New reporting opportunity: Amazon Infrastructure

The battle for the Amazon

Plans currently call for more than 400 new hydroelectric dams on the rivers of the Amazon basin and on its headwaters tributaries — projects that would block the region’s free-flowing streams and lead to major deforestation, habitat loss and degradation, and possible ecosystem collapse. With this dam building frenzy would come accompanying infrastructure: roads, railways, industrial waterways, transmission lines, new mining operations, agribusiness expansion, logging and settlement

Mongabay is looking for article pitches that detail the wide-ranging environmental impacts of hydropower development and ancillary infrastructure development in Amazonia, with a special emphasis on dam building projects in Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, and Brazil (Tapajós basin and elsewhere).

We welcome original pitches on any Amazon Infrastructure issue. Here are some suggested topics: environmental impacts, finance and energy development, social impacts and resistance, focus on a specific dam/region, how alternative energy could do away with need for dams.

Click here to read more about this opportunity and how to apply.

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