In a historic move, a special ministerial committee of Chile’s government unanimously decided this month to cancel the embattled HidroAysén dam project planned for the Aysén region of Patagonia. The move by the center-left government of President Michelle Bachelet, who began her four-year term in March, fulfills one of Bachelet’s key promises during her presidential campaign last fall. In that race, she repeatedly called HidroAysén “not viable.” The Bachelet campaign in effect promised to halt the large-scale dam venture to garner support from diverse politicians and voters. “This is the greatest victory in the history of Chile’s environmental movement,” says Patricio Rodrigo, executive secretary of the Patagonia Defense Council, an international coalition of more than 70 environmental and citizen organizations formed to...
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Mexico’s environment ministry, Semarnat, has rejected a proposal for a giant resort on the edge of the Cabo Pulmo Marine Reserve in the Gulf of California, aligning itself with scientists and conservationists who argue that the region’s fragile ecology cannot support large-scale development. In a closely argued ruling, the ministry rejected the environmental impact statement presented by the developers of the resort, Cabo Dorado, raising a series of complex concerns. The ruling would appear to set a very high bar for future development of the area, located on the Baja Peninsula, northeast of Cabo San Lucas. The Chinese investors behind Cabo Dorado, Beijing Sansong International Trade Group and Glorious Earth Group, did not acknowledge that their proposal had been rejected. In a letter to...
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With phosphorus levels in Uruguayan lakes, reservoirs, rivers and streams exceeding government limits of 25 micrograms per liter, authorities are taking two very different approaches to the problem, which has led to dangerous blue-green algae blooms. On one hand, regulators are implementing a mitigation program aimed at preventing pollutants from entering the country’s principal freshwater source, the Santa Lucía watershed. But on the other, they are trying to set new, more permissive standards for phosphorus concentrations—30 micrograms per liter for lakes and reservoirs and 100 micrograms per liter for rivers and streams. A recent study by the School of Science of Uruguay’s University of the Republic concludes that of 60 water bodies in the country that were tested, all showed phosphorus concentrations above...
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In recent decades the northern Argentine mountain community of Abra Pampa has stood as a symbol of the local pollution impacts this country’s mining industry can cause. Home to a population of 14,000 and located 3,500 meters above sea level near the Bolivian border, it has struggled with environmental and health effects stemming from a lead-smelting plant that operated for years in the heart of the community. The plant closed in 1987, leaving 15 to 20 tons of lead-tainted waste that government and university researchers have shown to be responsible for polluting the air and soil and compromising the health of the community’s mostly poor, indigenous residents. Documentation of the problem has not translated into an effective solution. In 2008, the Argentine government...
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