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How serious should the penalties for an oil spill be? In early November, Chevron and its drilling partner Transocean accidentally spilled some 3,000 barrels of oil into the ocean off the coast of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. As oil spill go, it was relatively minor—although it is a sign of how hard offshore drilling [...]
After years of allowing clear-cutting and rapid deforestation in the Amazon, Brazil has managed to save its forests. But a new law landing on the President’s desk could undo much of that — and open the door to the bad old days of massive deforestation
You probably wouldn’t know it from the U.S. media, but there’s a whole continent south of the U.S. Latin America rarely gets the media or public attention it deserves in part because of good reasons—years of relative political stability after the civil wars and juntas of the Cold War era, along with generally prosperous economies. [...]
An eight-part series that appeared in the Economist has won this year’s prestigious Grantham Prize for environmental reporting. Journalist James Astill reported the 14,000 word story in the forests of Brazil, Indonesia, Mexico and Uganda, assessing the state of the world’s tropical forests and what’s being done to protect them. The prize’s jurors credit the [...]
Another day, another global report on the world’s land use. This time a wide-ranging survey from the International Tropical Timber Organization (ITTO)—an intergovernmental body that promotes the sustainable use of forest resources—has revealed that the area of the world’s tropical forests that are under some form of sustainable management has increased 50% since 2005, from [...]
Last week environmental activists in Brazil – and Hollywood – were celebrating a victory over what is slated to become the world’s third largest hydroelectric plant. A Brazilian court in Para state ruled last Friday that the state-backed project, key to President’s Dilma Rousseff’s infrastructure push to support Brazil’s continued economic growth, has not met [...]
I’ve got one more tidbit from last weekend’s meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and it’s nothing less than a new scientific concept: telecoupling. This is not, as you might expect, a particular risqué form of conference call. Telecoupling refers to how connections between nature and human beings are growing [...]
Residents of Brisbane, Australia must have woke up Thursday morning with at least some sense of relief. The swollen Brisbane River that runs through the nation’s third largest city did not reach the catastrophic levels as they were predicted to overnight. With at least 25 dead and a dozen still missing, Australia did not face [...]
As we wrote yesterday, the meeting of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) in Nagoya has a long agenda. That’s what happens when you convene a global meeting to save wildlife on the planet Earth. But beyond the dire warnings about disappearing animals and emptying seas—and the grand, if fuzzy promises governments will make—there’s some [...]
The Amazonian rainforest isthe planet’s respiratory system–the more than 1 billion acres of trees help regulate the climate and produce more than 20% of the Earth’s oxygen. And that’s why one of the biggest fears surrounding climate change is the possibility of what’s known as Amazon dieback–the risk that higher temperatures and drought due to [...]
