Efforts to block construction of the mammoth R$26 billion (US$12.8 billion), 11,233-megawatt Belo Monte dam in Brazil’s eastern Amazon state of Pará gained some traction this month when an appeals court ordered the work suspended because indigenous peoples were not consulted on the project. The Aug. 6 ruling, which did indeed prompt work on the dam to halt, will likely be reviewed by the country’s Supreme Court, says Felício Pontes, a Pará state federal prosecutor. It was Pontes who filed the suit that prompted this month’s unanimous decision by the appeals court, a three-member panel of the Brasília-based First Regional Court of Justice (TRT). The court opined that the lack of consultation with indigenous groups made the dam project unconstitutional...
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In a decision that many observers consider precedent-setting, Chile’s Supreme Court ruled recently that the government’s water agency cannot grant water rights for commercial projects inside the country’s national parks. Chile’s water agency, DGA, had granted water rights inside Puyehue National Park and Chiloe National Park, in Chile’s Los Lagos Region, for private hydroelectric projects. But the Chilean National Forestry Corporation (Conaf), a public-private agency charged with administering both the nation’s forests and national parks, filed suit to stop the dam projects and cancel the water rights. Conaf cites Chile’s obligations as signatory to the 1940 Washington Convention on Nature Protection and Wild Life Preservation, which says national-park boundaries must not be altered or “capable of alienation” without legislative approval, and park...
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Situated in a growing part of western Mexico, Lake Chapala and its water basin are a vital ecosystem for humans, migratory birds and other species. But development and environmental degradation now pressure the basin, which long has been a popular vacation and retirement destination for U.S. and Canadian nationals. Warning that current trends could cause the lake to disappear, several environmental groups turned to the Montreal-based Commission for Environmental Cooperation (CEC), the tri-national agency established under the environmental side-accord to the North American Free Trade Agreement. Filing a complaint called a citizen submission, they asked the CEC in 2003 to probe possible failures by Mexico to enforce its environmental laws with respect to Lake Chapala. The CEC responded by deciding to compile...
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The expansion of a railway used primarily to haul iron ore from the Amazon has prompted opposition and a court order to suspend work on the project. Critics of the US$4.1 billion plan by Vale, the world’s second largest mining company and its largest producer and exporter of iron ore, charge the expanded rail service will increase illegal logging and settlement in the rainforest, thereby threatening the environment and indigenous peoples. Vale’s plan calls for construction of a second, parallel 559-kilometer (346-mile) track from its Carajás open-pit iron ore mine in the eastern Amazon state of Pará to Ponta da Madeira, a deepwater Atlantic port in the northeastern state of Maranhão, from which the ore is exported. Earlier this year, Vale...
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