The large number of dams that are planned, under construction and already in existence on rivers that feed the Pantanal, one of the world’s largest freshwater wetlands, is causing widespread concern here about their impact on this vast and teeming ecosystem. Increasingly, that concern is being expressed in the Brazilian courts. The Pantanal, a 54,000-square-mile (140,000-sq-km) floodplain stretching from western Brazil into Bolivia and Paraguay, hosts a wide variety of flora and one of the largest concentrations of wildlife, especially bird life, in the Americas. Unesco designated the Pantanal, roughly the size of the state of New York, a World Biosphere Reserve and World Heritage site in 2000. On Dec. 19, Adriana Delboni Taricco, a federal judge in Mato Grosso do... [Log in to read more]
