An unprecedented study of clandestine airstrips in the Brazilian Amazon rainforest, conducted in a partnership between The New York Times, The Intercept, the Pulitzer Center and Earthrise Media, gathered data on illegal mining 🎉
The team compiled the possible locations of illegal airstrips by gathering data from Open Street Maps, the Socio-Environmental Institute and Hutukara. Then, by cross-referencing the geographic coordinates of the runways with mining deforestation alerts from Amazon Mining Watch, they found that 1,269 unregistered airstrips were still in active use in the last year and documented signs of mining nearby, such as cleared forest areas and mining pools. The team used satellite imagery 🛰 and geospatial analysis 🗺 to locate the airstrips and interconnect them with illegal mining, benefiting from NICFI data.
In addition, they determined that hundreds of the airstrips in mining areas are located within indigenous and protected lands, where any form of mining is against the law. On this, a research by Hutukara estimated that more than half of the inhabitants of the Brazilian Yanomami territory had been harmed by illegal mining.
Click here to read the full article from the Pulitzer Center.
Click here to read the full The New York Times’ article.
Click here to read the full The Intercept Brazil’s article.
