meters, and the gauge at the Mauá pier, the official measuring point for 150 years, read 2.02 meters early on Tuesday night. The flood quota widely known at that point is 3.00 meters; the electronic gauge was the only monitoring station that stayed online during the 2024 flood disaster, when the Brazilian Geological Service calculated the official maximum. MetSul assesses there is no risk for the non-insular part of the city.On the statewide map, the Civil Defense keeps a very high risk alert for Caí flooding in Montenegro through Wednesday afternoon, even as the river recedes downstream in São Sebastião do Caí, and it records flood thresholds at Nova Palmira on the Caí and at Igrejinha on the Paranhana. The forecast points to risks on the Jacuí, between Dona Francisca and Cachoeira do Sul, the Taquari from Santa Tereza, the Caí from Nova Palmira in Caxias do Sul, and the Sinos at Campo Bom. The rise followed rainfall of up to 200 mm on Monday in the Serra and Campos de Cima da Serra highlands. Five rivers form the Guaíba (Jacuí, Taquari, Caí, Sinos and Gravataí), and because it rained in every basin, all of them are feeding the rise.A spring under El NiñoFor the months ahead, the concern shifts scale: MetSul projects above-average rainfall and more frequent storms this spring, linked to an El Niño that the firm says is heading to an extreme level never seen before, with the possibility of new flood episodes in the state, especially in the second half of the season. In the short term the forecast is settled, with a cold air mass keeping sunshine through Friday (25), which should help the rivers fall. The federal government announced the release of 64 million reais to soften the effects of El Niño, according to GZH, which also reported the opening on Tuesday of a 2,600-square-meter square in Porto Alegre's Quarto Distrito, designed with drainage and tree cover to absorb rain. Civil Defense advises residents to avoid flood-prone areas and to call 190 or 193 in emergencies.

A storm that swept Brazil's southernmost state, Rio Grande do Sul, in the early hours of Monday (Sept 21), with torrential rain and gusts reaching 126.7 km/h, has left four people dead and one woman missing, according to the state Civil Defense authority. The toll rose on Tuesday (Sept 22) after firefighters found the bodies of a man and a child in the Serra Gaúcha highlands, G1 and CNN Brasil report. Severe weather alerts remain in force until Wednesday.The first death was confirmed by civil police in Pelotas, where a motorcyclist died after hitting a downed wire lying across the road. The other cases are in Caxias do Sul, in the highlands. In the Parada Cristal area, a car was swept away by a flash flood; a man was rescued, but a 13-year-old girl, a 4-year-old child and a 43-year-old woman went missing. In the De Lazzer neighborhood, a man cleaning a storm drain gallery was also dragged away by the water. By Tuesday, with the bodies recovered, only the 43-year-old woman remained unaccounted for, and firefighters continue the search.Damage across nearly 200 municipalitiesOn Monday, the state Civil Defense counted 119 municipalities with storm damage and 485,170 people affected, plus 701 residents displaced but staying with relatives or friends, 101 in public shelters, 1,009 houses stripped of their roofs, 273 damaged and 18 destroyed. The number of hit cities, which stood at 64 in the first tally reported by Agência Brasil, 49 of them hit mainly by the winds, reached 194 in a later survey, when the agency began counting 1,099 people out of their homes, 728 of them in shelters, CNN Brasil reports.The damage varies sharply across the state. Caxias do Sul recorded 159.4 mm of rain in a single day. In Hulha Negra, gusts hit 126.7 km/h, and in the city of Rio Grande, 113.7 km/h, according to the municipal civil defense. In Nova Santa Rita, 400 houses lost their roofs and city hall suspended classes. In Igrejinha, the Paranhana River reached 3.5 meters, one stage below full flood alert, and more than 100 houses were unroofed. Pelotas woke to torn-off roofs and fallen trees.Alerts run through WednesdayBrazil's national weather service, the Inmet, issued a high-danger storm alert for the state, warning of rain above 60 mm per hour or 100 mm per day, winds over 100 km/h and possible hail. Civil Defense expects another 50 to 80 mm in 12 hours over the state's North, Vales (valleys) and Serra regions, and storms with gusts above 90 km/h in the northwest, north and northeast through Wednesday. Streams and rivers are rising in the Guaíba basin, the watershed that drains much of the state toward Porto Alegre, with risks of flash floods and rivers bursting their banks.The area of highest flood risk is the Taquari Valley, one of the regions hit hardest by the floods that devastated the state in May 2024. There, eight municipalities (Arroio do Meio, Lajeado, Encantado, Santa Tereza, Cruzeiro do Sul, Roca Sales, Muçum and Estrela) received cell broadcast alerts, emergency messages pushed directly to phones, along with official flood maps. Civil Defense advises residents not to return to evacuated areas until officials declare them safe, and to take pets along when leaving. Rio Grande do Sul has been hit by repeated extreme rain events since 2023, and the phone alert system is part of the response built after the 2024 disaster.

The environment has vanished from Brazil's 2026 presidential race, with the first round less than two weeks away, in a year of floods and cyclones in the South and Southeast and of extreme drought risk in the North. The finding comes from Folha de S.Paulo, which reviewed on Monday (21) the government programs of the six main candidates and concluded that only President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of the Workers' Party offers proposals equal to the climate challenge.Voters say they want the topic on the stump. An Ipsos poll commissioned by the Observatório do Clima, a coalition of Brazilian civil society groups, heard 1,800 people across all regions between August 17 and 20: 91% consider it important that candidates present climate proposals, and for 62% the issue is very important, according to a report by the environmental news site ((o))eco. For 87%, climate change is already causing droughts, heavy rains and heat waves, and 79% say the issue should come first even at economic cost.A country under weather alertsBrazilians vote on October 4, after months of extremes. Early on Monday (21), a storm dumped heavy rain, lightning, hail and gusts of 106 km/h on Porto Alegre, according to MetSul Meteorology, which kept warnings of destructive winds and possible tornadoes in Rio Grande do Sul and expected a cold front and a low-pressure area to bring rain and storms to 11 states. Folha also points to the risk of a new extreme drought in the North, and MetSul records Super El Niño conditions in the Pacific, with droughts worsening across South America. In the Northern Hemisphere, temperature records and floods such as those in Nepal and Tibet complete, according to the paper, the picture of a destabilized climate.Vague programs and an unclaimed green voteThe gap repeats in the candidates' plans. According to Folha, the other five contenders, Flávio Bolsonaro (PL), Ronaldo Caiado (PSD), Romeu Zema (Novo), Augusto Cury (Avante) and Renan Santos (Missão), address the climate vaguely, with no details on central points such as cutting greenhouse gas emissions. The paper links the silence to the institutional crisis around the Supreme Federal Court, Brazil's top court, which dominates campaign coverage."The poll shows Brazilians want commitments from candidates on the climate agenda, but unfortunately that is not what is happening. Most presidential candidates have weak or nonexistent plans on the issue. One of the candidates is even a convinced denier," says Marcio Astrini, executive secretary of the Observatório do Clima.Suely Araújo, public policy coordinator at the coalition, argues the concern must turn into votes: "In the middle of a climate crisis, we cannot accept deniers, declared or disguised, in either the Executive or the Legislature." Leila da Costa Ferreira, a professor of environmental sociology at the University of Campinas (Unicamp), told Folha that research has already shown extreme events influence how people vote. "Rain and extreme events are part of our daily lives, and this has to be on the lips of candidates for president of Brazil," she says.Demand shows up beyond polling. In the Amazon, an InfoAmazonia analysis published on Friday (18) crossed electoral and demographic data and found that precincts with more evangelical and white voters tend to back candidates opposed to the climate agenda. In the Ipsos survey, climate change leads among environmental problems, with 35% of mentions, ahead of waste management (21%) and air pollution (15%), and 90% consider it very important that government work on environmental protection. What is missing, in Ferreira's reading, is a candidate who takes the issue into people's daily lives.

The governor of Bahia, Jerônimo Rodrigues of the Workers' Party (PT), used a helicopter during a campaign event that Brazil's Federal Police links to businessman Augusto Lima, a former partner of Daniel Vorcaro, the former owner of Banco Master. The column Painel of the newspaper Folha de S.Paulo reported the case on Sunday (20). According to the paper, the aircraft is the same one Lima had made available to Senator Jaques Wagner (PT-BA), the government's leader in the Senate.The Bahia link in the Master scandalLima, who is from Salvador, founded Credcesta in 2018, a payroll lending business that reached 24 of Brazil's states and 176 municipalities. Federal police arrested him in November 2025 in Operation Compliance Zero, which investigates fraud in credit portfolios Banco Master sold to BRB, the bank controlled by the Federal District government, and he is under house arrest with an electronic ankle monitor, according to a Folha reconstruction republished by the outlet Farol da Bahia. Vorcaro, the bank's former owner, remains a target of the Federal Police inquiry whose confidentiality was lifted by Supreme Court Justice André Mendonça.In the inquiry, the Federal Police says Lima put aircraft at the disposal of Wagner and the senator's family on more than one occasion. In October 2023, the businessman arranged a meeting with Wagner on an island he owns in Salvador and sent the aircraft's registration and the flight time, investigators say."On that occasion, Augusto Lima places a private aircraft at the disposal of Jaques Wagner and members of his family for travel between Salvador and the island indicated."The Federal Police lists other benefits it is investigating as bribes: box tickets worth 63,339 reais for members of Wagner's family at a concert in Los Angeles in June 2023, bought by Reag Investimentos, an asset manager linked to João Carlos Mansur that was later raided in Operation Carbono Oculto and liquidated by the central bank; the purchase of an apartment worth 2.5 million reais; and 3.5 million reais paid to a company owned by the senator's daughter-in-law. Reached by Folha, Wagner said he met Lima in an institutional setting, that they became friends, and that the sale of the state-owned Ebal supermarket company, privatized for 15 million reais in 2018 when he was Bahia's economic development secretary, was a good deal for the state.Aircraft as currencyThe Bahia episode fits a pattern the Federal Police describes in the Master case: aircraft treated as a form of payment. According to G1, the police report says contracts of about 131 million reais with Banco Master and 50 million reais with Vorcaro's Viking Participações, both signed by the law office of lawyer Viviane Barci, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, could be settled by transferring shares in an Embraer Legacy 650 jet and an Airbus EC 155 B1 helicopter, aircraft tied to Prime Aviation, an air taxi company in which Vorcaro was a partner.The Federal Police is examining whether the benefits Wagner allegedly received relate to his Senate work on matters of interest to Banco Master. Lima's lawyers denied wrongdoing and called the police operations unnecessary, saying he had been available to the authorities for six months. The Folha report lands weeks before Brazil's October general elections, with Rodrigues campaigning for re-election in the country's largest northeastern state.

Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva said on Saturday that his government will not allow the electricity produced in Brazil to go only to feeding data centers. Speaking at a campaign event in the southern state of Santa Catarina, two weeks before the first round of Brazil's presidential election, he said companies that want to operate in the country will have to build their own power plants to supply their processing centers.Defending Redata, a tax incentive regime he signed into law on Tuesday, Lula put expected investment at around R$ 500 billion and said Brazil has everything it takes to become a major hub for the industry because of its abundant renewable energy. "We will not let the energy we produce go only to the data centers. Whoever wants to come here will have to invest in building renewable energy," he said, in remarks distributed by the Estado news agency. In the same speech he mentioned the new Critical Minerals Law and said Brazil has mapped only 30% of its territory, yet already holds the world's second largest rare earth reserves, behind China.The law signed at the presidential palace is more flexible than the campaign framing, though. It lets companies secure their power through supply contracts or their own generation. Firms that join the regime must also reserve at least 10% of their processing and storage capacity for the Brazilian market and invest a minimum of 2% of the value of equipment bought under the benefit in research and development. In return, four federal taxes on equipment purchases are suspended for up to five years. By the government's own math, the tax break will cost R$ 5.2 billion this year and fall to about R$ 1 billion in each of the next two fiscal years.An unresolved definition of "low emission"The program's biggest energy question remains open. A Senate amendment replaced the requirement for "clean" or "renewable" sources with "renewable or low emission" ones, wording that could open the door to natural gas. Sources at the Ministry of Mines and Energy say gas will certainly be included; at the Finance Ministry, a source who helped design the policy told the news agency Eixos that officials will "fight to the end to block gas." States in the Northeast, such as Pernambuco and Sergipe, and gas distributors push for its inclusion, while the wind power and battery storage industries lobby against it, fearing they will lose ground to the new demand.An interministerial directive will set the technical parameters. Options under discussion include excluding gas, accepting it fully, or allowing it with conditions such as carbon credits, biomethane and carbon capture and storage. "This is a debate under way inside the government to work out the reach of the low carbon definition," said Rafael Dubeux, a special advisor to the finance minister.A global race for powerThe scramble for electricity to run artificial intelligence is global. The government's economic team calculates that most data and AI applications consumed in Brazil are still processed abroad, and Finance Minister Dario Durigan presents Redata as a way to bring that flow home. A 2025 survey by CNI, Brazil's national industry confederation, listed data centers alongside critical minerals, satellites and energy among the sectors where US investors wanted to expand in Brazil, a move tied to the reworking of supply chains to reduce dependence on China. On the environmental side, companies that join the regime will have to publish reports on water use and energy sources, the very issue environmental groups raise when they criticize the spread of facilities that run around the clock and need constant cooling.

President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva said on Friday (18) that Brazil's Equatorial Margin, an offshore oil frontier on the country's northern coast, has the potential to become a "new pre-salt", and that the oil found there appears to be of even higher quality. Speaking at a Federal Highway Police base in Rio de Janeiro during a public security event, the president, who is running for reelection, said Brazil must protect its natural wealth from the interest of US President Donald Trump in oil, critical minerals and rare earths.It was when he compared Brazil's two oil frontiers that Lula put numbers to the discovery. According to InfoMoney, he said:"We have oil in the Equatorial Margin, 175 kilometers off the coast of Amapá. The pre-salt is 300 kilometers out. We have to take care of it, because Trump is out there, after critical minerals and oil."The pre-salt, ultradeep reserves beneath a thick layer of salt off Brazil's southeastern coast, yields high quality oil and accounts for much of the country's oil and gas output, according to news outlet G1. "There is oil there... possibly the new pre-salt. It seems to be of higher quality," Lula said, in remarks reported by G1 with information from Reuters.The Morpho field, off the coast of AmapáThe president's comparison rests on recent facts. State-controlled Petrobras has announced an oil discovery at the Morpho field, in the Foz do Amazonas Basin off the coast of Amapá, within the Equatorial Margin, and has already received a license from Ibama, Brazil's federal environmental licensing agency, to expand exploration in nearby wells. For Lula, defending these resources is part of the wider global race for inputs such as the minerals used in technology and energy. "Trump is after critical minerals, oil and rare earths. No, this here is ours," he said, to applause from an audience made up mostly of security officers.Strain with WashingtonThe speech came amid friction between the two governments. On the same occasion, Lula again rejected the Trump administration's designation of Brazilian criminal factions as terrorist organizations. "I don't accept the idea that gangs of criminals are terrorists, as Trump says," he declared. The event, according to InfoMoney, launched integrated public security actions in Rio, where the president also described border policing as a matter of national sovereignty. On oil, Lula said the government will need major investments to keep control of these riches in a country of continental size. Meanwhile, exploration moves ahead through the regulatory route, with Ibama's license allowing Petrobras to expand drilling in wells next to Morpho, at the mouth of the Amazon River.

Brazil's Federal Prosecution Office (MPF) and the Federal Public Defender's Office (DPU) have filed a public civil action demanding that the Anacé indigenous people be consulted before the Pecém Data Center, known as the TikTok data center, starts operating in Caucaia, in the metropolitan area of Fortaleza, in the state of Ceará. According to G1, the agencies argue the project cannot begin operations without prior consultation, an environmental impact study and report (EIA/Rima) and impact monitoring measures.The agencies cite effects on water and energy use and on noise levels. "In the region, surrounding communities depend on wells for their water supply," they said in a joint statement. Besides free, prior and informed consultation as required by ILO Convention 169, the lawsuit asks for pumping tests, validation of the hydrogeological model, an integrated water and energy impact program and regular disclosure of power, water and noise indicators, as reported by Mobile Time. The same demands were recommended in May to Omnia WN Holding, the company building the site, through Semace, Ceará's environmental agency. Because the responses "did not demonstrate full compliance with the points considered central," the agencies took the case to court. The action also asks Semace not to issue the operating license and, if it does, for the facility to be suspended until a final ruling. The state of Ceará and the Caucaia city government are also defendants."The project is close to the area that partially overlaps the Anacé Indigenous Territory, which is under study by Funai, Brazil's indigenous affairs agency. For the DPU, informational meetings do not replace free, prior and informed consultation," the agencies said.Seventy hectares, two kilometers from the lagoonThe project covers 70 hectares (173 acres) in the Pecém Industrial and Port Complex, inside a federal export processing zone on the border between São Gonçalo do Amarante and Caucaia. It sits about two kilometers from the environmental protection area around the Cauípe coastal lagoon, where the Anacé live. TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew presented the project to President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in September 2025. G1 puts the investment above 580 billion reais and the initial capacity at 200 MW, which would make it Brazil's largest single-client data center and the first aimed at exports, processing data of users in other countries. Mobile Time adds that planned installed capacity is 300 MW, with 120 diesel generators, an electrical substation and groundwater extraction for cooling.Mobile Time reports the region has a history of drought, and civil society groups including the Rights on the Net Coalition (Coalizão Direitos na Rede) and the consumer institute Idec had already warned about pressure on the wells supplying communities near the lagoon.The responsesIn a statement, Omnia said it "holds all valid environmental licenses and authorizations" and maintains "broad dialogue" with local communities, adding that it has not yet been formally summoned in the case. The Ceará state attorney general's office said the project "has been conducted in accordance with applicable legislation" and will present its defense in court. TikTok did not respond to Mobile Time's request for comment.The case reaches the courts amid a global race to build data centers for artificial intelligence, which raises demand for water and energy in places where those resources are already contested. At the Cauípe lagoon, the groundwater meant to cool servers serving users abroad is the same water that feeds the wells of surrounding communities. The outcome will show how the prior consultation required by ILO Convention 169 applies to this new wave of digital expansion in Brazil.

Brazil's push into a new oil frontier off the state of Amapa moved forward with the discovery of hydrocarbons at the Morpho well, about 175 kilometers from the coast, and with the authorization by Ibama, the federal environmental agency, for Petrobras to drill three more wells in block FZA-M-59, in the Foz do Amazonas Basin, off Brazil's northern coast. The frontier sits in front of one of the world's most sensitive shorelines, home to the planet's largest continuous mangrove belt and the Great Amazon Reef System, and the licensing is already being challenged by federal prosecutors.Petrobras announced the find on August 14. The well was drilled in deep waters, at a point where the sea is 2,886 meters deep. According to Ibama, the licensed campaign covers four wells, Morpho as the main well plus three contingency wells, with activities between 2025 and 2029. News site G1 reports that the state-controlled company plans to invest US$2.5 billion in 15 wells along the Equatorial Margin, the offshore strip that runs from Amapa toward the country's northeast, by 2030. Petrobras is testing the commercial potential of the reservoir and sent a sample of the light crude to Rio de Janeiro for analysis.What prosecutors and the regulator sayThe Federal Prosecution Office (MPF) again demanded explanations from Ibama in a request confirmed on September 2. According to prosecutors, the agency told a federal court hearing in April 2025 that the drilling would be short, lasting about six months, while the licensing documents describe a four-well campaign running to 2029. The MPF says the contradiction undermines transparency and makes it harder to weigh risks, because a multi-year offshore operation can pile up impacts on marine fauna, artisanal fishing and the way of life of traditional communities. The request went from the prosecutors' socio-environmental support group to Ibama president Jair Schmitt. In a statement, Ibama said it runs the licensing with technical rigor, that the environmental impact study and the individual emergency plan cover every phase of the operations, and that the prosecutors' recommendations are already part of the process.Mangroves, corals and poorly mapped currentsFrom Amapa to Maranhao, the coast forms the longest unbroken mangrove belt on Earth, built by species such as the red mangrove (Rhizophora mangle). The ecosystem works as a nursery for the fisheries that sustain local communities, holds back erosion and stores large volumes of carbon. Between 70 and 220 meters below the surface lies the Great Amazon Reef System, documented in 2016: a rare mesophotic reef, with more than 40 coral species and 60 sponge species, that thrives under the murky water discharged by the Amazon River."If we have an environmental problem, cleanup is much harder, because most of our coast is mangrove and floodplain forest," Valdenira dos Santos, who holds a doctorate in marine geology and geophysics, told Rede Amazonica, the local TV affiliate that first aired her assessment. She said the Amapa coast has unique hydrodynamics, maximum environmental sensitivity (index 10), currents that reach 2 meters per second, tides that hit the shore head-on and an almost total lack of data on coastal currents. She also points to a daily risk that predates the oil push: tankers pass every day through the North Channel, the entrance to the Amazon waterway, and the state has no regional contingency plan. "In Amapa we depend directly on surface water to supply our cities," she said.Greenpeace Brasil said in a note to G1 that economic viability "does not erase the environmental, climate and social risks" of the Equatorial Margin. The group noted that in the 2025 auction run by ANP, the national oil regulator, 19 blocks were taken in the Foz do Amazonas and await licensing, while another 36 remain under study, raising the cumulative risk of simultaneous operations. For the NGO, defending a just energy transition abroad while opening new fossil fuel fronts at home are incompatible paths. While Petrobras tests the reservoir's potential, Santos points to another bottleneck: Amapa has minimal installed capacity for marine research and a shortage of qualified workers to produce the coastal data the coming years will demand.

The temperature of the equatorial Pacific reached 2.0°C above average on September 14, the threshold that classifies El Niño as "very strong", according to a bulletin released on Wednesday (16) by ClimaInfo, a Brazilian organization focused on climate, and reported by CNN Brasil. The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) estimates a probability above 90% that the phenomenon will stay at that level between September and January. Its effects are already splitting the country: the city of São Paulo is living through its rainiest September on record, while the Branco River in the northern state of Roraima runs below historical minimums.Record rain in the South and SoutheastIn 14 days, the Mirante de Santana station in the city of São Paulo recorded 253.8 mm of rain, the rainiest September since records began in 1943 and three times the average for the whole month, according to INMET, Brazil's national meteorology institute. Stations in Bragança Paulista, Registro and Iguape have already broken their monthly records. CNN Brasil reported two deaths and one missing person in São Paulo state, where the town of Eldorado, in the Ribeira Valley, was left completely flooded. The ClimaInfo bulletin, citing state civil defense agencies, counts at least eight deaths in Greater São Paulo and four in Paraná, where more than 21,000 people were affected across 76 municipalities. São Paulo's state civil defense attributes the storms to El Niño, and a new extratropical cyclone could bring heavy rain to nine states starting Sunday (20).The outlook points to more rain in the same direction. The federal El Niño Panel, run by INPE, Brazil's space research agency, together with other government bodies, forecasts above-average rainfall in the South and part of São Paulo state through November. In Rio Grande do Sul, the southernmost state, soil moisture could run 150 mm above normal in October. In the rest of the Southeast, rain should stay above average in São Paulo, with isolated storms in northern Minas Gerais and Espírito Santo.Drought in the North and NortheastIn the North, the effect is the opposite. The Branco River fell 22 cm in one week and reached 93 cm in Boa Vista, the capital of Roraima, below historical minimums for the period and 250 cm below its level on the same date in 2016. At Caracaraí, the river is also at its historical low for the season. The Geological Survey of Brazil sees little chance of recovery in the coming months: only 45% of expected rain fell over the basin in July and August. The state government of Roraima has declared an emergency for 180 days. Across most of the Amazon, the annual low-water season is still within its normal range, but falling fast: the Purus River dropped 120 cm at Beruri, the Solimões 111 cm at Manacapuru and the Negro 104 cm at Manaus.According to INMET, the dry scenario should persist in the North and Northeast through November. In the Northeast, the soil water deficit is expected to reach 150 mm in Ceará, in central-northern Piauí and in the west of Rio Grande do Norte, Paraíba, Pernambuco and Alagoas.El Niño is a natural cycle that warms the Pacific and disrupts wind and rain patterns, but this episode is playing out on a warmer planet. NOAA's index already discounts the background warming of the tropical ocean, so the 2 degrees measured come from the phenomenon itself. Scientists heard by ClimaInfo note that attribution studies still need to confirm El Niño's weight in each event, though a more humid atmosphere tends to intensify extreme rainfall. For now, the response is running on two tracks: Roraima has its 180-day emergency decree and the federal panel keeps monitoring river basins, even though federal records of affected populations, fed by municipalities, tend to arrive days or weeks after the events.

President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva signed into law on Tuesday (Sept. 15) the Redata, a special tax regime for data center services that zeroes federal levies such as PIS/Pasep, Cofins and the IPI industrial tax on equipment used to build, maintain or expand data centers in Brazil. The industry welcomed the move as a step forward for artificial intelligence infrastructure, but companies and government agencies themselves say the availability of electricity is now the main obstacle to growth.According to G1, the bill passed the Senate on Sept. 1 and replaces a provisional decree issued in September 2025 that expired in February without ever reaching a vote in Congress. It was introduced by then congressman José Guimarães of the Workers' Party (PT), now a minister. A government estimate cited by Veja puts the tax break at 5.2 billion reais in forgone revenue in 2026, falling to about 1 billion reais over the following two years.The incentives come with strings attached. To join the regime, companies must reserve at least 10% of their processing and storage capacity for the Brazilian market, invest at least 2% of the value of equipment bought under the program in research and development, and secure their electricity supply through purchase contracts or self generation. The law is a bet on the economy and on digital sovereignty: data from telecoms regulator Anatel cited by Veja show that about 60% of Brazil's digital workload is processed abroad, and a Finance Ministry estimate says processing data in Brazil can be up to 30% more expensive than overseas.The power bottleneckThiago Prado, head of the EPE, the federal energy planning office, told Folha de S.Paulo that data centers have filed grid access requests totaling more than 56 gigawatts, the equivalent of one fifth of the country's installed generation capacity. He believes many of those requests will never materialize, and the EPE is talking with investors to gauge how far along each project really is before proposing transmission expansions. Timing is the core problem: in Brazil a transmission line takes about five years to build, while a large data center goes up in about three years. If a consumer of that scale drops off the grid abruptly, it can cause disturbances and raise the risk of regional blackouts.Installed capacity today is concentrated in the Southeast. According to Rogério Gachet, CEO of fiber network operator Eletronet, 96% of Brazil's data center capacity sits in that region, and areas with available power and land are starting to be considered as alternatives. The Redata itself earmarks funds for industrial and technology development programs with special attention to the North, Northeast and Center-West regions. Axia Energia, Eletronet's controlling company, welcomed the new law, but its vice president for technology and innovation, Juliano Dantas, told Folha: "But we still have to advance on other aspects, such as energy regulation in general".Global demand and environmental rules"The bottleneck is no longer in applications, it is in energy", said Marcio Aguiar, Nvidia's director for Latin America. Flávio Loução, a partner at consultancy Deloitte cited by Folha, estimates that data centers worldwide will consume 565 TWh in 2026, up 26% from 2025, reaching 702 TWh in 2027, with AI servers accounting for more than half of that volume. With a mostly renewable power matrix and cheap energy, Brazil shares with Chile the position of most attractive South American destination for such investments, according to Loução, with the added advantage of having no earthquakes. The law also raises environmental demands: companies must publish reports on their water efficiency and on the energy sources used by their facilities. What remains to be regulated is what will count as low carbon energy, including the debate over natural gas, and how emissions offsets will work. "We still have no closed position on compensation", said Ceron, executive secretary of the Finance Ministry, quoted by G1.

Google announced on Wednesday (Sept. 16) the largest carbon removal purchase in its history. The agreement with Terradot, a removal company operating in Brazil and the United States in which Google is an investor, starts in the rice paddies of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil's southernmost state and its main rice grower. Together, the two parts of the project add up to 2 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent by 2040, spread over more than 200,000 hectares of farmland. The deal value was not disclosed.One fast front, one permanentThe shorter part runs to 2030: 1 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent in avoided methane emissions from the state's paddies. According to Folha de S.Paulo, Terradot will help local farmers adopt alternate wetting and drying, a technique that drains the fields at intervals and cuts both methane formation and water use. As CNN Brasil notes, this figure counts emissions avoided and converted into CO2 equivalent, and will be verified separately from the second part.The second part, by 2040, is the actual removal of 1 million tonnes of CO2 using ground volcanic rock, mostly basalt, spread on farmland. Rainwater turns atmospheric CO2 into carbonic acid, which reacts with minerals in the rock and forms bicarbonate, a stable molecule that moves into groundwater and eventually the ocean. Terradot says the carbon stays out of the atmosphere for more than 10,000 years, which is why the method counts as permanent removal.Why Rio Grande do Sul, and what comes nextThe companies say the state offers the right conditions: tropical soils, a hot and humid climate, irrigated rice and basalt quarries nearby. Rice matters to the global methane account, since flooded paddies generate 10% to 12% of the world's emissions of the gas, according to an estimate cited by Reuters. A molecule of methane warms the planet about 30 times as much as a molecule of CO2, though it stays in the atmosphere for roughly a decade, compared with up to a century for CO2. According to the companies, this is the largest enhanced rock weathering project ever announced and the first at this scale to combine cutting a super pollutant with durable removal."While most climate solutions focus on either short- or long-term horizons, our partnership with Terradot will address both timelines simultaneously," Google said in a statement.The model is meant to be copied. Brazil grows rice on more than 1.5 million hectares, and Terradot plans pilot projects in other producer countries such as India and Vietnam from 2026, with commercial expansion from 2028. "With this new model, every tonne of removal meets the same rigorous standard and delivers climate impact faster than ever," said James Kanoff, CEO of Terradot. Price remains a hurdle: Reuters reported that an earlier Terradot contract, for 90,000 tonnes, cost close to US$300 per tonne, and the company says the new project has not yet reached the US$100 mark many developers see as the level needed to scale the market. How much of the credit revenue will reach rice farmers was also not disclosed. In 2024, Google had already bought 200,000 tonnes of removal credits from Terradot and invested in the company.For Google, the deal answers a balance sheet that keeps getting worse. As Folha reported, the company's emissions rose 18% in 2025 to 14.4 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent, a direct result of artificial intelligence and the energy demand of data centers. Pollution is up 80% since 2019, and the carbon neutrality goal for 2030, set in 2021, has moved further away. The total could be larger, because Google uses an "ambition-based emissions" metric that excludes activities considered peripheral. The 2 million tonnes in the deal, combining both parts, equal about 14% of what Google emitted in 2025 alone.

Brazil recorded 26 killings of land and environmental defenders in 2025, more than double the 12 murders counted in 2024. The rise took the country from fourth to second place in the global ranking of the NGO Global Witness, released on Wednesday (Sept. 16), returning Brazil to the position it held in 2022 and 2023.At least 124 defenders were killed worldwide in 2025, bringing the total of documented killings and disappearances since 2012, when the London-based group began its annual count, to 2,375. This year's edition is titled Collective power. Latin America concentrated 85% of the cases, about 105 deaths. Colombia led the list for the fourth consecutive year, with 39 killings, followed by Brazil; the two countries together accounted for 52% of last year's murders. Honduras and the Philippines had 12 cases each, Mexico 10 and Guatemala 8.Land in disputeNearly all the Brazilian cases documented in 2025 had land disputes as their main cause, according to the report: seven were tied to Indigenous territories and 14 to smallholder farmers. Rondônia and Pará, two Amazon states, together accounted for half of the deaths. There, traditional communities face the pressure of expanding farming and extractive frontiers, often through land grabbing known in Brazil as grilagem."The lack of resolution on their land rights leaves Indigenous peoples and small farmers exposed to land grabbing, intimidation and violence," said Gabriella Bianchini, head of partnerships at Global Witness.The increase came in the same year Brazil hosted COP30, the UN climate summit, in Belém, an event with record Indigenous participation that included commitments on territorial rights.Collective protectionThese communities, however, are not passive. "They are organising, going to the law and developing their own strategies to defend their territories and their rights," Bianchini said. The report documents collective protection mechanisms such as territorial patrols, early warning systems and community monitoring networks. Worldwide, 44 Indigenous people were killed in 2025, including seven members of Indigenous guards; in Peru, Kakataibo communities run an Indigenous guard that patrols their land against organised crime and illegal coca crops.Globally, land disputes were associated with more than half of the 2025 killings. Mining was linked to 11 deaths, logging to eight and agribusiness to six, and more than a third of the cases involved organised crime or hitmen. "Defenders are the world's eyes and ears on the ground. It's thanks to them that we know when ecosystems are being destroyed, where forests are being cleared or rivers polluted," wrote Toby Hill, the report's lead author.

Seven days of heavy rain have affected 22,176 people in Paraná, a state in southern Brazil, leaving four dead and two missing, according to a bulletin released by the state's civil defense agency on Tuesday morning, September 15. The rains began on Wednesday, September 9, and caused damage in 80 municipalities, with flooded cities and stretches of highway closed. The count of affected people includes those whose homes were damaged or who lost power, water or communications.The state recorded 3,022 damaged houses and 18 destroyed. At least 2,587 people left their homes: 2,182 took refuge with relatives or friends, and 405 went to public shelters. The largest share is in União da Vitória, a city in the state's south crossed by the Iguaçu River. City hall estimates at least 1,800 people displaced and 400 in public shelters. The river, whose normal level is 3.5 meters (11.5 feet), peaked at 6.275 meters (about 20.6 feet) on Monday afternoon, September 14, and began to recede slowly; at 8 a.m. on Tuesday it stood at 6.267 meters, according to monitoring by Copel, the Paraná power company.Deaths and disappearancesThree of the four victims lived in Ponta Grossa, in the Campos Gerais region. According to news outlet g1, a family was buried while sleeping on the morning of Thursday, September 10, after a slope collapsed onto their house: Kauan da Silva Contador, 21, his partner Jaqueline Gabriela de Lima Andrade, 20, and her son Vinícius Hendrick de Lima Machado, 5. The bodies were found in the same bed, and the Fire Department said a wall and the roof collapsed under the impact.The fourth victim was in Rio Branco do Sul, in the metropolitan region of Curitiba, the state capital. A man's body was found on Monday on the banks of the Ribeira River by the Paraná Military Fire Department, using a rescue jet ski and a rafting boat, CNN Brasil reported. Investigators suspect he disappeared while trying to drive across a submerged bridge; the car was found inside the river, and another man who was with him remains missing. In Tunas do Paraná, also in the metropolitan region, a resident of the Pacas community disappeared in the late afternoon after leaving home to fix water pipes at a spring. His route required crossing a bridge swept by the current; community members began the search, supported by the Tactical Rescue Operations Group (Gost).State response and climate warningSince Friday, September 11, the Paraná government's Integrated Management Office has operated at the Regional Integrated Command and Control Center in Curitiba to centralize information and coordinate teams. State Security Secretary Hudson Teixeira said that "all efforts and resources are being used to mitigate the effects of the climate events that have hit Paraná in recent days". On the highway network, the main closed stretch was between Curitiba and Adrianópolis, in the Ribeira Valley, which links Paraná to São Paulo state; the Federal Highway Police maintains a real-time map of road conditions.The disaster comes in a September with above-average rainfall in several Paraná cities, g1 reported, and as federal agencies warn of a very strong El Niño. Bulletin No. 2 of the 2026-2027 El Niño Panel, prepared by the National Institute of Meteorology (Inmet) with partners including the water agency ANA and the disaster monitoring center Cemaden, says there is a 100% probability the phenomenon will remain active until early 2027. It forecasts above-average rain, river floods and landslides in Brazil's South, where soil is already wetter than in previous El Niño episodes. The bulletin does not link this particular episode to the phenomenon. Even so, it ranks the South as the region most exposed to its impacts in spring and summer.

Chief Raoni Metuktire, the 94-year-old Brazilian indigenous leader known worldwide for defending the Amazon, has a tumor in his digestive system, and the medical team treating him has ruled out therapy aimed at a cure. The Instituto Raoni announced the diagnosis on Monday night (14), and G1, Globo's news portal, detailed the case. The chief has been receiving palliative care since an emergency operation in June in the city of São Paulo.According to the institute's statement, carried by the Reuters news agency, the first signs of decline appeared a few months ago, with persistent abdominal pain that led to his first hospitalization. Imaging exams showed a tumor at an advanced stage. On June 19, Raoni was transferred to Hospital São Paulo, run by the Federal University of São Paulo (Unifesp), where he underwent surgery to relieve a bowel obstruction caused by the disease.The diagnosis is a poorly differentiated adenocarcinoma, the most common type of malignant tumor of the digestive tract, which starts in the glands that line it. "Poorly differentiated" describes cells that have lost much of the appearance and organization of healthy cells, a trait linked to more aggressive behavior, G1 explains. The lesion sits at the duodenum, the first portion of the small intestine. Because a biopsy was avoided in June due to the risk of bleeding, confirmation came from laboratory analysis of tumor tissue removed during the operation. The organ where the cancer began remains undefined.Why a cure was ruled outSince the tumor could not be removed, the Unifesp team performed a gastroenteroanastomosis, a procedure that creates a new route in the digestive system so food bypasses the blocked area. "When the mass is very large, it is not always possible to know what the epicenter was. It could have been the stomach, the pancreas, the intestine," surgeon Pedro Luiz Bertevello, who holds a doctorate from the University of São Paulo and works in oncological surgery at the Beneficência Portuguesa hospital, told G1. With advanced disease in a patient too frail for a wider investigation, finding the starting point became unviable and of little consequence for treatment.Oncologist Stephen Stefani, of the Oncoclínicas group, summed up the clinical reasoning: "The biology of the disease is what defines the possibilities of treatment and the prognosis." The goal now, according to the Instituto Raoni, is a different one: caring for the chief rather than fighting the tumor. The institute listed what the team is working toward:"The objective becomes controlling pain and other symptoms, reducing discomfort, preserving whatever autonomy is possible, ensuring adequate food and hydration, preventing complications, providing medical and nursing follow-up and offering the best possible quality of life."The institute added that the priority is care delivered "with safety, comfort and dignity, respecting his culture, his language, his decisions and the presence of his family and his people." At 94, Raoni has for decades been one of the most recognized indigenous voices for the protection of native peoples and the forest. He has appeared alongside presidents and popes, and in the 1980s joined the musician Sting in international campaigns to save the Amazon, a path that made him a lasting presence in the global climate debate.

Brazil's monetary policy committee, the Copom, opened its meeting on Tuesday (Sept 15) at the Central Bank headquarters in Brasília, chaired by Gabriel Galípolo, and financial markets widely expect it to deliver a fifth consecutive cut to the country's benchmark interest rate. The consensus bet, reported by Folha de S.Paulo, is a 0.25 percentage point reduction that would take the Selic, as the benchmark rate is known, from 14% to 13.75% a year. The decision is due on Wednesday night (16), in the committee's last meeting before the presidential election.The case for easing rests on the domestic economy. Since the August meeting, according to Folha, economists have grown more convinced that activity is slowing and inflation is easing. In the Focus bulletin, a weekly survey of market forecasts released by the Central Bank on Monday (14), the median projection for the Selic at the end of 2026 stood at 13.75%, a reading the market takes as a sign this may be the final cut of the cycle. The same bulletin showed 2026 inflation, measured by the IPCA index, easing from 5% to 4.9%, still far above the 3% center of the official target, which carries a tolerance band of 1.5 percentage points.Against the global currentWhile Brasília prepares to cut, the world's major central banks are raising rates. On the same Wednesday, the Fed in Washington is expected to lift its policy rate from a range of 3.5% to 3.75% up to between 3.75% and 4%. Last week the European Central Bank in Frankfurt raised its deposit rate by a quarter point to 2.5%, and bets are growing that the Bank of Japan in Tokyo will raise its own rate from 1% to 1.25%. The common driver is the war in the Middle East, which has pushed oil prices back above US$ 100 and stoked global inflation. Economists heard by Folha still judge that the external scenario should not change the Brazilian bank's plan to cut.Cautious wording and criticism of the paceResearch desks at Itaú BBA, C6 Bank, Suno Research and Daycoval, surveyed by Exame, see the quarter-point cut as the most likely outcome, with attention focused on the tone of the statement. Itaú BBA expects a unanimous decision and projects that the Central Bank's own model will keep its inflation estimate at 3.2% for the first quarter of 2028, the committee's relevant horizon, with risks described as asymmetric to the upside. C6 Bank cut its year-end Selic forecast from 14% to 13.75% and expects the rate to hold through the remaining meetings of the year. Its chief economist, Felipe Salles, expects cautious communication:"The Committee should justify the continued calibration of interest rates given the projection of inflation around the target over the relevant horizon. However, inflation expectations above target, a tight labor market and the resilience of economic activity still require contractionary monetary policy."Not everyone agrees with the pace. Fabio Kanczuk, a former Central Bank director, argues the committee is guided by a very strong belief that current rates are high enough to cause a very large contraction of the economy ahead, an assessment he calls mistaken. In his view, the committee should not keep cutting the Selic if it wants to secure the convergence of inflation to target.Gustavo Sung, chief economist at Suno Research, sees the domestic picture as more favorable than in previous months, with current inflation falling and activity losing steam. If the Focus median proves right, this will be the last cut before Brazilians choose their next president, and the remaining question for the committee is whether to hold the rate at 13.75% in the meetings left this year.

São Paulo, Brazil's largest city, is living through its rainiest September since weather records began in 1943. By 9 a.m. on Monday, September 14, the station of the National Institute of Meteorology (Inmet) at Mirante de Santana, in the city's north zone, had collected 253.8 millimeters of rain in the month, roughly 10 inches, according to agency data published by the state news service Agência SP. That is three times the climate average for all of September, 83.3 millimeters.The total has passed the previous September record of 1983, when the same station measured 243.1 millimeters. Next in the ranking come 1993, with 206.7 millimeters, 2015, with 201.7, and 1957, with 197.2. The record fell quickly: at 9 a.m. on Saturday, September 12, the month stood at 198.2 millimeters, and another 55.6 millimeters fell on the station in the following 48 hours. Between Friday and Saturday, the site registered 75.4 millimeters in 24 hours, the largest volume recorded anywhere in Brazil in that period, according to Inmet data reported by G1. September is now the second rainiest month of 2026 at the station, behind only January, which accumulated 256.4 millimeters.The record extends across the stateThe high totals are not confined to the capital. Between September 1 and 13, Campinas accumulated 257.2 millimeters, 3.1 times its monthly average of 83.7 millimeters and its largest September since the local series began in 1961, beating the 1976 mark of 183.3 millimeters. In Registro, a town in the Vale do Ribeira valley in southern São Paulo state, the 185.3 millimeters through the 13th make this the third rainiest September in a series that also dates from 1961. In São José dos Campos (161 millimeters), the Baixada Santista coastal region around the port of Santos (232.7 millimeters) and Bauru (118.8 millimeters), volumes are also well above the climate averages, according to Agência SP. In the capital, the storms flooded streets and left people missing, G1 reported; across the state there have been river floods, urban flooding and landslides, with deaths recorded, according to InfoMoney. Families in the Vale do Ribeira and around Itapeva have already received state aid because of the rains.The role of El NiñoThe state Civil Defense attributes the heavy rain to El Niño, a natural phenomenon linked to abnormal warming of Pacific waters along the Equator that changes atmospheric circulation and redistributes moisture and temperature across the planet. Climatologist José Antônio Marengo of Brazil's National Center for Monitoring and Early Warning of Natural Disasters (Cemaden) says the phenomenon is established and still strengthening. In his view, a strong El Niño does not by itself guarantee a summer with more severe storms: heavy rain, damaging winds and tornadoes can happen with or without it."In the equatorial Pacific region where it forms, the warming has already passed 1.8 degrees Celsius of anomaly, and when it reaches 2, that would mean a very strong El Niño, which is forecast for the end of this year and the start of the next," Marengo said.What is being doneSince Friday, September 11, a crisis cabinet has been working in person at state Civil Defense headquarters, bringing together representatives of the state government, the power, water and gas utilities, the highway department (DER), state regulators (Arsesp, SP Águas and Artesp), the Fire Department and the state Highway Police. The agency is tracking conditions with radar and satellites, with teams mobilized across the state, and residents can receive free SMS alerts by texting their postcode, called CEP in Brazil, to 40199; in emergencies the numbers are 193 and 199. "Numbers like these show why monitoring cannot stop. Information and risk awareness are what allow people to protect themselves in this period. Prevention is what saves lives," said Colonel Araújo Monteiro, the state coordinator of civil defense. Ahead of the storm season's peak, the state has also advanced the delivery of emergency response kits and training for municipal teams, including sessions of the Operação Chuvas de Verão, the summer rains operation, held in Piracicaba, according to the local outlet Piranot.Forecaster Climatempo expects the rain to start easing on Tuesday, September 15, with clouds thinning only on Thursday the 17th. State Civil Defense meteorologist William Minhoto warns that the record may still grow: "Since September is still under way and more rain is forecast in the coming days, the monthly total may increase until the end of the period, extending the current record," he said. Even as the weather system moves away from Wednesday the 16th, saturated soil keeps the risk of flooding, flash floods and landslides, mainly in vulnerable areas, and the arrival of polar air should hold temperatures below 20 degrees Celsius in the capital this week.

Saudi Arabia holds enough crude to keep exporting from the Red Sea port of Yanbu for only five to seven days unless it can soon restart its main pipeline, shut since Friday (11) after drone attacks. The estimate comes from Saudi oil buyers and traders who spoke to Reuters on Sunday (13), in a report carried by G1, the news portal of Brazil's Globo group. The East-West line crosses the Arabian Peninsula and moves about 4 million barrels a day, around 4% of world supply, from eastern oil fields to the Red Sea.Yanbu can store about 35 million barrels, according to industry estimates cited by Reuters. The kingdom also keeps stocks at the Egyptian ports of Ain Sukhna on the Red Sea, with room for 18 million barrels, and Sidi Kerir on the Mediterranean, with 20 million. Four industry sources told the agency the tanks are not full and will run dry if the pipeline stays down. Saudi Arabia's government media office and its energy ministry did not respond to requests for comment, and Riyadh has not detailed the damage or a timeline for restart.The chokepoints of a warFor the past six months the pipeline has been the kingdom's escape route: with the Strait of Hormuz closed by the war between the United States and Iran, a conflict described by CNN Brasil, the line spared Saudi Arabia the export freeze that hit its neighbors. Regional flows through Hormuz, about 22 million barrels a day for the whole Middle East before the war, have fallen to between 6 million and 9 million, industry sources said. On Friday (11), Iran-aligned Houthi fighters from Yemen took Perim island at the mouth of the Red Sea, a day after seizing the port city of Mocha, CNN Brasil reported. Perim divides the Bab el-Mandeb strait, the gateway to the Suez Canal shipping route.Production figures already show the squeeze. Saudi Arabia told OPEC, the producers' cartel, that it pumped 6.2 million barrels a day in August, down from 10.9 million in February, before the war began. The International Energy Agency (IEA), which coordinates Western energy policy, said on Friday (11) that Saudi supply fell in August to its lowest level in more than three decades and that world supply will drop by 5.7 million barrels a day this year, about 6%.Repairs and diplomacyEstimates on the pipeline diverge. One Reuters source said repairs could take five to six weeks; another said the problem may be fixed sooner, with pumping partly resumed while work continues. On the military front, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman called US President Donald Trump twice on Thursday (10) to ask for strikes against the Houthis, and Trump declined, a source told CNN Brasil. The White House said in a statement:"The United States is focused on protecting our core national security interests, such as ensuring freedom of navigation in the Red Sea, while empowering our regional partners to take the lead in managing and resolving regional security challenges."Another drop in Saudi flows would deepen a shortage that has already pushed fuel prices to record levels, fueled inflation worldwide and lifted US Treasury yields to their highest since the 2008 financial crisis, according to the G1 report. For global buyers, the clock that matters now is the one on Yanbu's tanks: five to seven days at most before the world's largest oil exporter has to fall back on the smaller stocks it keeps in Egypt.

A report by Gaeco, the organized crime unit of Brazil's federal prosecution service (MPF) in the state of Amazonas, gathers investigations that point to a web of crimes around wildcat gold mining: more than 290 kilograms of illegally extracted gold across two cases, 56 workers held in slavery-like conditions, the use of mercury and cyanide, and environmental damage estimated above 1.7 billion reais. The document, obtained by the news outlet g1, covers the unit's work from July 2025 to June 2026 and was reviewed by deputy attorney general Samantha Chantal Dobrowolski.The two biggest casesThe largest volume appears in Operação Jurupari. According to the indictment, a criminal organization extracted at least 219 kilograms of gold over roughly three years, a figure the MPF called conservative, with environmental damage calculated at 1.5 billion reais. Front companies and intermediaries gave the operations a legal appearance and hid the origin of the metal, the link through which illegal Amazon gold enters trading chains that look regular to buyers in Brazil and abroad. In April 2026 the unit filed two indictments in the case. Among those charged is army lieutenant colonel Abimael Alves Pinto: in intercepted audio he warned miners about an operation near São Gabriel da Cachoeira, on Brazil's border with Venezuela and Colombia. g1 reported it could not locate his defense lawyers.The other investigation, Operação Barões do Filão, targeted the Filão do Abacaxis mining area inside the Urupadi National Forest, a federal conservation unit in Maués, in southern Amazonas, a region the MPF describes as one of Latin America's most lucrative gold mining areas. The group, prosecutors say, ran from April 2023 to August 2025, extracted about 71.1 kilograms of gold that belongs to the federal state without any license, and moved 258.6 million reais traced in financial intelligence reports by Coaf, Brazil's anti-money laundering council. Thirteen people were charged and a federal court accepted the case. The document states:"Based on the technical evidence gathered in the case file, the usurpation of approximately 71.1 kilograms of gold was verified, along with the subjection of 56 workers to conditions analogous to slavery and socioenvironmental and patrimonial damage with a minimum estimated value of 267 million reais."About 8.5 kilograms of mercury were dumped into the Abacaxis river basin and converted into methylmercury, a more toxic form of the element that entered the food chain. The MPF estimates a risk of chronic contamination for about 67,000 people in the region. Workers, according to a labor ministry report, were kept isolated in the forest under plastic-sheet shelters, with no drinking water, on shifts of 24 hours of work followed by 24 of rest; 50 of the 56 found on site were formally classified as being in slavery-like conditions. The mine was guarded by a permanent armed security structure, and searches seized a rifle, a submachine gun, a shotgun, a revolver and more than 400 rounds of ammunition, plus about 140 grams of undocumented gold. According to g1, one suspect tried to smash phones with a hammer before agents entered.Enforcement and the Comando VermelhoThe investigation grew out of Operação Déjà Vu, a 2023 interstate drug trafficking probe, and unfolded into four actions in the area: Aurum, Mineração Obscura, Mineração Obscura 2 and Barões do Filão. The federal police coordinated the operations with the highway police, the National Public Security Force, the intelligence agency Abin, labor inspectors and prosecutors, the parks agency ICMBio and the indigenous affairs agency Funai; warrants, police said, reached Itaituba and Novo Progresso (Pará), Sinop (Mato Grosso), Porto Velho (Rondônia) and Regeneração (Piauí). When Barões do Filão launched in August 2025, a court authorized freezing up to 74 million reais in assets. Federal police images show illegal mining dredges destroyed in the interior of Amazonas. The defendants face charges including usurping federal property, armed criminal organization, money laundering, reducing workers to a slavery-like condition, environmental crimes and illegal possession of firearms. The indictment came from Gaeco together with the MPF's 2nd Office for the Western Amazon, a unit specialized in illegal mining in the states of Amazonas, Rondônia, Roraima and Acre.Beyond the mines, the report details the reach of the Comando Vermelho, Brazil's largest criminal faction, in Amazonas, in investigations separate from the gold cases. In February 2026 prosecutors charged 13 people with transnational drug trafficking, criminal organization, money laundering, tax evasion and use of false documents; funds were deposited in front men's accounts, and part was converted into crypto assets sent to digital wallets on the Tron network. The indictment named Alan Sérgio Martins Batista, known as "Alan Índio", as a leading figure of the faction in the state, a member of its so-called permanent council with influence over members active in different zones of Manaus, the state capital. Operação Roque, in November 2025, targeted the faction's legal wing: four lawyers were arrested and charged with membership in the criminal organization. The report also lists Operação Brazilian Cricket among the period's cases.

The station run by Brazil's national meteorology institute, Inmet, at Mirante de Santana in northern São Paulo recorded 75.4 millimeters of rain between 9 a.m. Friday and 9 a.m. Saturday. Inmet said it was the largest 24-hour total measured anywhere in Brazil in that period, and the state Civil Defense confirmed the record. The storm flooded streets across the city and left two men missing in Jandira, in Greater São Paulo.The downpour pushed September's total at Mirante de Santana, where the city's historical rain series began in 1943, to 198.2 mm in just 12 days. That already ranks as the fourth wettest September on record at the station, behind 1983 with 243.1 mm, 1993 with 206.7 mm and 2015 with 201.7 mm, according to Inmet data compiled by CNN Brasil. With more rain forecast before the end of the month, the ranking could still change. Only January, with 256.4 mm, has been wetter at the station this year, G1 reported.Floods and missing people in Greater São PauloAround 1 a.m. Saturday, two men aged 32 and 33 were swept away by a river current during a flood on Avenida Antônio Bardella, in the Jardim São Luiz neighborhood of Jandira, a city in São Paulo's metropolitan region. According to the police report filed in Jandira, one of the men was in the flooded area when the other and his 32-year-old sister tried to rescue him. The current dragged all three, and the woman only got out of the water after grabbing trees on the riverbank. She received medical care but lost sight of the two men. The Fire Department is searching for them with support from the municipal Civil Defense.Between midnight and 1:20 p.m. Saturday, the Fire Department logged 48 calls related to rain and wind in the city and its metropolitan region: 20 floods, 16 fallen trees and 12 structural collapses. Lanes of the Marginal Tietê, the expressway that runs along the Tietê river through the city, were blocked by flooding for much of Saturday, and the river ran a risk of bursting its banks, according to Estadão and UOL.Amazon moisture feeds the stormsMeteorologists at Climatempo, in an account published by CNN Brasil, attribute the record volume to three factors: a cold front around the September 7 holiday left 35.6 mm on September 5 and 6; from September 9, an area of low pressure over Paraguay and southern Brazil pushed a new cold front through on Friday, with instability moving from Paraná state toward São Paulo; and the low-level jet, a stream of warm, moist air flowing from the Amazon, carried humidity toward São Paulo, Paraná and Mato Grosso do Sul and fed the buildup of heavy clouds. In other words, part of the water that flooded Brazil's largest city traveled across the continent from the Amazon rainforest.State Civil Defense says it is monitoring conditions with radar and satellites and has teams mobilized. It advises residents to avoid flooded areas or fast-moving water, never try to cross inundated roads and seek safe shelter during storms. "Numbers like these show why monitoring cannot stop. Information and risk awareness are what allow people to protect themselves in this period. Prevention is what saves lives," said Colonel Araújo Monteiro, São Paulo state's civil defense coordinator. Free SMS alerts are available by texting the postal code of a location to 40199; the emergency numbers are 193 for the Fire Department and 199 for Civil Defense.The outlook stays poor in the short term. For Sunday, Climatempo expects rain all day and night in the capital, with temperatures between 14°C and 16°C. Unstable weather should last through Monday, ease from Tuesday, and a polar air mass off the Southeast coast is expected to keep temperatures below 20°C until September 17.

An extratropical cyclone forming over southern Brazil has placed nine states across the country's South, Southeast and Center-West regions under storm warnings on Thursday (Sept 10), with gusts that could top 100 km/h and a risk of tornadoes in Paraná, in southern and southwestern São Paulo state and in far southern Mato Grosso do Sul, according to Inmet, Brazil's national weather institute, and the private forecaster Climatempo.Where the danger is highestInmet's warnings cover Rio Grande do Sul, Santa Catarina, Paraná, São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Minas Gerais, Goiás, Mato Grosso and Mato Grosso do Sul. The institute's highest level, great danger, applies to far northern Rio Grande do Sul, central-western Santa Catarina and Paraná and far southern Mato Grosso do Sul, where more than 100 mm of rain per day is forecast, with winds above 100 km/h and a risk of flash flooding and falling trees. In Paraná, news outlet g1 reported that 265 municipalities were under a red storm alert.In São Paulo state, Inmet kept an orange danger alert for the coast at least until the end of Thursday morning, with rainfall of 30 to 60 mm per hour or 50 to 100 mm per day and a risk of flooding, landslides and overflowing rivers, according to the newspaper Folha de S.Paulo. In Greater São Paulo, the CGE, the city's emergency management weather center, forecast heavy cloud cover and rain through the day.How the system worksClimatempo says the instability comes from the combination of a trough, an elongated area of low pressure whose winds help storm clouds form, and a low-pressure system over inland South America linked to the extratropical cyclone taking shape in the country's South. Heavily loaded clouds are expected to organize into supercells over parts of Paraná, far southern Mato Grosso do Sul and southern and southwestern São Paulo between Thursday and Friday (Sept 11), when a new cold front approaches the region and could intensify the storms. In Paraná, the tornado risk is highest in the north and west of the state.Josélia Pegorim, a meteorologist at Climatempo, explained the phenomenon to Folha:"Supercells are special cumulonimbus clouds that can produce tornadoes, microbursts and intense wind gusts above 90 km/h. A supercell is called a mesocyclone when it acquires a rotating motion."MetSul, a meteorology company based in Rio Grande do Sul, had already flagged the week as high risk, with a storm wave and an intense cyclone, and estimates that rainfall in São Paulo could reach three times the September average. The system arrives days after Rio Grande do Sul recorded four straight days of below-zero cold, including the year's lowest temperature, near -7 degrees, on Sept 7. Inmet continued to update its advisories through Thursday.

An area of more than 700,000 km² in the central-northern Amazon, nearly the size of Chile, has seen extreme dry-season temperatures rise by at least 3.2 °C since 1981. The figure comes from the study "Rapid increase of climate extremes reveals new areas of concern in Amazonia", published on Thursday in Communications Earth & Environment, a Nature Portfolio journal, and signed by 53 scientists from several countries, including Brazilians and experts from the Science Panel for the Amazon. The team is led by Lancaster University in the United Kingdom, in partnership with WWF.In the affected region, one of the best-preserved parts of the basin, warming advanced at a rate of at least 0.75 °C per decade, more than three times the pace of the forest's average annual temperature, about 0.21 °C per decade over the past four decades. To measure the change, the researchers divided the entire basin into 11 km grid cells and analysed high-resolution temperature and rainfall data from 1981 to 2023. Across the forest as a whole, the 95th percentile of maximum temperatures in the driest period rose 0.49 °C per decade, according to the paper's abstract. During the dry season, 10% of the basin already faces increases in extreme heat of at least 0.75 °C per decade.An uneven shift in the forestThe southern Amazon remains the fastest-warming part of the biome on average. It is in the centre-north, however, far from the "arc of deforestation", the farming frontier pushing into the forest's southern and eastern edges in states such as Pará and Mato Grosso, that extreme heat and water deficit are growing fastest. The affected area holds intact forest, natural savannas and Indigenous territories, and had therefore been treated as one of the Amazon's most resilient zones. According to reporting by Luciana Constantino of Agência Fapesp published in Folha de S.Paulo, the result indicates the phenomenon stems both from forest loss, Brazil's main source of greenhouse gas emissions, and from global climate change. "The rates of change in climate extremes are much higher than the rates of change of average climate in the Amazon, and the most affected regions are also different for extremes and average climate," said Nathália Carvalho, a postdoctoral researcher at the Lancaster Environment Centre, in a statement. Lead author Jos Barlow, a professor at Lancaster University, explained the scope of the analysis:"We are most interested in things when they are at their hottest and driest as that is when the most harm can be caused by high temperatures. While this has been assessed in the Southern Amazon, which shares a largely similar dry season, it has never been assessed across the whole of the Amazon, which includes regions north of the equator which have a different dry season period."In recent years, hot and dry extremes in the Amazon have brought unprecedented fires, large-scale tree mortality and localised animal deaths, including mass die-offs of river dolphins, along with shrinking bird populations, according to the paper and WWF. The immediate concern is this year's El Niño, expected to be the strongest on record, which could again expose the forest to extreme heat and drought two years after the major drought of 2024, Folha reported.Measures and fundingThe study calls for rapid cuts in global greenhouse gas emissions, fire prevention, an end to deforestation and forest degradation, and greater investment in adaptation. About 17% of the forest has already been cleared, and the 2025 Global Tipping Points Report, produced with WWF involvement, estimates that a loss of between 20% and 25% could be enough to trigger a transformation of the biome into a degraded state. On 3 September, the UK government announced a commitment to the Tropical Forest Forever Facility (TFFF), an international mechanism created to fund conservation and adaptation in tropical forests."The rapidly increasing climate extremes revealed in this study highlight the urgent need for global action on climate change to protect vital ecosystems such as the Amazon. However, the new regions of risk also demonstrate the need to support other measures, including an end to deforestation and support for measures such as the Tropical Forest Forever Facility if we are to avoid critical tipping points and environmental collapse."The statement came from Mike Barrett, chief scientific adviser at WWF-UK. In the organisation's view, the British commitment to the TFFF announced last week is timely and now needs to be backed by measures removing deforestation-linked commodities from UK supply chains.

Deforestation alerts in Brazil's Cerrado fell 19% in August compared with the same month last year. The savanna biome lost 238 km² (about 92 square miles) of native vegetation, against 294 km² a year earlier. In the Amazon, the sign flipped: alerts rose 12%, from 319 km² to 358 km². The figures come from Deter, the near-real-time satellite system run by INPE, Brazil's National Institute for Space Research, released at an event in São Paulo on Friday, the day Brazil marks Cerrado Day in honor of its vast tropical savanna.Deter issues rapid alerts to guide enforcement raids; the official deforestation rates come from a second INPE system, Prodes, which is more accurate and published once a year. August sits in the heart of the Amazon dry season, when July, August and September account for most of the clearing, because dry vegetation is easier to cut. In the Cerrado the dry season starts earlier, in May, and usually lasts longer.Year-to-date decline continuesOver the year as a whole, both biomes are still trending down. From January to August the Cerrado lost 3,810 km², a 7% drop (7.1% according to the regional outlet Piauí Hoje, which reviewed the same INPE data), while the Amazon lost 2,041 km², down 31%. Combined, the two biomes have lost nearly 6,000 km² in eight months, an area close to that of Brasília (5,760 km²) and about four times the city of São Paulo (1,521 km²).The state ranking shows where the pressure sits. Pará leads Amazon clearing with 704 km², followed by Mato Grosso (611 km²) and Amazonas (347 km²). In the Cerrado, the largest totals are in Maranhão (1,025 km²), Piauí (420 km²) and, again, Mato Grosso (414 km²), a state that straddles both biomes. The Cerrado total is nearly double the Amazon's.Looser rules, uneven enforcementThe clearing follows different patterns, according to Folha de S.Paulo, the newspaper that first published the August data. In the Amazon it concentrates on undesignated public land and invaded protected areas; in the Cerrado it happens mostly on private farms. The law is looser in the second case: under Brazil's Forest Code, landowners in the Cerrado may legally clear up to 80% of their property, or 65% in transition zones toward the Amazon forest. In the Amazon, the legal limit is 20%.Deter exists to feed enforcement: its alerts guide inspection operations. Where inspections were stepped up, the decline was steeper. In Piauí, where the Cerrado covers 53% of the territory, the year-to-date reduction was the largest among states, 52.1% (from 877.91 km² to 420.11 km²), a result the Piauí Hoje news site credits to more inspection and greater use of technology by the state environment secretariat, Semarh. The clearing also carries a global cost: carbon released by felled vegetation feeds into the emissions balance Brazil reports under its international climate commitments.

Brent crude, the international oil benchmark, rose 6.3% on Thursday and closed at $107.63 a barrel, after trading above $108 during the session. According to g1, it is the highest level since May. The barrel has gained more than 49% since early July, when it traded below $72, and Valor Investe puts the rally at 77% for the year.The trigger on Thursday was the seizure of Mokha, a port city in southwestern Yemen, by the Houthi movement, an ally of Iran. The area serves as an alternative route for Saudi oil shipments, and O Globo notes that Saudi Arabia had been expanding exports through the Red Sea after the war with Iran. The conflict between the United States and Iran had already disrupted traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, one of the world's main oil routes, and the loss of another export point deepened fears of a drop in global supply. The paper also notes the barrel had not closed this high since May, shortly before a regional truce and the signing in June of a protocol of agreement between Iran and the United States to end the war.Pressure on the United StatesOil at $107 pushed investors away from risk in the world's main markets, O Globo reports. Brazil moved the other way: the commercial dollar fell to R$ 5.10 and the Ibovespa index closed up 1.42%, on a day driven by the election calendar. The bill worries the government of President Donald Trump. According to g1, costlier oil pressures inflation and interest rates in the United States by raising the price of fuel and goods shipped to stores, two months before the midterm elections in November. On Wednesday, Trump said oil prices will probably not fall before the vote.Brazil cuts taxes and raises subsidiesPresident Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva signed a decree on Wednesday that raises the gasoline subsidy from R$ 0.44 to R$ 0.63 per liter and eliminates federal taxes on hydrous ethanol, a cut of R$ 0.19 per liter. The government also issued a provisional measure, a presidential act with the force of law pending congressional approval, authorizing a R$ 1 per liter subsidy for diesel. It adds to an existing R$ 1.12 subsidy valid until September 26; during that period, the total reaches R$ 2.12 per liter.Petrobras, the state-controlled oil company, said it will stop applying a R$ 0.44 per liter discount on pure gasoline A, the version refineries sell to distributors before it is blended with ethanol. The average price of gasoline A to distributors moves to R$ 3.05 per liter and, according to the company, the net reduction at the pump will be R$ 0.19 per liter.The backdrop is in the weekly survey by the National Agency for Petroleum, Natural Gas and Biofuels (ANP, the Brazilian fuel regulator): between August 30 and September 5, gasoline averaged R$ 6.51 per liter at pumps across Brazil, S-10 diesel R$ 6.88 and hydrous ethanol R$ 3.95. The tax cuts should ease prices at the pump, but lasting relief depends on a truce that, in Trump's own assessment, is unlikely before November.

NOAA, the U.S. government's climate agency, raised the probability that El Niño will reach "very strong" status from the start of the Southern Hemisphere spring in late September to 97%. The figure appears in the ENSO bulletin released on Thursday (Sept. 10) by the agency's Climate Prediction Center and was reported by the Brazilian daily Folha de S.Paulo.The agency also puts a 93% chance that equatorial Pacific sea surface temperatures will hold at that very high level through January, a scenario informally known as a Super El Niño. Its forecast a month earlier gave a 93% chance of a very strong event starting in September."During the October-December 2026 season, there is a 75% chance of a historic event that would exceed the strength of previous El Niño events dating back to 1950," the bulletin reads.Pacific waters are already more than 3°C warmer off PeruOn NOAA's technical scale, that historic scenario means a three-month relative index (RONI) of +2.5°C or higher across the central equatorial Pacific. August readings show the buildup under way: sea surface anomalies exceeded +3°C in the eastern equatorial Pacific. In the Niño 1+2 region, off the coasts of Peru and Ecuador, water reached +3.4°C above average; in Niño 3, +2.5°C; and in Niño 3.4, the central zone used to define the event, +1.8°C. At depth, parts of the ocean column are running up to 10°C hotter than normal.MetSul Meteorologia, a private forecasting firm based in the southern Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul, notes that by the traditional Oceanic Niño Index (ONI) the weekly anomaly in Niño 3.4 already stands at +2.7°C. By that measure, no event in the modern era crossed the +2°C "very strong" line so early: it happened in the week of July 8 this year, compared with Sept. 3, 1997, Sept. 16, 2015 and Nov. 24, 1982. U.S. and European climate models, synthesized by the firm, point to a peak between November and December near +4°C, a level never seen in 170 years of records.Advisory in effect, with no guarantee of impactsEl Niño began in June and is defined by abnormal warming of equatorial Pacific waters near the coast of Peru, the opposite of La Niña. The categories follow the temperature anomaly: 0.5°C to 1°C makes a weak event; 1°C to 1.5°C, moderate; 1.5°C to 2°C, strong; and above 2°C, very strong.NOAA keeps its "El Niño Advisory" in force and cautions that an event of this magnitude increases the odds of El Niño-type impacts, with no guarantee they will materialize or be worse than usual. The effects are already visible elsewhere: Indonesia is in extreme drought that is feeding forest fires, according to Folha, which published an image of firefighters battling flames in Palembang, in South Sumatra province. NOAA's next ENSO bulletin is scheduled for October 8.

Climate models from the United States and Europe now agree, in their early-September updates, that this year's El Niño will peak between November and December, with sea surface temperatures around +4°C above average in the Niño 3.4 region of the central equatorial Pacific. The reading comes from Brazil's MetSul Meteorologia, published on Thursday (10). On the same day, NOAA, the U.S. ocean and atmosphere agency, raised to 97% the probability that the phenomenon will reach the very strong category by late September, up from 93% in last month's outlook, according to Folha de S.Paulo.NOAA's latest weekly bulletin puts the anomaly at +2.7°C in the Niño 3.4 region on the ONI index, the official measure used to define El Niño. Readings at or above +2°C mean a very strong event, informally known as a Super El Niño. This year NOAA also began publishing a second index, RONI, which subtracts the long-term warming of tropical oceans; on that measure the anomaly is +1.8°C, still in the strong category. The phenomenon began in June, as equatorial Pacific waters near the coast of Peru warmed above average.A September with no precedent in the PacificBy historical standards, no September has ever found the Pacific this warm. In the first week of the month, the anomaly stood at 1.6°C in 2023, 1.7°C in 2015, 2.1°C in 1997 and 0.6°C in 1982, according to a MetSul survey of NOAA data. The highest weekly value ever measured in an El Niño was 3.0°C, in the week of November 18, 2015, followed by 2.6°C in the week of December 29, 1982. In 2026 the +2°C mark was crossed in the week of July 8. In 1982 that only happened on November 24, in 1997 on September 3 and in 2015 on September 16.The speed of the buildup is what most impresses meteorologists tracking the event, according to Luiz F. Nachtigall, the MetSul meteorologist who wrote the analysis. If the peak near +4°C is confirmed, this episode would far exceed the peaks of every 20th-century event and move into territory never observed in 170 years of measurements.NOAA's probabilities and caveatsNOAA puts at 93% the probability that equatorial Pacific temperatures stay at the very high level through January. For the October-to-December quarter it assigns a 75% chance of a historic event, more intense than every El Niño recorded since 1950."In the October to December 2026 quarter, there is a 75% probability of a historic event that would exceed the intensity of all previous El Niño events recorded since 1950."The agency's statement expects El Niño to keep strengthening through the end of the year, with one caveat: an event of this magnitude raises the probability of typical El Niño impacts but does not guarantee consequences worse than normal. The effects are already visible. Indonesia is in extreme drought that feeds forest fires and blankets the country in smoke; in Palembang, in South Sumatra province, firefighters were battling fire fronts this week. Monitoring continues, with monthly model updates and NOAA's weekly bulletins on Pacific temperatures.

Yemen's Houthi rebels attacked four cities and energy installations in southern Saudi Arabia on Tuesday, September 8. The strikes injured at least 73 people, among them women and children, and set fires that temporarily halted operations at energy facilities in the kingdom, according to Saudi authorities. A Houthi military spokesperson said the group would announce a broad military operation on Saudi territory, signaling a new escalation of the conflict in the Gulf.Using drones and missiles, the Houthis hit an air base in Khamis Mushait and targets linked to the state oil company Saudi Aramco in the cities of Abha, Najran, on the border with Yemen, and Jazan, a Red Sea port that is home to a large refinery and a power plant, according to the Brazilian business daily Valor Econômico. Saudi Arabia's Energy Ministry confirmed that facilities in the south were struck and had operations suspended, with firefighting and emergency crews mobilized to contain the blazes. "The competent authorities are dealing with the repercussions of the attacks," the ministry said, adding that it would take steps to protect workers and keep operations running. On Monday, the Financial Times had already reported that Aramco facilities in Jazan had been hit; that report was not independently confirmed and the company did not comment.Coalition promises responseColonel Turki al-Malki, spokesperson for the Saudi-led military coalition, called the offensive a "dangerous escalation" and promised retaliation. "The coalition will take all necessary operational measures to stop this terrorist militia," he said. Houthi spokesperson Yahya Saree accused Riyadh of intensifying the war with airstrikes on Yemen and said the group would respond. The attacks came hours after the Houthis accused Saudi Arabia of bombing a prison in the province of Jawf, in northern Yemen, in a strike the rebels say killed seven people, including a child, a claim that could not be independently verified. Media controlled by the group also reported four Saudi airstrikes in the district of Jubah, east of the capital, Sanaa. According to Valor Econômico, the offensive ranks among the largest against Saudi Arabia since the United States and Israel began their war with Iran in February.Oil closes in on US$ 100Brent, the main international oil benchmark, rose more than 2% on Tuesday to above US$ 99 a barrel, its highest level since July, according to Valor Econômico. The attacks on southwest Saudi Arabia could deepen the war's global economic impact by disrupting Middle East energy supplies beyond the Strait of Hormuz, which is blocked. Before the conflict, roughly one fifth of the oil and liquefied natural gas traded worldwide moved through the strait. The United States has been trying to push more oil to world markets by escorting vessels along the route.In Yemen, the International Organization for Migration said more than 18,500 people had fled their homes in the past three days because of fighting along the country's west coast. The civil war began in 2014, when the Houthis seized the capital, Sanaa, and widened in 2015 with the intervention of the Saudi-led Arab coalition. A four-year truce has effectively collapsed in recent weeks, and the group announced a naval blockade against the kingdom in July. The United Nations says the conflict has killed at least 150,000 people and created one of the world's largest humanitarian crises, with millions dependent on international aid.

President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva signed decrees on Tuesday (8) at the Planalto palace creating four Sustainable Development Reserves in southern Amazonas state, in the corridor influenced by the BR-319 highway. Together the new units cover about 669,000 hectares. The ceremony marked Amazon Day, a Brazilian date celebrated on September 5. A separate decree expanded Sete Cidades National Park in Piauí state by 7,192 hectares, bringing it to 13,502 hectares.According to Agência Brasil and Gazeta da Amazônia, the new reserves and their sizes are:Tupana Igapó-Açu I, in the municipality of Borba, with 114,076 hectares;Tupana Igapó-Açu II, in Beruri and Tapauá, with 422,100 hectares;Canaã, in Careiro and Autazes, with 109,607 hectares;Mirari, in Humaitá, with 22,775 hectares, aimed at protecting forest and aquatic environments.The category, known in Brazil as RDS, lets residents keep using natural resources sustainably while protecting biodiversity and the agroextractivist way of life of local communities. Counting the expansion in Piauí, the measures protect about 676,000 hectares. The Manaus daily A Crítica noted that the decrees authorize the creation of the units in the road's area of influence.The government's answer on the BR-319The BR-319 links Manaus to Porto Velho. Lula promised to rebuild it during the 2022 campaign, and it still has unpaved stretches that worry socioenvironmental groups, A Crítica reported. At the ceremony, the president presented the new protected areas as the condition for settling what he called the "celeuma", the long dispute, around the road:"We found a way to do it, demarcating whatever needs to be demarcated, demanding responsibility from the federal government, the states, every level of the federation, so we could tell the world: we will build a modern road that can carry the production of two Brazilian states, a road that is an example for the world."The package ties infrastructure to standing-forest markets. The Brazilian Forest Service signed 40-year concession contracts for Forest Management Units II and III of the Humaitá National Forest (Flona), covering 162,700 hectares and completing the concession of all three units of the Flona, a combined 200,900 hectares under sustainable management. According to Gazeta da Amazônia, the contracts foresee R$ 240 million in investment, legal production of 2.54 million cubic meters of timber over 30 years, and 339 direct and 678 indirect jobs. Brazil now has 29 federal forest concession contracts covering 1.75 million hectares.Public money and politicsThe state development bank BNDES used the same ceremony to announce funding. The Amazon Fund will channel R$ 50.5 million in non-reimbursable money to the Naturezas Quilombolas project, run by the Fundação Guamá over 60 months to manage more than 16 quilombola territories, communities descended from people who escaped slavery, in the Legal Amazon. According to Gazeta da Amazônia, the Climate Fund approved R$ 180 million to restore more than 10,000 hectares in the Triunfo do Xingu environmental protection area in Pará, and the Floresta Viva initiative will receive R$ 5.3 million for restoration grants in the Xingu river basin, across Pará and Mato Grosso. Full protection, Lula argued, will come when society sees the profit from tourism in preserved areas, because it "will have enough money to justify that a standing forest is more profitable than a felled or burned one".The event also carried political weight. It was Lula's first speech since the removal of Federal Police director-general Andrei Rodrigues, an episode the president did not address, according to Folha de S.Paulo. Alongside Environment and Climate Change Minister João Paulo Capobianco and Amazonas vice-governor Serafim Corrêa (PSB), Lula attacked the environmental record of Jair Bolsonaro's government: "To destroy, you do not even need a meeting; all it takes is any crook who dislikes environmental rules taking over the government". Corrêa said Amazonas keeps 97% of its forest standing, yet "the people preserve the forest but feel the absence of the state". Lula travels to Piauí on Wednesday (9) for official and campaign events, in a state where the enlarged Sete Cidades park, in Brasileira and Piracuruca, is meant to shield endangered species and boost tourism.

Deforestation in the Amazon is associated with declining rainfall in the Iguaçu River basin, in the southern Brazilian state of Paraná, according to a study by the Federal University of Paraná (UFPR) published in July in the peer-reviewed journal Brazilian Journal of Biology. The researchers compared forest-loss data from Brazil's space research institute INPE and the NGO Imazon with records from 64 rain gauge stations between January 2011 and December 2023, and found a correlation: periods of heavier Amazon deforestation lined up with lower rainfall in the Paraná basin.The basin is central to the state's economy. It covers the eastern, southern, southwestern and western regions of Paraná, spans 35 municipalities and holds about 60% of the state's grain production and 23% of its livestock farming, the research found. It also contains five large reservoirs that account for roughly 41% of Paraná's hydroelectric generation, based on data from the state power company Copel and the national water agency ANA cited in the study.How the forest feeds southern rainsThe link runs through atmospheric moisture transport, a phenomenon known in Brazil as flying rivers: the forest releases water vapor that flows in corridors toward distant regions. About 40% of the rain that reaches Paraná is connected to moisture originating in the Amazon, said Ana Carolina da Silva, one of the study's authors."The Amazon is not an isolated system in the country's North; it affects all of South America, including Paraná. The greater the deforestation observed in the Amazon, the lower the rainfall volumes recorded in the state tend to be."The Portal Amazônia news site, reporting on the study with material from the science agency Agência Bori, said forest loss jumped from 2020 onward and reached 2,095 sq km in a single month, in July 2021. In the author's assessment, human pressure outweighed the climate: weakened environmental enforcement mattered more to the rise in deforestation than the weather conditions of the period, which was partly marked by La Niña. In 2020 the Amazon recorded more than 222,000 fire hotspots, up 120% from the average of previous years.The warning for crops and power plantsWhen rains fail, losses show up quickly in the basin's fields. Soybeans, corn, wheat and barley are the most exposed crops, and drought at critical stages of the growing cycle cuts both the volume and the quality of the harvest, said Ana Paula Kowalski, head of the technical and economic department of Faep, Paraná's farmers federation. In extreme events, farmers log drops of 10% to 20% in productivity, and a prolonged drought can leave soybean yields 15% to 25% below a target of 3,500 to 4,000 kg per hectare. In the 2021/2022 season, a dry spell between December and January cut the state's soybean output by about 50%.The study does not attribute every drought in Paraná to Amazon deforestation. The state has a varied climate and is frequently hit by shifting air masses, as Kowalski noted, and the research shows a correlation between the two phenomena. The path proposed by the researchers is direct: stop the clearing in the North and tie agricultural and energy planning to forest conservation, treating the Amazon's tree cover as part of southern Brazil's water security. "The data suggest that this region of Paraná will face strong impacts on power generation and water supply if this keeps happening," Ana Carolina said.

At least five people were killed and five others injured when an Amazon cargo plane ran off the runway while landing at Miami International Airport, in the US state of Florida, on Sunday (September 6). The Boeing 767-300 crossed the end of the runway, struck vehicles on a road that runs beside the airport and caught fire at around 2 pm local time (3 pm in Brasilia), according to Miami-Dade County officials and the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).Three of the injured were in serious condition and two were hospitalized with light injuries, county authorities said. Miami-Dade Fire Chief Ray Jadallah said some people were trapped inside the vehicles that were hit, and that the pilot and copilot were also trapped in the aircraft. More than 60 fire rescue units responded, and crews were still working hours later to contain a fuel leak. Authorities did not immediately say whether the dead were in the vehicles or on the plane. Videos shared on social media showed thick black smoke rising from the aircraft.Flight from Puerto RicoThe jet belongs to Amazon Air, the e-commerce company's cargo network, and was operated by 21 Air, a cargo airline based in North Carolina. According to Flightradar24 data cited by BBC Brasil, the 32-year-old plane, built to carry passengers and converted to a freighter in 2015, had taken off from Luis Muñoz Marín International Airport in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and was moving at 112 knots (207 km/h) when it left the runway. The tracking site also reported storms and wind gusts in Miami at the time of landing, conditions investigators are expected to examine. The aircraft came to a stop near a parking lot that serves an Amazon warehouse and, despite the fire, remained largely intact beside the road, near two trucks, according to InfoMoney.The airport closed all runways and ordered a full ground stop. About 250 flights were showing delays by late afternoon, according to the FlightAware tracking service. The San Juan to Miami route is part of the cargo network that feeds Amazon's e-commerce operations in the United States and the Caribbean.Investigation and responseThe National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), the US agency that investigates transport accidents, said it will send a team to Miami led by its chair, Jennifer Homendy, to investigate the crash. The cause remains unknown. Amazon spokesperson Kelly Nantel said the company "is working closely with local authorities to understand exactly what happened". Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava said her office is closely monitoring the situation."At this time, our focus is on everyone involved and on making sure our first responders have everything they need. We will share updates as we learn more," the mayor said.

An illegal mining scheme worth at least R$ 200 million moved cassiterite, the ore from which tin is extracted, out of the Yanomami Indigenous Territory in Roraima state and the Campos Amazônicos National Park between 2020 and 2025, and the refined metal appears in the supply chains of global companies including Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Sony, Disney and PepsiCo. That is the finding of confidential documents from Operation Forja de Hefesto, run by Brazil's Federal Police, and investigations by the Federal Prosecution Service (MPF), obtained by the newspaper O Globo, which opened its series "Ouro Invisivel" (Invisible Gold) on the case this weekend.At the center of the case is White Solder, a tin smelter headquartered in Ribeirão Preto, São Paulo state, with plants in Manaus and in Ariquemes, Rondônia, which presents itself as one of the world's largest producers. The MPF's criminal complaint, accepted by Federal Judge Mirna Brenda Magalhães Salmázio of the 4th Federal Criminal Court in Boa Vista, the capital of Roraima, made four companies and six people defendants, among them managing partner Alessandro Saccoman Torrente, the White Solder group itself, the tin producers cooperative Coopertin, and the companies Cataratas Poços Artesianos and TARP Táxi Aéreo. The smelter had already been targeted by the same Federal Police operation in 2023 on suspicion of buying illegally mined ore. According to the investigation, Coopertin issued fake invoices and guides to make the ore look as if it came from mines licensed by the National Mining Agency (ANM): 97.6% of the cooperative's credits over a five-month period went to White Solder, the equivalent of R$ 166.3 million, used to give legal cover to gold and more than 525 tonnes of cassiterite. Accounting records seized by the police registered the outflow of those 525 tonnes between May and August 2021 alone.From the rainforest to corporate filingsSmelted into ingots at the Rondônia plants, the cassiterite lost the physical traits that could reveal its origin and entered the formal market with clean papers. Prosecutors cross-checked audit reports filed by White Solder itself against the database of the SEC, the U.S. securities regulator, and found that the Brazilian smelter was formally listed as a tin supplier in the filings of companies traded on U.S. stock exchanges. Beyond the tech names, the series cites Starbucks, Caterpillar, Colgate-Palmolive, Victoria's Secret and Levi's. Ten multinationals operating in Brazil were notified in a civil investigation over failures in their environmental and human rights due diligence. The MPF is seeking R$ 1.7 billion in damages for environmental, property and collective moral harm across the whole chain, from extraction to sale, and argues that large buyers must prove the tin they bought came from legitimate sources. Tin solders electronic components, from smartphones to artificial intelligence chips.Prosecutor André Luiz Porreca, of the MPF office for the Western Amazon, which covers Roraima, Rondônia and Acre, told the newspaper how he arrived at the figure:"I am asking for these amounts based on similar cases. My criteria were, in short, the gravity of the facts, the sophistication of the criminal scheme, the economic capacity of the offenders and the length of time the illegal activity lasted."The forest footprintIn the Yanomami territory, Brazil's largest indigenous reserve, mining ran with excavators, suction dredges, aircraft and clandestine airstrips. In Campos Amazônicos National Park, on the border of Amazonas, Rondônia and Mato Grosso states, a 2024 inspection found clandestine camps and degraded areas: Censipam imagery shows 193 hectares of destroyed forest and 15 illegal airstrips inside the park and its buffer zone. Dario Kopenawa, president of the Hutukara Yanomami Association, told reporters that demand for cassiterite keeps driving new invasions even after police operations removed wildcat miners from the territory. Federal Police experts also found monazite, ilmenite and columbite in processing waste, sources of rare earths, niobium and tantalum, strategic minerals that the network began to exploit as international demand grew.White Solder did not respond to requests for comment before publication. Amazon, the retailer, said it has no direct commercial relationship with the smelter and is tightening supplier checks, and Disney said it was not named in the inquiry; lawyers for the other defendants deny any wrongdoing. The smelter held international seals such as the LME Brand from the London Metal Exchange and the endorsement of the Responsible Minerals Initiative, and advertised certifications from clients including Sony and Panasonic, according to Repórter Brasil. The weak point flagged by authorities is traceability: the ANM admitted there is no national system able to track cassiterite from extraction to industry, and the Geological Survey of Brazil said studies like those now starting for gold do not yet exist for the ore.

Environmental groups and Brazil's infrastructure industry, usually on opposite sides of the licensing debate, are making the same demand: the country's Supreme Court, the STF, must rule quickly on the constitutionality of parts of the new environmental licensing law, in force since February. Both sides told Folha de S.Paulo that the delay creates legal uncertainty for projects and for environmental agencies.The court had scheduled for August the trial of three lawsuits claiming the law is unconstitutional (known as ADIs) and one asking the court to confirm its validity (an ADC). The full bench pulled the case from the agenda after a new suit was filed, and no new date has been set, Folha reports. In its August 12 session, the justices ruled on cases involving the soy moratorium, but the licensing law was left out, according to the environmental news site ((o))eco.What the law changedThe General Environmental Licensing Law (15.190/25) was approved in 2025, after Congress overrode 56 of the 63 vetoes issued by President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, days after the COP30 climate summit in Belém, according to ((o))eco. It created the License by Adhesion and Commitment, under which developers simply declare they will meet official standards, with no prior technical review and only sample-based inspections, and the Special Environmental License for projects deemed strategic, added at the last minute by Senate President Davi Alcolumbre, who cited obstacles to the country's growth. Critics nicknamed the bill the "Devastation Bill".According to ((o))eco, the law also expands waivers, allows automatic license renewals and lets states and municipalities draw up their own lists of activities exempt from licensing. One waiver covers maintenance and improvement works on existing infrastructure, including highways paved before, a passage the site says was written with the BR-319 highway, between Manaus and Porto Velho, in mind. Experts heard by the site expect extra deforestation pressure in the Deforestation Arc that already encroaches on southern Amazonas state.Licenses already issuedFor companies, the fear is that licenses already granted could be changed or reversed. Ronei Glanzmann, CEO of MoveInfra, an association that brings together EcoRodovias, Hidrovias do Brasil, Motiva, Rumo, Santos Brasil and Ultracargo, put it this way:"We have a law in force, investments are being made and some projects are going through licensing by adhesion and commitment, as the law provides, and other interventions are exempt from licensing, such as maintenance works, also provided for in the law. The big problem is if this changes: what happens to the retroactive effects of these decisions."On the environmental side, the Climate Observatory, a network of more than one hundred organizations that helped draft one of the suits filed in December 2025, wants the same speed. Fábio Ishisaki, the network's public policy adviser, said the delay "hurts business, because there is legal uncertainty about what will or will not stand" and creates doubt about how environmental agencies will apply the law.Other actors have joined the push. The PSOL party and Apib, which represents Indigenous peoples in Brazil, filed their own suit in January, and on August 12 more than 30 religious organizations, including the CNBB, the Brazilian bishops' conference, and the Israeli Confederation of Brazil, sent an open letter to the justices defending constitutional safeguards, ((o))eco reports. There is precedent at the court: in 2022, the STF struck down simplified licensing for medium-impact activities. Until the case returns to the agenda, the law stays in force, licenses keep being issued under it, and the question of retroactive effects rests with the justices.

Brazil's federal environmental agency Ibama has authorized Petrobras, the state-controlled oil company, to drill three new exploratory wells in the Foz do Amazonas basin, an environmentally sensitive area off the country's northern Amazon coast. The decision was signed on Thursday (Sept. 3) by Ibama's president, Jair Schmitt, according to a document seen by Reuters and reported by Folha de S.Paulo and G1. The license requires Petrobras to submit an updated drilling schedule to Ibama within 30 days of receiving the authorization.The wells will help determine whether Petrobras's recent oil discovery in the region is commercially viable. The company filed the drilling request in August, after its first well in block FZA-M-59 found signs of oil. G1 reported that production at the site could begin within up to seven years, a timeline that would open a new oil frontier for Brazil if the reserves prove viable.Political backingThe approval strengthens Petrobras's push into the basin. In August, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Petrobras chief executive Magda Chambriard and Mines and Energy Minister Alexandre Silveira visited the NS-42 drillship operating in the area, according to Folha.Prosecutors demand answersThe operation faces scrutiny from Brazil's Federal Prosecution Office, the MPF, which is pressing Ibama to explain inconsistencies in its account of the licensing process for block FZA-M-59. At a hearing in federal court in April 2025, Ibama representatives described the drilling as a one-off activity lasting about six months. In a later response to prosecutors, the institute said the project involves a campaign of four wells, with activities running from 2025 to 2029.Prosecutors say the discrepancy undermines the transparency of the process and makes it harder to assess the environmental impacts. They argue that an operation spanning several years can have cumulative effects on marine wildlife, small-scale fishing and the way of life of traditional communities along the Amazon coast, and they want Schmitt to explain why Ibama gave different versions of the drilling's duration and planning.

The UK government announced on Thursday (Sept. 3) that it intends to invest £400 million (about US$540 million, or R$2.7 billion) in the Tropical Forest Forever Facility, or TFFF, a fund created by Brazil and launched at COP30, the UN climate conference the country hosted in Belém, in the Amazonian state of Pará, in November 2025. According to news outlet g1, the contribution will come as a loan and still depends on the conclusion of the fund's governance and operating rules, plus a final review by the British government.How the fund worksThe TFFF is designed to pay countries that keep their tropical forests standing, the Amazon among them. Unlike donation-based schemes, it combines public and private money: the capital is invested, and the returns are shared between investors and forest countries, according to their conservation performance. Countries that receive the money do not have to pay it back, the British government said, as reported by g1.With the British pledge, total commitments to the TFFF reach US$7.3 billion (R$37.6 billion), according to the newspaper Folha de S.Paulo. To keep Norway's contribution of US$3 billion (R$15.3 billion), the fund must reach US$10 billion (R$51.2 billion) by the end of the year, which means raising about US$2.7 billion in the next four months.The UK as investorThe British amount sits below other European commitments: Germany has confirmed €1 billion (R$5.9 billion) and France has approved €500 million (R$2.9 billion), Folha reported. The UK's choice of a loan instead of a grant allows it to recover the money invested, according to a statement from its Department for Energy Security."With the UK investment in the TFFF, the loan will be repaid, while continuing to support action on climate and nature. This demonstrates the UK's new approach to climate finance, acting as an investor rather than a donor," the British government statement said.As a condition for the contribution, the UK also wants a role in the fund's decision-making and supervision structures, g1 reported. For Mauricio Voivodic, executive director of WWF-Brasil, the pledge arrives at a "decisive moment" and could "encourage other countries to move forward as well". He noted that the fund places indigenous peoples and local communities at the center of the solution, which in the organization's view can turn conservation into a development agenda.

Nepali authorities ordered rescue teams searching for flood survivors in the Himalayas to move to safe ground on Friday (28), after a lake formed by recent landslides burst in Tibet. The incident raised the risk of new flash floods and temporarily suspended operations, according to Folha de S.Paulo, citing the AFP and Reuters news agencies. The still preliminary death toll from the disaster reached 543.Of that total, 538 deaths were recorded in Nepal, according to a police tally released on Friday morning, and 5 on the Chinese side, according to China's state media. More than 1,400 people remain missing. Victim figures are not centralized and are released separately by authorities and media on each side of the border.The lake that gave way on Friday morning in Tibet is one of several formed by dammed water after the landslide that triggered the tragedy. Nepal's Army reported that the water level rose about 60 centimeters after the alert, and Nepali police told all rescue workers to seek protection. On the Chinese side, rescue teams were also pulled back to safe areas. Hours later, Chinese state media said the flood risk was under control, and search operations resumed.The glacier collapse and the climate warningThe disaster began on Wednesday (26), when part of a glacier broke away from Mount Langtang Lirung, on the Nepali side of the border, near the Lhende river, according to an official assessment reported by BBC News Brasil. The mass of ice, rock and mud temporarily blocked the Lhende Khola river and, when the blockage gave way, a wave swept through the region's narrow valleys, burying homes, toppling bridges and destroying power plants along the road linking Kathmandu, Nepal's capital, to Lhasa in Tibet. The United States Geological Survey (USGS) first registered a magnitude 4.4 tremor moments before the flood, but later corrected itself: the seismic event, equivalent to magnitude 5.2, was a consequence of the glacier collapse itself hitting the valley floor, not its cause. The Red Cross estimates that more than 90,000 people were affected, and trucks carrying humanitarian aid were unable to reach the hit areas.Scientists link the sequence of events to global warming. Basanta Raj Adhikari, director of the Disaster Studies Center at Tribhuvan University in Nepal, told the BBC there is a risk of second and third flood waves, and that Nepali researchers are discussing the situation with colleagues in China. "Climate change is really happening," he said. Simon Cook, a professor at the University of Dundee in Scotland who specializes in glaciology, explained that warming may be degrading permafrost, the permanently frozen ground that helps hold mountain slopes together, which would make high mountain environments more unstable. He pointed to similar events in recent years in the Himalayas, Switzerland and Italy's Dolomites.With dammed lakes on both sides of the border still at risk of bursting, monitoring teams keep tracking river levels in the Langtang region. Researchers caution that the exact sequence of the collapse still needs to be confirmed through satellite image analysis. Meanwhile, the search for more than 1,400 missing people continues in the mud, now under constant watch for new alerts coming from the Tibetan side.

Security cameras recorded from start to finish the pursuit that ended in the lynching and death of Cláudio Rafael Landeiro, 37, in Copacabana, in Rio de Janeiro's South Zone, on the night of August 11. The footage, aired by TV Globo's Fantástico program on Sunday (23) and obtained by Folha de S.Paulo, points to at least seven people involved or present at different moments of the sequence. Cláudio was killed under suspicion of having stolen a bicycle that, according to the Civil Police investigation, belonged to his sister.The timeline pieced together from the images shows that Cláudio left the housing complex where he lived in Botafogo, also in the South Zone, at 10:26 p.m., and arrived at 10:54 p.m. at a convenience store on the corner of Barata Ribeiro and Belford Roxo streets. According to an employee's account to investigators, he went in to ask for a cigarette but gave up when told he would have to pay, and stayed outside leaning against the wall. At 11:21 p.m., security guard Davi Santos Machado arrived and asked whether the bicycle was his. At 11:23 p.m., the store employee padlocked the bike next to water jugs while Davi photographed it. At 11:33 p.m., the two men even shook hands, but according to the investigation Davi then called another security guard on his phone. At 11:37 p.m., Jorge Luiz Ricardo Dias crossed Barata Ribeiro carrying the bicycle, accompanied by Davi and Cláudio, and rode off on it.The assault took place on Felipe de Oliveira street. According to CNN Brasil, two men with app delivery backpacks arrived on bicycles and a third appeared holding a piece of wood. The attack lasted nearly nine minutes: Folha's analysis of the footage counted 63 blows with pieces of wood, while the police count cited by CNN points to at least 30 club strikes, plus punches and kicks. Cláudio did not fight back. After he fell unconscious, the attackers went through his pockets and one of them photographed the scene. The group took the bicycle and left Cláudio on the sidewalk without calling for help.Firefighters were called and took the cyclist to the Miguel Couto Municipal Hospital, in Gávea, but he did not survive. According to information given to the family, the death was caused by traumatic brain injury and internal bleeding.The investigation so farThe case is being investigated by the Rio de Janeiro Civil Police. Days after the crime, Davi Santos Machado was caught on security cameras riding the victim's bicycle to the 12th police precinct, in Copacabana, where he gave a statement and denied taking part in the beating. On Thursday (20), he turned up again, this time at the 53rd precinct, in Mesquita, and admitted involvement in the case, according to CNN Brasil. Besides Davi and Jorge Luiz, police identified as participants security guard Felipe Eduardo dos Santos and men who worked as app delivery riders in the area.Four suspects have been arrested, and police are still trying to locate a fifth person involved, according to G1. The case has renewed the debate over lynchings in Brazil, which recur in large cities and often start from false accusations. In an analysis published on Friday (28), Brasil de Fato linked the episode to the spread of hate speech and "take the law into your own hands" rhetoric. For the police, the footage covering nearly the entire crime, from the approach at the convenience store to the nine minutes of beating, is now the main piece of evidence to hold each of those involved accountable.

A cold front paired with an upper-level trough is set to bring three straight days of severe storms to southern Brazil, with rainfall totals that could top 200 millimeters in the Planalto Sul highlands and the southern coast of Santa Catarina state between this Friday (28) and Sunday (30). The forecast, from Meteored meteorologist Ana Maria Pereira Nunes, also includes a risk of hail, lightning and damaging wind gusts across Rio Grande do Sul, Santa Catarina and parts of Paraná, based on the extreme forecast index of the European weather model (ECMWF). Brazil's National Institute of Meteorology (Inmet) placed 518 cities in the South region under a danger alert this Friday and Saturday, forecasting rain of 30 to 60 mm per hour, winds of 60 to 100 km/h and hail. The warning covers areas such as the Santa Catarina highlands and the Itajaí Valley, the Porto Alegre metro area and northeastern Rio Grande do Sul, and central, southwestern and southeastern Paraná. The institute lists risks of power cuts, crop damage, falling trees and flooding. In Greater Florianópolis, the Grande Oeste and the Itajaí Valley, Santa Catarina's Civil Defense expects 100 to 150 mm of rain, with a risk of street flooding and flash floods. Rivers at risk of flooding MetSul Meteorologia, a private weather service based in Rio Grande do Sul, reinforced a special high flood risk alert for Rio Grande do Sul and Santa Catarina this Friday, valid through Monday (31). According to the bulletin, the most threatened rivers in Rio Grande do Sul are the Uruguai, Jacuí, Taquari and Caí, because the heaviest rain is expected over the Campos de Cima da Serra plateau, where those basins begin. In the state capital Porto Alegre, the Guaíba, the lake-like waterway at the heart of the city, is highly likely to rise past its alert level of 2.50 meters next week, flooding islands and possibly forcing safety power shutdowns in the Arquipélago neighborhood. MetSul also warns that a cold air mass with strong southerly winds, forecast for September 4 and 5, could dam the Guaíba's outflow just as its level peaks. The episode is fed by an atmospheric river, a corridor channeling moisture from the Amazon region toward the South, which explains the unusually long duration of the instability, according to MetSul. Rio Grande do Sul is still recovering from the historic floods of May 2024, which left dozens dead and entire cities under water, so any forecast of excessive rain triggers heightened attention from authorities. This Friday, neighboring Uruguay, which shares the same river basin, already recorded large hail near the Brazilian border, MetSul reported. Heat and dry air across the rest of the country While the South faces storms, the Southeast and Central-West are entering a stretch of heat and low humidity, according to g1. São Paulo's state Civil Defense forecasts intense heat through Monday, with highs of up to 40°C inland and 36°C in the state capital. Inmet, however, does not classify the period as a heat wave, because its criteria require temperatures at least 5°C above average for five consecutive days, and a new cold front is expected to push temperatures down from Tuesday (September 1). In the Central-West, Cuiabá should reach around 40°C this Friday, with a chance of hitting 41°C in the coming days. Air humidity may drop to between 12% and 20% in Mato Grosso do Sul, Goiás, the Federal District and parts of Mato Grosso during the hottest hours, a condition that favors the spread of wildfires, warns Climatempo. Santa Catarina's Civil Defense advises residents to avoid sheltering near trees and power poles during windstorms, never cross flooded streets or submerged bridges, and seek protected locations away from windows during severe thunderstorms.

A 14-year-old student was detained after attacking a teacher with a pocket knife during a tutoring class at a private school in Manaus, the capital of Amazonas state. The attack happened on Wednesday afternoon (26) in the Adrianópolis neighborhood, in the city's south-central area, and was recorded by a security camera installed in the classroom, according to Folha de S.Paulo.The Civil Police of Amazonas are investigating the case as an offense equivalent to attempted homicide, the Specialized Precinct for Juvenile Offenses (Deaai) told G1. Under Brazilian law, minors under 18 do not face criminal charges; their cases are handled as atos infracionais by the juvenile justice system. The teenager was taken to the precinct on Thursday (27), gave a statement and, after judicial authorization, was sent to a provisional detention unit, where he remains. Executing a search and seizure warrant, police collected his backpack, which held a pocket knife, a kitchen knife and his personal cellphone. According to detective Luiz Rocha, who leads the case, the pocket knife was the weapon used in the attack.The teacher, identified as Vinícius Siqueira Figueiredo, 23, was struck by nine blows to the neck, arms and legs. He was first taken to the 28 de Agosto emergency hospital and later transferred to a private hospital in Manaus, where he remains in stable condition, out of danger but under observation. In an interview with the news portal Rios de Notícias, the teacher described lasting effects from the attack: "I cannot move my leg properly." Police will hear his testimony after he is discharged.The motive remains unknown. Detective Luiz Rocha said witnesses and the teenager's relatives have already been heard and that his cellphone will undergo forensic analysis. "We still have some steps to complete to try to reach the real motive behind what happened," Rocha said, according to Folha. The teenager has not explained what led him to carry out the attack.Union demands a responseThe case has renewed the debate over school safety in Manaus, an issue that remains central to public policy in Brazil after a series of school attacks in recent years. According to the news portal Radar Amazônico, the local teachers' union demanded a response from Amazonas state authorities. The Civil Police said they will not release further details to avoid interfering with the investigation, and the Amazonas state court did not answer Folha's request to confirm whether the teenager or his family had retained a lawyer.

Brazil's National Mining Agency (ANM) on Friday ordered the immediate embargo of the Maravilhas II tailings dam, owned by Vale, at the Pico Mine in Itabirito, in the central region of Minas Gerais state. The decision, published in the Federal Official Gazette, comes eight months after the structure left emergency level 1 in January. According to G1, which first reported the case, the miner is barred from depositing tailings in the dam, which was active when the measure was ordered. Maintenance, safety and compliance work remains allowed.According to the ANM, the embargo does not stem from a new anomaly in the structure. The problem is documentary: studies submitted by Vale did not account for the dam's condition after reinforcement works completed at the site, leaving outdated both the study that simulates a potential failure and the Mining Dam Emergency Action Plan (PAEBM, its Portuguese acronym), the protocol that guides the response to a possible collapse and the protection of Itabirito's communities. At the last on-site inspection, on July 13, agency technicians found no signs of immediate compromise to the dam's safety.Because of the irregularity, the structure was reclassified to alert level. The ANM stresses that this classification differs from emergency levels and does not indicate an immediate risk to stability. For the embargo to be lifted, Vale must update the hypothetical failure study and the PAEBM and undergo a new agency evaluation to verify the plan's compliance and operability.Reinforcement works had ended the emergency in JanuaryVale said the Maravilhas II emergency level 1 was closed on January 9, after reinforcement works concluded in October 2025 that, according to the company, improved stability conditions and met legal requirements. The dam then received a positive Declaration of Stability Condition (DCE), a technical document attesting to the structure's stability. At the time, the miner said Maravilhas II was the 23rd Vale structure to leave an emergency level since 2022. Contacted by G1 about the embargo, Vale had not responded by the time of publication.Minas Gerais holds most of Brazil's iron ore tailings dams and has lived under heightened scrutiny since the Mariana collapse in 2015 and the Brumadinho disaster in 2019, the latter at a Vale dam, which killed 270 people. The Itabirito case shows the current oversight regime working in both directions: the agency lifted the emergency once the works were done, then stepped in again when the paperwork stopped reflecting the dam's actual condition. The outcome now depends on how quickly Vale updates its studies and proves to the ANM that the emergency plan protecting Itabirito's population matches the structure standing at the Pico complex today.

The technical staff of Funai, Brazil's federal agency for indigenous affairs, has asked for the suspension or annulment of the installation license for the Volta Grande Project, an open-pit gold venture by miner Belo Sun billed as the largest of its kind in the country. The mine would sit in the Volta Grande do Xingu, a big bend of the Xingu River in Pará state already altered by the Belo Monte hydroelectric dam, one of the largest in the world.The position appears in an official letter from Funai's Environmental and Territorial Management Directorate (Digat), dated August 7 and sent to the agency's specialized federal prosecutors' office. The document, first revealed by Agência Pública and also obtained by Folha de S.Paulo, was produced as part of a conciliation attempt led by the TRF-1, the federal appeals court reviewing the case. It reverses the stance Funai held under former president Jair Bolsonaro.Communities left out of the studiesFunai's main argument is that the impact studies behind the license ignored indigenous communities that could be affected by the mining. In a survey carried out after a commitment made during the conciliation, the agency identified 20 communities and villages in different land situations: six in the Jericoá Indigenous Reserve, still being formally created; five with territorial claims registered at Funai; and nine outside demarcated indigenous lands. Being listed does not mean all will be deemed affected. Funai says studies still need to determine the impacts on each group and define the project's area of influence.Digat also points to technical gaps: disagreements over water intake from the Xingu River, the lack of a settled design for the ore processing plant, and the fact that the license reissued by Pará's state environmental agency (Semas) covers neither the tailings dam nor the Ouro Verde pit, one of the planned extraction sites. According to Diogo Cabral, a lawyer with the Movimento Xingu Vivo para Sempre (Xingu Alive Forever Movement), the project foresees a tailings dam with capacity for 35 million cubic meters of waste and cyanide processing close to the river."These aspects show that essential information has not yet been sufficiently clarified, compromising the proper assessment of impacts on the indigenous component and informed consultation with the potentially affected communities," Funai's technical note says.The mine's relationship with Belo Monte is another friction point. Norte Energia, the dam's operator, has itself flagged incompatibilities between the two projects, citing risks to water quality, river flow and fish in the stretch of the Xingu with reduced flow, and asked for the mine's licensing to be reviewed because of what it called a conflict between the activities. Funai now demands an answer from Semas on these concerns and requires Belo Sun to produce a Cumulative Impact Assessment adding up the effects of the mine and the dam on the indigenous peoples of the Volta Grande.The installation license was reinstated in February by a single-judge ruling from Justice Flávio Jardim of the TRF-1 and validated by Semas in April, without Funai's consent. Cabral disputes the idea that pending issues could be fixed later through license conditions: "it allows questions that should be resolved before authorization to be left for later," he told Agência Pública. The outcome, now before the TRF-1, should show how far Brazil's licensing rules and ILO Convention 169, which requires prior and informed consultation of indigenous peoples, will actually be enforced on large mining projects in the Amazon.

Nube Oma Kulina, a 24-year-old member of a recently contacted indigenous people from the middle Juruá River, in Amazonas state, has been missing for three months after being released from a prison in Manaus, about 1,200 km in a straight line from his village. The case was revealed on Friday (28) by Folha de S.Paulo, the only outlet to report the story so far. Nube was in pretrial detention at a police station in Envira, a municipality in the middle Juruá region of southern Amazonas, when a court ordered his transfer to the state capital. According to Folha, his release warrant is dated May 28 and bears the stamp of CDPM II, a provisional detention center in Manaus, marked "released" and signed by Nube in print letters. Since then, relatives in the villages, indigenous organizations, the courts, the public prosecutor's office and Funai, Brazil's national indigenous affairs agency, have had no word of his whereabouts. Release without notice to Funai or family The release took place without any notice from the state prison system to public defenders, relatives or Funai, the report says. In cases involving recently contacted indigenous people, that notification is required because they usually do not speak Portuguese, are not familiar with the workings of a city the size of Manaus, a capital of about 2 million people, and have no relatives or support networks in the area. Faced with the silence, the Amazonas Public Defender's Office formally asked the state government for explanations about the arrest, the transfer and the release. A missing person report was filed at a Manaus police station following action by the Defender's Office and Funai. The madiha Kulina, Nube's ethnic group, are classified by Funai as a recently contacted people. They keep their own cultural system in villages along the middle Juruá, do not master Portuguese and struggle with urban life. Brazil's Constitution and ILO Convention 169, ratified by the country, provide for special protection of indigenous peoples, including in their contact with the justice system. The Amazonas state government did not answer Folha's questions, sent by email and WhatsApp between Tuesday (25) and Friday (28). The newspaper also tried to reach both prison units involved in the case, CDPM II and the Puraquequara facility, but the phones went unanswered. As of publication, no state agency had explained the circumstances of the release or reported any search effort for the indigenous man.

Brazil now has 4.6 million consumers who are also micro or mini power generators, about 5% of all consumers, and the spread of this "rooftop energy" is starting to strain the national grid. On Sunday (23), the National Electric System Operator (ONS), the body that coordinates power generation and transmission across the country, ordered distribution companies to cut about 1 gigawatt (GW) of generation between 11 a.m. and 1:30 p.m. to keep excess supply from overloading the National Interconnected System (SIN). It was the second time this year the emergency plan was triggered, according to G1 and Agência Brasil.The first activation came on June 7, during the Corpus Christi holiday weekend, when the operator asked for 1,000 megawatts to be managed between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. Solar and wind are intermittent sources: they depend on natural conditions that do not always match consumption. On weekends, when commercial and industrial activity drops, panel output can exceed demand. Because electricity cannot be stored at scale, the ONS must balance supply and consumption at every moment.The risk has already materialized once. On Father's Day in 2025, distributed generation reached 37.6% of national demand and the surplus nearly overloaded the system. To prevent a blackout that could have hit several states, the ONS cut hydroelectric and thermoelectric plants to a minimum and slashed 98.5% of centralized wind and solar generation, according to Agência Brasil. Even with those steps, power is left over at certain hours, and the cuts have become routine. The targets are Type 3 plants, which the operator does not dispatch directly, such as small hydro plants, biomass units and smaller wind and solar farms, switched off through the distribution companies."The ONS tends to reduce hydro generation to a minimum, thermal to a minimum, but even then there is more generation than consumption and it keeps cutting. It cuts wind, it cuts solar, centralized", Roberto Brandão, technical and scientific director of the Electric Sector Study Group (Gesel) at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), told G1.Subsidies weigh on power billsBehind the boom is the sector's incentive structure. The Distributed Generation Legal Framework, signed in 2022, guaranteed until 2045 the benefit of not paying in full for use of the distribution network for those who requested a connection by January 2023. Later adopters entered transition rules, with gradual charges for grid use. According to Clauber Leite, director of Sustainable Energy and Bioeconomy at the E+ Energy Transition Institute, the subsidies made the transformation of Brazil's energy matrix viable, but they have become a burden on tariffs: regulator Aneel estimated the Energy Development Account (CDE), a fund that finances public energy policies, at R$ 52.7 billion for 2026, with about R$ 47.8 billion paid directly by consumers through their power bills. "The part linked to the expansion of distributed generation and other subsidies is the most sensitive point of the debate, because it transfers costs to consumers who often cannot afford to install panels", he told G1.Losses and the operator's responseThe cuts carry a cost for investors. Consultancy Volt Robotics estimated that losses from solar and wind curtailment totaled R$ 6.5 billion in 2025. For Joisa Dutra of the Center for Regulation and Infrastructure Studies (Cebi) at Fundação Getúlio Vargas, the energy surplus undermines investment returns and, in some cases, can make it harder for investors to meet their obligations.Faced with this scenario, the ONS announced on August 20 that it is preparing the Regional Generation Relief Scheme, a system to automatically switch off part of distributed generation in critical situations, with cutting capacity of up to 3 GW split into three stages, activated only after all other control options are exhausted. A pilot project is due to be tested by the end of 2026 at one distributor and, if it works, implementation moves forward in 2027. Distributed generation now totals about 50 GW of installed capacity in Brazil. Abradee, the association of power distributors, said its members will follow ONS guidance, but asked for clearer criteria for the cuts to give generators operational and legal security.

Brazil is expected to face at least six heat waves by the end of the year, driven by an El Niño that may become one of the strongest on record. The forecast comes from an analysis by the National Center for Monitoring and Early Warning of Natural Disasters (Cemaden), a federal agency, based on 47 years of temperature records. The number could be higher: during the last El Niño, in 2023 and 2024, the country endured nine heat waves between August and December, the most since records began in 1979 and more than double the national average of four events.Under the study's criteria, a heat wave occurs when, for at least three consecutive days, both daytime highs and nighttime lows stay exceptionally above normal, with no relief even at night. "That is an average, but in the last El Niño we saw the country live through nine heat waves, with extremely hot days," researcher Mabel Calim Costa, who holds a doctorate in Earth system science and authored the survey at Cemaden, told G1. "With ocean temperatures rising, the scenario could be even more intense, and that brings consequences for the country."More frequent and more widespreadThe study points to a shift in how extreme heat behaves across Brazil. In the 1980s and 1990s, episodes were rare and concentrated in specific regions, such as the Northeast. From 2010 onward, and more sharply after 2020, heat waves became more frequent and began covering the whole country at the same time. "The heat wave now affects the entire country, and that is an issue because we are talking about additional heat in areas that are already hot and in areas that have no resilience to face such high temperatures," Mabel said. In 2024, more than 6 million Brazilians faced at least 150 days of extreme heat, according to a G1 survey.The expected intensity originates in the equatorial Pacific. The current El Niño was officially declared in June and has strengthened quickly. According to MetSul, a Brazilian weather service, the model run by the Met Office, the United Kingdom's national weather service, projects temperatures more than 3°C above average in the Pacific's Niño 3.4 region, a level that would place the episode in the Super El Niño category and make it surpass the major events of 1982-1983, 1997-1998 and 2015-2016. The British service also estimates that 2027 could overtake 2024 as the hottest year ever measured on the planet.The immediate trigger for the waves is usually the formation of high-pressure areas that stall over a region for several days, blocking clouds and rain and trapping a mass of hot, dry air in place. Without rain, soil moisture is depleted, which intensifies warming and can worsen existing drought. On a hotter planet, each such episode produces more extreme peaks than it would have decades ago. For September, forecast maps already show nearly all of Brazil in orange and red tones, with temperatures that could reach 3°C above average, according to G1.Severe drought in 157 citiesThe heat tends to aggravate drought. According to the Integrated Drought Index, produced by Cemaden for the federal government, 157 cities are already in severe drought, most of them in the North and Northeast. Tocantins accounts for 50 municipalities in that condition, and Bahia for 18. "The most affected regions will be the North and the Northeast, we are already seeing rainfall below what was expected in those regions," said Ana Paula Cunha, a drought specialist at Cemaden.Fire risk is also rising. A joint survey by CPTEC/Inpe, the national weather and climate forecasting center, the Inmet meteorology institute and Funceme, Ceara's state meteorology foundation, classifies Brazilian municipalities by fire risk level, combining data on human activity with heat-spot trends. Together with the alerts issued by Cemaden, this monitoring is now the basis for states and municipalities to prepare for the extreme heat, drought and wildfire episodes that El Niño is expected to intensify in the coming months.

A joint operation by Brazil's Federal Police, the environmental agency Ibama, the conservation unit agency ICMBio and the National Force identified new illegal gold mining sites in Curionópolis and Eldorado dos Carajás, in southeastern Pará state, in the Amazon. Announced on Wednesday (26) as a new phase of Operation Extractio II, the action found illegal extraction taking place even beneath high-voltage transmission lines of the Sistema Interligado Nacional, the grid that carries electricity across Brazil, according to information from the federal agencies reported by G1.The damage was located while agents mapped new extraction points in the Carajás region on Saturday (22) and Tuesday (25). Teams found excavations, churned soil and large flooded areas on land once covered by forest, and at one site the mining had advanced to the riverbanks. According to the agencies involved, mining under transmission lines is not an isolated case: similar structures have been found at several points across the region.Rivers that supply local communitiesIn Curionópolis, inspectors focused on an area along the Rio Novo and Rio Sereno, waterways important to local communities that belong to the Itacaiúnas river basin. Environmental damage caused by mineral extraction was confirmed there. In the rural area of Eldorado dos Carajás, near the Vila 17 de Abril settlement, agents found a large illegal extraction site and improvised structures used by the workers.The two fronts of the operation shut down most of the mining infrastructure. Agents destroyed 26 stationary engines, two excavators and 12 camps, and rendered about 7,000 liters of diesel unusable. They also seized a firearm, two chainsaws and three motorcycles.The Carajás region holds one of the world's largest mineral provinces and has faced years of pressure from illegal gold mining, an activity that degrades the Amazon rainforest and contaminates the rivers that sustain riverside communities. According to the federal agencies, the operation aims to contain forest degradation and stop the activity from further damaging streams and rivers in the Itacaiúnas basin. Monitoring continues at other points across the Carajás territory.So far, the available information comes from the assessment released by the federal agencies and reported by G1, the only source located on the case. There is no confirmation of arrests or an official estimate of the volume of gold extracted from the dismantled sites.

El Niño, the climate pattern typically linked to drought in Brazil's North and Northeast and to above-average rainfall in the South, is intensifying with global warming. That is the finding of a study published this Thursday (27) in the journal Science, according to a report by Folha de S.Paulo: the phenomenon's variability is at least 36.5% greater than in the pre-industrial period.The conclusion is based on geochemical analysis of corals from the Galápagos archipelago, in Ecuador's equatorial Pacific, a natural archive holding a thousand years of climate records. The research was led by Julia Cole, a professor at the University of Michigan who specializes in paleoclimatology. According to Folha, the work confirms what recent observational data had suggested: El Niño is also being affected by climate change driven mainly by the burning of oil, coal and natural gas.A thousand-year archiveLike air bubbles trapped in glaciers and tree rings, corals and their fossils preserve information about the climate of past eras. Cole's team estimated ocean surface temperatures around Galápagos over the last thousand years and compared the results with measurements from other Pacific corals. The location helps: the archipelago sits in the eastern equatorial Pacific, close to the region where El Niño is monitored by scientific convention.To check whether the observed variability could be explained by natural causes, the researchers ran simulations with 12 climate models. The result showed a surge in variability over the last four decades, inconsistent with the natural oscillation that would be expected. The link between global warming and El Niño had long been presumed but was hard to prove, given the lack of ancient records and the phenomenon's own high natural variability. Fossilized corals allowed the team to work around that obstacle.What it means for BrazilEl Niño favors everything from droughts to floods and, according to Folha, is expected to bring extreme events through the rest of 2026 and into 2027. In Brazil, that usually means harsher dry spells in regions such as the Amazon basin and the semi-arid Northeast, and excess rain in the South, a combination that weighs on farming, hydroelectric power generation and civil defense planning.Confirming that human activity intensifies the phenomenon gives researchers a firmer basis for refining climate projections. For monitoring agencies and public officials, the study reinforces the need to treat El Niño-related extremes not as exceptions, but as a growing trend on a warmer planet.

Brazil's southernmost state, Rio Grande do Sul, went on alert on Thursday (27) as the state Civil Defense monitoring center and the National Meteorology Institute (Inmet) warned of a stretch of storms expected to last through Monday (31). Rainfall totals may top 250 millimeters in the Vales, Serra and Nordeste regions between Friday and Monday, with a risk of flooding in the lowlands of the Taquari river basin downstream from the town of Encantado and of the Caí river from São Sebastião do Caí, according to G1.The unstable weather began on Thursday with heavy rain and hail mainly in the state's southern region. On Friday (28), storms spread across the Costa Doce, the central region, the Porto Alegre metropolitan area and the middle coast, with up to 150 millimeters in 24 hours. Over the weekend, the heaviest rain concentrates in the Vales, Serra and Nordeste regions, which also face severe storms and winds above 90 km/h. Gusts in parts of the state may reach 100 km/h.Rivers under watchThe Civil Defense hydrological outlook points to floods with streams overflowing, flash floods and urban flooding. In the state's south and west, the Quaraí, Ibirapuitã, Santa Maria, Jaguarão and Camaquã rivers are expected to rise, along with the Grande and São Lourenço streams, the São Gonçalo canal and the Mirim and Patos lagoons. In the northern half, the Paranhana, Sinos, Gravataí, Maquiné, Três Forquilhas, Passo Fundo and Várzea rivers and Taquari tributaries are also forecast to swell. For now, river levels across the state range between attention and normal thresholds.The alert mobilizes a state still recovering from the May 2024 floods, the worst in its history, when the Taquari Valley was among the hardest-hit areas. This time, protective structures rebuilt since then were activated before the rain even arrived: GaúchaZH reported the closure of an emergency dike near Porto Alegre's airport and said President Lula canceled an event in the state because of the weather. On the state Civil Defense website, two orange alerts for storms with hail and wind in the southern region were active on Thursday. Inmet also issued danger and potential danger notices forecasting up to 100 millimeters of rain per day and a risk of power cuts in the southwest, the center and the metropolitan region.Authorities advise residents not to shelter under trees during wind gusts, not to park vehicles near transmission towers or billboards and, when possible, to unplug electrical appliances. Civil Defense can be reached at 199 and the Fire Department at 193.

Brazil's National Institute of Meteorology (Inmet) issued high-level weather alerts for critical relative humidity dropping below 15% across nine states in the Central-West, Southeast, Northeast, and North regions. The intense dry spell affects the Federal District, Goiás, Mato Grosso, Mato Grosso do Sul, Tocantins, and interior sectors of São Paulo, Minas Gerais, Bahia, and Maranhão, combining elevated temperatures with desert-like dryness.Data from automated weather stations show that the Araguaia river basin and sections of the São Francisco valley are experiencing the sharpest drops, with humidity levels swinging between 12% and 20% during peak afternoon hours. The World Health Organization (WHO) classifies humidity under 20% as an emergency alert, which quickly increases hospital visits for respiratory distress and dehydration in regional hubs such as Goiânia, Cuiabá, and Montes Claros.The condition stems from a persistent atmospheric blocking system anchored over central South America. This hot, dry air mass prevents cold fronts from pushing northward and cuts off tropical moisture flows from the Amazon basin, accelerating soil water loss in a dynamic tied to shifting global climate circulation patterns.Fire prevention and health advisoriesTo reduce the spread of fires across savannah grasslands and agricultural fields, Prevfogo, the national specialized fire management center under environmental agency Ibama, joined state brigades to enforce bans on open-field agricultural burning. State civil defense agencies advised residents to drink extra water, suspend outdoor exercise between 10:00 and 17:00, and use indoor humidifiers or wet towels.Municipal clinics across the affected states have expanded primary care triage for children and elderly patients suffering from asthma and chronic bronchitis. Forecasters at Inmet project that the high-pressure system will linger over the coming days, requiring steady vigilance from rural communities and city services until rain systems can break through the dry block.

A heat wave is expected to push temperatures as high as 47°C in at least five Brazilian states this weekend, according to a forecast by the Meteored weather service released on Thursday (27). In São Paulo, the state Civil Defense agency issued an alert for Friday (28) through Monday (31), with highs near 40°C in the interior of the state.The peak of the heat is expected on Sunday (30), when a wide area between Mato Grosso and Mato Grosso do Sul, in Brazil's Center-West farm belt, should see highs of 46°C to 47°C, Meteored said. Over the same period, northern Paraná, northern and western São Paulo state and the Triângulo Mineiro region, in western Minas Gerais, could reach 45°C.Alert in São PauloIn São Paulo state, the most severe conditions are forecast for the northern and northwestern regions, where relative humidity could fall below 12% in the afternoons, Civil Defense reported. In the rest of the state, forecasts point to temperatures between 30°C and 35°C with humidity at or below 20%, a combination the agency says will bring intense thermal discomfort and dry out the environment.The state Civil Defense coordinator, Colonel Rinaldo de Araujo Monteiro, is set to meet with municipal representatives to present the weather outlook and coordinate preventive measures. The agency warned that parched vegetation at the height of the dry season raises the chance of wildfires and lets flames spread quickly, especially in rural areas. It advised residents not to use fire to clear land, not to burn trash and not to throw cigarette butts along highways or near vegetation. Anyone who spots smoke or the start of a fire should call 193 (fire department) or 199 (Civil Defense).Beyond the heat, much of Brazil is recording very low relative humidity, and the mix of dry air and high temperatures should raise the heat index in several regions, according to the forecast. São Paulo's Civil Defense recommends special care for children, the elderly and animals, frequent hydration, ventilated and humidified rooms, and less sun exposure and physical exercise during the hottest hours.The episode arrives at the end of the southern winter, when the Center-West and the interior of the Southeast have gone months without significant rain and fire risk reaches its yearly high. Climate projections indicate that extreme heat events like this one are set to become more frequent and intense as the planet warms, adding pressure on governments to adapt health and fire prevention protocols.

A glacial collapse high in the Himalayas triggered a rapid torrent of mud and boulders that struck mountain villages across the Solukhumbu district in Nepal. The sudden surge along the Bhote Koshi river basin washed away houses, pedestrian bridges, and essential local utilities, injuring dozens of residents and forcing the urgent evacuation of villagers and international trekkers near Mount Everest.Units from the Nepal Army and the Armed Police Force deployed helicopters and ground rescue squads to Thame and surrounding settlements. According to reporting by CNN Brasil and local emergency services, military teams evacuated dozens of injured residents and guided 31 stranded foreign tourists to safety, airlifting those with severe injuries to specialized medical facilities in Kathmandu.Rising temperatures and expanding glacial lakesTechnical assessments by the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development indicate the disaster was a glacial lake outburst flood, commonly known as a GLOF. Rapidly rising global temperatures are accelerating ice loss across the Hindu Kush Himalaya, creating unstable meltwater lakes held back only by loose moraine dams that can fail suddenly under hydrostatic pressure.While soldiers and relief workers distribute emergency food rations, blankets, and temporary shelters in Solukhumbu, mountain climate scientists emphasize the need for automated early warning systems and controlled siphoning of vulnerable glacial lakes. Expanding satellite monitoring and reinforcing riverbanks remain vital steps to protect vulnerable highland communities from recurrent flash floods.

The Federal Police launched an enforcement sweep on Thursday to dismantle a criminal network accused of land grabbing, illegal deforestation, and subjecting workers to modern slavery in Manicoré, a municipality along the Madeira River basin in southern Amazonas state. Officers executed search warrants and asset freezing orders authorized by the 7th Federal Environmental and Agrarian Court of Amazonas.Investigators estimate that the illegal clearing of public lands caused over 179 million reais (around 32 million dollars) in environmental destruction. The police probe began after enforcement teams rescued roughly 50 workers who had been held in degrading conditions at an isolated forest clearing camp.The use of vulnerable, unfree labor serves as an economic driver for predatory expansion across the Amazon basin, drastically lowering the cost of clearing pristine rainforest for cattle ranching and land speculation. This dynamic connects illicit local clearing to global supply chains while escalating carbon emissions from tropical deforestation.According to the Federal Police, the suspects face charges including criminal conspiracy, enslavement, illegal deforestation, invasion of federal public lands, forgery, and corruption. The court ordered the blocking of bank accounts and property to secure funds for ecological remediation and compensation for the rescued laborers.While financial asset freezes target the profits of illicit land syndicates, environmental monitors emphasize that lasting protection in southern Amazonas requires sustained field presence by inspection agencies, clear demarcation of unallocated public lands, and stricter land registry oversight.

The installed capacity of distributed micro and mini-generation, driven largely by rooftop solar panels and small solar arrays, has surpassed 50 gigawatts (GW) in Brazil. That volume accounts for nearly a fifth of the country's total power generation capacity, currently estimated at approximately 260 GW. The swift rollout of photovoltaic panels, stretching from residential rooftops in metropolitan São Paulo to rural properties across the São Francisco river basin in Minas Gerais and Bahia, has accelerated Brazil's clean energy transition while confronting transmission and distribution grids with an unprecedented stress test.According to an analysis by economist and former director of the National Electric Energy Agency (Aneel) Joisa Dutra, published in Folha de S.Paulo, actual solar generation is higher. A technical report from the National Electric System Operator (ONS) estimated that unregistered solar systems operating without formal utility authorization in rural and peri-urban circuits of states like Goiás and Mato Grosso added up to 14.6 GW in unmonitored capacity in 2025.Emergency curtailment and relief mechanismsThe surge of midday solar power, particularly during weekends and national holidays when industrial power demand drops, creates localized oversupply and threatens grid stability. To prevent blackouts and protect electrical equipment, ONS triggered emergency curtailments on connected distributed generation plants in recent days. The operator previously used the mechanism during the Corpus Christi holiday earlier this year.To manage persistent oversupply, ONS is preparing to test the Regional Generation Relief Scheme (ERAG) later this year. The automated protocol will step down or disconnect output from remote solar farms in a tiered fashion during severe grid imbalances. The system adapts the operational logic of Brazil's longstanding load-shedding scheme (ERAC), used historically to stabilize urban power supplies during transmission failures.Tariff imbalances and regulatory reformsBeyond the technical hurdles of physical grid balance, rapid decentralized expansion exposes structural economic imbalances. Energy economists highlight that current net-metering structures shift a growing share of fixed grid maintenance costs and sector subsidies onto conventional consumers, disproportionately affecting lower-income households and renters who lack the capital or roof space to generate their own power.To keep the clean energy transition equitable, regulators at Aneel and regional utilities are exploring revised tariff structures, dynamic time-of-use rates, and incentives for utility-scale battery storage across regional substations, measures designed to maintain reliability as clean power expands across the national territory.

Two of the world's largest shipping companies, Mediterranean Shipping Company (MSC) and CMA CGM, announced in early August a surcharge of up to US$ 1,900 (about R$ 9,785) per container bound for Manaus, in the Brazilian state of Amazonas. The fee, known as Low Water Surcharge (LWS) or "drought surcharge," was set to take effect in the first week of September, according to company notices. The Amazonas Commercial Association (ACA) challenged the measure and filed a petition with the National Waterway Transport Agency (Antaq). The association argues that agency rules only allow the surcharge when the Rio Negro reaches 17.7 meters. On Wednesday (26), the river level stood at 24.93 meters, well above that threshold. Rules and oversight Antaq's Ruling No. 459, issued in 2025, requires the fee to be charged only with at least 30 days' prior notice, detailing the triggering event, covered services, calculation basis, application period, and information on containers, costs and oversight. The agency said on August 13 it would step up operational measures to reduce impacts on passenger and cargo transport during the drought, but stressed that companies' prior notice does not mean the charge is authorized or regular. G1 contacted MSC and CMA CGM but received no response by publication time. Antaq also did not reply to questions about the two companies' authorizations. Drought spreads across the state The dry spell is already affecting some of Amazonas's 62 municipalities. On August 19, the city of Humaitá, in the south of the state, declared a state of emergency due to drought on the Rio Madeira, which has hampered essential public services. The decree, however, is not recognized by the state Civil Defense. According to the agency, as of Wednesday only São Paulo de Olivença, in the Upper Solimões region, was officially in a state of emergency. Another 14 municipalities were on alert and 10 on attention. The 32nd Hydrological Alert Bulletin from the Brazilian Geological Service (SGB), published in August, says below-average rainfall has intensified the receding of rivers in the Amazon Basin. Despite the drop, most SGB monitoring stations remain within normal levels for this time of year. The phenomenon, which recurs annually, has gained strength in recent dry seasons and pressures Manaus's supply logistics, as the city depends on river transport to receive goods from other parts of Brazil and abroad.

An extratropical cyclone that begins to form this Thursday (27) over the South Atlantic is expected to keep southern Brazil on alert for at least five straight days, with rainfall totals that could exceed 200 mm in the northern half of Rio Grande do Sul state through Monday (31). The forecast, released by Meteored and detailed in an alert by MetSul Meteorologia, points to a sequence of storms linked to an advancing cold front, with a risk of flooding, landslides and swollen rivers in the states of Rio Grande do Sul and Santa Catarina.According to ND Mais, Rio Grande do Sul concentrates the highest volumes, with 200 mm forecast for the state. In Santa Catarina, the border strip with Rio Grande do Sul could top 100 mm, while Paraná is expected to total around 60 mm. The timing also raises concern: the south of Rio Grande do Sul may see heavy rain as early as Thursday, Saturday (29) should bring more than 100 mm to the state's southern half, and Sunday (30) tends to be the most critical day in the north, with a potential 150 mm in 24 hours.MetSul describes the episode as a long-duration event fed by an atmospheric river, a corridor that carries moisture from the Amazon region toward southern South America. In the alert signed by meteorologist Estael Sias, the largest accumulations, from 100 mm to 250 mm through the end of Monday, are expected in areas such as Alto Uruguai, Planalto Médio, the Serra highlands, Aparados and the northern coast of Rio Grande do Sul. That volume should push up the Uruguai, Jacuí, Taquari, Sinos, Caí and Gravataí rivers. Since several of them flow into the northern end of the Patos Lagoon, the Guaíba, in the state capital Porto Alegre, could flood next week, with a high probability of inundation on the city's islands.Above-average rain spreads across the Center-SouthFrom Monday, the cold front starts advancing over the Center-West and Southeast. The weekly outlook from the ECMWF model, analyzed by Meteored, shows above-average rain across much of Brazil between August 31 and September 7. The largest deviations, 60 mm to 90 mm above the climatological norm, are expected in western Santa Catarina and Paraná; anomalies of 30 mm to 60 mm stretch from northern Rio Grande do Sul to Paraná, and above-normal totals should also reach most of Mato Grosso do Sul, southern Goiás, São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and southern Minas Gerais. A new frontal system begins to form next Thursday (3) and could keep conditions unstable across the Center-South until at least September 7.Civil defense mobilized, with 2024 in memoryThe Santa Catarina Civil Defense, the state agency responsible for disaster prevention and response, has already issued special warnings. Bulletin 152/2026, signed by meteorologist Augusto Pereira, warns of storms with wind gusts and hail between Friday (28) and Saturday (29) under a semi-stationary front, while another advisory forecasts rough seas along the coast through Friday. The agency publishes updated five-day forecasts and runs a real-time alert system that reaches residents by SMS. In Rio Grande do Sul, the forecast sharpens attention on basins such as the Taquari and the Jacuí, devastated by the historic floods of May 2024, and close monitoring of official bulletins will be essential in the coming days, especially in riverside communities and hillside areas.

Brazil's official inflation preview recorded deflation of 0.40% in August, the first negative reading since August 2025 (-0.14%), pulled down by cheaper electricity bills. The IPCA-15, released on Wednesday (26) by the national statistics agency IBGE, was the lowest result since August 2022, when it marked -0.73%. In July the index had risen 0.06%, and it now accumulates a 4.24% increase over 12 months.Residential electricity was the heaviest item behind the drop: it fell 6.25% and alone shaved 0.26 percentage point off the index. The move came from the Bônus de Itaipu, a discount credited to consumers' August power bills and linked to the binational Itaipu hydroelectric dam on the Paraná River, on the border with Paraguay. According to CNN Brasil, the credit applies only to this month and will not be repeated in September.The price survey ran from July 16 to August 14 across 11 locations, from the metro area of Belém, at the mouth of the Amazon, to Porto Alegre in the far south, including Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Salvador, Recife, Fortaleza, Belo Horizonte, Curitiba, Brasília and Goiânia. Five of the nine groups surveyed showed deflation: housing (-1.41%), transport (-1.00%), food and beverages (-0.57%), clothing (-0.20%) and communication (-0.02%). Airfares fell 13.30% and fuels 1.43%, with ethanol down 3.63%, gasoline 1.23% and diesel 0.71%. Food consumed at home became 0.97% cheaper, led by tomatoes (-27.38%), potatoes (-25.14%), carrots (-17.05%) and ground coffee (-2.31%).On the other side, personal expenses (0.66%), education (0.46%) and health (0.40%) kept rising. The 12-month inflation rate fell from 4.52% to 4.24%, back below the 4.5% ceiling of Brazil's inflation target, though still far from the 3% midpoint. The result came in below market expectations of a 0.30% monthly drop and 4.34% over 12 months, according to InfoMoney.Temporary relief and climate riskAnalysts interviewed by CNN Brasil describe the relief as temporary. Part of it came from one-off factors such as the power bill bonus, or volatile ones such as airfares, and core inflation gauges showed no relevant improvement. Juliana Inhasz, an economist and professor at the Insper business school, says the result makes the central bank's Monetary Policy Committee (Copom) more comfortable cutting the Selic benchmark rate by 0.25 percentage point in September:"A 0.25-point cut in September looks more likely and the situation becomes more comfortable. But anything beyond that cannot be justified by today's indicator."The inflation strategy team at Warren Investimentos, formed by Andréa Angelo, Laís Camargo and Júlia Freitas, was even more cautious. According to the economists, core and underlying services measures came in more pressured in some components, and an intense El Niño could add about 0.40 percentage point to the 2026 IPCA and another 0.20 point in the first quarter of 2027. Annualized inflation in labor-intensive services remains above 7%, according to the firm. For Inhasz, disinflation will only be considered structural once services cool down, core measures fall and price increases become less widespread.The full August IPCA, which covers 16 locations, will be released on September 11. The central bank's Focus survey, published on Monday (24), shows the market expects deflation of 0.18% in the full monthly index.

Brazil submitted its national Land Degradation Neutrality (LDN) target to the United Nations for the first time on Tuesday, August 25. The commitment, announced by Environment and Climate Change Minister João Paulo Capobianco, sets a goal of recovering and restoring more than 163,000 square kilometers of degraded land by 2030, part of a broader set of actions covering 3.67 million square kilometers, equal to 43.1% of Brazil's territory, according to newspaper Folha de S.Paulo.The announcement came during the 17th Conference of the Parties to the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (COP17), held in Ulaanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia, a summit that began August 17 and runs through Friday, August 28, with delegates from the convention's 197 member countries, according to Brazil's Ministry of Environment and Climate Change (MMA). Brazil had owed this commitment since 2018, when COP13 asked signatory countries to draft voluntary national plans on the issue.According to the ministry, the target is made up of 17 sub-goals split across three fronts: restoring land that is already degraded, slowing degradation processes underway, and preventing new losses. Of the 163,000 km² earmarked for restoration, the plan includes recovering native vegetation, expanding agroforestry systems and taking action inside conservation units, Indigenous Territories, legally protected riparian zones and river basins. Another 3.51 million km² fall under prevention, conservation and sustainable land management measures.The scale of the problem shows in the government's own figures: Brazil's Land Degradation Index estimates that about 2.3 million km², or 28% of the country's territory, already shows some degree of degradation, and the LDN baseline found 55.7 million hectares trending toward degradation as of 2020. The MMA estimates 39 million Brazilians live in 1,649 municipalities located in or near areas susceptible to desertification. A 2023 study by disaster-monitoring agency Cemaden and Brazil's space research institute Inpe, cited by Folha, found that semi-arid regions of Brazil expanded by an average of 75,000 km² per decade since 1960, with the caatinga scrubland of northern Bahia state registering the country's first stretch of arid climate, where evaporation now outpaces rainfall replenishment.River basins under strainA study by Brazil's National Water and Sanitation Agency (ANA), cited by the MMA, projects declining water flows across most of the country's hydrographic regions, with the sharpest drops expected in the North and Northeast, including the Tocantins-Araguaia, Parnaíba and São Francisco river basins, which cover parts of MATOPIBA, a fast-expanding agribusiness frontier spanning Maranhão, Tocantins, Piauí and Bahia. "Healthy soils sustain farming production, food security, biodiversity and water availability," Capobianco said, according to the ministry, adding that more frequent extreme weather events make land restoration also a resilience strategy for rural communities.Tracking the promiseTo track the commitments, the government revived Brazil's National Commission to Combat Desertification (CNCD) in 2024. The body, created under Law 13,153/2015, had gone unstaffed for eight years, the ministry said. Its relaunch, formalized through Decree 11,932, is the mechanism the government says it will use going forward to monitor whether the 17 restoration and prevention sub-goals stay on track for the 2030 deadline.

The death toll from Wednesday's flash flood on the Nepal-Tibet border rose sharply, from an initial count of roughly 19 in the hours after the disaster to 157, according to a new update from Nepal's police cited by BBC News Brasil. Another 579 people remain missing in Nepal. On the Tibetan side, controlled by China, local authorities reported 3 deaths and 265 people missing, according to G1. The figures are still being revised as rescue teams push into hard to reach areas of the Himalayas.The disaster began when a large mass of ice and rock, which Nepal's Department of Hydrology and Meteorology says may have broken off a glacier on the Tibetan side, blocked the Lhende River. The debris dam burst hours later, sending a wall of mud and water down the Trishuli River valley on the border, destroying homes, bridges, roads and power infrastructure. The flood hit Nuwakot district and the town of Rasuwa, as well as Syabrubesi, the starting point of the popular Langtang trekking route.Cause still under investigationEarly reports suggested an earthquake triggered the ice avalanche. The US Geological Survey (USGS) initially logged a magnitude 4.4 tremor in the area, then retracted that reading hours later, saying "the seismic energy was actually generated by the landslide itself," not the other way around. Imperial College hydrology researcher Martha Day told the BBC that in steep, glacier covered terrain like the Himalayas, hazardous events often cascade, with one raising the odds of another. Scientists are still trying to reconstruct the exact sequence using satellite imagery, though monsoon cloud cover has complicated the analysis.The disaster has renewed attention on the accelerated melting of glaciers across the Hindu Kush Himalaya region, a process scientists link to climate change, though it is too early to say how much it weighed in this specific event, according to BBC World Service environment correspondent Navin Singh Khadka. Chinese authorities describe the region as Asia's "water tower," the source of rivers including the Brahmaputra, the Indus and the Ganges, on which hundreds of millions of people downstream depend.Emergency response mobilizes thousandsNepal Prime Minister Balen Shah's office said 1,697 troops had been deployed to search efforts, with another 656 on standby. Six military helicopters rescued 94 people over the day, five civilian aircraft rescued another 12, and ground teams saved 27 more, according to the official statement. Sniffer dogs and four drones were also sent to the hardest hit areas. Police said 28 officers remain missing in Rasuwa district alone. The government has urged residents to stay away from riverbanks and risk areas while the search, expected to continue overnight, goes on.On the Chinese side, President Xi Jinping ordered reinforced rescue operations in Gyirong, the main land crossing between Tibet and Nepal. India sent ten tonnes of humanitarian aid to its neighbor; in a social media post, Indian Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar said "India stands with Nepal and its people." Nepal's Tourism Board counts 384 missing travelers, 341 of them foreigners, caught while trekking in the region. In Brazil, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva expressed solidarity with victims' families and the governments of Nepal and China; Brazil's foreign ministry says there are no reports of Brazilian nationals among those affected so far.

The Panama Canal, the primary maritime route linking the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, will once again reduce daily vessel crossings starting in September. The measure is a response to falling water levels in the artificial lakes that feed the canal's lock system, severely impacted by drought associated with El Niño. At the same time, the government of Panama declared a national state of emergency through June 2027 to deal with dry conditions and severe storms, according to reports by MetSul Meteorologia and Panamanian outlet Telemetro. The Panama Canal Authority announced that the daily transit limit will drop from 36 to 34 vessels on September 3, and then to 32 vessels on September 15. Canal administrators have not ruled out further restrictions if rainfall in the coming weeks remains below expectations. Between May and August, rainfall across the canal's watershed reached 34% below the historical average, driven by the ongoing climate anomaly. The water shortage exposes a dual vulnerability for the Central American nation: the same reservoir system that operates the locks supplies drinking water to roughly half of Panama's 4.2 million residents. In response to agricultural pressures, Panama's Ministry of Agricultural Development submitted a 2027 budget proposal to the National Assembly allocating dedicated funds to mitigate drought impacts on farms, reported local newspaper La Estrella de Panamá. Auction bids surge as global shipping faces new delays The waterway handles approximately 5% of global maritime trade and roughly 40% of all container traffic moving to and from the United States. Main users include the US, China, Japan, Chile, and South Korea. With daily transits restricted, waiting times are set to increase for ships without advance bookings. About nine out of ten vessels use the canal's reservation system, leaving a small remaining pool of daily slots sold through competitive auctions. Auction prices for those unreserved slots have risen sharply. The average winning bid was around $135,000 before recent geopolitical conflicts in the Middle East, but reached $4 million in April when one shipping line paid the amount to secure passage. This week, Panamanian newspaper La Prensa reported that a South Korean carrier won a single crossing slot for $5.3 million, highlighting the financial burden placed on global supply chains. The current El Niño, characterized by abnormal warming in the equatorial Pacific Ocean, is shaping up to be one of the strongest on record. Elsewhere in Central America, Honduras has placed 80% of its national territory under drought alerts. Globally, ocean surface temperatures reached an all-time record high of 21.10°C on August 22, according to data from the European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service cited by MetSul. "The record is another clear signal of an ocean under increasing stress," stated Samantha Burgess, strategic climate lead at ECMWF. The upcoming restrictions build upon prior draft reductions imposed on larger vessels. During the severe drought of 2023, daily transits were cut from 38 to 22, triggering weeks of vessel backups at both ocean entries. The Panama Canal Authority is monitoring rainfall through the end of the wet season before deciding whether additional water conservation steps will be needed.

The United Nations on Wednesday (26) named Brazil's Araticum network, a coalition dedicated to restoring the cerrado, the vast tropical savanna that covers much of central Brazil, as one of three global models for the recovery of degraded ecosystems. The announcement was made by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) and the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) at COP17, the UN conference on desertification held in Mongolia.The award, called World Restoration Flagship, also went to initiatives in the Sahel region of Africa and in Saudi Arabia, areas that, like Brazil, face drought, desertification and the impacts of climate change. It is the second time a Brazilian restoration project has been selected for the prize, according to the newspaper Folha de S.Paulo."Investing in healthy land is one of our strongest defenses against these threats," said Inger Andersen, UNEP's executive director. "The three initiatives show that restoring ecosystems brings significant benefits for everyone, from food security and new jobs to greater resilience for millions of people."The cerrado has already lost more than half of its native vegetation, largely to large-scale land conversion, Andersen said. The destruction of the biome, she added, harms Indigenous peoples, biodiversity, food production, water availability and climate resilience.The winning networkCreated in 2020, Araticum, short for Articulação pela Restauração do Cerrado (Articulation for the Restoration of the Cerrado), monitors 27,000 hectares of the biome. Its work spans the Federal District, where Brasília is located, and the states of Bahia, Goiás, Maranhão, Mato Grosso, Mato Grosso do Sul, Minas Gerais, Piauí, São Paulo and Tocantins. Member organizations include the Cerrado Seed Network, which works in areas such as the Chapada dos Veadeiros National Park, in the state of Goiás.The initiative combines natural regeneration, direct seeding, ecological restoration and agroforestry systems with native species, recovering forest, savanna and grassland areas. On its website, the network describes itself as a collaborative effort grounded in science, ancestral knowledge and the participation of traditional peoples and communities.The UN recognition was also highlighted on Wednesday by WWF Brazil and by Embrapa, the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation, which said it is one of the initiative's supporters.

A flash flood struck the mountainous border region between Nepal and Tibet, in China, on Wednesday, killing at least 19 people and leaving 384 missing, according to preliminary tolls from authorities in both countries cited by the Reuters and AFP news agencies. The waters destroyed roads, bridges, homes and at least one hydroelectric plant in the Himalayan region.According to Nepal's Tourism Board, the 384 missing include 291 foreigners, among them 105 Indian citizens. District administrator Narendra Pariyar urged residents along the Bhote Koshi River to move to higher ground, warning that there may be many casualties or loss of property. Nepal's prime minister, Balendra Shah, said police and army units had joined rescue efforts.The mountainous district of Rasuwa, home to roughly 50,000 people, was among the hardest hit. Nepal army spokesman Raja Ram Basnet said rescue helicopters could not land in the affected areas of Syapru Besi and Timure because the Bhote Koshi River had overflowed, and landings would only be possible once water levels drop. Television footage showed homes destroyed by the current, cars adrift and a metal bridge swept away by the water. Witnesses told Reuters the flood swallowed entire villages.Landslide also hits the Chinese sideIn Gyirong county, in Tibet, a landslide struck a border crossing between the two countries, leaving several people missing, including eight South Korean nationals who were working at a hydroelectric plant. According to China's official Xinhua news agency, the landslide occurred on the Nepalese side and hit a local port, cutting off roads, communications and power supply in the Shigatse region. Chinese authorities said they feared major loss of life.Health worker Tula Bahadur BK, a Rasuwa resident, described the scene to Reuters:There is devastation everywhere. Settlements near the river have been completely destroyed. Five of my relatives are missing.The cause of the flood has not been confirmed, but a similar flood on the same river last year was later attributed to the sudden draining of a glacial lake, a phenomenon common in Himalayan mountain regions affected by glacier melt.

Brazil's Federal Police carried out an operation on Tuesday, August 25, to combat illegal logging on the Rio Mequéns Indigenous Territory, located in the municipality of Parecis, in the northern state of Rondônia, according to Brazilian outlet G1.During the investigation, agents found and destroyed mobile sawmills, a camp used by illegal loggers, and a motorcycle at the site, police said.According to the Federal Police, the operation followed an analysis of satellite imagery that allowed investigators to pinpoint the exact locations of logging activity inside the protected indigenous reserve. Satellite monitoring has become a common tool for Brazilian environmental agencies tracking deforestation on protected lands before ground teams move in.The operation was not carried out by the Federal Police alone. It also involved Rondônia's Environmental Military Police, the National Public Security Force and Ibama, Brazil's federal environmental protection agency, G1 reported.Indigenous territories in Rondônia have repeatedly been targeted by illegal loggers, an activity linked both to Amazon deforestation and to conflicts with traditional communities. As of this report, the Federal Police had not disclosed whether any arrests were made during the operation or how much timber was found at the site.

The Fundação SOS Mata Atlântica, a Brazilian environmental group, describes the country's Atlantic Forest as Brazil's "first line of climate defense" against a new El Niño forming in the Pacific Ocean. The assessment comes from Luis Fernando Guedes Pinto, the foundation's executive director, in a column published by newspaper Folha de S.Paulo on Wednesday. According to him, the United States oceanic and atmospheric agency Noaa recently confirmed the phenomenon's formation and estimates a 63% probability that it will reach very strong intensity between late 2026 and early 2027.Guedes Pinto argues that the key question for Brazil is not just how strong the event will be, but how its effects will hit a country he describes as deeply unequal, heavily urbanized and vulnerable to floods, landslides, droughts and water crises. In that scenario, he says, the native vegetation still standing along Brazil's coast, known as the Mata Atlântica or Atlantic Forest, works as a natural protective structure: it helps hold hillsides in place, regulates rainfall patterns and sustains water supply in river basins that serve much of the country's population.Official bulletin details regional risksIndependent reporting reinforces the scale of the situation. According to the outlet Neo Mondo, Noaa's Climate Prediction Center issued an alert on August 13 using unusually stark language: sea surface temperature anomalies in the eastern equatorial Pacific already exceed 2 degrees Celsius, and the agency projects a 69% chance of a historic event for the October-December quarter, one that could surpass every El Niño recorded since 1950. The probability of a very strong event in the second half of the year exceeds 90%, per the same data.In Brazil, Bulletin No. 2 of the El Niño 2026-2027 Panel, released July 31 by agencies including Inmet, Inpe, the National Water Agency (ANA), Cemaden and the National Civil Protection and Defense Secretariat, projects opposite effects across the country: heavy rain and flood risk in the South, alongside prolonged drought in the North, Northeast, Center-West and Southeast. The bulletin flags a critical situation in the Paraguay River basin and a delayed rainy season in the Legal Amazon region, with a 100% probability the phenomenon will remain active into early 2027.Recent history shows what is at stake. In 2024, Rio Grande do Sul state suffered floods that killed 181 people, with losses estimated at 88.9 billion reais (roughly 17 billion dollars) by the Inter-American Development Bank, the United Nations' Cepal and the World Bank, according to figures cited by Neo Mondo. Disasters like that one have pushed governments, companies and environmental groups to build disaster-response protocols in advance rather than reacting after the fact.Guedes Pinto argues that preserving and restoring the Atlantic Forest, now reduced to a fraction of its original cover after centuries of deforestation along Brazil's densely populated coast, should be treated as climate adaptation policy rather than a standalone environmental issue. Folha de S.Paulo was the only primary source located with direct access to the analysis; other outlets consulted independently corroborate the Noaa figures and the official Brazilian panel's data on the phenomenon's intensity and regional risks.

Electricity sector unions met on Tuesday with João Daniel Cascalho, Brazil's national secretary for electric energy at the Ministry of Mines and Energy (MME), to discuss the impact on workers of a possible revocation of Enel's distribution license in São Paulo, according to the Painel S.A. column in Folha de S.Paulo. The meeting also addressed uncertainty over the renewal of Enel's contracts in Rio de Janeiro and Ceará states.Union representatives said there is a lack of clarity about the future of these concessions and warned that the lack of predictability could affect company planning, investment and the maintenance of services provided to the public. Four organizations took part: the Sindicato dos Trabalhadores nas Indústrias de Energia Elétrica do Norte e Nordeste Fluminense (STIEENNF), the Sindicato dos Eletricitários de São Paulo (STIEESP), the Associação dos Eletricitários Aposentados de São Paulo (AEASP), and the vice presidency of the Associação dos Aposentados da Fundação Cesp (AAFC).Revocation case nears final stageThe discussion comes as an administrative proceeding opened by Brazil's electricity regulator, Aneel, in April against Enel Distribuição São Paulo moves toward a conclusion. The case could strip the Italian-controlled company of its license to distribute power in the state, Latin America's largest economy. According to the trade outlet Canal Energia, Aneel rejected on August 24 a request by the utility for an expert technical review, pushing the case into its final evidentiary phase. The regulator had already turned down an Enel appeal against the opening of the proceeding on August 11.Aneel's director-general, Sandoval Feitosa, told reporters it is not up to the regulator to weigh alternatives to revocation, since that political decision rests with the "granting authority," in this case the energy ministry. He said a "negotiated solution" mentioned by Mines and Energy Minister Alexandre Silveira would likely involve a transfer of control of the concession, a mechanism used in similar cases before, such as Enel's handover of its Goiás distributor to the Equatorial group in 2022 and the transfer of Amazonas Energia to the Âmbar group.Feitosa said he hoped the case would be resolved "as quickly as possible," while acknowledging that the approaching elections make the situation more complex. "Uncertainty is bad for the end user, and bad for companies that need predictability for their investments," he said, according to InfoMoney.Enel has publicly stated it does not intend to give up the São Paulo concession and argued in its defense filed with Aneel in May that it had improved the distributor's operational indicators. A final ruling in the case could directly affect thousands of workers in São Paulo's electricity sector, which is why unions are now pressing the ministry for guarantees.

The average temperature of the ocean surface reached 21.1°C on Saturday (22), the hottest day ever recorded in the world's seas, according to the European Union's Copernicus climate change service. The mark tops the previous record of 21.09°C, set in March 2024, Folha de S.Paulo reported on Monday (24).According to Copernicus, it is the highest value since 1979, when its ERA5 dataset, which goes back to 1940, became more reliable for measuring sea surface temperature with the help of satellites. The service's technicians say the new record is in line with the long-term warming of the oceans and with the emergence of El Niño, the cyclical natural phenomenon that warms parts of the Pacific and is expected to intensify climate anomalies in the second half of this year and in 2027."The oceans are under increasing stress. El Niño is adding heat to the system, and this comes in a context of decades of human-caused warming," said Samantha Burgess of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), which runs Copernicus.According to Burgess, the consequences are already visible: the number of marine heatwave days worldwide has more than tripled since the early 1990s, putting growing pressure on marine ecosystems and the communities that depend on them. Warmer waters transfer heat and moisture to the atmosphere, which raises the chance and the strength of storms. The oceans also absorb about 25% of the carbon dioxide emissions generated by human activity, mainly from burning oil, coal and natural gas, and warming reduces that absorption capacity.A streak of recordsSaturday's record comes after months of exceptional heat at sea. According to Brazilian meteorology site MetSul, by late July the average temperature of the ocean surface, excluding polar regions, had spent more than 50 consecutive days at record levels for the time of year, around 21°C. Copernicus itself had already registered, also in July, the highest sea surface temperatures ever measured for that month. MetSul notes that the strengthening of El Niño in the Equatorial Pacific contributes to the picture, although it does not by itself explain the observed heat, with extensive marine heatwaves also in the North Atlantic, the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean, where the water approached 30°C in some areas.The timing of Saturday's mark also draws attention, the Folha report notes: the previous record dated from March 2024, at the end of the Southern Hemisphere summer. Oceans cover about 71% of the Earth's surface and absorb more than 90% of the excess heat caused by greenhouse gases, which makes them the planet's main thermal regulator, according to MetSul.

Dry weather and high temperatures over the past week fueled fires in rural areas of three Brazilian states, Mato Grosso, Tocantins and Rondônia, according to G1. In Jangada, in Mato Grosso, a major farming state in Brazil's Center-West, the flames reached crop fields and cattle ranches, and a video shows cattle running from the fire.In the Mato Grosso municipality, the fire caused losses to dozens of rural producers, and some had to leave their homes. A 120-hectare sugarcane field was completely destroyed. According to G1 Mato Grosso, the fire had already been burning for four days on Tuesday (25)."Everything we have done, we will have to do again. Two areas were burning at the same time and there was not much we could do," said Elizamara de Souza, manager of the affected sugar mill.According to the Fire Department, wind gusts of about 40 km/h and overgrown pastures helped the fire spread quickly. On Dogmar Rockenbach's farm, more than 40 neighbors joined forces to keep the flames from taking over the property.Fire in Tocantins settlement and preservation area in RondôniaIn São Miguel do Tocantins, the fire destroyed 50 hectares of vegetation in an agrarian reform settlement that is home to 150 family farming families. Firefighting efforts lasted more than 24 hours and were led by regional Civil Defense agents. No property damage or injuries were reported.In Rondônia, a state in Brazil's Amazon region, the fire grew large and hit rural properties and an environmental preservation area in the municipality of Mirante da Serra. The causes of the blaze are under investigation.

Braskem, Latin America's largest petrochemical company, filed on Monday (24) for recuperação extrajudicial, a Brazilian out-of-court debt restructuring mechanism negotiated with creditors and later submitted to a court, to restructure about US$ 10.9 billion (R$ 56 billion) in financial debt. The petition was filed with the 2nd Bankruptcy and Judicial Recovery Court of São Paulo, according to a material fact notice sent by the company to Brazil's securities regulator, the CVM. It was backed by creditors holding 39.6% of the claims subject to restructuring, above the legal minimum of one third.Created in 2002 through the merger of six petrochemical companies linked to the Odebrecht group, Braskem is controlled by Novonor (formerly Odebrecht), which holds about 38% of the capital, with state-run oil company Petrobras as the second-largest shareholder, at about 36%. Headquartered in São Paulo, the company runs 40 industrial plants, 28 of them in Brazil, spread across the states of Alagoas, Bahia, Rio de Janeiro, Rio Grande do Sul and São Paulo, plus units in the United States, Mexico and Germany. It is the leading producer of thermoplastic resins in the Americas, such as polyethylene, polypropylene and PVC, a pioneer in industrial-scale bioplastics, and its shares trade in São Paulo, New York and Madrid.How the restructuring will workThe filing opens a 90-day protection period during which covered creditors are barred from suing to collect the debts or enforcing claims against the group's assets. In that window, Braskem will try to close a definitive plan: by August 31 it must present an updated business plan and a detailed proposal; in-person meetings between executives, shareholders and creditors are scheduled for September 9; and by October 9 the parties are to seek an agreement on the main commercial terms. To bind the full covered debt, the company needs a simple majority of the claims subject to the plan. The proposal allows part of the credits to be converted into shares, which could turn creditors into shareholders.The restructuring covers only unsecured financial debt of Braskem S.A. and five foreign group companies. Obligations to suppliers, clients and service providers are left out."The extrajudicial recovery has a limited, strictly financial scope and does not cover any of the company's obligations to its suppliers, clients and other stakeholders, which remain in force and continue to be fulfilled as usual, under the terms of their contracts," Braskem said in a statement.In parallel, Mexican subsidiary Braskem Idesa filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the United States. Braskem's plan includes a US$ 476 million (R$ 2.4 billion) capital injection to keep control of the subsidiary.What pushed Braskem into crisisAccording to G1, the filing results from a combination of financial pressures built up in recent years. One is the cost of the geological disaster in Maceió, in northeastern Brazil, caused by rock salt mining, which destabilized the ground under neighborhoods of the capital of Alagoas state. More than 14,000 properties were evacuated and about 60,000 people were affected. Braskem has already spent over R$ 4.2 billion on compensation, aid and relocation of residents and shopkeepers, and keeps R$ 3.24 billion booked for future reparation costs. In June, a federal court accepted criminal charges brought by federal prosecutors in the case, and the company's shares fell nearly 15% in a single session, CNN Brasil reported.The other factor is the downturn in the global petrochemical market, which faces oversupply, driven by the expansion of China's industrial capacity, falling prices and weak demand. At Braskem, the cost of goods sold came to consume about 96% of net revenue, CNN Brasil reported.The market reaction was immediate. Braskem shares were down about 6.1% on Monday, trading at R$ 4.76 around 3:15 p.m., according to G1. B3, the São Paulo stock exchange, announced that the common (BRKM3) and preferred (BRKM5) shares will be dropped from a series of indexes, including the benchmark Ibovespa, the IBrX and the Small Caps index, after the close of Tuesday's session (25), because they will start trading under a "Recuperação Extrajudicial" designation. The shares will remain listed and can be traded normally. "When B3 takes a company out of that basket, everyone tracking the index has to sell the paper (...) because the fund's rulebook requires it," Matheus Matos, partner at MA7 Capital, told G1.With the filing, Braskem joins a string of large Brazilian companies that turned to restructuring mechanisms in 2026, CNN Brasil recalls: retailer Casas Bahia and furniture chain Lojas Marabraz filed for court-supervised recovery, while energy company Raízen and GPA, owner of the Pão de Açúcar supermarket chain, chose the out-of-court route.

Brazil's national grid operator, ONS, activated on Sunday (23) an emergency plan to curb a surplus of electricity in the country's interconnected power system (SIN), ordering generation cuts for the second time in 2026. The mechanism, called the Energy Surplus Management Plan for the Distribution Network, is used when power production exceeds what the grid needs.According to Agência Brasil, the measure was in force from 11 a.m. to 1:30 p.m., with no impact on consumers and affecting only distribution companies. The plan restricts output from so-called Type 3 plants connected to distribution networks — a group that includes small hydroelectric stations, biomass plants and smaller wind and solar farms. The ONS also reduced generation at plants under its direct control and had warned distributors in advance to prepare for the cuts, since it cannot directly command assets connected to their grids.The intervention stems from the combination of strong output from distributed micro and mini generation — mostly rooftop and small-scale solar systems installed near consumers — and the lower demand typical of weekends. On Sundays and holidays, consumption falls while solar systems keep producing during peak sunlight hours, shrinking the so-called net load, the share of demand that must be met by plants the ONS controls, according to CNN Brasil. The problem, in other words, is not a shortage of power but an excess of it at certain hours.Second activation of the yearThe first activation of 2026 took place on June 7, during the Corpus Christi holiday weekend, when the ONS called for the management of 1,000 megawatts (MW) between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. The emergency plan was approved in 2025 by the electricity regulator Aneel and is treated as a last resort, triggered only after other options for balancing supply and demand have been exhausted. In August 2025, on Father's Day in Brazil, excess supply nearly overloaded the system: distributed generation came to represent 37.6% of national demand, and the operator cut 98.5% of centralized wind and solar output to avert a blackout.ONS studies cited by CNN Brasil indicate that installed micro and mini distributed generation capacity in the country has already surpassed 43 gigawatts (GW); Agência Brasil puts the figure at around 50 GW. For the operator, the rapid growth of these sources makes the grid harder to run, because part of the power produced can be neither observed nor directly controlled.On Thursday (20), the ONS announced it is developing a system to automatically disconnect part of distributed generation in critical situations. Called the Regional Generation Relief Scheme (Erag), the mechanism provides for cuts of up to 3 GW, split into three 1 GW stages, and would only be triggered after all other control alternatives are exhausted. A pilot project is expected at one distributor by the end of 2026, with possible implementation in 2027. The Brazilian association of power distributors (Abradee) said its members will follow the ONS instructions but asked for more detailed criteria for the cuts, in order to give generators operational and legal certainty.