With no railroads to speak of, Venezuela relies almost exclusively on trucks for domestic transport of its vast volumes of mining, petroleum, chemical and other products—to say nothing of hazardous waste. Yet officials here say there’s a dearth of regulations on hazardous-materials transport. To address it, the government has unveiled draft legislation spelling out an array of reporting and safety requirements. The bill, currently being circulated to public and private industry groups for comment, was drafted by three agencies—the Infrastructure Ministry (Minfra), the Energy and Mines Ministry (Mem) and the Environment and Natural Resources Ministry (Marn). It seeks to combine provisions of the nation’s Law of Dangerous Substances, Materials and Waste, with those of the Law of Land Transport and bring them...
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The first stage in a project to build a comprehensive GIS database for the Pantanal, the world’s largest continuous freshwater wetland, has been completed successfully. The pilot study of a small, approximately 60- by 60-mile (100- by 100-km) section of the Pantanal was funded by the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS). It involved 11 governmental and non-governmental groups in a cross-border conservation effort. Covering 27 million acres (11 million hectares) in Bolivia, Brazil and Paraguay, the Pantanal is home to over 600 bird and 260 fish species. Much of it is unprotected and faces development ranging from farming and mining to road building and river-dredging. Local project partners used satellite images to establish...
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Two years after serious lead contamination was discovered in their neighborhood, 24 Montevideo families have been shifted to new housing—the first of 40 families that the Uruguayan Health Ministry says must be moved urgently. In all, it is expected 200 families will be relocated from the capital’s La Teja neighborhood, a blue-collar barrio of approximately 50,000 residents. Concern about contamination in La Teja arose in late 2000. Though experts have not pinpointed the source of the pollution, they have suggested causes including contaminated fill under houses, water pollution from tanneries and the combination of heavy traffic flows in the area and the wide use in Uruguay of leaded fuel. La Teja residents said authorities ignored their appeals for months, but the government began...
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The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) held a general hearing last month on how environmental degradation can undermine human rights. The Oct. 16 session in Washington, D.C. marked a first for the IACHR, an autonomous body under the Organization of American States (OAS). It featured testimony by experts including Romina Picolotti of the Center for Human Rights and Environment (Cedha) in Argentina, Dinah Shelton, a Notre Dame University law professor, and Richard Meganck, director of the OAS Unit for Sustainable Development. Participants discussed, among other issues, how environmentally destructive activity can threaten human rights and how in such cases principles of international environmental law can be applied by international human-rights bodies. After the hearing, Cedha said it hoped that “…through human rights...
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