- Organized crime, the expansion of extractive industries and climate extremes intensified environmental pressures across Latin America in 2025, driving deforestation, biodiversity loss and growing risks to local communities.
- Even as Latin America championed environmental protection internationally, wide gaps persisted in domestic enforcement of environmental regulations and prevention of environmental crimes.
- Country trajectories diverged sharply, with Colombia showing relative international policy leadership, while Venezuela, Bolivia, Peru and Ecuador saw marked environmental deterioration amid political instability and extractivist pushback.
- Looking toward 2026, experts warn that elections, fiscal constraints and security priorities could further erode environmental governance in Latin America.
MEXICO CITY — Throughout 2025, Latin America remained a battleground between efforts to conserve some of the world’s most valuable ecosystems and mounting pressure from organized crime and legal extractive industries pushing into new frontiers. Home to about 40% of the world’s known species, Latin America is one of the world’s most biodiverse regions: It holds roughly half of the world’s tropical forests, and at the same time has more than 60% of the planet’s known lithium reserves, 45% of its copper, and significant shares of graphite, silver and zinc that are central to the global energy transition
While some governments strengthened environmental laws, multilateral commitments and financing mechanisms to protect forests, oceans and biodiversity, the overall state of the environment continued to deteriorate.
In 2025, Latin America emerged as a focus of the global environmental agenda. On the heels of the U.N. biodiversity summit, COP16, in Cali, Colombia, in late 2024, the region also hosted the climate summit, COP30, in Belém, Brazil, in November 2025. According to Alejandra Laina, director for food, land and water at the World Resources Institute (WRI) in Colombia, Latin American governments shared several milestones in 2025: a wave of updated National Biodiversity Strategies and Action Plans submitted after COP16, and updates to countries’ climate commitments, with a strong focus on climate adaptation, restoration and the recognition of Indigenous people in decision-making processes.
Yet 2025 was also marked by escalating threats to the environment. Organized crime and illicit economies, particularly illegal mining and logging, expanded their footprint across the region. At the same time, agricultural expansion and extractive industries — from industrial soy and cattle to oil, gas and large-scale mining — continued to push deeper into forests, wetlands and coastal zones. Deforestation ravaged the region. Satellite analysis shows that the tropics lost a record 6.7 million hectares (16.6 million acres) of primary rainforest in 2024, an 80% increase from 2023, with Latin American countries driving much of the increase as drought‑driven wildfires and land grabbing surged. Beyond deforestation and degradation, the region experienced greater climate volatility, with more frequent episodes of water stress, wildfires and floods compounding impacts on infrastructure, food security and public health, according to María Inés Rivadeneira, policy lead for WWF in Latin America and the Caribbean. “It is not just an environmental problem; it is a problem of risk management and territorial and economic stability,” Rivadeneira says.
According to Laina, political volatility across the region made environmental policy increasingly fragile — not only because of domestic instability, but also due to shifting geopolitics under U.S. President Donald Trump. “The evisceration of U.S. foreign assistance, implementation of an erratic tariffs policy, imposition of a new Monroe Doctrine, boycotting of multilateral climate negotiations and support for right-wing authoritarianism all contribute toward worsening environmental outcomes across the region,” says Andrew Miller, advocacy director at Amazon Watch. He adds the abrupt end to USAID-financed programs has further opened the space for illicit economies and transnational organized crime.
“Environmental crime was much more on everyone’s radar this year, especially in the Amazon,” Laina says. Criminal groups are active in or exert control over roughly two-thirds of the Amazon’s municipalities, according to Amazon Underworld, a collaborative media alliance focused on the rainforest. In 2025, rising gold prices and shifts in cocaine demand and drug trafficking routes have strengthened organized crime, according to Bram Ebus, founder and co-director of Amazon Underworld. Governments responded with law enforcement initiatives, including the launch of Operation Green Shield in the Amazon and the inauguration of the Amazon International Police Cooperation Center in Manaus in September 2025, but “violence and lethal force against state officials countering illegal gold mining have demonstrated the willingness of criminal actors to protect these [illicit] economies,” Ebus says.
Latin America remained the deadliest region for land and environmental defenders, with 120 killings, accounting for 82% of the global total in 2024, according to Global Witness. “Defending territories remains a major challenge for Indigenous people, as they are exposed to danger, threats, killings and disappearances,” says Mónica Chuji Gualinga, deputy director of Indigenous Peoples’ Rights International.
However, for Chuji Gualinga, the most important change in 2025 is that governments have “acknowledged their inability to conserve the Amazon on their own.” She says this has “opened unprecedented doors” like the creation of the Amazonian Indigenous Peoples Mechanism within the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization (ACTO) in August this year. With that, “for the first time in 45 years, the Indigenous voice has diplomatic status and a co-presidency … At least in the Amazon Basin, we are no longer merely ‘observers’ in side events,” Chuji Gualinga says.
Colombia as a regional environmental leader
“In 2025, Colombia strengthened its role as a key actor in the international and regional environmental agenda,” says Ximena Barrera, director of government and international affairs at WWF Colombia.
Earlier this year, the Colombian government approved a decree creating and regulating Indigenous Territorial Entities, and granting Indigenous people in Colombia full local‑government powers over their territories. “That marks a major milestone in terms of the recognition of the rights of Indigenous peoples,” Laina says.
Colombia maintained its leadership on the biodiversity agenda, Amazonian cooperation and nature finance following its hosting of COP16 last year, Barrera tells Mongabay. During the Ramsar COP15 on wetlands, the country also led a resolution to recognize river dolphins as keystone species for wetland conservation, strengthening the link between biodiversity, freshwater ecosystems and the rights of the communities that depend on these territories, Barrera says.
Colombia continued to face mounting environmental challenges in 2025, like an increase in deforestation, intensifying gold mining (especially in rivers) and rampant environmental crimes. “While there is greater recognition of the environment as a priority in public discourse and in the country’s foreign policy, challenges remain in ensuring that these decisions are consistently translated into tangible results on the ground,” Barrera says. She adds that Colombia needs to strengthen implementation, interinstitutional coordination and environmental governance to achieve sustained impacts.
Laina says President Gustavo Petro’s plans to bring “total peace” to Colombia, while linking his peace negotiations with the country’s armed groups to nature, have “not worked well.”
Presidential elections in Colombia in May and June 2026 have the potential to change Colombia’s environmental and security trajectory, according to Barrera.
Mexico’s test of climate leadership
2025 marked the first full year of the administration of Claudia Sheinbaum, a climate scientist by training and former environment secretary of Mexico City, raising expectations for a more ambitious environmental agenda. While Sheinbaum had announced major investments in renewables, public transport and water infrastructure, and a 2050 net‑zero goal, Mexico’s power matrix remains dominated by oil, gas and coal, with fossil fuels supplying around three-quarters of electricity and the state-owned petroleum company, Pemex, still central to the economy and public finances.
In 2025, Mexico endured another year of heat, with almost half of the territory experiencing some level of drought, and big cities like Mexico City, Monterrey and Guadalajara continuing to record fine-particle pollution several times above World Health Organization limits. Deforestation pressures persisted in southern forest regions, linked to agricultural expansion and social programs.
Yet there have been pockets of progress in local restoration efforts and urban greening. In June 2025, Sheinbaum’s administration unveiled the 2025-2030 National Environmental Restoration Program, which designates 78 priority sites for ecological recovery. The program sets ambitious goals, including restoring 100,000 hectares (nearly 250,000 acres) of forest, recovering 30% of degraded coastal ecosystems, and rehabilitating heavily polluted river basins — such as the Tula, Lerma-Santiago, Atoyac and Sonora rivers — by 2030. The government also made commitments to restore urban parks and forests, with plans to rehabilitate roughly 1,500 hectares (3,700 acres) of green space in cities, in line with Mexico’s zero-deforestation pledge. Similarly, in October, Mexico took another step toward deforestation-free agriculture with the launch of the Federal Agreement for Deforestation-Free Agricultural Exports. Starting with avocado, the initiative aims to ensure agricultural exports are deforestation-free while aligning with international regulations like the EUDR in Europe, says Santiago Gowland, CEO of the Rainforest Alliance.
Chile: A solid but slow performer
In 2025, Chile focused on completing climate change legislation, rolling out its new biodiversity law and tackling air pollution, says Cristóbal de la Maza, director of research at San Sebastián University and former superintendent for the environment in Chile. After roughly 13 years of debate in Congress, Chile has started implementing its biodiversity law to centralize and strengthen conservation by creating a new Biodiversity and Protected Areas Service and a unified national system of protected areas.
Ensuring better air quality is one of “the important environmental challenges for Chile,” according to Marcelo Mena, the country’s former environment minister. He says existing environmental regulations on particulate matter are outdated and that “very few decontamination plans were implemented during this presidential term, and as a result, we have not made significant progress.”
Generally, Chile’s “environmental policies have largely been treated as state policies, with each government building on them in different ways,” de la Maza says. He says the major challenge is to “advance environmental objectives without undermining economic growth.” Mena agrees that it’s important to maintain environmental protections as state policies, adding that “Chile has a superior environmental performance with a larger set of [environmental] regulations overall” compared to other countries in the region.
As a mining country where copper alone regularly generates more than half of export revenues, Chile has seen a “very important change” as the country’s mining sector adopts stricter standards on water use and glacier protection, de la Maza says. The government has tied the sector to its 2050 carbon-neutrality goal, aiming for copper operations to run mostly on electricity and green hydrogen and pushing companies to cut emissions and water impacts. Following presidential elections earlier this month, 2026 will show whether the new administration doubles down on this agenda of decarbonizing mining, tightening environmental impact assessments and enforcing Chile’s climate and biodiversity commitments — or whether it slows them.
De la Maza says more needs to be done to make environmental information transparent and available in Chile. “Without information, it is very difficult to exercise rights or demand environmental protection,” he says. De la Maza says Chile has a strong emphasis on control and enforcement of environmental regulation, but the country could make more use of economic instruments like carbon markets, biodiversity markets and other incentives.
Peru: Political instability, rising crime and a mining surge
While international conversations have advanced on moving away from fossil fuels and strengthening climate action, and the negative environmental impacts of mining have been widely recognized, Peru is moving backward, says Gisela Hurtado Barboza, senior Amazon campaigner at Stand.earth, an environmental advocacy organization.
Peru has been plagued by political instability that has resulted in weakened environmental governance and increased vulnerability to illegal activities, according to several experts interviewed by Mongabay. Peru has seen rampant expansion of crime groups, especially from Brazil and Colombia, says Ebus from Amazon Underworld. He says environmental protections have been weakened in Peru and Ecuador to favor extractive industries, including logging, oil production and mining. This often comes at the expense of biodiversity hotspots and Indigenous territories, Ebus says.
Gold mining was one of the main threats to Peru’s forests and environment in 2025, according to Laina and Ebus. In 2025, the Ministry of Energy and Mines issued a decree to extend Peru’s mining formalization regime (REINFO), allowing small-scale and artisanal miners with an active REINFO registration — and those whose registration had been suspended for up to a year — to continue operating and complete their formalization process until the end of the year. Proponents argued the legislation would help formalize the mining sector. Hurtado Barboza, however, says this will result in the expansion of damaging mining activities. “In practice, the state has chosen to coexist with illegality rather than confront it in a structural manner,” she says.
The Peruvian government has also moved to reactivate suspended oil blocks and seek new concessions in the Amazon, Hurtado Barboza says. She warns that pushing new drilling through aging infrastructure in a region already scarred by more than a thousand polluted sites raises the risk of fresh oil spills and deepens a legacy of unremediated environmental liabilities.
In March 2025, Peru’s Constitutional Tribunal ruled on several constitutional challenges against Law 31973, known as Peru’s anti-forest law, which forgives past illegal deforestation and makes it much easier to clear forests in the future. The court struck down two provisions in the law as unconstitutional, saying they threatened forest and wildlife resources and violated the state’s duty to preserve the environment and use natural resources sustainably.
Hurtado Barboza says she expects Peru’s environment to deteriorate even further if there’s no change in direction in 2026, saying that political decisions “are often justified by the need to attract investment … but in practice they shift environmental and social costs onto Amazonian territories and future generations.” She adds she hopes that international oversight and pressure will help safeguard the environment to some extent.
Ecuador’s extractivist shift
Following his reelection in April, President Daniel Noboa used his “New Ecuador” development plan to deepen an extractivist shift while sidelining environmental safeguards, according to Chuji Gualinga from Indigenous Peoples’ Rights International. In July 2025, he eliminated the Ministry of Environment, Water and Ecological Transition, merging it into the Ministry of Energy and Mines. According to Chuji Gualinga, “the most serious impact is that the Ministry of Energy — responsible for meeting the target of increasing oil production — now controls environmental licensing.”
As Ecuador has suffered a dramatic surge in violence and the government has declared an “internal armed conflict” against gangs, Noboa has pursued mano dura policies, repeatedly deploying the military under states of exception. State security forces have clashed several times with Indigenous communities protesting new mining and oil projects in Amazonian provinces, where leaders denounce militarization and repression around contested concessions.
The government has promoted large-scale copper and gold projects as pillars of economic recovery, using institutional reforms and streamlined permitting to favor mining expansion at the expense of independent environmental oversight. In August 2023, Ecuadorians voted against oil drilling in the controversial Yasuní Block 43-ITT in the Amazon. Yet in 2025, with just 10 wells closed and production still hovering at some 40,000 barrels per day, Noboa sought a five-year delay to ending production at the block, citing fiscal and security crises. That prompting a lawsuit in November and a referendum rebuke.
Venezuela’s lawlessness
Venezuela’s environment remains in a critical state, with criminal groups exerting control over Indigenous communities, and illegal gold mining causing widespread environmental damage, Ebus says. He warns that growing evidence of mining for critical minerals such as coltan, cassiterite and rare earth elements “does not bode well for the future” of Venezuela’s environment.
Cristina Vollmer Burelli, founder of the NGO SOS Orinoco, says “there were no positive achievements in 2025” for the environment in Venezuela. Instead, she says, environmental degradation intensified with “the destruction of semiarid ecosystems for the illegal production of charcoal for export, a sharp increase in the illegal export of wildlife including threatened species, and an acceleration of destruction caused by mining.” She also reports that firewood is being illegally extracted from the country’s national parks.
While President Nicolás Maduro’s government cracked down on illegal mining in 2025, Ebus notes that these operations haven’t resulted in meaningful environmental protection. Instead, he says, they’ve enabled the Venezuelan military to assume control over parts of the illegal mining sector.
Argentina’s environmental agenda takes a back seat
Despite Argentina’s significant wind and solar potential, in 2025 President Javier Milei’s government doubled down on a fossil fuel- and mining-led development model, rolling out investment incentives and deregulation to speed up drilling in the Vaca Muerta shale of Patagonia. In December, Milei sent Congress a bill to reform Argentina’s Glacier Protection Law, opening the door to mining and hydrocarbon exploration in periglacial zones that feed Andean watersheds, with provincial governments given more power over permits.
Laina from WRI says the environment in Argentina received little attention and that the overall trend for environmental health in Argentina is “worsening.”
Bolivia’s economic crisis fuels environmental damage
A prolonged economic crisis in Bolivia in 2025 has brought a strong focus on the expansion of agriculture, mining and hydrocarbon extraction at the expense of the environment, according to Cecilia Requena Zárate, a Bolivian member of parliament.
After record forest fires in 2024, when more than 10 million hectares (25 million acres) — nearly 60% of Bolivia’s forest — burned, the country saw a much milder 2025 fire season, thanks to wetter conditions. However, blazes in Santa Cruz and Beni departments still scorched tens of thousands of hectares, and fires are expected to continue challenging Bolivia’s forests in the future.
Meanwhile, illegal mining activities expanded in protected areas and Indigenous territories. The integrity of these areas, along with wildlife trafficking, biodiversity loss and water contamination, “are all processes in which there has been regression and worsening conditions” in Bolivia in 2025, Requena Zárate tells Mongabay.
She says that although Bolivia is internationally recognized for prioritizing the environment — “a country where the rights of Mother Earth are enshrined in the Constitution” — in reality, “Bolivia has in no way acted better than its neighbors on environmental issues.” Environmental regulations are often go unenforced, and the government has been involved in the expansion of the hydrocarbon, mining and agricultural sectors.
Requena Zárate says there are opportunities for improvement in 2026 through market-driven mechanisms. She highlights that sustainable finance has drawn attention from the business sector and could be part of the response to Bolivia’s environmental challenges, “but only if it is well regulated.” She adds that demands from consumer markets, particularly in Europe, for traceable and environmentally responsible production will help push more sustainable production methods.
Guyana and Suriname’s oil boom
Guyana and Suriname’s oil boom has been putting pressure on some of the world’s most intact tropical forests.
At the same time, Guyana promotes itself as a high-forest, low-deforestation state: roughly 85% of its territory remains forested, mostly in the Guiana Shield, and official monitoring shows very low annual deforestation rates, though most of that loss is now driven by gold mining in interior regions, including the disputed Essequibo territory.
“Guyana is investing politically in environmentalist rhetoric, hosting events and crafting narratives, but in terms of real environmental management, there is only continuity in the destruction of the forests of the Essequibo territory through mining,” says Burelli from SOS Orinoco.
Neighboring Suriname is also drawing increasing attention for oil exploration. In 2025, the country approved its first major deep-water project, marking a new phase for the oil and gas industry in Suriname. Just like Guyana, Suriname is a high-forest, low-deforestation country, with about 93% forest cover and a government pledge to keep at least 90% of that permanently protected. But weak oversight of logging, small-scale mining and new infrastructure threatens to undercut such goals.
“Suriname’s [President] Jennifer Geerlings-Simons has been vocal about conservation and holding major global emitters accountable,” Ebus says. Nevertheless, Venezuelan gold miners in Guyana and Brazilian gold miners in both Guyana and Suriname continue to put pressure on forests, often backed by organized crime syndicates, Ebus says. Regional cooperation is therefore key, he says, and Brazil needs to help tackle irregularities in gold supply chains and the money flows behind the industry.
Central America’s divergent paths
Central America, one of the world’s most climate-vulnerable regions, has undergone “a process of environmental rollback” in 2025, becoming “a sacrifice zone” to supply raw materials like minerals, agrofuels and export commodities like palm oil, coffee and sugarcane to global markets, says Pedro Cabezas, coordinator of the Central American Alliance Against Mining (ACAFREMIN). Some governments in Central America are opening limited space for dialogue, while others are doubling down on extractive projects while shrinking civic space.
Cabezas says some governments in Central America have become increasingly authoritarian — notably Nicaragua and El Salvador — with limited dialogue with civil society. In Nicaragua, he describes a focus on eco-extractivism, with the government granting Chinese-linked companies dozens of mining concessions, many “at the expense of Indigenous and peasant communities, and protected areas.”liikjn. Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega has also kept alive the idea of an interoceanic canal to compete with the Panama Canal, a megaproject that experts deem economically unfeasible and likely to have “major environmental impacts” and to “generate conflict with affected populations,” Cabezas says.
In El Salvador, the legislative assembly in May passed a foreign agents law requiring organizations that receive international funding to register and giving authorities broad powers to restrict or dissolve them. According to Cabezas, this has put even more pressure on environmental organizations in El Salvador.
Guatemala and Honduras have shown more openness to dialogue with civil society, developing environmental policies and complying with institutional processes, according to Cabezas. He highlights the Cerro Blanco gold-silver mine as an example of how the Guatemalan government has responded at least partially to local demands to halt the project. In 2025, authorities also resumed debate on a long‑stalled general water law, which civil society sees as a modest but positive sign of institutional engagement. Laina highlights Guatemala as a country that has “been very serious about restoration” in 2025 and has allowed for more participative government.
Cabezas notes that Honduras finds itself at “a critical moment” following contested presidential elections in November. He says that under either of the two parties, “conditions for the environment are unlikely to improve.”
One important regional step forward in 2025 was the decision by Mexico, Belize and Guatemala to sign a trilateral agreement to create the Great Maya Forest Biocultural Corridor, the largest of its kind in the world, aiming to coordinate conservation, restoration and community-based management across about 5.7 million hectares (14 million acres) of contiguous forest. This initiative “stood out as an example of cross-border conservation with a strong focus on local community inclusion,” says Gowland from the Rainforest Alliance. He adds that certification programs can help turn commitments into action by supporting deforestation-free practices and helping communities protect and regenerate ecosystems.
