The latter phenomenon is what happened in 2005 when the Amazon rainforest was hit by a serious drought.
The dam is to be built on the Xingu River in the heart of the Amazon rainforest.
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Because, you know, humans prefer eating food to dying of starvation and the Amazon rainforest be damned.
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This, despite the fact that over half of the cerrado has already been converted far more than the Amazon rainforest.
But environmentalists campaigned for a total veto of the bill, which they said would spur deforestation in the Amazon rainforest.
Nearly all the growth has come from large, mechanised farms in the south-central region hundreds of miles away from the Amazon rainforest.
LONDON, England (CNN) -- Climate change's impact is felt most heavily in natural wildernesses such as the Arctic and the Amazon rainforest.
According to the government, in 2012 the destruction of the Amazon rainforest reached its lowest level since monitoring began more than two decades ago.
In September, a Gol Airlines Boeing 737 collided with an executive jet over the Amazon rainforest, causing the passenger jet to crash, killing 154 people.
His village in the Amazon rainforest has a population of only 600 people and it takes five days of travelling by boat to reach the nearest town.
Its management of the Amazon rainforest is crucial to the health of the planet, which is why the recent large reduction in the rate of deforestation has been so encouraging.
Western taxpayers need the Amazon rainforest to control their climate.
Thousands of indigenous people arrived in the capital on Thursday carrying a giant rainbow flag, having marched for two weeks from the Amazon rainforest town of El Pangui.
The crash came less than a year after 154 people were killed in the September collision of a Gol Airlines Boeing 737 with a small jet over the Amazon rainforest.
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So far this year, the Belo Monte 11, 300 megawatt power station smack dab in the heart of Indian country in the Amazon rainforest has been shut down four times.
As part of its proven crude reserves, Ecuador has an estimated 900 million barrels (and 1.3 billion barrels of potential recoverable reserves) in the Ishpingo-Tapococha-Tiputini (ITT) block in the Amazon rainforest.
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Language, geography and history have combined to isolate Brazil from its Spanish-speaking neighbours on the far side of the Amazon rainforest and the Parana basin, let alone from the wider world.
"If extreme droughts like these become more frequent, the days of the Amazon rainforest acting as a natural buffer to man-made carbon emissions may be numbered, " forest ecologist Simon Lewis, from University College London, has said.
There are also some ecosystems, such as the boreal forests of Canada and Siberia and the Amazon rainforest, which are huge absorbers of carbon dioxide, but which are changing rapidly because of temperature increases and deforestation.
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It would be easy to think that the rainforest was saved, or at least, that the destruction of the Amazon rainforest is no longer one of the great crises facing a planet finally reaching consensus on the issue of global warming.
Given that Brazil holds approximately one-third of the world's biodiversity and 20% of its fresh water in the Amazon rainforest, it is also becoming a leader in fields ranging from combating deforestation (which has dropped by 80% since 2004) to plant genetics.
The Enawene Nawe people live in the basin of the Juruena River in the southern Amazon rainforest.
Unowned forests are unprotected, which is why the grileiros, or land-grabbers, of the Brazilian Amazon rainforest can so easily turn it to pasture.
Second, you perpetuate the view of the cerrado as the expendable, scrubby neighbour of the far more glamorous Amazon rainforest.
In 2005, severe drought in the Amazon region saw widespread wildfires that turned the rainforest into a carbon source.
Belo Monte is to be built on the Xingu River in the Amazon, home to virgin rainforest and around 2, 500 natives.
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With other rainforest regions such as the Amazon also being depleted rapidly -- the percentage of the earth's land surface covered by rainforest is estimated to have slipped from 14 percent to around six percent -- the sudden disappearance of millions of hectares of the earth's natural defenses against climate change is likely to have consequences far beyond local communities and wildlife.
By moving northwards into the Amazon basin, soya farmers are also driving ranchers deeper into the rainforest.
Not since a military government quartered the Amazon basin with roads, dams and settlements in the 1970s has Brazil seen such a row over the rainforest.
In Brazil, meanwhile, huge swathes of Amazon rainforest are being lost to sugarcane plantations, again for the provision of raw materials to the biofuel industry.
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