After a month of protests by environmental and other groups, the Peruvian government has backtracked slightly on two decrees issued by the executive branch in mid-January to speed up major infrastructure work. The so-called urgent decrees listed a series of infrastructure projects that would not need environmental certification before final concessions could be granted, although environmental impact studies would have to be approved before construction could begin. The decrees bypassed Congress, which had turned down similar legislation in November 2010. On Feb. 17, after a meeting with presidents of the regions for which the projects were slated, government officials announced that the article eliminating approval of environmental studies as a requirement for granting temporary concessions would be struck from the decree, although other...
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In Latin America, reforestation figures prominently as a response to global warming. The region hosts dozens of projects being developed under the initiative known as Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (Redd), in which developing-world forest protection is to be financed through the sale of carbon credits to polluters in industrialized nations. But a study in the U.S.-based Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences emphasizes that nationally directed reforestation and conservation initiatives are not necessarily panaceas to the problem of global forest loss. In fact, reforestation in one nation often leads to deforestation in another through a process known as “leakage.” The study, by researchers from the University of Louvain in Belgium and the U.S. universities Stanford and Rutgers, has significant implications...
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Belize has become the world’s third nation after Venezuela and the Pacific island nation of Palau to completely ban the destructive practice of bottom trawling in its national waters. The ban, encompassing the nation’s territorial waters and the 200 nautical miles of its exclusive economic zone, comes after the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (Unesco) warned it could remove the Belize Barrier Reef’s World Heritage status if the government did not do more to protect the reef. The ban, which took effect Jan. 1, involved the buying out of the country’s last two trawlers—the result of many months of negotiation between the conservation group Oceana, government officials and regional fishing cooperatives. Bottom trawling is a particularly destructive method of fishing that involves...
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Brazil is now implementing the only major environmental legislation to clear the country’s Congress last year: a sweeping solid-waste management law. An implementing decree for the law was signed in late December by outgoing Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Government and business must now begin work to comply with its provisions. The law creates requirements for local, state and federal solid-waste management plans; hazardous-waste handling; recycling; development of new sanitary landfills; and controls to stop illegal dumping and burning of solid waste. (See “National waste bill nears passage in Brazil”—EcoAméricas, March ’10). It also requires sectoral recycling agreements among businesses that generate packaging or deal in specific goods, such as batteries, tires and fluorescent lights, that can pose health...
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