Nov 8, 09
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Can Finance Save Forests?
By Martin Wright If rainforests are so valuable, why can’t we make them pay? For years, that was a rhetorical question. Not any more. Martin Wright on our last, best hope of saving forests – and the climate. It’s a gorgeous June day, 2040, deep in the Amazon rainforest. Peering through the clouds, you can see your pension plan – the vibrant greens of the canopy, reassuringly intact. Panning left, you can just make out the line of the last logging road, long swallowed up by the...
Ocean Acidification's Effects Documented in New Study of Shellfish
Relatively small increases in ocean acidity significantly harm clams, bay scallops, and oysters, particularly in their crucial larval stage, according to a new study. Researchers at the State University of New York, Stony Brook, exposed shellfish to levels of acidity expected in Earth’s oceans later this century and next century, and found that modest increases in acidity led to a 50 percent decline in survival of clam and scallop larvae, reduced the size of the larvae, and caused the...
United States Under Pressure to Protect Tropical Forests
The state of Acre in western Brazil gained notoriety in 1988 when cattle ranchers murdered Chico Mendes, a rubber tapper who campaigned against the destruction of the Amazon forest. Twenty years later, roughly half the state is marked as a protected area. The government continues to integrate conservation efforts into development plans, but total deforestation rates have still risen in recent years. To avoid further forest loss, the state is looking to assistance from outside funders. "We...
Kew Gardens Seed Bank Has Collected 10 Percent of Plant Species
A repository created by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, has collected nearly 10 percent of the seeds from the world’s estimated 300,000 seed-bearing plants, completing the first phase of an ambitious plan to preserve the seeds of all the species threatened by human development and climate change. The final seeds added in the project’s opening phase came from an endangered pink banana — Musa itinerans — favored by Asian elephants. To date, the Kew seed bank has collected 1.6 billion...
Brazil's President: "I Foresee That By 2020 We Will Be Able To Reduce Deforestation By 80 Percent; In Other Words We Will Emit Some 4.8 Billion Fewer Tons Of Carbon Dioxide Gas"
This is really the first year since the launch in 2006 that the blog seems appropriately named! AFP reports: President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said Tuesday he will offer to reduce the pace of deforestation in Brazil’s Amazon rain forest by 80 percent by 2020 when he attends December’s global climate talks in Copenhagen. Lula said his pledge will come during high-stakes talks in the Danish capital that aim to push 192 nations towards a climate deal to succeed the landmark Kyoto...
A Blueprint For Restoring The World's Oceans To Health
In her long career as an oceanographer, Sylvia Earle has witnessed the damage that humanity has done to the Earth’s oceans. But in an interview with Yale Environment 360, she says there's still time to pull the seas back from the brink. For nearly half a century, Sylvia Earle has been exploring the world’s oceans, taking part in more than 400 expeditions and spending thousands of hours under the sea. An explorer-in-residence at the National Geographic Society and former chief scientist...
A Sea Change: Imagine a World Without Fish - Ocean Acidification Film
Global warming is “capable of wrecking the marine ecosystem and depriving future generations of the harvest of the seas” (see Ocean dead zones to expand, “remain for thousands of years”). A new documentary on ocean acidification is airing tonight (Saturday) on Planet Green at 8 pm. (You can find your Planet Green channel on their website.) Here’s the trailer: For more on the subject with links to primary sources and recent studies, see “Imagine a World without...
Controlling the Ranching Boom That Threatens the Amazon
by Rhett Butler Clearing land for cattle is responsible for 80 percent of rainforest loss in the Brazilian Amazon. But with Amazon ranching now a multi-billion dollar business, corporate buyers of beef and leather, including Wal-Mart, are starting to demand that the destruction of the forest be halted. In the Brazilian Amazon, 80 million head of cattle — nearly as many as exist in all of the United States — now graze on land that once was tropical rainforest or the biologically rich,...
Can We Give Fish a Chance?
Will the oceans run out of edible fish in our lifetimes? Maybe not, according to a new study. In 2006, a team of scientists led by Boris Worm in Halifax, Nova Scotia, made an alarming prediction: Overfishing was causing saltwater fish populations to collapse at such a rate that we could see the end of seafood by the year 2048. Because more than one billion people worldwide rely on seafood as a primary source of protein, and about 43.5 million people worldwide work in the fishing and seafood...
Reintroduction of Wolves Would Boost Ecology of Scottish Highlands
The reintroduction of grey wolves in the Scottish Highlands would create a beneficial “landscape of fear” that would prevent red deer from severely overgrazing the region, according to a new study. U.S. and Australian researchers studied the beneficial ecological effects of the reintroduction of grey wolves in Yellowstone National park in the 1990s and concluded that bringing wolves back to the Highlands would be equally salutary. Scotland’s grey wolves were extirpated by hunting 250...
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