By Marie Jégo 27 November 2012 (Guardian Weekly) – At Tegul’det (population 3,000), a village in the south-east corner of Tomsk oblast, it takes a lot to upset the residents, busy hunting, fishing and preening their vegetable patches, except during the six long winter months, when their only distraction is cutting holes in the ice […]
BEIJING, 29 November 2012 (EIA) – China, emergent superpower and the world’s second biggest economy, is effectively standing on the sidelines as its exponential growth devastates forests in a trade worth billions of dollars a year. In the new report Appetite for Destruction: China’s Trade in Illegal Timber, launched today in Beijing, the London-based Environmental […]
By Jeremy Hance29 November 2012 (mongabay.com) – Runaway economic growth comes with costs: in the case of China’s economic engine, one of them has been the world’s forests. According to a new report by the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA), China has become the number one importer of illegal wood products from around the world. Illegal […]
By Jon Gambrell 28 November 2012 By the time ranchers found the rhinoceros calf wandering alone in this idyllic setting of scrub brush and acacia, the nature reserve had become yet another blood-soaked crime scene in South Africa’s losing battle against poachers. Hunters killed eight rhinos at the private Finfoot Game Reserve inside the Vaalkop […]
By Thuy Binh25 November 2012 AN BIEN, Vietnam (IPS) – For the last decade, many families in this southwestern Vietnamese province have been uprooted at least once every two years – but this is not due to economic or political upheaval. Rather, extreme weather has forcibly turned many of these coast-dwellers into unwilling travellers, as […]
By Jeremy Hance8 October 2012 (mongabay.com) – From 1990 to 2010 almost all palm oil expansion in Kalimantan came at the expense of forest cover, according to the most detailed look yet at the oil palm industry in the Indonesian state, published in Nature: Climate Change. Palm oil plantations now cover 31,640 square kilometers of […]
By Gwen Ackerman 23 October 2012 The Dead Sea is shrinking at a record rate, prompting calls for Israel and Jordan to stop fertilizer makers from siphoning so much of the water whose restorative powers have attracted visitors since biblical times. The salty inland lake bordering the nations dropped a record 1.5 meters (4.9 feet) […]
By KIRK JOHNSON11 October 2012 FERNDALE, Washington – At age 94, Mary Helen Cagey, an elder of the Lummi Indian tribe, has seen a lot of yesterdays. Some are ripe for fond reminiscence, like the herring that used to run rich in the waters here in the nation’s upper-left margin, near the border with Canada. […]
16 October 2012 (ReliefWeb) – Flash floods prompted by monsoon rains across Pakistan in the third week of August 2012 affected Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) and Gilgit Baltistan (GB) provinces, and Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJ & K) state. A second spell of monsoon rainfall started over the southern parts of the country from the end […]
12 October 2012 (United Nations) – With nearly five million Pakistanis hit by floods that have already claimed some 400 lives, ruined tens of thousands of houses and vast swathes of crops, and left hundreds of thousands living in camps or simply under tarpaulins, the United Nations today appealed for more donations to bolster relief […]
