By Dimitra DeFotis4 September 2015 (Barron’s) – Moody’s Investors Service said in a note this week that the credit rating of Sao Paulo, Brazil’s drought-starved water utility Companhia de Saneamento Basico do Estado de São Paulo or Sabesp (SBS) is at risk. As the Brazilian real stumbles lower against the dollar, shares of Sabesp, the […]
By Deirdre Fulton, staff writer2 September 2015 (Common Dreams) – Demanding reparations for industrial pollution and adequate compensation for use of native lands, Indigenous activists in Peru shut down 11 wells in an Amazonian oil block on Tuesday. According to the Spanish EFE news agency, native protesters led by the Federation of the Achuar and […]
By Cally Carswell5 September 2015 (The Guardian) – Last September, US Geological Survey ecologist Nate Stephenson hiked into Sequoia National Park’s Giant Forest to look for dying seedlings. California was suffering through its third year of severe drought, and trees were dying in the park in greater numbers than usual. The roadside leading up to […]
By Michael E. Miller 27 August 2015 (Washington Post) – The killers came from the forest, the very same forest Raimundo Santos Rodrigues so loved. The environmentalist had spent years defending one of the last pristine swathes of the eastern Amazon rain forest from loggers, miners and farmers. But his activism had earned him enemies […]
By Vincent Bevins10 July 2015 (Los Angeles Times) – Carrying guns and wearing jungle fatigues, the three men don’t look like scientists as they push their way through the thick foliage of the Amazon. They’re trying to reach a clearing they’ve seen on satellite images. When they finally get there, they discover that the largest […]
By David Mcfadden10 August 2015 KINGSTON, Jamaica (Associated Press) – The picture-perfect beaches and turquoise waters that people expect on their visits to the Caribbean are increasingly being fouled by mats of decaying seaweed that attract biting sand fleas and smell like rotten eggs. Clumps of the brownish seaweed known as sargassum have long washed […]
By David Volodzko5 August 2015 CHENGDU, China (Global Post) – While China clamps down on logging within its borders, illegal Chinese loggers are felling the world’s forests with abandon for the sake of teak floors and fancy chairs. In late July, 153 Chinese nationals were sentenced to life in prison for illegal logging in Myanmar’s […]
28 July 2015 (Institute of Physics) – A global “gold rush” has led to a significant increase of deforestation in the tropical forests of South America. This is according to a study published in IOP Publishing’s journal Environmental Research Letters, which has highlighted the growing environmental impact of gold mining in some of the […]
By Antônio Fonseca, Carlos Souza Jr., and Adalberto Veríssimo May 2015 (Imazon) – In May 2015, SAD detected 389 square kilometers of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon with a cloud cover of 39% over the territory. That represented an increase of 110% in relation to May 2014 when deforestation totaled 185 square kilometers and the […]
São Paulo, 16 June 2015 (Associated Press) – Construction of a massive hydroelectric dam is endangering the livelihoods of at least 2,000 families in Brazil’s Amazon jungle state of Pará, according to federal prosecutors who recommend that efforts to move the residents be suspended. The federal prosecutors’ office said in a statement Monday that the […]
