Forests
Environmental organisations urged governments not to back-pedal on new legislation to prevent deforestation linked to goods imported into the EU, after a large majority of agriculture ministers lined up behind a call to postpone the law which is due to take effect at the end of this year. In an open letter to EU governments today (28 March) some three dozen NGOs including forest action group Fern and the legal charity Client Earth reacted with alarm to an “urgent call for action” tabled by Austria at an EU Council summit on Tuesday, demanding the implementation period be “significantly extende...
Euronews (English)
When we talk about the greenhouse effect, we rarely talk about the fact that most of it is not caused by carbon dioxide (although most of global warming probably is). Yet, as a greenhouse gas, water vapour contributes 70% of the insulation that keeps solar energy within our atmosphere, at the right temperature for life. CO2’s impact is at around just 20% of that, though it is rising. One of the reasons for this skewed perception revolves around us not struggling to measure how much water vapour is around at any one time because it varies according to where you are. Meanwhile, we can measure CO...
Euronews (English)
The EU is “on the right trajectory” to meet the raft of climate, environmental and ecological goals it has set itself in recent years, but achieving its climate action goals will require considerable additional effort, especially on buildings and transport, the European Commission has warned. This conclusion was set out in a mid-term review of the EU’s eighth Environmental Action Programme (EAP), published today (13 March), 24 hours after the EU executive proposed urgent action to respond to a new normal of extreme weather caused by a rise in global average temperatures that is already touchin...
Euronews (English)
Lock gates have always been an essential part of Amsterdam. It only became liveable when the River Amstel was dammed to hold back the salty waters of the IJ. Now the city has 200 sets of mainly wooden lock gates, offering an increasingly important defence as sea levels rise. These fine pieces of woodwork come from a far more distant source than the 12th century fisherman who made Amsterdam’s first lock could have dreamed of: the Congo Basin. More specifically, they’re made of Azobé wood from Gabon \- a tropical timber renowned for its strong, water-resistant properties and used for everything ...
Euronews (English)
By Hans Nicholas Jong JAKARTA — A massive nickel mining and processing project on the Indonesian island of Halmahera has cleared thousands of hectares of forest, forcefully displaced local people, and polluted the rivers and sea, devastating the lives of many Indigenous people in the process, a new report says. Climate Rights International (CRI), a U.S.-based nonprofit, interviewed 45 people living near the mining and smelting operations at the Indonesia Weda Bay Industrial Park (IWIP) for the report. Some, like Maklon Lobe, an Indigenous Sawai farmer, complained of their rights being violated...
Mongabay
By Maxwell Radwin The government in Ecuador is looking for ways to keep open a controversial oil block in the Amazon Rainforest, defying the results of a referendum to close the operation due to pollution and public health risks. Officials said they are considering ways to avoid closing the 43-ITT oil block, located inside Yasuní National Park in the eastern Amazon, despite the results of a national referendum last year to halt drilling. “The entire system of the rule of law is at risk if the people’s will isn’t fulfilled,” said Pedro Bermeo, a spokesperson for YASunidos, an anti-extractives g...
Mongabay
By Liz Kimbrough A new study has for the first time identified the most common tree species in the tropical forests of Africa, the Amazon and Southeast Asia — and their similarities have surprised scientists. “The [study] shows some uncanny similarities among the world’s great tropical rainforests,” said tropical ecologist Bill Laurance, who wasn’t affiliated with the study published in the journal Nature. “In terms of their tree communities, rainforests in the Amazon, Africa, and Southeast Asia are all dominated by a few surprisingly ‘common’ species. In each of these regions, about 2.2% of t...
Mongabay
Human-induced global warming, and not El Niño, was the primary driver of last year's severe drought in the Amazon, researchers said on Wednesday. The drought sent rivers to record lows, required deliveries of food and drinking water to hundreds of river communities and killed dozens of endangered dolphins. Both climate change and El Niño contributed about equally to a reduction in rainfall. But higher global temperatures were the biggest reason for the drought, according to World Weather Attribution, an initiative that brings together climate scientists to rapidly analyse extreme events and th...
Euronews (English)
By Maxwell Radwin Ecuador’s new free trade agreement with China is getting backlash from critics worried about public health risks and potential damage to the environment. The agreement, which was signed last May but still needs approval in Ecuador’s National Assembly, has come under fire for policies that could overwhelm the country’s waste disposal systems, increase deforestation and let polluting companies off the hook, among other issues. “This is one of the smallest economies in South America starting to negotiate with the largest economy in the world,” said Diana Castro, a researcher wit...
Mongabay
By Maxwell Radwin Possible plans to develop large-scale agriculture in Suriname have sparked backlash from Indigenous communities, conservation groups and some members of parliament, who are concerned about deforestation of the Amazon and the fate of ancestral territories. Government documents, first published by Mongabay last year, showed that hundreds of thousands of hectares of Suriname’s primary forest might be under consideration for agriculture. Now, voices from all over the country are speaking out against it. “The government doesn’t communicate with the people in the forest. They don’t...
Mongabay
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