15 April 2013 (Reuters) – Coal-fired power generation in Asia and cattle ranching in South America are the most damaging businesses for nature with hidden costs that exceed the value of their production, a U.N.-backed report said on Monday. Global output of basic goods from cement to wheat caused damage totalling $7.3 trillion a year […]
By Paulo Padilha and Felipe Milanez 15 April 2013 (VICE) – The city of Marabá was founded on 6 April 1913, in the southeastern edge of the Amazon rainforest on a narrow strip of land where the rivers Tocantins and Itacaiunas meet. For the first several decades of its existence, the city’s economy was dependent […]
5 April 2013 (Reuters) – Rising foreign demand for beef and soybeans will tempt Brazil to clear more of the Amazon rainforest, in a reversal of recent success in slowing forest losses, a study said on Thursday. About 30 per cent of deforestation in Brazil in the decade to 2010 was due to farmers and […]
By Jonathan Watts3 April 2013 Rio de Janeiro (guardian.co.uk) – An Amazonian community has threatened to “go to war” with the Brazilian government after what they say is a military incursion into their land by dam builders. The Munduruku indigenous group in Para state say they have been betrayed by the authorities, who are pushing […]
By Jonathan Kaiman26 March 2013 BEIJING (guardian.co.uk) – Ecuador plans to auction off more than three million hectares of pristine Amazonian rainforest to Chinese oil companies, angering indigenous groups and underlining the global environmental toll of China’s insatiable thirst for energy. On Monday morning a group of Ecuadorean politicians pitched bidding contracts to representatives of […]
1 February 2013 (mongabay.com) – The rate of tree mortality in the Amazon rainforest due to storm damage and drought is 9-17 percent higher than conventionally believed, reports a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). Comparing Landsat satellite images with on-the-ground observations, researchers from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, […]
29 January 2013 (mongabay.com) – NASA satellites picked up signals of extensive potential deforestation in Sumatra, Borneo, Central Africa, the Brazilian and Peruvian Amazon, the Chocó in Colombia and Ecuador, and the Chaco region of Paraguay between October 1 and December 31, 2012, according to the latest update on Mongabay.com’s Global Forest Disturbance Alert System […]
Contact: Alan Buis, Alan.buis@jpl.nasa.gov, 818-354-0474 Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California17 January 2013 PASADENA, California (Jet Propulsion Laboratory) – An area of the Amazon rainforest twice the size of California continues to suffer from the effects of a megadrought that began in 2005, finds a new NASA-led study. These results, together with observed recurrences of droughts […]
By SIMON ROMERO24 November 2012 PARAUAPEBAS, Brazil (The New York Times) — The Amazon has been viewed for ages as a vast quilt of rain forest interspersed by remote river outposts. But the surging population growth of cities in the jungle is turning that rural vision on its head and alarming scientists, as an array […]
Media Inquiries: 202.473.7660, media@worldbank.org18 November 2012 (World Bank) – Like summer’s satellite image of the melting Greenland ice sheet, a new report suggests time may be running out to temper the rising risks of climate change. Turn Down the Heat: Why a 4°C Warmer World Must be Avoided, [pdf, eBook] warns we’re on track for […]
