www.mongabay.comOctober 12, 2010 Brazil will auction large blocks of the Amazon rainforest to private timber companies as part of an effort to reduce demand for illegal logging, reports Reuters. The government will grant 1 million hectares (2.5 million acres) of logging concessions by the end of the year, according to Antonio Carlos Hummel, head of […]
Monday, October 11, 2010 A couple of months ago, I traveled with my Amazon Watch colleagues Mitch and Kevin into the Ecuadorian Amazon, where we met up with our friend Donald, an activist with the Amazon Defense Coalition. In this video, Mitch and Donald illustrate Chevron’s toxic legacy in Ecuador, in the form of one […]
ScienceDaily (Oct. 11, 2010) — The soils in large areas of the Southern Hemisphere, including major portions of Australia, Africa and South America, have been drying up in the past decade, a group of researchers conclude in the first major study to ever examine “evapotranspiration” on a global basis. Most climate models have suggested that […]
By Rhett A. Butler, www.mongabay.comOctober 06, 2010 A new global assessment of forest stocks by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) shows a sharp acceleration of primary forest loss since 2005 despite gains in the extent of protected areas. FAO’s Global Forest Resources Assessment 2010 reveals some 13 million hectares of forest were cleared […]
By Jeremy Hance, www.mongabay.com September 27, 2010 Spreading over three central African nations—Cameroon, Central African Republic, and Republic of Congo—the Sangha tri-national landscape is home to a variety of actors: over 150,000 Bantu people and nearly 20,000 pygmies; endangered species including forest elephants and gorillas; and, not least, the Congo rainforest ecosystem itself, which here […]
Contact: Karen Hinton at 703-798-3109 or Karen@hintoncommunications.com 17 September 2010 Lago Agrio, Ecuador (September 17) – A group of highly respected American technical and medical experts, using conservative assumptions, have concluded that it could cost Chevron up to tens of billions of dollars to clean up oil waste discharged into Ecuador’s rainforest and compensate local […]
www.mongabay.com September 07, 2010 San Rafael Falls, Ecuador’s tallest waterfall, is threatened by a Chinese-funded hydroelectric project, reports Save America’s Forests, an environmental group. The 1,500 megawatt Coca-Codo Sinclair Hydroelectric Project will divert water flow away from the 480-foot San Rafael Falls, leaving it “high and dry.” Worse, the project, which is scheduled for completion […]
www.wildmadagascar.orgSeptember 06, 2010 Despite government assurances that it would crack down on the rosewood trade, illegal logging continues in Madagascar’s rainforest parks, according to new information provided by sources on the ground. The sources report logging in three parks: Mananara, Makira, and Masoala. All three are known for their high levels of biodiversity, including endangered […]
Palo Alto, CA—By integrating satellite mapping, airborne-laser technology, and ground-based plot surveys, scientists from the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology, with colleagues from the World Wildlife Fund and in coordination with the Peruvian Ministry of the Environment (MINAM), have revealed the first high-resolution maps of carbon locked up in tropical forest vegetation and emitted […]
The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite detected 148,946 fires in this image on August 23, 2010. The fires are outlined in red. Most of the fires are concentrated in Bolivia, where the governments of two states had declared a state of emergency because of widespread fires three days earlier. Scores of […]
