Nov 22, 09
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Norway to Help Protect Guyana's Forests
For the past year, President Bharrat Jagdeo of Guyana has traveled the world offering to place his nation's forests under international supervision if other countries paid his citizens not to deforest the tropical landscapes. The campaign received major support last week when Norway announced a $30 million commitment on Monday for the small South American nation to implement an "avoided deforestation" plan. If the program demonstrates success, Guyana will receive an additional $250 million...
Yangtze Delta Warned to Prepare for Effects of Climate Change
by Jonathan Watts Delta has been warming faster than global average for a decade, and the impact is already being felt, according to WWF China. China's most populous river needs massive investment and careful planning to ease the impact of climate change, which is causing floods, droughts and storms to intensify, a new report (pdf) said today. The Yangtze delta, which is home to about 400 million people, has been warming far faster than the global average for more than a decade and the...
Aid Groups, Farmers Collaborate to Re-Green Sahel
Disastrous droughts crippled Niger, Burkina Faso, and Mali in the early 1970s and more severely in the early 1980s. More than 100,000 people died. "The soil dried up. Everything dried up. All the trees died,"; said Yacouba Savadogo, a sorghum and millet farmer from the village of Gourma in Burkina Faso, at an Oxfam-hosted event in Washington, D.C. "When the soil dries up, there's no more trees and no more rain." Dry conditions and a locust outbreak hit West Africa again in 2005, and...
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...
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