Handing a key victory to environmentalists, Colombia’s Constitutional Court has ruled to prohibit mining and oil activity in páramos, the fragile, high-altitude grasslands that are critical to water supplies and biodiversity. The court, the nation’s highest, voided an article of the 2014-18 National Development Plan, rendering illegal and ordering the removal of hundreds of gold mining and other mineral projects that cover more than 124,000 hectares (306,410 acres). The court, which has ruled to protect páramos in the past, emphasized the national importance of the ecosystem, which occupies just 1.7% of Colombia’s territory but provides 70% of its fresh water. “This decision marks a milestone for Colombia and the Andean region as a whole, as many rivers throughout the Andes are fed by Colombia’s...
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For decades, Latin American countries have relied mainly on the creation of national parks and, to a lesser extent, indigenous reserves to curb deforestation in remote regions. Many such efforts have been highly successful. The creation of such parks and reserves, along with better forest monitoring and enforcement, for example, was crucial in reducing or stabilizing deforestation rates in almost all countries of the Amazon watershed except Venezuela during the period 2010-13. But halting deforestation in less remote areas often presents a bigger challenge. That is especially the case when export commodities such as beef, soy or timber are produced nearer to urban centers or ports where demand is high. It is also true when governments, sensitive to industry concerns, might not want to jeopardize...
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They had camped for over a month outside the federal courts building in Buenos Aires, some 1,300 kilometers (800 miles) from home. But on March 2, demonstrators from Andalgalá, a city of 20,000 in the northwest province of Catamarca, got what they were looking for: an Argentine Supreme Court ruling that puts the brakes on a massive open-pit mining project in their region. The Supreme Court overturned a 2009 decision by the Catamarca provincial Mining Secretariat to approve an environmental-impact study for the project, known as Agua Rica, on condition that certain environmental issues are addressed. The high court said conditional approval of an environmental-impact statement is not provided for in Argentina’s main environmental law, only approval or rejection, and was thus...
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Two new studies on the connection between vegetation and climate could yield useful insights for Latin America and other regions. One study shows that second-growth tropical forests regenerating on abandoned cattle pastures or cropland can sequester 11 times more carbon than old-growth forests. This would suggest that repurposed farmland could play an important role in removing carbon from the atmosphere without human intervention. Meanwhile, a second recently published study sheds light on how climate change affects vegetation in some parts of the world differently than in others. The study of second-growth forests, published in the Feb. 11 issue of the journal Nature and conducted by a team of 65 researchers, holds implications for climate change mitigation policy by illustrating the resilience of...
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