Focus on Arts and Ecology

As millions in Latin America still lack basic energy access, any transition must be equitable, democratic and tackle structural issues, writes the editor of a new book. 

By Esteban Serrani, July 24, 2025

Is a “just” energy transition possible in Latin America when millions of people still lack access to basic energy services?

This was one of the central questions that prompted me and fellow editors Lira Luz Benites Lázaro and Sigrid de Aquino Neiva to create our recently published book, Energy Poverty, Justice and Gender in Latin America.

The book is organised by three key focuses: the multidimensional problem of energy poverty; contradictions in the burdens and benefits of energy justice; and the links between energy poverty, justice and gender inequalities. Over 14 chapters, written by 35 authors, we set out to offer a critical analysis of energy inequalities in the region, highlight the limits of current policies, and underline the urgency of rethinking the role that Latin America must play in global debates on energy and justice.

Although the International Energy Agency indicates that 97% of the population in Latin America and the Caribbean has access to electricity, this figure hides deeper realities.

Nearly 17 million people in the region, mostly in rural areas and Indigenous communities, still lack access to electricity. For those who are connected, access is often precarious: frequent outages, unaffordable tariffs and heavy reliance on highly polluting energy sources. In Bolivia and Peru, for example, the cost of electricity for the poorest households can represent up to 20% of their monthly income.

In addition, some 75 million people in Latin America and the Caribbean still cook with biomass, which is about 11% of the population. This has serious health consequences, and disproportionately impacts women and children. While some countries are nearing universal access to clean cooking sources, in others, significant portions of the population are still without access, such as Haiti (95%), Honduras (50%), Guatemala (50%), Mexico (15%), Peru (15%) and Bolivia (12%).

From our perspective, energy poverty is not an issue that can be solved solely with more infrastructure: it is a reflection of the structural inequalities from which our societies suffer.

Throughout the research published in the book, we have found that, in Latin America, it is women in rural areas who suffer most from the consequences of energy precariousness: they spend hours collecting firewood, face the effects of pollution within the home and suffer greater risks of violence in spaces without adequate lighting. The relationship between energy and gender is undeniable: when energy is scarce, inequalities deepen.

The dominant discourse on energy transition in the region has been strongly influenced by the agenda of the Global North and the interests of large corporations. The expansion of renewable energy is promoted, but without questioning who benefits from these investments. In Brazil and Mexico, for example, wind projects have generated tensions with local communities. In the case of lithium in Argentina, Chile and Bolivia, exploitation is particularly responsive to the demand of international markets and multinationals, seeking to ensure resilience in their value chains. There is less likely to be a regional strategy oriented towards development with inclusion and quality employment.

To reverse this trend, it is essential to articulate the energy transition in Latin American countries with active industrial policies. These should promote the local production of technologies, the strengthening of national capacities and the generation of qualified employment. This is no more and no less than what is at stake in the current tariff war that the United States has launched since the beginning of Donald Trump’s second presidency, with China as its main target. Indeed, without a vision of autonomous productive development, the green transition risks perpetuating the technological and economic dependence of the countries of the South.

Latin America needs to build an energy agenda that challenges these logics and opens a profound debate on energy justice. This implies not only guaranteeing universal access to energy but also rethinking the governance of the sector. Academic research has a key role to play in this process: identifying the mechanisms of exclusion, making their effects visible and proposing viable alternatives.

Some urgent questions to ask are: how can we ensure that communities can participate in the planning of major energy projects? What impacts will the energy transition have on employment and the regional productive structure? What role can energy cooperatives and other forms of decentralised management play in ensuring greater justice?

Energy Poverty, Justice and Gender in Latin America is a call to recognise that energy transition is not simply a technical process: it is first and foremost a political process. As such, the book highlights several structural dimensions that cut across the Latin American energy experience and deserve special attention:

● Urban-rural dichotomy: Despite progress, many rural areas and Indigenous communities remain excluded from access to modern energy services. This affects the quality of supply and perpetuates energy poverty.

● Health impacts of biomass burning: Reliance on traditional sources such as wood or charcoal has serious health effects, especially through indoor air pollution. Although this link is known, there is still a lack of empirical evidence to account for its regional specificities.

● High energy costs: In contexts with limited access to conventional energy, high costs constitute a structural barrier that limits vulnerable communities’ access to modern energy sources. This calls for a revision of the regulatory framework, following the principle that energy is a human right.

● Gender gaps: Gender inequalities persist in access to energy, in women’s economic and political participation, and in the differential impacts of energy poverty. In many sectors, traditional gender roles continue to limit the advancement of true social justice.

Energy Poverty, Justice and Gender in Latin America seeks to contribute to the construction of an energy transition that is equitable, democratic and deeply rooted in the needs and aspirations of our region. Because without social justice and energy sovereignty, there will be no just transition possible for Latin America.

Esteban Serrani

‘Our elders warned us’ – local Indigenous people are tracking the impact of the Belo Monte hydropower plant on the river they rely on. 

By Matt Sandy, Juliana Horta, July 23, 2025

An Indigenous Brazilian community is taking on the company behind one of the world’s biggest hydroelectric plants over the impacts of its dams on the environment and livelihoods.

A community-led study alleges the Belo Monte plant, which opened in 2016, is responsible for disruption to rivers, fish and those who rely on both. Academics who took part in the research say the dams’ prevention of flooding is destroying local ecosystems, but the company responsible is strongly defending its record.

Belo Monte’s two dams have triggered decades of controversy, due to their installation in a sensitive rainforest ecosystem in the Amazonian state of Pará. They divert much of the Xingu River’s natural flow into an off-channel reservoir that feeds the main powerhouse. This includes reducing the flow of a 130km stretch known as the Volta Grande do Xingu (VGX or “Big Bend”).

The Juruna/Yudjá people are an Indigenous population who have inhabited the islands and peninsulas of the lower and middle Xingu River for centuries, using canoes to navigate the area and to hunt. The Belo Monte project has compelled the Juruna/Yudjá, along with other small-scale fishing communities and an array of specialist researchers, to collaboratively track flood cycles and fishing habitats along the VGX.

At the end of May, the results of this monitoring programme were published in Conservation Biology, a peer-reviewed scientific journal. It was co-authored by a team of 32, who concluded that water diversions caused by the dams have caused permanent drought-like conditions, devastating fish spawning and consequently the catch of local fishers. They documented drastic changes to traditional lifestyles and fishing practices.

“Because we live here, we were born here, we grew up here; we know the region very well. So, if anything changes, we notice it very quickly,” says Josiel Jacinto Pereira Juruna, the report’s lead author. He is also the vice-leader of Miratu, a village of around 90 people on the Xingu’s west bank. “Our elders warned us that over time this would happen. And once the dam opened, it did.”

These riverside communities say they are no longer able to depend on the river’s natural flooding cycle.

Distrustful of the official impact assessments produced by the dam operators, members of the communities have been conducting independent research since 2013. As part of these efforts, Juruna co-created an organisation, the Independent Territorial Environmental Monitoring of the VGX (MATI-VGX), in 2022.

Norte Energia, the private consortium that built and operates the dams, disputes many of the claims made in the study. It argues the dams “do not promote drought in the Xingu”. It also insists that changes documented by the researchers were considered before construction began and are being dealt with.

It told Dialogue Earth: “The monitoring carried out by MATI-VGX, despite having relevant methodological gaps, has indicated changes that were already foreseen in the environmental licence and for which Norte Energia is developing mitigation and compensation actions.” Norte Energia did not elaborate on these methodological gaps.

Waiting for the floods

The community monitoring programme installed water-level gauges at nine piracema sites. These are the seasonally flooded habitats that are crucial for fish reproduction, feeding and shelter. The stations followed protocols used by Brazil’s National Water Agency (ANA), as part of a drive to combine scientific rigour with local ecological knowledge about fish behaviour and spawning.

“The monitoring is done daily or weekly, by the local monitors, who are Indigenous people and riverside dwellers who live in the affected region,” says Camila Cherem Ribas, a senior researcher at the National Institute for Amazonian Research (INPA) in Manaus, and a co-author of the paper.

In natural conditions, the South American monsoon system triggers river flooding that begins in November. Many fish begin to spawn in December, when water levels reach critical thresholds. The Conservation Biology paper says the dams’ water diversions delay this flooding by between one and four months.

According to the research, at one piracema near Zé Maria Island, fish require water levels of at least 103cm to enter spawning areas. This level was not reached until February in 2022 and April in 2023 – long after the natural spawning season should have begun. The paper argues that these delays either prevent spawning entirely, or cause fish eggs and larvae to die due to insufficient water, food availability and shelter.

“It is forbidden to flood Indigenous land, but drying out Indigenous land is not in that law,” says Ribas. “These environments have unique characteristics and depend on the flooding cycle. So, the lack of flooding starts to kill the environment. The Indigenous people clearly noticed this.”

Norte Energia’s statement says its own studies with local fishers have identified 140 existing piracema areas in the Volta Grande do Xingu: “As foreseen in the environmental impact assessment, a large part of these areas will be flooded at the start of the season, guaranteeing suitable conditions for the reproduction of many species. Furthermore, it is important to note that several species of fish do not depend on the piracemas to reproduce.”

Catching less

This disruption of the flooding affects the broader ecosystem, according to the communities’ research. Most trees in seasonally flooded forests typically synchronise their fruiting with rising water levels, providing crucial food for aquatic animals and allowing their seeds to be dispersed by fish. When flooding is delayed, fruits fall before water arrives, breaking this essential ecological connection and reducing food availability for fish and other aquatic animals.

“[The locals] not only collect the data, they also decided what needed to be monitored, what the strategies should be,” explains Ribas. “When they decided what should be monitored, they had much more ecological vision than traditional scientific monitoring, which is very compartmentalised in western science.”

Fishing yields in local communities also saw a dramatic decline. The researchers compared data collected by Norte Energia before the dam was operational (2001-2008) to the communities’ post-dam data (2020-2023). The overall catch per unit effort figure dropped from 11.1kg per fisher per day before 2009 to 4.53kg from 2020.

Average catches plummeted. Pescada (Plagioscion) catches dropped from nearly 100kg per fishing trip to 1.66kg, whilst curimatá (Prochilodus nigricans) declined from 68kg to 5.4kg.

The composition of catches changed significantly. Tucunaré (Cichla), a large fish native to the Amazon, previously made up 29% of catches. This has fallen to just 5.5%, according to the community monitoring data.

These changes forced adaptations in fishing practices. For example, instances of gillnet catches among the Altamira commercial fleet, representing the primary city in the area affected by the dams, increased from 22% to 47%.

Meanwhile, hook-and-line fishing declined from 47% to 35%. Gillnets are often reported to be a less sustainable fishing method than hook-and-line, due to the amount of non-target species they can inadvertently snare.

Norte Energia says: “Most species have maintained the proportion of mature fish over 13 years of study in the Volta Grande do Xingu region. Some species had changes in their reproduction pattern, a scenario foreseen in the project’s environmental impact assessment. However, no fish species have become extinct in the areas of influence of the project.”

“Many of the harms of Belo Monte were underestimated in the formal [environmental impact assessment],” counters Eve Bratman, a professor of environmental studies at Franklin and Marshall College in the US. She was not involved in the Conservation Biology paper.

“Scholarly researchers and community members had completely predicted that the dam would be an ecological disaster as well as a social tragedy,” she adds. “It was absolutely preventable, had the government and its contractors done a better job of listening to civil society voices from the get-go.”

Monitoring and mitigation

The communities’ study proposes specific criteria for a new operational framework for the power plant and the region. It balances energy production with ecological respect. For example, matching the river’s dam-controlled water levels to fluctuations that would have occurred naturally, supporting fish migration and synchronising flooding with the natural fruiting periods of riverine vegetation.

Both the local researchers and their academic colleagues say policy change is necessary. Hydropower is presented as a green option, vital to reducing fossil-fuel emissions, and Belo Monte is estimated to represent around 5% of Brazil’s electricity-generation capacity. But the researchers say their study shows hydropower has consequences that are often neglected.

“In the Amazon, at least, hydroelectric energy is not clean energy,” says Ribas. “The environmental and social costs are very high. The Amazon depends on the flood cycle and dams, by nature, interrupt it. We think a change in the sharing of water in the Volta Grande is the only option.”

Norte Energia strongly defends its project’s environmental credentials:

“The amount of water earmarked for the Volta Grande do Xingu was studied and established by the Brazilian government as part of the concession auction [for the dams] and is an integral part of the environmental licensing process. The current model was developed based on 11 different hydrological scenarios evaluated in the environmental impact assessment and is an environmental mitigation measure, with the aim of ensuring, among other things, the flooding of the piracema areas and the maintenance of the river’s ecological cycles.”

Norte Energia says its monitoring meets the criteria established by Brazil’s environmental regulator, the Brazilian Institute of the Environment and Renewable Natural Resources (Ibama). Furthermore, the consortium says its research has resulted in 36 scientific articles in national and international journals and 39 abstracts presented at academic conferences.

Norte Energia says it has taken mitigatory action including compensation to protect and maintain reproductive and feeding sites for fauna; setting up ecology and fish-reproduction laboratories; restoring vegetation to maintain reproduction and feeding environments; strengthening subsistence production actions with riverside families and fishers; and improving water supply and sewage systems. The company says its socio-environmental investments in the region total BRL 8 billion (USD 1.4 billion).

Ibama, meanwhile, tells Dialogue Earth that it “continuously monitors compliance with the environmental conditions established in the Belo Monte hydroelectric power plant licence” by “monitoring data generated by the programmes provided for in the licensing process”.

Ibama continues: “To date, the aforementioned document and the data produced by the MATI-VGX Programme have not been included in the records of the Belo Monte hydroelectric power plant licensing process, which makes it impossible for Ibama to make any technical statement.”

Integrating traditional knowledge

Whatever happens with Belo Monte’s piracema sites, the researchers hope their collaborative model for monitoring them will spread.

Juruna says he hopes this partnership of riverside communities, Indigenous people and scientists can become a reference for other studies, to show that science can incorporate the local knowledge of traditional peoples.

Beyond this, Juruna hopes for national solidarity:

“We cannot abolish Belo Monte, but we can at least share the water. People in the large cities that receive this energy need to understand we live here, too. We are human beings, we need to have a life. We cannot destroy this biome just to benefit one part of society and forget the other parts. Because that other part of society is suffering.”

Matt Sandy

Matt Sandy is a British journalist who has covered the Amazon rainforest for a variety of publications for nearly a decade.

Juliana Horta

Juliana Horta is a journalist, podcaster and Rio de Janeiro native who started her career at Reuters.

(Sources: Dialogue Earth)

An analysis of how various tissues age is the latest to suggest that ageing does not march to a steady beat. 

By Heidi Ledford, 25 July 2025

It is a warning that middle-aged people have long offered the young: ageing is not a smooth process. Now, an exhaustive analysis of how proteins change over time in different organs backs up that idea, finding that people experience an inflection point at around 50 years old, after which ageing seems to accelerate.

The study, published on 25 July in Cell1, also suggests that some tissues — especially blood vessels — age faster than others, and it identifies molecules that can hasten the march of time.

The findings add to mounting evidence that ageing is not linear, but is instead pockmarked by periods of rapid change. Even so, larger studies are needed before scientists can label the age of 50 as a crisis point, says Maja Olecka, who studies ageing at the Leibniz Institute on Aging — Fritz Lipmann Institute in Jena, Germany, and was not involved in the study.

“There are these waves of age-related changes,” she says. “But it is still difficult to make a general conclusion about the timing of the inflection points.”

Showing their age

Previous work has shown that different organs can age at different rates2. To further unpick this, Guanghui Liu, who studies regenerative medicine at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, and his colleagues, collected tissue samples from 76 people of Chinese ancestry aged 14 to 68 who had died from accidental brain injury. The samples came from organs representing eight of the body’s systems, including the cardiovascular, immune and digestive systems.

The researchers then created a compendium of the proteins found in each of the samples. They found age-related increases in the expression of 48 disease-associated proteins, and saw early changes at around age 30 in the adrenal gland, which is responsible for producing various hormones.

This tracks well with previous data, says Michael Snyder, a geneticist at the Stanford University School of Medicine in California. “It fits the idea that your hormonal and metabolic control are a big deal,” he says. “That is where some of the most profound shifts occur as people age.”

Between the ages of 45 and 55 came a turning point marked by large changes in protein levels. The most dramatic shift was found in the aorta, the body’s main artery, which carries oxygenated blood out of the heart. The team tracked down one protein produced in the aorta that, when administered to mice, triggers signs of accelerated ageing. Liu speculates that blood vessels act as a conduit, carrying molecules that promote ageing to remote destinations throughout the body.

The study is an important addition to others that have analysed molecules circulating in the blood, rather than tissue samples taken from individual organs, as a way to monitor age-related changes, says Snyder. “We’re like a car,” he says. “Some parts wear out faster.” Knowing which parts are prone to wear and tear can help researchers to develop ways to intervene to promote healthy ageing, he says.

Halfway to 100

Last year, Snyder and his colleagues found ageing inflection points at around the ages of 44 and 603. Other studies have found accelerated ageing at different times, including at around 80 years old, which was beyond the scope of the current study, says Olecka.

Discrepancies with other studies can emerge from their use of different kinds of samples, populations and analytical approaches, says Liu. As data build over time, key molecular pathways involved in ageing will probably converge across studies, he adds.

These data will accumulate rapidly, says Olecka, because researchers are increasingly incorporating detailed time series in their studies, rather than simply comparing ‘young’ with ‘old’. And those results could help researchers to interpret these periods of rapid change. “Currently, we do not understand what triggers this transition point,” she says. “It’s a really intriguing emerging field.”

References

(Sources: Nature)

By Clay Bolt, July 01, 2025

As the sun sets over a forest stream, a beaver family gets to work. For millions of years, these large rodents—known for their bright orange teeth and flat paddle-shaped tails—have been reshaping landscapes. Their craftily constructed dams slow flowing water and create ponds where they build their lodge homes. Chomping through the night, they drag aspen and willow branches through the water, stack them with precision, and seal the gaps with mud and plants. Thanks to their impressive building skills, these industrious animals, which are found across most of North America, are a keystone species—an animal whose activities support its entire habitat, including the other species that it lives alongside.

Many wetlands started as beaver-dammed streams. As the beaver pond grows, it provides for an increasing number of plants and animals. Frogs splash at the edges, fish dart beneath the surface, and many species of birds find refuge in these lush habitats. But there's an invisible benefit too – these waterlogged areas are amazing at trapping air pollution. Studies show beaver-made wetlands contribute to clean air and water worth, providing services worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Though to the beavers, it’s all in a day’s work.

During a heavy rainstorm, some streams and rivers overflow their banks, but a beaver-engineered stream system handles floodwaters with ease. Their dams work like aquatic speed bumps, creating winding paths that slow rushing water. This prevents soil washing away and allows rich nutrients to settle to the bottom. Over time, this activity gradually raises the stream beds and reconnects them to surrounding land that used to flood naturally. And during dry spells, beaver dams release stored water slowly, keeping streams flowing when they might otherwise dry up. Perhaps most impressively, these structures function like a free water treatment plant, cleaning water by trapping dirt and filtering out pollutants like nitrogen and phosphorus.

Recent studies have also found that areas with beaver activity burn much less severely during wildfires – suffering only one-third the damage compared to similar areas without beavers. In the western United States, where landscapes are subject to drought and wildfires, fires often burn everything except areas surrounding beaver complexes. There, even during dry spells, water continues to soak into the ground, refilling underground water supplies and keeping plants moist.

Putting this ingenuity into practice, World Wildlife Fund is working with ranchers in the Northern Great Plains to recreate beaver habitat by constructing dams—Beaver Dam Analogs—that mimic the crafty rodent’s water management systems to store water, a particularly precious resource in this arid habitat. Some landowners are even seeing beaver return thanks to the more favorable conditions provided by these human-made dams.

By protecting beaver families and welcoming them back to our waterways, we can benefit from their natural building skills to create landscapes that better withstand severe weather, support wildlife, and suppress wildfire, one carefully laid stick at a time.

(Sources: WWF)