By Olasunkanmi Akoni and Johnbosco Agbakwuru26 March 2012 Lagos – Following the prevalence of heat wave in Lagos State and other parts of the country in the past two weeks, the Lagos State Government has urged residents to reduce the time they stay in the sun by staying indoors more. Environmental experts have also blamed […]
BASEL, SWITZERLAND – The Swiss Bruno Manser Fund (BMF) has today disclosed a series of shocking pictures from the Bakun dam exclusion zone showing disturbing poverty and environmental destruction in the Malaysian state of Sarawak on Borneo. A BMF research team has managed to overcome the tight security measures preventing journalists or NGOs to travel […]
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 […]
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 […]
November 23 (mongabay.com) – A peace accord has been announced to resolve a long-running conflict between a giant state-owned plantation company and local communities on the Indonesian island of Java. The Forest Trust (TFT), an international NGO that works to improve the environmental performance of companies’ supply chains, says it has negotiated a deal under […]
By Camila Ruz, www.guardian.co.uk 16 November 2011 If the current rapid extermination of animals, plants and other species really is the “sixth mass extinction”, then it is the amphibian branch of the tree of life that is undergoing the most drastic pruning. In research described as “terrifying” by an independent expert, scientists predict the future […]
Caption by William L. Stefanov, Jacobs/ESCG at NASA-JSC10 October 2011 The rainforest of South America, also known as Amazonia, has been undergoing a continual and accelerated conversion process into farmlands (including pasture for livestock) since the early 1960s. This process has typically been achieved by clearing the forest using fire—“slash and burn”—followed by planting of […]
October 9 (mongabay.com) – The 2010 drought that affected much of the Amazon rainforest triggered the release of nearly 500 million tons of carbon (1.8 billion tons of carbon dioxide) into the atmosphere, or more than the total emissions from deforestation in the region over the period, estimates a new study published in the journal […]
By JUSTIN GILLIS7 October 2011 In an article last weekend about rising stress in the world’s forests, I briefly mentioned that computer projections regarding the future of forests are still in a primitive state. Scientists cannot really say whether trees will continue to take up a big proportion of our carbon emissions through the rest […]
