Air quality in Malaysian Borneo is worsening as large numbers of fires rage near the Sarawak-Brunei border, reports the Star newspaper. The Air Pollutant Index (API) reached as high as 197 in parts of Sarawak on Sunday, according to Malaysia’s Environment Department. Fires are set in Sarawak to clear brush and forest in and around […]
Despite violent protests by indigenous groups over plans to expand oil and gas exploration in the Peru’s Amazon rainforest, energy investments in the South American country are expected to increase to $1.5 billion in both 2009 and 2010, reports Reuters. Daniel Saba, president of Perupetro, Peru’s energy agency, told Reuters that the government will auction […]
Though Brazil has pledged to slow Amazon deforestation, and several groups are making headlines trying to tackle the leading cause of that deforestation, cattle ranching, AFP reports new data from Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research that shows the area of trees chopped down in June was four times that of May: In June some […]
By now I’m sure you know that deforestation is a major source of carbon emissions — in fact more than all the fuel burned for transportation — which would be enough to worry about, except that when it comes to emissions from chopping down trees in the Amazon, those emissions are actually increasing as […]
Commentary by Hambone Littletail Barely six weeks after dozens of Amazon natives were gunned down in cold blood by the Peruvian Army in the oil town of Bagua for protesting the cozy relationship between Big Oil and the government of President Alan Garcia, I find myself on the banks of the Mother of God River […]
By Michael Smith and Adriana Brasileiro July 31 (Bloomberg) — For four decades, Edimar Bentes and his family have survived by farming tiny clearings in the jungle near their dirt-floor shack in the state of Para in the Brazilian Amazon. On this April afternoon, Bentes, 56, squats in the driving rain and dips a glass […]
Swiss banks, Credit Suisse and UBS, together with the French BNP Paribas, are helping Singapore-listed Golden Agri-Resources raise up to 280 million Swiss francs ($258 million) to finance conversion of large areas of rainforest in New Guinea and Borneo for oil palm plantations, reports the Bruno Manser Fund (BMF), a group that campaigns on behalf […]
Researchers are starting to make sense of a severe drought that ravaged the Amazon rainforest four years ago. Their findings are terrifying. By Paul Brown In the summer of 2005, the Amazon rainforest suffered the worst drought it had seen in a century. Whole tributaries of the Amazon River dried up, leaving ferries stranded on […]
By Tim Hirsch Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has approved a controversial bill allowing Amazon farmers to acquire an area of public land larger than France. But the president vetoed some of the most contentious clauses that would have enabled absentee landlords and companies to benefit from the measure. Smaller parcels of public […]
A Scottish firm has been implicated in funding a plan that would destroy the rainforest habitat of critically endangered orangutans in Sumatra. Jardine Matheson Holdings is the majority shareholder of Astra Agro Lestar, a palm oil company that plans to develop the peatland forests of Tripa in Aceh Province for oil palm plantations. Environmentalists say […]
