Nicaraguan police say four indigenous Mayangna people were shot dead when a large band of individuals attacked their community in the vast Bosawás Biosphere Reserve, which is located in northern Nicaragua on the country’s border with Honduras. Environmental and indigenous-rights advocates attribute the Jan. 29th killings to territorial disputes between indigenous communities and outsiders who have cleared and occupied reserve land illegally. “It is a conflict of more than 10 years in which the [Nicaraguan] government has not intervened,” Amaru Ruiz, director of Fundación del Río, a Nicaraguan environmental group, told EcoAméricas this month. “When the [land] invader comes the first thing he does is deforest to plant crops or pasture for cattle. That way, they deprive indigenous people of forest resources, increasing their vulnerability.” Police on Feb. 12 announced the arrest of a man suspected to have been one of the estimated 80 attackers. Bosawás makes up some...
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Issuing an official statement on the Amazon this month, Pope Francis spoke out strongly about the importance of protecting ecosystems and supporting the people who defend them. The statement, called an apostolic exhortation, stems from the Synod for the Amazon, an official meeting of bishops held at the Vatican in October. (See "Bishops call for halt to Amazon region devastation" —EcoAméricas, October 2019.) It is intended to be official Catholic Church teaching. In the document, titled “Querida Amazonia,” the pope decries the history of predatory industries in the region, including rubber operations of the past and current logging and mining, which destroy ecosystems and force indigenous people to migrate to cities. “The businesses, national or international, which harm the Amazon and fail to respect the right of the original peoples to the land and its boundaries, and...
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The ability of tropical forests to sequester carbon as they regenerate after having been cleared might be vastly overestimated, says the lead author of a recent study on the subject. The study, conducted by a team of Brazilian and British researchers and published in December in the journal Ecology, raises questions about the climate-change-mitigation potential of so-called secondary tropical forests, which account for 50% of the world’s tropical woodlands. Conducted in the state of Pará during 1999-2017, the study did confirm earlier research showing that secondary tropical forests show greater carbon-sequestration rates than primary tropical forests, or woodlands largely undisturbed by humans, on account of their more rapid tree growth. But it found these were double the primary forest rate—a far cry from the 11-fold difference found in previous studies by other scientists. The research team concluded that carbon absorption in the monitored plots...
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Uruguay has banned imports of agrochemical products containing Fenthion, a moderately toxic organophosphate insecticide. The ban, issued by the General Directorate of Agricultural Services of the Ministry of Livestock, Agriculture and Fishing, had been anticipated. But it was imposed ahead of schedule, in December, after Italian authorities in October had rejected a shipment of Uruguayan oranges in which the chemical was detected above allowable levels, says Federico Montes, the head of the directorate. Residue of the chemical in the shipment registered 0.1 milligrams per kilogram (mg/kg). Though that concentration is ten times the European Union limit, Uruguayan officials point out it was well below the World Health Organization’s limit of 0.2 mg/kg. Uruguayan officials say Fenthion was already being considered for a ban when the government, responding to the rejection of the orange shipment, took the step ahead of schedule and on Dec. 19 announced a prohibition on...
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