A new law ostensibly intended to curb land clearing and increase food production may in fact spur deforestation in Bolivia, where forests already are falling at a rate of 350,000 hectares (865,000 acres) annually, critics say. Under previous legislation, agro-industrial farms could be assessed fines for illegally deforesting and could have their unused lands expropriated for distribution to the landless. Under the new legislation, known as the Law to Support Food Production and the Restitution of Forests and signed into law in January, farm operators pay reduced fines and can keep all their lands as long as they reforest 10% of illegally cleared land and put all of their idle holdings to work. The goal, says President Evo Morales, is to boost land under...
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Environmentalists have praised INEA, the licensing and enforcement arm of the Rio de Janeiro State Environmental Secretariat, for using big fines to force industrial polluters to clean up their act. But they also fault the agency for permitting decisions that set the stage for excessive environmental impacts. The US$40 billion Açu mega-port and industrial-complex project in Rio de Janeiro state offers a case in point on both counts, green advocates say. The port, to be the biggest in Latin America, is scheduled to be completed by the end of this year. It will include two steel mills, a shipyard, a cement plant, a crude-oil treatment unit and an iron-ore storage warehouse. On Feb. 1, INEA announced it had fined OSX...
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Battered by hurricanes, flooding and landslides, the Commonwealth of Dominica has every reason to try to mitigate climate change. In 2011 alone, the tiny island nation between the French islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique in the Eastern Caribbean suffered US$100 million in damage from extreme weather events. For its 71,000 inhabitants, the cost was staggering. Still, environmentalists say they are deeply impressed by the country’s efforts to reduce imports of petroleum products. According to the most recent United Nations analysis, Dominica is at the forefront of 52 low-lying impoverished nations in its efforts to become carbon “negative” by 2020. Those efforts are expected to take final shape in the next few months when the government puts the finishing touches on its most ambitious...
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A decision by the French government to allow gold mining in French Guiana’s only national park has sparked outrage among local inhabitants and international environmental groups who say it will lead to deforestation, water pollution and destruction of local ecotourism business. The decision, announced in December by the French Ministry of Industrial Renewal, grants the French mining company Rexma a permit to exploit gold deposits along 10 square kilometers (3.9 sq miles) of the Limonade Creek in Guiana Amazonian Park, a 33,670-square-kilometer (13,000 sq-mile) trove of biodiversity with hundreds of species of birds and mammals, including jaguars, pumas and tapirs. National law permits mining in the park on condition local communities give their consent. But the majority of the inhabitants of the...
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