As world attention has focused on record fires and ongoing deforestation in Brazil, Bolivia has been suffering through devastating conflagrations of its own. The Bolivian fires broke out in July, peaked in August and continued this month, burning widely in the eastern departments of Beni and Santa Cruz. Consuming vast tracts of natural lands, they have charred Bolivian portions of the Amazon, the Chiquitano dry forest and the Pantanal wetland. Though the government has provided no estimate of the total acreage burned, the Bolivian green group Friends of Nature put the figure at 4 million hectares (9.9 million acres) based on analysis of images from U.S. and European satellites. Bolivian President Evo Morales was shown on local media taking part in firefighting, a move critics criticized as a ploy to draw attention from his controversial support for land clearing and controlled burns aimed at expanding the country’s cropland and pastureland...
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Two participants in community protests against the operations of an iron-oxide mine near Honduras’s Guapinol River were shot to death on Aug. 28 in the municipality of Tocoa, located in the department of Colón. Roberto Antonio Argueta and José Mario Rivera, both from villages near the Guapinol, had participated in longstanding community protests against the mining company Inversiones Los Pinares. The company was granted a government concession to build the mine next to the river, the villages’ main source of water. Community members claim they were not consulted by the government or the company prior to the start of operations at the mine in 2014. They have attempted to impede the mining, resulting in a series of clashes between townspeople and security personnel. Earlier this year, the Honduran Attorney General’s office filed arrest warrants for 32 community members for alleged crimes including usurpation, obstruction, arson and theft. Among them...
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Business associations representing Brazil’s automotive-battery supply chain have agreed to a regimen under which their members must collect and recycle batteries, extracting lead as well as other car-battery ingredients that might otherwise threaten the environment and public health. The Aug. 14 accord, effective immediately, will result in annual recycling of 153,000 metric tons of lead from the estimated 16 million spent car batteries collected each year, according to the Environment Ministry, a signer of the agreement. The accord requires distributors and retailers to collect and return used car batteries to producers and importers who must recycle a growing share of them in accordance with a timetable. The timetable calls for the recycling of 75% of batteries—measured in weight, not number—sold this year. That’s a relatively easy target since producers and importers already are recycling used car batteries at that rate, says Tiago Andrade Lima, executive director of...
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A report assessing the impact of a five-year-old pledge by governments, multinationals and civil society groups to halt global deforestation, points to an alarming lack of progress and cites Amazon basin countries as having the greatest total amount of forest loss. The “NYDF Progress Assessment,” issued Sept. 12, evaluates whether the New York Declaration on Forests (NYDF)—a voluntary initiative endorsed at the UN Climate Summit in 2014—was within reach of meeting its ambitious goals, one year before their initial deadlines. The report’s answer is a resounding “no.” In its summary, the report says bleakly: “There is little evidence that these goals are on track, and achieving the 2020 NYDF targets is likely impossible.” The NYDF’s main goals are to halve the rate of global forest loss by 2020 and strive to end it by 2030, and to restore 150 million hectares (370 million acres) of degraded forest...
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