In 2018, the Amazon Fund chose to support a project in the Brazilian Amazon helping 614 families engaged in babassu coconut breaking in 11 traditional communities. Encroached on by soy farming and cattle ranching, the families in the state of Tocantins would receive financial support to keep producing oil, flour and handicrafts from this unique Amazonian fruit while reinforcing their role as guardians of the forest. But the promise was short-lived. Jair Bolsonaro took office as Brazil’s president in January 2019, and immediately set his far-right agenda to work dismantling the country’s environmental frameworks and freezing the Amazon Fund’s contributions. The fund was created in 2008, with initial donations from Norway and Germany to reward Brazil for its success in reducing Amazonian deforestation. Over the last 18 years, it has benefited 288,000 people and supported 144 projects in forest restoration, sustainable production, firefighting, inspections and monitoring of environmental crimes, and Indigenous issues. “It is one of the world’s leading funds for investing in projects that protect the rainforest,” said Rayandra Araújo, climate policy specialist at Talanoa, a Brazilian climate think tank. When Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva replaced Bolsonaro, returning to the presidency in January 2023, he revived the Amazon Fund’s operations. The babassu coconut breaker project, led by the group Alternatives for Small-Scale Farming in Tocantins (APA-TO), was again considered and began implementation in April 2026. “The project was on hold for almost 10 years,” says Selma Yuki Ishii, the project coordinator and technical director at APA-TO. With Lula,…This article was originally published on Mongabay

PARACATU, Brazil — As the president of Paracatu’s city council, Manoel Alves is used to being courted by companies and executives that want his blessing for new business. But on a Thursday afternoon in May 2026, he was upset talking on the phone about a data center planned for his city, about which he was informed by reporters. “I just heard the data center construction will start in two months. Don’t you guys know about this either?” Alves asked someone at the mayor’s office. The answer from the other side of the call was “no”, the same received from all interviewees: Local authorities, business owners, farmers, and citizens. “It is some new hotel concept?” a major restaurant owner in the city asked. “A dentist?” a citizen in Paracatu’s main square questioned. “Data center? What is this?” queried the guardian of an 18th-century church. Read it in Portuguese. The data center in Paracatu, a municipality located a three-hour drive from Brazil’s capital, Brasília, is not just any data center, but a 1-gigawatt data center, which will be larger than the combined total of all data centers currently installed in the country, which use around 800 megawatts. Or similar to one of the gigantic projects that are part of the Stargate initiative, one of the world’s largest artificial intelligence infrastructure networks, strongly supported by the U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration. Paracatu’s data center is being planned by Atlas Renewable Energy, owned by an arm of the global asset manager BlackRock, which already…This article was originally published on Mongabay