Late on a Thursday night in 2005, Brazilian journalist Manoel Francisco Brito called a source looking for data on Amazon deforestation. He had been working double shifts for a year, since he co-founded ((o))eco, one of the first digital newsrooms in the country fully dedicated to covering environmental issues. Despite the long hours, Brito didn’t feel like resting. He was hoping to get at least one more update to post on the website, likely anticipating numbers similar to the previous month that would confirm the ongoing deforestation trend. But what Brito heard during the call was so startling that even his source, the then director of Forests at the Environmental Ministry, couldn’t believe the satellite images he had in front of him.
The data revealed that deforestation in the Amazon had plummeted by 95% that June.
“It can’t be,” the director told him when checking the data on the Real-Time Deforestation Detection System per his request. “It would be a drop too dramatic.” Brito was also stunned. That information seemed too good to be true. He dropped the phone in disbelief but kept investigating the claim. A few days later, he confirmed the information and published a national scoop. “A miracle has happened,” the headline read.
“I felt like I was witnessing a miracle,” Brito smiled when recalling the story in a video call with the Report for the World team.
While historical, that headline could have remained ignored if the story hadn’t been published by ((o))eco (which name translates as “the echo”). At the time, few reporters in the country would choose the environment as a beat. While the traditional Brazilian media would mainly cover official events or public announcements related to the environment, ((o))eco began going after the stories nobody else was paying attention to.
“In those first years, we could wait a week, two weeks, or even months to publish a story; we didn’t have competitors,” Britto recalled. “But the beginning was really hard. We didn’t have money. To give you an idea, Marcos Sá Correa, Sérgio Abranches and I, the trio of founders, never took one cent from ((o))eco. We financed ourselves over that time, either with external work or our own savings.”
The efforts paid off. The newsroom is celebrating its 20th anniversary this week with a ceremony in Rio de Janeiro with the presence of the Minister of Environment in Brazil, Marina Silva, and a long list of supporters and collaborators.
“Over these two decades, ((o))eco has consolidated as a great reference in environmental journalism precisely because it understands that this is a necessary niche to be occupied, to address issues that often do not appear in other publications or the traditional media, and always listening very closely to scientific issues, to the topics brought up by organizations and by socio-environmental movements to produce quality, well-grounded journalism,” says Marcio Isensee e Sá, content director of ((o))eco.
Today, the newsroom has a staff of 13 people and keeps honoring the manifesto written by its founders when they launched their venture from a restored garage turned into an office in the house of one of the founders. “The site was created to be the voice of animals and plants,” Brito said. “This generated some controversy among some groups, but we were radical about it. The issue was always to defend plants and animals. If a riverine threatened a jaguar, we would defend the jaguar.”
Along with the militant spirit in defense of conservationism, the newsroom also had innovation as part of its DNA. “((o))eco started digital in 2004. For comparison, YouTube is from 2006, and back in 2004, they already invested in a 100% digital native media outlet”, Isensee highlighted.
Throughout these 20 years, ((o))eco has bore witness and closely covered the transformation taking place in Brazil both in journalism and the environmental landscape. They keep covering the Amazon, but also other natural biomes in Brazil, and major infrastructure projects impacting the environment, such as the Belo Monte hydroelectric dam. “We have uncovered many wrongdoings, following these events very closely and that is also one of the reasons why we are today a reference in environmental journalism. We delve into the issues, going beyond the reported facts and dig deeper to uncover the impacts caused by these events,” Insensee said.
Aldem Bourscheit, Report for the World Corps member at ((o))eco, is also proud to be part of this history, which includes an Inter American Press Association award, in 2006, for a story on how Brazilians were helping to reforest Haiti. “((o))eco has unique achievements on the national and even global stage,” says Bourscheit, citing “staying strong, resilient, and maintaining high-quality production for two uninterrupted decades” among them. “It has also managed to overcome a major flaw in Brazilian journalism, which is the failure to cover ongoing processes and the tendency to report almost exclusively on confirmed losses, fostering frustration and social inaction.”
Another particular characteristic of ((o))eco is that along these two decades the newsroom has always invested in training for environmental reporters. The constancy has helped to form a new generation of journalists covering the beat: “The website has historically trained numerous professionals and has been a founding figure for various public media outlets, showing that investing in professional journalism yields certain returns and is indispensable if we want a minimally sustainable present and future,” Bourscheit said.
Thinking about the journey and the current challenges in the area, Brito said his only disappointment was facing the escalation of environmental degradation. While the entire planet has considerably more information about the impacts of human activity and climate change on the natural surroundings than 20 years ago, this knowledge has not been enough to stop the course of destruction. “The amount of information has not led to change,” Brito sighed. “But journalism is not about winning, it is mainly about telling what is happening.”
Aldem Bourscheit ((o))eco Best stories
As climate change continues to knock on the planet’s door, the environmental beat is busier than ever. Our corps member Aldem Bourscheit has covered many relevant stories in recent years, here are some of them:
Brazil’s National System of Conservation Units covers about 20 percent of land, protecting these crucial ecosystems from further destruction. Currently, however, 81 conservation units overlap with indigenous and quilombola lands.
While the law requires the removal of private properties and individuals harmful to conservation in some fully protected areas, Brazil has long sought to respect the rights of its indigenous populations, which has created a difficult situation for both conservationists and indigenous activists.
Experts are divided on the issue, explains Bourscheit, who highlights both sides’ perspectives in this report. Further complicating the issue are chronic underfunding and understaffing in environmental agencies, along with political pressures that hinder the effective management of conservation units.
The devastating floods in Rio Grande do Sul this past May have highlighted the increased vulnerability of towns and cities due to environmental degradation. These catastrophic events are responsible for over 100,000 homes and hundreds of casualties.
While immediate rebuilding of infrastructure is necessary, experts suggest that “nature-based solutions” could play a crucial role in strengthening the state’s resilience to climate disasters in the long term.
In this report, Bourscheit spoke to researchers, advocates, and a family whose lives were upended by the floods to highlight an alternative approach to addressing these vulnerabilities. Proposed solutions include increasing vegetated spaces, restoring slopes and riverbanks, and promoting urban agriculture to absorb excess rainwater and reduce flooding risks.
The rapid destruction of Brazil’s savannah, known as the Cerrado, is threatening the conservation of jaguars, the largest carnivores in the Americas. Jaguars have lost half of their original territory and have been nearly eliminated from many areas.
Deforestation and habitat fragmentation expose jaguars to various risks, including hunting, road accidents, and inbreeding due to genetic isolation. To reverse this alarming trend and ensure the long-term survival of these mammals, Conservation groups are aiming to create a massive corridor linking protected areas across South and Central America.
Bourscheit explains why this particular solution is receiving so much attention from researchers and advocates, as well as the various obstacles to achieving this corridor in this report.
- December 2023 Restingas taken over by exotic plants are less resistant to the effects of the climate crisis
Coastal forests in Brazil, particularly restingas, have long suffered amidst increased urbanization, real estate development, and tourism, but now are facing a significant threat from invasive plant species.
These non-native plants, many of which are ornamental, are reducing the ecosystem’s resilience to climate change effects, endangering biodiversity, and posing risks to local populations and economies.
The issue is exacerbated by a lack of policies aimed at controlling the spread of these invasive species. Despite the urgent need for action, short-term economic interests often take precedence over long-term ecological concerns, reports Bourscheit in this article.
As Brazil continues to maintain its decades-long position as the world’s leading beef exporter, the expansive industry is having increasingly negative consequences on the Pantanal, Earth’s largest floodplain. Over the past decade, nearly 50,000 hectares of natural landscapes have been transformed into pastures, with the biome now hosting over 3.8 million cattle.
In this report, Bourscheit spoke to experts who emphasized the need to protect non-forest ecosystems and called for the same level of effort used to combat Amazon deforestation to be applied to other Brazilian biomes.
Alana Campbell contributed to this story