forests
Portugal is the world’s leading producer of cork. In 2023, cork exports achieved a record value of €1.2 billion, 75 percent of which came from cork stoppers, according to APCOR, the Portuguese association of cork producers. The Amorim Group, Portugal's leading cork company, claims that around one out of three wine bottles worldwide is sealed with a cork stopper made in Portugal. About 20 years ago, significant concerns emerged that cork might lose market share to synthetic alternatives, which were less expensive and carried no risk of spoiling the wine with 'cork taint'. However, the industry ...
Euronews (English)
Matthew Walley's eyes sweep over the large forest that has sustained his Indigenous community in Liberia for generations. Even as the morning sun casts a golden hue over the canopy, a sense of unease lingers. Their use of the land is being threatened, and they have organised to resist the possibility of losing their livelihood. In the past year, the Liberian government has agreed to sell about 10 per cent of the West African country’s land - equivalent to 10,931 square kilometres - to Dubai-based company Blue Carbon to preserve forests that might otherwise be logged and used for farming, the p...
Euronews (English)
In December 2022, the EU took a historic step in the fight against deforestation. Following years of intense political debate and tireless campaigning by NGOs, the EU Regulation on deforestation-free products (EUDR) became law. For the first time, companies will be banned from selling certain high-risk commodities — including palm oil, cocoa, beef and soy — in the EU, unless they can prove that they are deforestation-free and produced legally. Just a few years ago, the notion that the EU would pass a law constraining companies in this way seemed unattainable. But it became a reality. The need ...
Euronews (English)
Tropical forest loss in Brazil and Colombia fell dramatically last year but fires and a rise in tree felling elsewhere severely counteracted this progress. In 2023, the tropics lost 3.7 million hectares of primary forest - an area just smaller than Bhutan, or the equivalent of losing 10 football fields per minute. That is around 9 per cent less tropical tree cover lost than in 2022, according to an annual survey by the research organisation the World Resources Institute (WRI) and the University of Maryland. Global tree loss would have been much higher without improvements in Brazil and Colombi...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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 ...
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