A court in Peru’s most heavily forested Amazonian region has ruled that regional authorities must not create, grant or reactivate timber concessions in areas designated or requested as reserves for semi-nomadic indigenous groups that shun contact with wider society. The Nov. 8 Loreto region Superior Court ruling also requires cancellation of existing concessions in these areas. Because the regional government did not appeal the decision within three days, the ruling is final. The Loreto court was acting on a lawsuit that was filed in 2020 against the Loreto regional government and its forestry and wildlife office by the regional indigenous organization Orpio and the Lima-based nonprofit Legal Defense Institute (IDL). The suit seeks protection of areas inhabited by indigenous groups that are living in isolation or are in initial contact, which usually means they have settled in villages and are beginning to interact with the wider society. The...
[ Log in to read more | Subscribe ]
Among those who attended November’s U.N. climate summit (COP27) in Egypt were young people from Latin America and the Caribbean promoting a set of proposals, some addressed to governments and others to those directly responsible for large-scale greenhouse-gas emissions. Some 50 strong and all under the age of 30, they were transmitting proposals drafted in a September meeting in Cartago, Costa Rica, of young people representing 200 environmental groups across the region. The September event was the first Regional Conference of Youth of Latin America and the Caribbean, part of a UN-sponsored initiative to promote climate-policy engagement by young people around the world. Youth from six other regions attended as well. “We are pushing for young people to have more influence in government, and that’s why we’re here,” María Aguilar, member of an advisory group to the Argentine government’s National Climate Change Plan and a co...
[ Log in to read more | Subscribe ]
Increasingly, climate anomalies are appearing to be anything but, with “extremes beginning to be the norm,” Uruguayan meteorologist and climate-change expert Mario Bidegain tells EcoAméricas. As Southern Cone countries look forward to the conclusion of the third year in a row of cool and dry La Niña weather conditions, climate modelers are forecasting a warmer and wetter El Niño weather pattern starting in the second half of 2023 as waters in the equatorial Pacific warm. Experts expect the La Niña trend of colder equatorial Pacific Ocean temperatures to moderate in January or February, returning the region to relatively normal rainfall patterns and temperature ranges, before further warming of those waters eventually creates El Niño conditions. “There should be a neutral phase, that is neither cold nor hot,” Bidegain says. It’s the more frequent and prolonged departures from the norm in recent decades that have caught the attention of analysts...
[ Log in to read more | Subscribe ]
