Using 1.2 million Chinese-built solar panels, workers have begun to install three solar-power plants in northwest Argentina that will have an installed capacity of 300 megawatts, or 1% of the country’s entire generating capacity. The project, slated for a 700-hectare (1,730-acre) tract in the province of Jujuy, is expected to cost US$390 million, of which $330 million will be financed by China’s state-owned Eximbank and the rest by the provincial government through a green bond floated on the New York Stock Exchange in September. Argentina’s government describes the solar plants, called Cauchari I, II and III, as “the biggest solar park in Latin America,” though larger solar-power projects are being developed in Mexico and Chile. The three plants will be located at an elevation of 4,000 feet in the Puna, an arid Andean plateau long identified by experts as possessing significant solar-energy...
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Coffee growers in Latin America have long worried that global warming will reduce the land apt for coffee production and contribute to coffee blights. Higher temperatures and heavier rainfall in recent years already have wreaked havoc in Central America, sparking outbreaks of coffee rust disease (Hemileia vastatrix) that have caused hundreds of thousands of people in the coffee industry to lose their jobs. A new study, published in September in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, provides grim support for that view. It suggests that global warming could reduce the area suitable for coffee growing by up to 88% by 2050, with lowland producers in Nicaragua, Honduras and Venezuela especially affected. That, unfortunately, is not all. The study forecasts that high temperatures associated with climate change could drive down the diversity of bees, further impacting production of the world’s most popular legal drug. “Bees are vital to the...
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Brazil has launched a system by which companies can avoid paying fines by instead investing in the restoration of degraded ecosystems, and receive a hefty discount on their penalties in the process. Decree No. 9,179, issued by President Michel Temer on Oct. 23 and put into effect the next day, aims to use the promise of discounted penalties to spur ecosystems recovery while cutting down on the number of environmental-fine appeals filed in the country’s backlogged courts. Some R$4.6 billion (US$1.44 billion) in currently uncollected fines for environmental violations could be converted into restoration investments through the program, according to an Environment Ministry statement. The decree permits Ibama, the ministry’s enforcement arm, to give a 35% discount on fines that are converted into restoration investments if the penalized company applies the money “directly” to its choice of small-scale, Ibama-approved ecosystem recovery projects. In these cases...
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Citing human health concerns, Anvisa, the enforcement arm of Brazil’s Health Ministry, this month ordered an immediate halt on use of the toxic pesticide carbofuran in the case of all but three economically important crops. Anvisa, which evaluates pesticides for the ministry, allowed a phase-out rather than an immediate ban in the case of bananas, coffee and sugar cane. For those three crops the agency set a six-month phase-out on use of the chemical and a three-month phase-out on the pesticide’s production, importation and sale. The immediate ban did not apply in these cases because “the Agriculture Ministry, in evaluating agronomic and economic effects of the carbofuran ban on bananas, coffee and sugarcane, argued that these crops are of great national, agricultural relevance,” the agency said in an e-mail response to an inquiry from EcoAméricas. Brazil, the world’s second-largest consumer of pesticides after...
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