deforestation – Page 5 – Desdemona Despair

Poster demanding justice for Dom Phillips, a British journalist, and Bruno Pereira, a Brazilian expert on indigenous people, who were murdered while doing investigative work in a remote region of the Amazon rainforest in early June 2022. Graphic: Cris Vector

June 27, 2022

Assassinated British journalist Dom Phillips and Indigenous expert Bruno Pereira laid to rest in Brazil – Indigenous group Univaja demands probe into murders – “They tried to tell the world what was happening to the rainforest and its inhabitants”

By Tom Phillips and Andrew Downie 26 June 2022 Niterói (The Guardian) – The British journalist Dom Phillips has been laid to rest in Brazil, exactly three weeks after he was gunned down while journeying through the Amazon with the Indigenous expert Bruno Pereira. Pereira and Phillips, a longtime Guardian contributor, disappeared while travelling on […]

Aerial view of an illegal mining operation on Yanomami land in Roraima, in the Amazon rainforest. By April 2021, a Greenpeace flyover had already shown the expansion of the mine in the Yanomami land, which a year later was the second most deforested indigenous territory in the entire Amazon. Photo: Christian Braga / Greenpeace

June 4, 2022

Amazon deforestation in April 2022 increased by 54 percent, making it the worst April in the last 15 years

11 May 2022 (Imazon) – The Amazon is getting closer and closer to suffering from a new annual record for deforestation. However, there is still time to reduce forest loss before the so-called “deforestation calendar” closes at the end of July. And the time to act must be now, because in May begins the dry […]

Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro arrives at a resort hotel to meet with Elon Musk in Porto Feliz, Brazil, Friday, 20 May 2022. The Telsa and SpaceX chief executive officer tweeted that he was in Brazil to help bring Internet service to rural schools in the Amazon and to help monitor the Amazon environmentally. Photo: Andre Penner / AP Photo

May 22, 2022

Elon Musk visits Brazil’s Bolsonaro to discuss Amazon plans

By Diane Jeantet 20 May 2022 RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) – Tesla and SpaceX chief executive officer Elon Musk met with Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro on Friday to discuss connectivity and other projects in the Amazon rainforest. The meeting, held in a luxurious resort in Sao Paulo state, was organized by Communications Minister Fábio Faria, who has […]

Russia tree cover loss, 2001-2021. The rate of loss in in boreal forests reached unprecedented levels in 2021, increasing by 29 percent over 2020. An unprecedented fire season in Russia drove much of this increase. Russia experienced the worst fire season since record-keeping began in 2001, with more than 6.5 million hectares of tree cover loss in 2021. While fires are a natural part of boreal forest ecosystems, larger, more intense fires are worrying. Hotter, drier weather related to climate change has led to fire-prone conditions, drier peatlands and melted permafrost. Siberia’s vast peatland area — the largest in the world — stores massive amounts of carbon, which is released into the atmosphere when peat dries up. Melting permafrost also releases stored carbon and methane. These conditions may represent a new normal, impacting people living in Siberia and creating a feedback loop in which increasing fires and carbon emissions reinforce each other and lead to worsening conditions. Graphic: WRI

May 8, 2022

Vast forest losses in 2021 imperil global climate targets, report says – “We’re seeing fires burning more frequently, more intensively and more broadly than they ever would under normal conditions”

By Jake Spring 28 April 2022 SAO PAULO, April 28 (Reuters) – The world lost an area of forest the size of the U.S. state of Wyoming last year, as wildfires in Russia set all-time records and Brazilian deforestation of the Amazon remains high, a global forest monitoring project report said on Thursday. Global Forest Watch, which […]

U.S. soybean oil futures, U.N. FAO edible oils index, and Malaysia palm oil futures, 2002-2022. Global edible oil prices have soared to all-time highs in 2022 on supply shocks. Graphic: Refinitiv / Reuters

April 23, 2022

Indonesia bans palm oil exports as global food inflation spikes – “Sky would be the limit for edible oil prices now”

By Fransiska Nangoy 22 April 2022 JAKARTA (Reuters) – Indonesia, the world’s top palm oil producer, announced plans to ban exports of the most widely used vegetable oil on Friday, in a shock move that could further inflame surging global food inflation. The halting of shipments of the cooking oil and its raw material, widely […]

$Changes in Amazon vegetation resilience since the 1990s and from 2003. (a) A map of the Kendall τ values of individual grid cells from 2003. (b) Histogram of the Kendall τ values for the Amazon rainforest, considering data from 2003 onwards. Of the grid cells, 76.2 percent have a positive Kendall τ value from 2003 onwards and 77.8 percent have this for the full time series. (c) Mean Vegetation Optical Depth (VOD) AR(1) time series (solid line) along with ±1 s.d. (dotted lines) created from grid cells that have BL fraction ≥80 percent in the Amazon basin and also contain no human land use (main text and Methods). The full AR(1) time series from 1991 (grey) has a Kendall τ value of 0.589 (P = 0.006) and from 2003 (black), a value of 0.913 (P$

March 20, 2022

The Amazon Rainforest is approaching a tipping point beyond which it would become savannah – “When it will be observable, it would likely be too late to stop it”

By Eric Shank 14 March 2022 (Salon) – A vast expanse of unique biological diversity hangs in the balance as the “lungs of the world” approach a tipping point from which there is no recovery. The Amazon Rainforest is losing its ability to regenerate, reported a peer-reviewed study, Monday, in Nature Climate Change. For 10% of all known species on […]

Aerial view of an area in the Amazon deforested for the expansion of livestock, in Lábrea, Amazonas state. The Amazon is still covered in smoke and torn by criminal and unrestrained destruction, according to overflights produced by the Amazon in Flames Alliance, organized by Amazon Watch, Greenpeace Brazil and the Brazilian Climate Observatory. The expedition took place between September 13th and 17th 2021, in the cities of Porto Velho (Rondônia state) and Lábrea (southern Amazonas state). Photo: Victor Moriyama / Amazônia em Chamas / Greenpeace

March 15, 2022

Brazil detects record Amazon deforestation in January and February 2022 – Forest destruction rate in 2021 was highest in ten years

By David Biller 11 March 2022 RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) – Detected deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon reached a record high for the month of February following a similar record the prior month. Satellite alerts of deforestation in February corresponded to 199 square kilometers (77 square miles), the highest indicator for that month in seven […]

Global greenhouse gas emissions, 1990-2020. The reduction in emissions in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic and global recession was 10 times greater than the impact on emissions from the 2008 global financial crisis. Graphic: Rhodium Group

January 9, 2022

Global greenhouse gas reduction in 2020 from pandemic and global recession “was 10 times greater than the impact on emissions from the 2008 global financial crisis”

By Alfredo Rivera, Shweta Movalia, Hannah Pitt, and Kate Larsen 23 December 2021 (Rhodium Group) – Understanding annual trends in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions is a critical input for decision-makers in their efforts to reach net-zero emissions, whether is at the national, state, city, or corporate levels. Tracking emissions of the 190+ Parties to the […]

South African environmental activist Fikile Ntshangase was assassinated by four gunmen in her own home on 22 October 2020. “Mama” Ntshangase was a leading member of the Mfolozi Community Environmental Justice Organisation, which is taking legal action against the proposed expansion of an open-cast coal mine operated by Tendele Coal near Somkhele, situated near Hluhluwe–Imfolozi park, the oldest nature reserve in Africa. Photo: Rob Symons / All Rise

September 13, 2021

Record number of environmental activists murdered in 2020 – “Fighting the climate crisis carries an unbearably heavy burden for some, who risk their lives to save the forests, rivers, and biospheres”

By Claire Marshall 13 September 2021 (BBC) – A record number of activists working to protect the environment and land rights were murdered last year, according to a report by a campaign group. 227 people were killed around the world in 2020, the highest number recorded for a second consecutive year, the report from Global […]

Time series of climate-related responses to anthropogenic drivers, 1990-2020. Out of the 31 tracked planetary vital signs, 18 were at new all-time record lows or highs in 2020. Data obtained before and after the publication of Ripple and colleagues (2020) are shown in gray and red respectively. For variables with relatively high variability, local regression trend lines are shown in black. The variables were measured at various frequencies (e.g., annual, monthly, weekly). The labels on the x-axis correspond to midpoints of years. Sources and additional details about each variable are provided in the supplemental material. Graphic: Ripple, et al., 2021 / BioScience

July 31, 2021

World scientists’ warning of a climate emergency 2021 – Humans face untold suffering from “the consequences of unrelenting business as usual”

28 July 2021 (BioScience) – In 2019, Ripple and colleagues (2020) warned of untold suffering and declared a climate emergency together with more than 11,000 scientist signatories from 153 countries. They presented graphs of planetary vital signs indicating very troubling trends, along with little progress by humanity to address climate change. On the basis of […]