This publication shows that carbon prices exceeding US$ 20 per ton of CO2 captured by the natural regeneration of deforested areas in the Amazon would be truly transformative for the region’s landscape. Offsets for captured carbon would ensure forest integrity, inducing extensive forest restoration and the capture of 16 Gt …
Cholera outbreaks seem to be on the increase, but a new study has found they cannot be explained by global warming. A bigger factor may be the cycle of droughts and floods along big rivers, according to Tufts University scientists who published a study in The American Journal of Tropical …
Concerns about antibiotics focus on bacterial resistance — but permanent changes to our protective flora could have more serious consequences, says Martin Blaser.
Indigenous protesters are targeting a new road in the Bolivian Amazon, reports the BBC. The 190-mile highway under construction in the Bolivian Amazon will pass through the Isiboro-Secure Indigenous Territory and National Park (Tipnis), a 4,600-square mile (11,900 square kilometers) preserve which boasts exceptional levels of rainforest biodiversity, including endangered …
Inferences about species loss following habitat conversion are typically drawn from short-term surveys, which cannot reconstruct long-term temporal dynamics of extinction and colonization. A long-term view can be critical, however, to determine the stability of communities within fragments. Likewise, landscape dynamics must be considered, as second growth structure and overall …
Rising forest density in many countries is helping to offset climate change caused by deforestation from the Amazon basin to Indonesia, a study showed on Sunday. The report indicated that the size of trees in a forest -- rather than just the area covered -- needed to be taken into …
The Republic of Congo will plant 1 million hectares of trees by 2020 to restore degraded forest and provide wood for paper and fuel, the president said on Friday. President Denis Sassou N'Guesso made the announcement on the final day of a weeklong summit in the Congolese capital, aimed at …
An Amazon rainforest activist and his wife were shot dead in northern Brazil on Tuesday as the country's Congress debated a divisive land bill that threatens to fuel deforestation. Joao Claudio Ribeiro da Silva, a rubber tapper and leading forest conservationist, and his wife Maria do Espirito Santo were ambushed …
Expansion of global demand for soy products and biofuel poses threats to food security and the environment. One environmental impact that has raised serious concerns is loss of Amazonian forest through indirect land use change (ILUC), whereby mechanized agriculture encroaches on existing pastures, displacing them to the frontier. This phenomenon …
Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon surged in March and April, the government said on Wednesday, fueling criticism that a proposed law to ease land-use rules may be spurring illegal tree-felling. Brazil's Environment Minister Izabella Teixeira told reporters the government was creating a "crisis cabinet" to investigate the jump in destruction …
Lawyers for Ecuadorean villagers who sued Chevron Corp over pollution in the Amazon rain forest asked an appeals panel on Tuesday to modify a court order that halted enforcement of an $8.6 billion award against the oil company. The lawyers told the Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit in …
Large swathes of the Brazilian Amazon have come to resemble the midwestern United States in recent years, having been planted with soya as far as the eye can see. This development has unnerved conservation organizations, which fear that huge expanses of pristine rainforest are being felled to make way for …
High prices and concerns about energy security in the oil and gas industry are driving expansion into ever more sensitive environments with greater technological, political and social risks. While brands such as BP, Shell and ExxonMobil are well known, some 70 per cent of oil and gas industry activities are …
Many factors such as poverty, ineffective institutions and environmental regulations may prevent developing countries from managing how natural resources are extracted to meet a strong market demand. Extraction for some resources has reached such proportions that evidence is measurable from space. We present recent evidence of the global demand for …
Repsol YPF, a Spanish-Argentine company, has a contract to explore for oil in a remote part of the Peruvian Amazon known as Lot 39. This region, in northern Peru, is home to at least two of the world’s last uncontacted tribes. Repsol currently claims there is not enough evidence to …
Ideas and ideologies, images and reports of events, both minor and cataclysmic, fly on the Internet, swirling through cyberspace, gathering resonance, metamorphosing and touching millions of lives in different ways. Many of the ideas—and visuals—could be banal (as they very often are), some dangerous, others bringing promise of change. Some …
The Compendium on Capacity for Implementing Land Based Mitigation has been produced in response to an identified demand from Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA) and other country officials for greater information on national policy contexts regarding the inclusion of land in the climate change solution.
After the WikiLeak revelation, cyber activists went to town claiming the disclosures as another indicator of internet-fostered democracy. Within days Western governments and their friends in the cyberworld clamped down on WikiLeaks. The not-so-thinly-veiled attacks on the whistle-blowing site and its charismatic founder, Julian Assange, by Western governments was covertly …
A pair of unusually severe droughts have parched the Amazon in recent years, raising concern about the rainforest’s future as a major absorber of carbon emissions, said a study on Thursday. A rare drought in 2005 was billed as a once-in-a-hundred-years event, but then it was followed by another drought …
