How independent journalism helped put Brazil’s Cerrado on the global agenda

19 May 2026

Brazil’s Cerrado is a vast tropical savanna teeming with life, yet it has long been overshadowed by the Amazon in global media coverage. Meanwhile, industrial agriculture, land speculation and global commodity demand are rapidly transforming it. Mongabay has spent years documenting these landscape scale changes. 

Through sustained reporting, particularly by contributors Sarah Sax and Maurício Angelo, Mongabay has contributed to bringing international attention to the Cerrado’s ecological importance and the pressures facing its communities. Spanning multiple articles on the ecosystem, reportage has informed global discussions around land use, supply chains and environmental governance in the region.

Cerrado coverage has examined the overlapping social, economic and political drivers  of environmental change. This includes stories about land rights struggles involving quilombolas — Afro-Brazilians whose ancestors resisted and self-emancipated from slavery — and other traditional communities, the expansion of soy production and agribusiness pressures and the challenges of restoring degraded landscapes.

An area deforested to plant grains next to preserved Cerrado within the Tirecatinga Indigenous Land. Image by André Dib for Mongabay.
An area deforested to plant grains next to preserved Cerrado within the Tirecatinga Indigenous Land. Image by André Dib for Mongabay.

These aren’t isolated stories. Together, they reveal how global supply chains, financial flows, and local land conflicts intersect in one of the world’s most threatened ecosystems.

Impact

Global policy and research

Mongabay’s reporting has informed broader discussions in international policy and research on rural inequality, land rights and sustainable development.

Coverage on themes like land tenure insecurity and the marginalization of traditional communities, is referenced in reports by the United Nations (UN) system and development organizations, including FAO analyses on drylands, agriculture, and rural livelihoods, UN policy briefs on rural inequalities and case studies on sustainable livelihoods in the Cerrado, and broader research on climate change, migration, and Indigenous and traditional peoples. These reports demonstrate a growing global recognition of the issues Mongabay has documented in the Cerrado.

Civil society and advocacy

Mongabay’s coverage has also informed a wider body of civil society research and advocacy examining deforestation, supply chains, and environmental governance.

For instance, reports by organizations including Greenpeace, the Forest Declaration Assessment, Climate Focus, Friends of the Earth, Rede Social and ActionAid and Mighty Earth highlight many of the same dynamics documented in Mongabay’s reporting and directly cite journalist Sarah Sax’s reporting on the Cerrado, including soy-driven deforestation, supply chain pressures and governance gaps. Together, these efforts contribute to a growing evidence base connecting local impacts in Brazil’s tropical savanna to global systems of trade, finance and consumption.

Financial and legal accountability

Mongabay’s reporting has also informed growing scrutiny of the financial sector’s role in deforestation and land-use change.

Reportage about  land speculation, agribusiness expansion, and supply chain opacity, is used in civil society complaints and financial sector analyses examining investment risks and links to environmental harm, including a Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI) complaint led by CIEL, as well as reports on European bank financing and deforestation risk by organizations such as SOMO and Fair Finance. These analyses directly cite Sax’s reporting, primarily on the Cerrado, with the PRI complaint drawing on her coverage of the Atlantic Forest, another highly threatened biome in Brazil.

These processes contribute to broader efforts to strengthen transparency and hold financial institutions and investors accountable for their role in ecosystem destruction.

While the Cerrado continues to face accelerating pressure, Mongabay’s independent journalism, which maintains long-term visibility — rather than solely when a crisis peaks — enables researchers, policymakers and advocates to act on the insights the reporting surfaces.

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