Hoping to advance towards its goal of carbon neutrality, Costa Rica has launched a bid to make its fleet of pollutant-spewing automobiles cleaner and more efficient. Costa Rica committed in 2009 to become carbon neutral, but its aging transport system, heavily reliant on fossil fuels and accounting for 32% of the nation’s greenhouse-gas emissions, has made attainment of that goal increasingly unlikely, analysts say. Today more than half of the estimated one million private vehicles in Costa Rica are 15 years old or older. The new program, launched March 5, will provide car owners with financial incentives to replace them with models that get at least 35 miles per gallon. Vehicle owners who turn in their old vehicles will get a $1,500 voucher...
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Federal authorities last August claimed a major breakthrough in the fight against illegal deforestation when they arrested eight members of a land-grabbing ring who allegedly had cleared and fraudulently sold public land to cattle ranchers in the eastern Amazon state of Pará. The crackdown, dubbed “Operation Brazil Nut Tree,” continued last month when Brazil’s Federal Police and Ibama, the enforcement arm of the Environment Ministry, further dismantled the ring by arresting its alleged leader, Ezequiel Antônio Castanha. One of three alleged ring members for whom arrest warrants were still outstanding, Castanha was described in an Ibama press statement as “the biggest [illegal] Amazon deforester of all time.” Ibama called the ring “the biggest group of land grabbers in Pará state.” The 11-member ring...
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Eager to show leadership on forest conservation and climate change, Colombia has proposed a mammoth ecological corridor stretching across 1.35-million square kilometers (520,000 sq miles) from the end of the Andes mountain chain in southern Colombia through the Amazon in Colombia, Venezuela and Brazil to the Atlantic Ocean. Known as the Triple-A corridor for its incorporation of Andean, Amazonian and Atlantic regions, the initiative, if approved by Brazil and Venezuela, would create the world’s largest protected area. If carried out, the Triple-A project would ensure rainforest connectivity between national parks and indigenous territories and position the three nations as leaders of forest conservation at the next United Nations climate summit, slated for Nov. 30 to Dec. 11 in Paris. Colombia hopes that...
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The Amazon rainforest’s role in putting a modest brake on climate change by storing carbon dioxide could be reduced in coming years, according to a study published this month in Nature magazine. The 30-year study, the most extensive analysis of Amazon rainforest dynamics to date, concludes the rainforest is losing its capacity to absorb carbon from the atmosphere. An international team of nearly 100 researchers—most of them from South America and coordinated by Britain’s University of Leeds—calculated carbon-storage changes by measuring 200,000 trees in 321 forest plots in eight South American countries. It recorded tree growth and death as well as the generation of new trees since the 1980s. They found that the Amazon region’s net CO2 uptake is 1 billion...
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