A sign that reads in Portuguese “Justice for Dom and Bruno” and with images of the British journalist Dom Phillips, on the left, and the indigenous specialist Bruno Pereira is displayed on the Arcos da Lapa aqueduct during a protest by environmental groups in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 26 June 2022. Brazilian police said Monday, 23 January 2023, they planned to indict Ruben Dario da Silva Villar, a Colombian fish trader, as the mastermind of the murders. Photo: Bruna Prado / AP Photo

Brazil police: Businessman ordered killings of men in Amazon

By Fabiano Maisonnave 23 January 2023 SAO PAULO (AP) – Brazilian police said Monday they planned to indict a Colombian fish trader as the mastermind of last year’s slayings of Indigenous expert Bruno Pereira and British journalist Dom Phillips. Ruben Dario da Silva Villar provided the ammunition to kill the pair, made phone calls to […]

Carbon credits claimed by Verra rainforest carbon credits vs. real emissions reductions. At least 90 percent of claimed credits do not represent real emissions reductions. Graphic: The Guardian

More than 90 percent of rainforest carbon offsets by biggest certifier are worthless, analysis shows – “It’s disappointing and scary”

By Patrick Greenfield 18 January 2023 (The Guardian) – The forest carbon offsets approved by the world’s leading certifier and used by Disney, Shell, Gucci and other big corporations are largely worthless and could make global heating worse, according to a new investigation. The research into Verra, the world’s leading carbon standard for the rapidly growing $2bn (£1.6bn) […]

The carcass of an elephant that died during the drought is seen in the Shaba National Reserve, Isiolo county, Kenya, 22 September 2022. Photo: Baz Ratner / REUTERS

Reuters pictures of the year: Extreme weather in 2022

30 December 2022 (Reuters) – From historic droughts to floods, climate change worsened weather extremes in 2022. See more 2022 extreme weather and environment photos from Reuters here and here. Pictures of the year: Extreme weather in 2022

Aerial view of the dried-up Manambovo River in Tsihombe, Madagascar in November 2022. Its dry bed is pocked with holes dug by desperate residents searching for water. Photo: DW

Video: Digging for water in a Madagascar riverbed – “We brought all the kids here, and now they work as water carriers”

By Adrian Kriesch 19 November 2022 Years of low rainfall in southern Madagascar are creating a food crisis, the UN World Food Programme has warned. DW correspondent Adrian Kriesch visited Tsiombe, where the situation is particularly dire. Watch the video here. Digging for water in a Madagascar riverbed

An aerial view shows deforestation near a forest on the border between Amazonia and Cerrado in Nova Xavantina, Mato Grosso state, Brazil 28 July 2021. Picture taken 28 July 2021 with a drone. Photo: Amanda Perobelli / REUTERS

Deforestation of Brazilian savanna surged 25 percent in one year – “More than 10,000 square km is a scary number”

By Jake Spring 13 December 2022 SAO PAULO, Dec 13 (Reuters) – Deforestation in the world’s most biologically diverse savanna, the Brazilian Cerrado, rose by around 25 percent in the 12 months through July from the previous period, two people familiar with the still unreleased government data told Reuters. Brazil has yet to publish its […]

A person wearing a carved wooden mask takes part with other people in a march during COP15, the two-week U.N. Biodiversity summit in Montreal, Quebec, Canada on 10 December 2022. Photo: Christinne Muschi / REUTERS

Activists dressed as birds and trees rally for nature at COP15 in Montreal – “We see what is happening and it is clearly not sufficient compared to our ambitions and our priorities”

By Gloria Dickie 10 December 2022 MONTREAL (Reuters) – Hundreds of people on Saturday braved sub-zero temperatures to march the streets of Montreal, the host city of this year’s U.N. biodiversity summit, demanding a strong new deal to protect nature worldwide. Wearing costumes to look like birds, trees, and caribou, activists said the COP15 summit could fail […]

Number of Western Monarch butterflies (left) and butterfly surveys (right), 1997-2021. In the western United States, the number of individual butterflies has been steadily decreasing over the past four decades, at a rate of around 1.6% every year, according to a March 2021 study in the journal Science. The iconic Monarch butterfly is one of the species in trouble. Warmer autumn temperatures, an effect of climate change, may be interfering with the butterflies’ hibernation-like period known as diapause. So rather than slowing down ahead of winter, the insects are staying awake longer, expending more energy, and eventually starving to death. In July 2022, the migratory monarch was added to the IUCN’s global endangered species list. Graphic: Catherine Tai / Reuters

The collapse of insects – “They’re the fabric tethering together every freshwater and terrestrial ecosystem across the planet”

By Julia Janicki, Gloria Dickie, Simon Scarr and Jitesh Chowdhury 6 December 2022 (Reuters) – As a boy in the 1960s, David Wagner would run around his family’s Missouri farm with a glass jar clutched in his hand, scooping flickering fireflies out of the sky. “We could fill it up and put it by our […]

Smoke rises from a forest fire in the Transamazonica highway region, in the municipality of Labrea, Amazonas state, Brazil, 17 September 2022. Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon slowed slightly last year, a year after a 15-year high, according to closely watched numbers published Wednesday, 30 November 2022. Photo: Edmar Barros / AP Photo

Amazon deforestation in Brazil remains near 15-year high in 2022 – “If da Silva wants to decrease forest destruction by 2023, he must have zero tolerance for environmental crime from Day One of his administration”

By Fabiano Maisonnave 30 November 2022 RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) – Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon slowed slightly last year, a year after a 15-year high, according to closely watched numbers published Wednesday. The data was released by the National Institute for Space Research. The agency’s Prodes monitoring system shows the rainforest lost an area […]

Deforested area of Amazon rainforest in Brazil, 2006-2021, with large increases shown during the Bolsonaro regime. Data: Brazil National Institute for Space Research (INPE). Graphic: DW

Lula insists “Brazil is back” at UN climate summit

By Stuart Braun 16 November 2022 (DW) – One of the most-watched visitors to the UN climate summit in Egypt this week has been incoming Brazilian president, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva — more commonly referred to as Lula. With his successful election campaign having included a promise to arrest record deforestation in the Amazon, Lula carried huge expectations into the yearly climate summit […]

Components of the global carbon budget and their uncertainties, 1960-2021 and projected to 2022. Components are presented individually for (a) fossil CO2 and cement carbonation emissions (EFOS), (b) growth rate in atmospheric CO2 concentration (GATM), (c) emissions from land-use change (ELUC), (d) the land CO2 sink (SLAND), (e) the ocean CO2 sink (SOCEAN), and (f) the budget imbalance that is not accounted for by the other terms. Positive values of SLAND and SOCEAN represent a flux from the atmosphere to land or the ocean. All data are in GtC yr−1 with the uncertainty bounds representing ±1 standard deviation in shaded colour. Data sources are as in Fig. 3. The red dots indicate our projections for the year 2022, and the red error bars the uncertainty in the projections. Graphic: Friedlingstein, et al., 2022 / Earth System Science Data

Global Carbon Budget 2022: Global carbon emissions in 2022 remain at record levels – No sign of decrease in global CO2 emissions – “This year we see yet another rise in global fossil CO2 emissions, when we need a rapid decline”

11 November 2022 (Global Carbon Project) – Global carbon emissions in 2022 remain at record levels – with no sign of the decrease that is urgently needed to limit warming to 1.5°C, according to the Global Carbon Project science team (Global Carbon Budget 2022). If current emissions levels persist, there is now a 50% chance […]

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