This archive collects solutions-journalism stories and milestones from Brazil — covering environmental progress, public health advances, community-led initiatives, and policy wins. Each entry highlights what’s working and why it matters.
Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado and his wife Lélia Deluiz Wanick Salgado founded Instituto Terra, a small organization that has since planted 4 million saplings and has brought the forest back from the dead.
A coalition of investors managing over US$5.6 trillion in assets joined a coalition of more than 70 large food companies in calling for zero deforestation in Brazil’s Cerrado region.
Brazil now has 320 MW of distributed solar generation, a sector which grew 270% in 2016, 304% in 2017, and is expected to increase by 358% in 2018.
The Temer government claims the decision is a response to intense resistance from environmentalists and indigenous groups
The Amazon Fund launched in 2009, when Brazil built a public finance mechanism that paid for verified reductions in rainforest loss rather than promises. Managed by the national development bank and backed early by Norway, it has since supported more than 115 projects across the Amazon Biome. It became an influential model for paying to keep forests standing.
UNASUR was born on May 23, 2008, when all 12 South American nations gathered in Brasília to sign a single treaty binding a continent of more than 400 million people into one union. For a region long defined by rivalry and isolation, it was a rare written promise that their futures would be shaped together.
Brazil’s return to civilian rule began on January 15, 1985, when an electoral college in Brasília chose Tancredo Neves as president, ending 21 years of military government. Neves fell ill before his inauguration and died that April, never taking office. Still, the opening he helped negotiate led to the 1988 “Citizen Constitution” — a framework that has now held for four decades.
Jaú National Park was created by government decree in September 1980, drawing a protective boundary around 2.3 million hectares of Amazon rainforest in Brazil — an area roughly the size of Slovenia. The park safeguards an entire blackwater river basin, jaguars and giant otters, and one of Earth’s most intact tropical ecosystems.
Indigenous protection in Brazil took its first formal shape on June 20, 1910, when the government created the Serviço de Proteção aos Índios, the Americas’ first federal agency tasked with shielding Indigenous peoples from settler violence. Its leader, Cândido Rondon, instructed agents entering uncontacted territory unarmed: “Die if you must, but never kill.”
Brazil’s independence began on 7 September 1822, when Prince Pedro stood beside the Ipiranga brook near São Paulo, tore the Portuguese insignia from his uniform, and cried “Independence or death.” Portugal formally recognized the new empire three years later. The moment set Brazil on a rare path — a single vast state, rather than a patchwork of republics, in South America.
