By Uki Goñi 1 April 2018Villa Mercedes, Argentina (The Guardian) – After a night of heavy rainfall, Ana Risatti woke to an ominous roar outside her home. Mistaking the noise for a continuation of the night’s downpour, she stepped outside to look. “I nearly fainted when I saw what it really was,” said Risatti, 71. […]
By Morgan Erickson-Davis 2 February 2018 (Mongabay) – A new study finds small-scale deforestation in the Amazon rainforest has been increasing over the past decade, with new hotspots emerging in Bolivia and Peru. The news somewhat dampens Brazil’s touted successes at combatting deforestation, with researchers saying the country’s forest monitoring system is not capable of […]
By Mariana Zuñiga 12 March 2018 CARACAS, Venezuela (NBC News) – Antonio Perez, 73, a semiretired real estate agent, woke up at 5 a.m. to stand in line outside a bank to cash his monthly pension. His breakfast was a cup of coffee.By the time he arrived, there were already 140 people there waiting to […]
By Claire Asher 28 February 2018 (Mongabay) – The scale of hydroelectric development in the Andean Amazon is far more extensive than previously thought, with numerous headwater dams fragmenting river habitats, disrupting natural systems, and affecting the lives and livelihoods of 30 million downstream Amazon basin inhabitants, according to a new study published in Science […]
By Sue Branford 1 March 2018 (Mongabay) – In what many consider Brazil’s most important ruling ever about the environment, the Supreme Court on Thursday rejected, by a tight vote of 6 to 5, some of the most important charges of “unconstitutionality” brought against the New Forest Code – the Law of Native Protection (12.651/2012).The […]
21 February 2018 (Nature) – Decarbonization of the world’s economy would bring colossal disruption of the status quo. It’s a desire to avoid that change — political, financial and otherwise — that drives many of the climate sceptics. Still, as this journal has noted numerous times, it’s clear that many policymakers who argue that emissions […]
14 February 2018 (Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research) – Tropical forests around the world play a key role in the global carbon cycle and harbour more than half of the species worldwide. However, increases in land use during the past decades caused unprecedented losses of tropical forest. Scientists at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research […]
By Barbara Fraser 23 February 2018 (Nature) – The jaguar was found floating in a drainage canal in Belize City, Belize, on the day after Christmas last year. Its body was mostly intact, but the head was missing its fangs. On 10 January 2018, a second cat — this time, an ocelot that may have […]
Arlington, Virginia, 12 February 2018 (Conservation International) – A study published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) finds that protected areas that are deforested are more likely to subsequently lose legal protections.The study examined 62 protected areas in Rondônia, Brazil, home to immense stretches of the Amazon, and found […]
14 February 2018 (UN News) – “This is an urgent signal for action, and the report recommends the directions to follow,” Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, the Executive Director of UN Women, said on the launch of the new report, Turning promises into action: Gender Equality in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.Speaking to reporters at UN Headquarters […]
