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Aimee Gabay

@aimeegabay

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Reporter for Mongabay. Words in the Guardian, Al Jazeera, New Scientist, Grist and others.

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Our six-month-long investigation into U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) grant spending on critical minerals has finally been published.

We found that DoD grants for critical minerals between 2021 and 2025 was nearly $550 million, up from just $31.3 million in the previous five-year period.

Lithium projects received the largest share of U.S. defense grants, followed by neodymium and boron combined projects, graphite and aluminum.

Several communities impacted by DoD-funded projects told us that state backing has fast-tracked approvals without essential environmental safeguards or meaningful consultation by companies. Some of the projects we looked into include Graphite Creek in Alaska, Thacker Pass in the U.S. and La Loutre in Canada.

Experts also explained how geopolitical pressure is transforming mineral supply chains, as well as trade patterns and relationships between countries, and could decrease the availability of minerals needed for the green energy transition.

The link to the full investigation for @mongabay, where we provide more details about DoD spending on critical minerals, including some nice graphics and an interactive map by our wonderful team, is in the comments below.

📷 U.S. Department of Defense via AP Photos, AP Photo/Rick Bowmer, AP Photo/John Locher and AP Photo/Rick Bowmer. by @aimeegabay

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4 months ago

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a year ago

My report from the Yaqui Valley in Sonora, where I wrote about the story of Mario Luna Romero - a Yaqui water defender who has faced constant threats to his life for fighting to protect his community’s rights to its water in Mexico - has now been published.

In 2014, Luna was arrested and spent a year and 11 days in a maximum-security prison in Sonora, Mexico. He was accused of being involved in the kidnapping of a man and theft, despite there being no evidence to keep him there.

Before his arrest, Luna had led a ferocious campaign against the construction of an aqueduct that would drastically decrease the Yaqui River’s waters from reaching his tribe. The government had approved its construction without their consent, as later confirmed by a Supreme Court ruling.

The river, which is sacred to the tribe, has been drained of all its water after decades of overexploitation, unequal water distribution and droughts.

In April, I saw this with my own eyes. There is no water left.

Besides Luna, other community members have been arrested, harassed by government officials or killed by criminals. Meanwhile, the region is experiencing a deadly heat wave and drought.

If you want to read the story I’ve added the link to my bio.

Story for @mongabay
Photos by Abimael Ochoa Hernández (@abiochoafotografia) taken in Pueblo Yaqui, Sonora, Mexico by @aimeegabay

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2 years ago

Em meados de agosto, quase 200 pessoas invadiram a Terra Indígena Ituna/Itatá, no Pará, arrombando portões da Funai, derrubando placas de advertência e montando acampamentos dentro de um território reservado a povos indígenas isolados.

Autoridades para o risco iminente de um confronto violento e possível genocídio do povo isolado do Igarapé Ipiaçava.

📲 Entenda como as invasões afetam essa população vulnerável . Visite brasil.mongabay.com ou clique no link da bio e leia a reportagem de Aimee Gabay e Elisângela Mendonça.

📸 AP Photo/Andre Penner (1,4); Foto de Valdir Hobus via Wikimedia Commons (6);
#Mongabay #MeioAmbiente #Natureza #Jornalismo #Ecologia #Brasil #Biodiversidade #Conservação #Diversidade #Preservação #Fauna #Flora by @aimeegabay

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12 days ago

Thrilled to share that a film we produced about a climate-displaced community in Mexico has won a Covering Climate Now Award 🏆

Flooding caused by rapid sea-level rise and increasingly severe storms has decimated the fishing village, forcing most to pack up and leave. Between 2019 and June 2024, at least 70 homes in the community were destroyed.

The government relocated most residents to a new site further inland. But the community now lives 12 kilometres away from the sea, and residents cannot fish as easily, which is what they depend on for their livelihoods.

We visited the area last year to speak to the impacted residents and to learn about how they plan to rebuild their lives after climate change took their homes and their way of life.

I worked on this film with the amazing @osopolita_, @samanthaleewq, @monicawiserobles and others, including our wonderful fixer @juan.leuman. It’s @mongabay’s first CCN Award — very exciting!

In case you haven’t seen it (link is also in my bio):

📹 https://youtu.be/EP3BvYtJAII?si=wOt05feagqBW4ye4 taken in El Bosque, Mexico, Mexico by @aimeegabay

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a month ago

As is often the case with journalism, I went into my last reporting trip expecting to cover one angle, but came back with something entirely different, and far more urgent.

I originally set out to report on the environmental threats facing the Matsés Indigenous people in the northeastern Peruvian Amazon — a community that first initiated contact with the outside world in 1969. But during our interviews, the Matsés redirected my focus to an even more immediate crisis: a deadly outbreak of malaria and hepatitis B.

Exacerbated by government inaction, the health crisis is colliding with environmental changes. An intensifying El Niño and severe droughts are disrupting rainfall, creating conditions that allow malaria-bearing mosquitoes to proliferate and affecting river transport for medical care.

My latest feature for @mongabay explores this urgent intersection of public health, environmental changes and systemic neglect. It includes perspectives from Matsés leaders, health experts, anthropologists, as well as an interview with a Matsés elder who remembers life before contact.

The full article is linked in my bio. taken in Distriro De Yaquerana - Angamos by @aimeegabay

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a month ago

Roberto Necca Tumi Unan is a 74-year-old member of the Matsés people, an Indigenous group that has for centuries inhabited the remote Amazonian rainforest border of Peru and Brazil, along the Javari, Yaquerana and Gálvez rivers. For most of Necca’s youth, the Matsés lived in voluntary isolation, rejecting contact with societies outside of their own.

Last week, during a visit to his community in the northeastern Peruvian Amazon, Necca told me about the changes he has observed since they first came into contact with a U.S. evangelical missionary group in 1969. Almost immediately after contact, rubber tappers and other invaders heavily exploited the Matsés, and families suffered greatly from exposure to previously unknown diseases like malaria and hepatitis B — diseases which continue to plague the community today.

Full story for @mongabay coming soon. taken in Reserva nacional Matsés by @aimeegabay

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3 months ago

Last September, during a field reporting trip to Colombia’s Vaupés region, members of an Indigenous community who live downstream from Mitú, a rapidly expanding Amazonian town, told me that the Vaupés River is contaminated by untreated sewage and has made people sick.

Traditionally, the Macaquiño community considers the river to be a living being with whom they coexist and depend on it for bathing, fishing and human consumption. But now, contamination in the water causes rashes, itching, and fevers, and has begun to spread diseases such as dengue and hepatitis, they said.

I spent six months trying to verify this information.

Last month, I finally got ahold of water quality studies from the Corporation for Sustainable Development of the Northern and Eastern Amazon (@cdacorporacion), which confirmed that sewage contamination and organic load exceed safe limits and may impact public health and the quality of the aquatic ecosystem.

Public authorities in Mitú and @institutosinchi_ told me the contamination stems in part from the municipality’s poorly constructed wastewater treatment plant, which was built on a flood zone and therefore frequently collapses, dumping untreated sewage into the river.

A link to the full report for @mongabay is in my bio. taken in Mitú, Vaupés by @aimeegabay

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6 months ago

The Brazilian Supreme Court has authorized the possibility of mining exploration and exploitation inside an Indigenous territory for the first time, at the request of an Indigenous Cinta Larga association in the southwestern Amazon.

While the decision does not automatically authorize mining within Cinta Larga land, it has set a deadline for Congress to regulate mining in all Indigenous lands. In the meantime, it has established provisional rules in case mining authorization in Cinta Larga territory is approved by Congress, such as allowing mining on only 1% of the territory.

An Indigenous leader and representative of the Cinta Larga Patjamaaj Association told Mongabay that without this law, his community has been unable to benefit economically from mining on their land. The Cinta Larga territory has some of the world’s largest diamond deposits, which are being mined illegally.

Brazil’s Ministry of Indigenous Peoples (MPI), several public prosecutors and other Indigenous peoples and organizations have raised concerns about the precedent this could set, and say that by establishing these rules, it can be interpreted as opening the door to future exploration requests while on-site environmental compliance inspections in Brazil remain rare.

Full story for @mongabay linked in my bio/story.

Quotes from @socioambiental @terenamauricio @patjamaaj and more.

Image by @gil_maan Cinta Larga / @patjamaaj taken in Aldeia Roosevelt by @aimeegabay

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7 months ago

After we analyzed data from @globalforests and discovered a dramatic uptick in forest loss in the Pirahã Indigenous Territory in Brazil, government officials told us that the recently contacted Pirahã people are facing a malaria outbreak, and the deforestation is the result of an effort by Brazil’s Indigenous affairs agency (@funaioficial) to improve food security.

The Pirahã Indigenous Territory lost 3,200 hectares (7,900 acres) of tree cover in 2024, roughly the size of more than 6,000 soccer fields, representing the largest spike of deforestation between 2001 and 2024.

For several decades, the Pirahã Indigenous people have faced a multitude of issues, from illegal loggers and hunters to invasions by outsiders seeking to extract natural resources from their territory in Brazil’s Amazonas state.

In recent years, government officials discovered the population was suffering from a malaria outbreak — a common side effect of deforestation and the encroachment of outsiders who can spread the disease.

Full story for @mongabay in my bio. Photo by Daniel Everett. by @aimeegabay

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8 months ago

Many Indigenous peoples in the Colombian Amazon have observed a series of changes over the past few decades.

Since the arrival of rubber tappers, missionaries and other non-Indigenous settlers, there has been a decline in many spiritual and cultural traditions, affecting their relationship with nature.

In mid-September, I visited the Vaupés region to report on how one community, like many others across the Amazon rainforest, has been impacted by cultural changes, and how this has led to a decline in respect for sacred sites and transformed their relationship with nature.

The first story, which focuses on the Indigenous Macaquiño community on the banks of the Vaupés River, is now live on the @mongabay website. Link is in my bio. taken in Vaupes, Colombia by @aimeegabay

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9 months ago

During our recent visit, members of the mostly Cubeo Macaquiño community in the Amazonian jungles of Vaupés in Colombia practised a traditional dance, known as the dance of the carrizo (danza del carrizo).

This was part of a day-long ceremony, during which members of the community gathered in their traditional communal house, commonly referred to as a maloca, and shared food and chicha (a fermented, lightly alcoholic yuca-based drink). taken in Río Vaupés by @aimeegabay

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a year ago