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 …
Wetlands perform many essential ecosystem services—carbon storage, flood control, maintenance of biodiversity, fish production, and aquifer recharge, among others—services that have increasingly important global consequences. Like biodiversity hotspots and frontier forests, the world’s largest wetlands are now mapped and described by an international team of scientists, highlighting their conservation importance …
More destructive hurricanes, shrinking forests, melting glaciers, disappearing animals: the prospective damage to Latin America and the Caribbean from climate change makes for grim reading. A new World Bank report, timed to coincide with a United Nations conference in Poland, tries to put numbers to the potential economic cost. (
An ITTO-sponsored project has supported a public-private partnership to promote the adoption of good forest management practices in the Brazilian Amazon.
Evidence is mounting that unchecked logging in the Peruvian Amazon is pushing some of the world's last isolated tribes into Brazil, increasing conflicts over land and food, a leading Brazilian tribe researcher and indigenous rights groups say. From his observation outpost in a remote part of Brazil's Acre state near …
In the Juma forest reserve deep in Brazil's Amazon, conservationists will receive money from a Brazilian bank and a global hotel chain to protect trees and combat global warming. The project is seen as a test case watched by other potential donors, mostly in rich countries, who want to help …
Norway will donate US$1 billion to Brazil's Amazon protection fund through 2015, Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg said on Tuesday, to help Brazil fight deforestation. Norway, the first country to pledge money to the fund, will donate as much as US$130 million next year, the Norwegian Embassy in Brasilia said. …
Nutrients carried by the Amazon River into the Atlantic Ocean help absorb significant amounts of carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere, new research reveals. The nutrients fertilize a type of plankton that the researchers estimate to consume 27 million metric tons of CO2 annually.
Rising elephant numbers in a protected forest park in Ghana are angering farmers whose crops are being raided in an unwanted side-effect of a plan to slow deforestation. Locals in Afiaso, a village of 620 people in southern Ghana with no electricity nor running water, grumble that they are seeing …
The effect of anthropogenic aerosols on clouds is one of the most important and least understood aspects of human-induced climate change. Small changes in the amount of cloud coverage can produce a climate forcing equivalent in magnitude and opposite in sign to that caused by anthropogenic greenhouse gases, and changes …
camera traps work well to estimate species diversity of medium and large mammals, a recent study says. Counting the number of mammals in dense tropical forests is difficult and rare species are often missed out. Camera traps offer a new tool for finding the number of large and medium sized …
The western Amazon is the most biologically rich part of the Amazon basin and is home to a great diversity of indigenous ethnic groups, including some of the world's last uncontacted peoples living in voluntary isolation. Unlike the eastern Brazilian Amazon, it is still a largely intact ecosystem. Underlying this …
Brazil's environment minister, Marina Silva, quit her post on April 13 in despair over the obstacles she faced in reining in destruction of the Amazon rainforest. In the resignation, Silva said she stepped down because of the difficulty she had been having for some time in carrying out the national …
Rio De Janeiro: Dramatic photographs of previously unfound Amazon Indians have highlighted the precariousness of the few remaining "lost' tribes and the dangers they face from contact with outsiders. The bow-and-arrow wielding Indians in the pictures released last week are likely the remnants of a larger tribe who were forced …
APPEALS have been made to leave alone the members of one of Brazil's last uncontacted Indian tribes, spotted deep in the Amazon jungle near the Peruvian border. The Indians were sighted and photographed from an aircraft during flights over the rainforest in remote Acre state, said Brazil's National Indian Foundation, …
Amazon dam project frozen: A Brazilian judge has issued a restraining order on a controversial dam in the Amazon basin. In response to a suit, the court ruled that the government has illegally awarded technical and economic feasibility studies for Belo Monte Dam to civil construction companies even before conducting …
Brazilian federal police said they arrested on Wednesday at least 40 members of an illegal logging operation in an Amazon tribal Indian reservation amid growing concern over destruction of the world's largest rain forest. The operation cleared the equivalent of 70,000 football fields of virgin forest in the Vale do …
The introduction of payments for environmental services (PES) offers an opportunity for traditional and indigenous populations to be compensated for contributing to carbon sequestration in meeting the challenge of ameliorating global warming. As one mechanism among several for promoting biodiversity conservation and sustainable development, pro-poor PES initiatives could eventually be …
