By David Ljunggren, with additional reporting by Jeff Jones in Calgary; editing by Peter Galloway26 January 2012 OTTAWA (Reuters) – Canada disassociated itself on Thursday from an embarrassing official policy paper that said the country’s independent energy regulator, now studying a controversial oil pipeline, is in fact a government ally. Critics have long charged the […]
26 January 2012 (AP) – Thailand’s revered national symbol, the elephant, may face a new threat of extinction: being poached not just for their tusks, but for their meat. Two wild elephants were found slaughtered last month in a national park in western Thailand, alerting authorities to the new practice of consuming elephant meat “The […]
By ALEXEI BARRIONUEVO24 January 2012 SÃO PAULO, Brazil – Brazil has made great strides in recent years in slowing Amazon deforestation and showing the world it was serious about protecting the mammoth rain forest. The rate of deforestation fell by 80 percent over the past six years, as the government carved out about 150 million […]
January 24 (mongabay.com) – The Sumatran elephant subspecies (Elephas maximus sumatranus) was downgraded to critically endangered on IUCN’s Red List of Threatened Species on Tuesday, prompting environmental group WWF to call for an immediate moratorium on destruction of its rainforest habitat, which is being rapidly lost to oil palm estates, timber plantations for pulp and […]
By Jeremy Hance, www.mongabay.com19 January 2012 Damming of the Xingu River has begun in Brazil to make way for the eventual construction of the hugely controversial, Belo Monte dam. The Norte Energia (NESA) consortium has begun building coffer dams across the Xingu, which will dry out parts of the river before permanent damming, reports the […]
By SIMON ROMERO14 January 2012 RIO BRANCO, Brazil – Edmar Araújo still remembers the awe. As he cleared trees on his family’s land decades ago near Rio Branco, an outpost in the far western reaches of the Brazilian Amazon, a series of deep earthen avenues carved into the soil came into focus. “These lines were […]
Eyes of the Forest analyzed government concession data and EoF’s own remote sensing analysis and field investigations of almost 1.2 million hectares of SMG/APP associated concessions in its mostly Riau study area covering close to 940,000 hectares of HTI (industrial timber plantation) concessions and around 45,000 hectares of a HPH selective logging concession that allows […]
By Cassandra James, Asia Travel Examiner4 January 2012 Just as the north of Thailand and Bangkok has begun the clean-up after our massive flooding that lasted more than three months, the south of the country is now experiencing flooding — for the third time in just a few months. While some southern cities like Nakhon […]
ISI Web of Science search of the trend in published reports of climate-related forest mortality in the scientific literature, for the years 1985–2009. Plotted bars show the percent of references using the topic words “forest AND mortality AND drought”, relative to all “forest” references. Line represents the linear regression model fitted to the data (R2 […]
Contact: Dr Michael Taylor, m.taylor@landcoalition.org, Programme Manager, Global Policy and Africa International Land Coalition Secretariat at IFAD, Tel: +39 065459 2267 The most comprehensive study of large land acquisitions in developing countries to date — published online on 14 December by the International Land Coalition (ILC) — has found more evidence of harm than benefits. […]
