Podcasts Science Mongabay Newscast Reporter Sue Branford on journalism from the Amazon that makes a difference

Reporter Sue Branford on journalism from the Amazon that makes a difference

Published: Feb. 7, 2017, 8:55 p.m.

This week we speak with journalist Sue Branford, a regular contributor to Mongabay who has been reporting from Brazil since 1979 for the BBC and others.

Branford is one of the writers behind a hard-hitting new series in English and Portuguese that Mongabay.com is producing with The Intercept-Brasil exploring the many impacts of massive dam development projects in Brazil’s Tapajos Basin. The reports have already resulted in a federal investigation being opened over official misconduct.

Read all the features and watch the powerful videos Sue and her team have produced for the series here.

Branford: "Sometimes your reporting has an impact that you don't actually realize...These reports that we're doing for Mongabay, we may discover such an impact...the Brazilian prosecutor is asking for compensation for this indigenous community, but there may also be other impacts that we only discover years later.

"We journalists sometimes feel we just go on reporting and don't really change very much, but now and again you come up with cases where you very definitely have changed things, and it makes you feel like, OK, it really was worthwhile."

We begin the show by talking about some of the latest top conservation news, from Hong Kong's amazingly resilient (and endangered) tree frogs to Norway's new financial commitment to stem deforestation around the world.