Apparently the girl had wandered away from her Awá tribe village, which consists of around 60 members who all live in complete isolation with the modern world, when she was captured by illegal loggers. Luis Carlos Guajajaras, a local leader from a separate tribe, said to Brazilian news sources that the loggers had tied the girl to a tree and then burned her alive. According to Guajajaras this was meant to be a warning to other indigenous tribes who live in a protected reserve in the north-eastern state of Maranhão.

“She was from another tribe, they live deep in the jungle, and have no contact with the outside world. It would have been the first time she had ever seen white men. We heard that they laughed as they burned her to death,” Guajajaras said.

News and evidence of this story are unfortunately few and limited. But this is understandable considering where the murder took place. But a third party, the Indigenous Missionary Council (CIMI) which is a Catholic group, have said that they have seen footage of the girl’s charred remains.

Survival International, an organization which works for indigenous people’s rights around the world, reports that large areas of the Awá tribe’s territories have been destroyed by illegal logging. Members from the Awá tribe have been attacked by loggers before.

“The Awá rely on their forest to survive, but vast numbers of loggers are illegally invading their land, which now suffers one of the highest deforestation rates in the Amazon. More than 30% of one of the Awá’s territories has already been destroyed. […]The Awá have recently suffered a series of brutal attacks, and loggers have warned that the Indians will be killed if they go into their forest.”

FUNAI, a Brazilian government agency that is responsible for mapping out and protecting lands traditionally inhabited by indigenous people, have said that they are seeking more information about the reported murder. But I would expect it’ll be hard to find any substantial evidence in the Amazon forest two or even three months later.

But this is not an isolated case. CIMI reports that around 450 indigenous people have been killed by loggers between 2003 and 2010, and these are numbers that are acknowledged by FIMI. For example, last year the famous Amazon rainforest activist José Cláudio Ribeiro da Silva was killed in an ambush near his home in Brazil. But it’s not just in Brazil that loggers are attacking people. In 2008, peaceful activists who were protecting an old-growth forest in Tasmania, Australia, was violently attacked by timber workers.

Six months after predicting his own murder, a leading rainforest defender has reportedly been gunned down in the Brazilian Amazon. José Cláudio Ribeiro da Silva and his wife, Maria do Espírito Santo, are said to have been killed in an ambush near their home in Nova Ipixuna, in Pará state, about 37 miles from Marabá. According to a local newspaper, Diário do Pará, the couple had not had police protection despite getting frequent death threats because of their battle against illegal loggers and ranchers.

Da Silva said in a speech at TEDxAmazonia in November last year that he was afraid loggers would try to kill him:

“I could be here today talking to you and in one month you will get the news that I disappeared. I will protect the forest at all costs. That is why I could get a bullet in my head at any moment … because I denounce the loggers and charcoal producers, and that is why they think I cannot exist. [People] ask me, ‘are you afraid?’ Yes, I’m a human being, of course I am afraid. But my fear does not silence me. As long as I have the strength to walk I will denounce all of those who damage the forest.”

Al Jazeera correspondent Gabriel Elizondo is, one of the few journalist, at the scene covering the murder of rainforest defender Da Silva. You can follow his reporting on Twitter under the hashtag #ZeClaudio. You can also watch his report below:

Watch the speech he gave at TEDxAmazonia last year:

Zé Cláudio Ribeiro lives in the Maraba, in Para, producing nuts in a sustainable way and resisting the construction boom in the Amazon, and the pressure to bring down these impressive trees. He has received several death threats.

Related: Environmental activists violently attacked by timber workers and Greenpeace activist violently attacked by bluefin tuna fishermen

Desertification never describes the presence of a natural desert. It is the process of making an area look like a desert, having its characteristics while it should not. It is caused by acid rain, deforestation and the setting of fires. Also, because of overgrazing when plants start to grow again after a fire. Most of the times there is a combination of some or of all those factors, which are all connected with human activities.

During desertification, many animal species die or lose their natural habitat. Plants disappear and face extinction. Valuable sources are lost, as fewer plants produce less oxygen. Thus, it is connected with global warming and climate change. Moreover, desertification often results in floods, as there are no trees to keep the soil steady with their roots. Floods harm both natural ecosystems and human properties, sometimes including death tolls.

Consequently, desertification is a very serious problem and should be solved. Laws ought to be passed in order to decrease the amount of trees cut down and of wooden products one can buy. Carbon dioxide emissions, by which acid rain is caused, must be reduced to prevent soil erosion. Authorities have to protect forests, by organising fire brigades and immediate reforestations. Animals that graze should be kept away from burnt areas where plants have just started to grow again.

Tropical rainforests have the largest biodiversity of all ecosystems on Earth. The soil is rather poor, but it sustains a great variety of plants. It is estimated that 65% of the known plant species are found in rainforests.

During the past three decades, rainforests have been decreasing in size for various reasons, though all of them are connected with human activities. Human populations living near rainforests had the impression that the soil must have been really fertile, as it could sustain such a variety of plants. So, when human started to need more fields for cultivation, they choose rainforests’ earth, and thus they set big fires to get rid of big trees and to obtain space. By the time it was understood that the soil wasn’t suitable for agriculture, many square kilometres of rainforests had already gone.

Apart from agricultural reasons, the rainforests are cut down in order to provide wood. Most of the paper, toilet paper or furniture manufactured nowadays is based on wood from tropical rainforests. Deforestation also takes place in order to extend cities and build roads. Increasing human needs, due to overpopulation, lead to mass deforestations all over the globe.

The pace with which it’s been done is so high, that every year an area of the size of half Greece is lost. 50 years ago rainforests would cover double the area they do today. Thousands of species, whether they are animals or plants become extinct and even more face extinction.

Humanity also depends on rainforests. A variety of building materials, food (bananas, vanilla, coffee), and even caoutchouk come from rainforests. Medical science, from the ancient times till today, also depends on substances from plants that grow there.

Quinine, a range of medicine against pain and stress are only some examples of medicine that require substances from rainforests in order to be manufactured. Nowadays, 20% of the medicines found in pharmacies are produced by the use of plants from rainforests.

Researchers have studied less than the 2% of the 100,000 species of plants that grow in rainforests, and are sure that most of them can be really useful in medicine or other fields. Though most of them point out that ”potentials for the future are endless, as long as scientists and pharmacologists reach the rainforests before chainsaws…”

And let us not forget that rainforests produce oxygen. Tropical rainforests produce 40% of Earth’s oxygen. Cutting them down means that oxygen levels decrease, while less CO2 is absorbed by plants and thus increases in the atmosphere, causing the green-house effect. Humanity has to re-examine its needs and reduce them, so that less quantities of substances from rainforests are used. We have to set limits on our activities, otherwise those huge forests will one day belong to history.