South America

This archive covers progress stories and milestones from across South America, spanning countries from Brazil and Colombia to Argentina and Peru. Expect reporting on conservation wins, public health advances, economic shifts, and community-led efforts shaping life across the continent.

Brazilian Indian Kaingang, for article on Brazil Indigenous representation

Brazil elects record-high number of Indigenous mayors, vice mayors, and councilors

By / / Good News For Humankind

Indigenous representation in Brazil hit a new high in October 2024, with 256 Indigenous candidates winning seats from city council to mayor — the most ever recorded. They were the only demographic group whose vote totals grew that election, drawn from a record 169 ethnic groups fielding candidates across the country. Among the firsts: Florianópolis, a city founded 351 years ago, elected its very first Indigenous councilor, while in Marcação, all nine newly elected councilors self-identified as Indigenous. With municipal governments running the schools, clinics, and services that shape daily life, these wins put Indigenous leaders where decisions actually land — and build a pipeline toward the 2026 state and federal races, where the movement hopes to climb another rung.

The beach with vegetation in foreground, for article on legal rights for ocean waves

In a first, the Brazilian city of Linhares grants legal rights to waves

By / / Good News For Humankind

Legal rights for ocean waves are now real: in August 2024, the Brazilian city of Linhares became the first government anywhere to extend legal personhood to part of the ocean, recognizing the waves at the mouth of the Doce River as rights-bearing. The waves had been smothered for seven years by mining sludge from a 2015 dam collapse, until a 2022 flood unexpectedly washed the river mouth clean. Rather than wait for the next disaster, the community wrote protection into law, requiring the city to actively defend the river’s flow and the waters it feeds. It’s a small, precise win with big implications — a hint of how coastal communities everywhere might begin defending the ecosystems they love on the ecosystems’ own terms.

Good news for Indigenous rights and climate, for article on Indigenous land titles

Record number of Indigenous land titles granted in Peru via innovative process

By / / Good News For Humankind

Indigenous land titles in the Peruvian Amazon just hit a new milestone: 37 communities secured formal recognition in under 11 months, the fastest pace in the country’s history. The breakthrough came from a partnership between AIDESEP, Peru’s Indigenous rights organization, and Rainforest Foundation U.S., who put satellite mapping tools and training directly into the hands of community forest monitors instead of routing everything through outside experts. Research suggests titled Indigenous territories see roughly two-thirds less deforestation than untitled lands nearby, making this one of the most effective climate tools we have. The model is designed to travel — a hopeful blueprint for protecting forests, honoring ancestral stewardship, and recognizing the communities who have cared for these ecosystems all along.

image for article on rights of nature ruling

Ecuador river is granted the right to not be polluted in historic court case

By / / Good News For Humankind

Ecuador’s Machángara River just won a landmark legal case: a court ruled that decades of pollution have violated the river’s constitutional rights, and Quito must now draft a concrete cleanup plan. The river runs through a capital city of 2.6 million people, and its oxygen levels have dropped to around 2 percent — barely livable for aquatic life. The Indigenous organization Kitu Kara filed the complaint on the river’s behalf, drawing on Andean traditions that treat rivers as living relatives. From New Zealand’s Whanganui to Colombia’s Amazon, this approach is spreading, giving courts a way to protect ecosystems as parties with standing rather than property — and reshaping what environmental justice can mean for communities everywhere.

Rainforest scene, for article on Suriname Indigenous land rights

Landmark ruling in Suriname grants protections to local and Indigenous communities

By / / Good News For Humankind

Suriname’s Indigenous land rights just got their first real domestic legal footing, with a court blocking agricultural development across roughly 535,000 hectares of Amazon rainforest. Twelve Indigenous and maroon communities brought the case, and for the first time a Surinamese court — not an international body — affirmed that the government must seek free, prior and informed consent before handing over ancestral land. The communities involved include descendants of Africans who escaped colonial plantations and have stewarded these forests for centuries. Suriname remains one of only three countries on Earth that absorbs more carbon than it emits, and protecting these forests helps keep it that way. Domestic rulings tend to stick, offering a model for Indigenous land defenders across the Amazon basin and beyond.

School of fish, for article on Peru marine protected area

Peru approves the creation of long-awaited marine protected area

By / / Good News For Humankind

Peru’s new Grau Tropical Sea National Reserve safeguards 115,675 hectares of ocean where the warm Eastern Pacific meets the cold Humboldt Current — a collision the IUCN ranks among the 70 most vital places on Earth for marine biodiversity. Humpback whales birth their calves here, hammerhead sharks patrol the reefs, and scientists keep finding species entirely new to them. The reserve also matters for people: of the 35 main fish species landed by Peru’s artisanal fleet, 24 come from these waters. Created after more than a decade of advocacy by fishers and scientists, the designation is a real step toward the global goal of protecting 30% of the ocean by 2030 — and a reminder that lasting protection still depends on enforcement and political will.

A person preparing for planting the plant, for article on Colombian Amazon restoration

Campesinos plant nearly a million trees in deforestation hotspot in the Colombian Amazon

By / / Good News For Humankind

More than 700 campesino families in the Colombian Amazon have planted nearly a million native trees across former cattle pasture, transforming one of the country’s worst deforestation hotspots into recovering forest. In just four months, families across the Cuemaní region planted over 984,000 trees and palms — and tapirs, deer, and parrots that had disappeared with the chainsaws are already coming back. Teenagers who joined botanical surveys alongside scientists discovered they could earn a living as local forest experts, with some now pursuing degrees in agroforestry. What makes this remarkable isn’t just the scale, but the model: when the people who once cleared the land become its protectors, restoration starts to hold — a lesson echoing across the Amazon and beyond.

Whale tail, for article on sei whale return

Sei whales reappear in Argentine waters after nearly 100 years

By / / Good News For Humankind

Sei whales are back in Argentina’s coastal waters for the first time in roughly 100 years, after industrial whaling wiped them out in the 1920s and 30s. These blue-grey giants are the third-largest whales on Earth and among the fastest, which once made them prime targets for hunters. Their slow return — the species reproduces just once every two or three years — is a quiet testament to the 1946 international whaling treaty that gave them room to rebuild. Global numbers now sit around 50,000 and are trending upward, though sei whales remain endangered. Their reappearance off Patagonia carries a hopeful lesson for marine conservation everywhere: give a species enough time and enough protection, and it can find its way home.

Howler monkey, for article on howler monkey rewilding

Brazil takes pioneering action to rewild howler monkeys

By / / Good News For Humankind

Brazil has launched its first national population management program for the brown howler monkey, a species now ranked among the 25 most threatened primates on Earth after yellow fever outbreaks killed thousands. Coordinated across eight states, the program pairs a newly adapted yellow fever vaccine with strategic translocations to restore wild populations. In Rio de Janeiro’s Tijuca National Park, two groups of howlers now live in an urban forest where the species had been absent for over a century. The effort offers a potential model for other imperiled Atlantic Forest species.

Wind turbines amid clouds, for article on E.U. wind power, for article on renewable electricity generation

Seven countries now generate 100% of their electricity from renewable energy

By / / Good News For Humankind

Renewable energy now powers more than 99.7% of electricity in seven countries: Albania, Bhutan, Nepal, Paraguay, Iceland, Ethiopia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Each one leaned into what their landscape offered — Himalayan rivers, volcanic heat, massive shared dams — and built their grids around it. They’re the leading edge of a wider shift, with roughly 40 countries now sourcing at least half their electricity from renewables. Stanford’s Mark Jacobson puts it plainly: no miracle technologies are needed, just focused deployment of wind, water, and solar. These seven nations are quiet proof that a modern society running on clean power isn’t a distant goal — it’s already happening, and the rest of the world is catching up.