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Lack of protection leaves Spain-size swath of Brazilian Amazon up for grabs
The Brazilian Amazon is home to public lands that span an area the size of Spain — undesignated forests that are at growing risk of land grabbing encouraged by the state, according to a recent study by Greenpeace. These public forests, covering a combined 50 million hectares (124 million acres), are not designated for a specific use — unlike conservation units, Indigenous territories, or quilombola (Afro-descendant) settlements, for instance — which leaves them without protection. This allows land grabbers to invade them and stake a claim through the breaches left open by the government’s Rura...
Mongabay
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IEEFA: NYS Comptroller DiNapoli’s bold divestment plan may inspire investors to follow suit
New York State Comptroller Thomas P. DiNapoli, who heads one of the largest public pension funds in the U.S., concluded 2020 with a bold investment decision on fossil fuels. He will hold the entire industry to higher standards regarding climate change and establish broader scrutiny of a pension portfolio with holdings that span the entire economy in a bid to reduce demand for fossil fuels. His follow-up is critical. Q3 2020 hedge fund letters, conferences and more DiNapoli's Bold Divestment PlanFor the energy sector, the comptroller’s decision serves as a last call: If companies do not meet re...
ValueWalk
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Indonesia renews peat restoration bid to include mangroves, but hurdles abound
JAKARTA — An Indonesian government initiative that fell short of its goal to rehabilitate degraded peat forests will get another chance to do so — plus the added task of rehabilitating mangrove habitats. Indonesian President Joko Widodo extended the mandate of the Peatland Restoration Agency (BRG) through to 2024, after it expired at the end of 2020. He had established the agency in 2016 in the wake of widespread peatland fires the previous year, and tasked it with restoring more than 2.6 million hectares (6.4 million acres) of degraded peatlands — an area nearly three times the size of Puerto...
Mongabay
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Editorial: Joe Biden and the reality of climate change
Not so long ago, the dangers posed by global warming and climate change loomed off in the future, allowing Americans to put off finding solutions. But tomorrow has arrived, and the new reality is impossible to deny. The years from 2015 through 2020 were the hottest six years on record for the planet. The past year ushered in the country’s worst season ever for wildfires, along with a record number of tropical storms in the Atlantic. The Great Lakes are warming, and their water levels are at or close to record highs. Yet Donald Trump’s administration didn’t just fail to take the steps needed to...
Chicago Tribune
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Climate change is devastating Central American coffee farms — and spurring migration
SAN DIEGO — Harvest season had just begun in Matagalpa, Nicaragua, and the coffee plants stood ripe and ready. But there was no one working at many of the farms. Joaquín Solórzano, a coffee farmer and advocate for Nicaraguan growers, pointed at the cherries on a cluster of coffee plants visible from the winding mountain highway that was eerily empty during the 2019 harvest. "Look, it's red," Solórzano said. "It should be picked, but no one is picking it right now because they won't get much money for it. Most of the coffee falls." With coffee production in other countries driving down prices a...
The San Diego Union-Tribune
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Top positive environmental stories from 2020
All told, this was a pretty bleak year. The COVID-19 pandemic brought tragedy and confusion; fires razed parts of Australia, the Amazon, and the U.S. West; and the world is still barreling headlong into the sixth mass extinction of species. But even in 2020, positive stories and trends emerged: species were brought back from the edge of extinction; interest in renewable energy surged; new protected areas were created; and a few Indigenous women leaders got some long-overdue credit and recognition. Here, in no particular order, we look back at some of the top positive environmental stories from...
Mongabay
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Famed Climatologist Charlie Munger
We were fortunate to watch a recent interview Charlie Munger did with Caltech as a distinguished alum. We consider him to be one of the most successful contrarian investment thinkers on the planet. At 96 years of age, he has no fear of being politically incorrect. We contrast this with the mountain of writing, media and rhetoric associated with the topic of climate change. Q3 2020 hedge fund letters, conferences and more Munger on Climate Change“This is a subject with a great deal of disagreement. The worst thing that can happen in climate change can be coped with by the civilized world. We ca...
ValueWalk
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Critical temperature threshold spells shorter lives for tropical trees
Tropical trees have shorter life spans than trees in other parts of the world, living, for example, just over half as long as temperate trees. A new analysis suggests that, as the world warms up, tropical trees will live even shorter lives, spelling trouble for global biodiversity and carbon stocks. A new study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) suggests that in warm tropical lowlands, tree longevity decreases when forests become drier and when the mean annual temperatures is greater than 25.4° Celsius (77.7° Fahrenheit). “Our findings — which are t...
Mongabay
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No endangered listing for monarch butterflies as western count hits alarming low
The iconic monarch butterfly (Danaus plexippus) meets the criteria to be listed under the U.S. Endangered Species Act — but will not be listed just yet because priority will be given to other species, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) announced Dec. 15. This leaves the monarch as “a candidate species” for possible listing under the Endangered Species Act (ESA) in the future. As a candidate, its status will be reviewed each year until it is either added to the ESA or the populations recover. “We in the Fish and Wildlife Service just concluded one of the most rigorous species status ass...
Mongabay
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Brazil scientists map forest regrowth keeping Amazon from collapse: Study
When Celso Silva Junior, a Ph.D. candidate at the Brazilian Institute for Space Research (INPE), stepped back from his recently completed map of Brazil’s secondary forests, he was surprised by the sheer quantity that had grown back since the 1980s. About a third of Brazil’s lost forests have recovered naturally, an area approximately the size of the United Kingdom — 262,791 square kilometers (101,464 square miles), according to the map Junior published in a recent study in the journal Scientific Data in collaboration with 11 other researchers. But until the article’s publication this past Augu...
Mongabay
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