Chile last month became the first country in the Americas to submit its updated Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC)—a formal statement of the country’s plans for reigning in greenhouse-gas emissions—as required under the Paris Climate Agreement. Paris accord signatory nations must issue an updated NDC every five years under the agreement, which was adopted in 2015 with a goal of keeping the average global temperature increase “well below” two degrees celsius over pre-industrial levels. Though targets are set by each country, they are expected to be tightened progressively over time. In its 51-page NDC, Chile forecasts it will reach its peak greenhouse-gas emissions in 2025—two years sooner than estimated in the initial, 2015 version of the plan. Then, it says, its emissions will decline in stages until carbon neutrality is achieved in 2050. Acknowledging its greenhouse-gas emissions have grown 115% since 1990 and...
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Bolivia has become the world’s second biggest importer of mercury behind India—a trend, experts say, that likely reflects the country’s role as a conduit of the toxic heavy metal to illegal gold miners in the Peruvian rainforest. The finding emerged in research conducted in eight countries by the Dutch affiliate of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the Switzerland-based conservation network. Commonly used by small-scale miners to separate gold from ore, mercury has been found to contaminate Amazon-region rivers and to bioaccumulate in fish, posing a health risk to rainforest communities that depend in part on fishing. Bolivia’s artisanal mining cooperatives use mercury as well. But the country’s enormous imports of the metal in the past five years suggest much of it continues on as contraband to Peru, where mercury imports in the same period have been subject to limits. “In Bolivia, regulations on...
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Its environmental-enforcement agency hobbled by budget cuts, Brazil has put the military in charge of combating a surge in Amazon deforestation. The crackdown comes amid estimates that deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon was 64% greater last month than in April 2019, and 55% greater in the first four months of 2020 compared to the same period in 2019. In a decree issued on May 6, President Jair Bolsonaro ordered the Armed Forces to coordinate operations to curb tree felling, the deliberate setting of fires and other forms of destruction by illegal loggers, land grabbers, wildcat miners and others. The areas targeted for enforcement are national and state parks and forests, indigenous reserves and public forests not designated for protection. The decree, short on details, said the crackdown, called “Operation Green Brazil 2,” would last from May 11 to June 9, but could be extended. This period marks the beginning...
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Mara, a 3.5-ton, 54-year-old female Asian elephant that had lived in captivity at Argentina’s Buenos Aires Zoo, arrived this month at her roomier retirement home—an elephant sanctuary in Brazil, the first of its kind in Latin America. On May 11, Mara, who was born in India, and who spent nearly all of her life in captivity—first in circuses in Montevideo, Uruguay, and Buenos Aires, then at the Buenos Aires Zoo—arrived at Elephant Sanctuary Brazil. The private, nonprofit nature reserve in western Mato Grosso state was created to help formerly captive elephants live out their lives with a higher quality of life. (See "Brazilian sanctuary giving elephants room to roam" —EcoAméricas, March 2020.) Mara had spent 25 years confined to a 1,200-square-meter (13,000-sq-foot) compound at the Buenos Aires Zoo...
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