An international fund to protect the Amazon forest launched by Brazil in 2008 has gotten bogged down in red tape and donors are frustrated their $466 million contributions are hardly put to use, a Norwegian official said. The fund was designed to slow deforestation by stimulating sustainable economic alternatives to cattle ranching and farming, [...]
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The Brazilian Amazon is now home to 24m people, many of them settlers who trekked those roads in the 1960s and 1970s, lured by a government promise that those who farmed “unproductive” land could keep it. Chaotic or corrupt land registries left some without secure title. Rubber-tappers, loggers, miners and charcoal-burners came too. The [...] Eight South American countries pledged to boost cooperation to protect one of the planet’s largest natural reserves from deforestation and illegal trafficking in timber and minerals. Representatives of Brazil, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Peru, Suriname and Venezuela gathered in Manaus, northern Brazil, also vowed to speak with one voice at next June’s UN conference [...] Close to 80 percent of the world‘s energy supply could be met by renewables by mid-century if backed by the right enabling public policies a new report shows, The findings, from over 120 researchers working with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), also indicate that the rising penetration of renewable energies could lead [...] Global efforts to drastically reduce toxic sulfur emissions in the shipping industry will likely be delayed for years due to the reluctance of refiners to invest billions of dollars to produce cleaner burning fuel. The U.N. shipping agency, International Maritime Organization (IMO), has set a 2020 deadline for the maritime community to slash the [...] Haze is a weasel word for the eye-stinging, throat-rasping smog that periodically engulfs parts of South-East Asia. The resort to euphemism points to why the pollution, which smothered much of the region in 1997, has been a nearly annual torment since the early 1990s: a reluctance to get tough with the country responsible, Indonesia, [...] A study of twelve producer, processing and consumer countries demonstrates that actions taken by governments, civil society and the private sector over the last ten years in response to illegal logging and related trade have been extensive and had a considerable impact. Illegal logging is estimated to have fallen by between 50 and 75 [...] Grand plans to halt the destruction of the Amazon rainforest have come and gone over the years with scant success, so a degree of scepticism about Brazil’s latest scheme seems justified. However, one positive sign is that, this time, the federal government seems to have recognised the importance of working with, rather than against, [...] A rare piece of good news from the world of conservation: the global extinction crisis may have been overstated. The world is unlikely to lose 100 species a day, or half of all species in the lifetime of people now alive, as some have claimed. The bad news, though, is that the lucky survivors [...] When Roberto Mangabeira Unger swapped life as a philosopher and Harvard law professor for a place in Brazil’s government, he was given a small ministry from which to think about the future. From this perch, Mr Unger has already produced a proposal for regularising land tenure in the Amazon. He also has a grand [...] |
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