Well over a decade since leading a highly successful campaign to reduce deforestation in Brazil, Marina Silva has returned for a second stint as environment minister amid hopes at home and abroad that she can repeat the achievement. On Dec. 29, three days before his inauguration, President-Elect Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva announced the former rubber tapper and national senator as his choice for the country’s top environmental post. She last held the job from 2003 to 2008—also under Lula, whose first presidency spanned two terms, from 2003 to 2011. Back then, as now, she began work with deforestation in Brazil seemingly out of control. But she went on to lead a US$136 million woodland-protection program that cut the rate of forest clearing in the Brazilian Amazon by 83% from 2004 to 2012. The program involved action on numerous fronts. It improved forest-protection monitoring and...
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The U.S. fossil-fuel energy company Hess has agreed to buy carbon credits from Guyana, spending a minimum of US$750 million by 2032 in a deal that Guyanese President Mohamed Irfaan Ali and Hess both described as historic. Guyana’s sale of the credits stems from its “Green State Development Strategy: Vision 2040.” The plan, launched in 2019, calls for offshore oil and gas development and investment of the proceeds to build a green economy that improves the lives of ordinary people in Guyana, one of Latin America’s poorest countries. (See "For Guyana, green path passes through oil" —EcoAméricas, November 2019.) Hess is part of a consortium of three companies exploiting the Stabroek Block, a 6.6-million-acre (2.7-million-hectare) offshore oil concession area located in the Caribbean Sea, 120 miles (190 kms) off the Guyanese coast...
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Ecuadorian activists pressing for a referendum to curb mining in the Andean Chocó region of northwestern Pichincha province say they fear the vote might not be held. The Pichincha portion of the Andean Chocó, a highly biodiverse 286,000-hectare (707,000-acre) region in the foothills of the Andes, was declared a biosphere reserve by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (Unesco) in 2018. Javier Guamán, a member of the activists’ network pushing for the anti-mining referendum, says Ecuador’s National Electoral Council (CNE) might throw out 60% of the 452,000 signatures gathered in support of the vote. Members of the network, called Quito Sin Minería, or Quito Without Mining, served as observers during the signature-validation process. Under Ecuadorian law, 198,000 valid signatures are needed in order for CNE to authorize a referendum, but thus far the agency only has accepted 184,000. Fred Larreátegui, the attorney representing Quito...
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Under Peru’s Constitution, humans should have priority when it comes to water use, but “that legal precept is not fulfilled,” the U.N. special rapporteur on the right to water and sanitation has written in a preliminary report. Pedro Arrojo-Agudo issued his report after a December visit to various Peruvian regions. In it, he highlighted two issues. The first, he wrote, is the “criminal poisoning of water that ruins the health of 10 million Peruvians and future generations, especially indigenous peoples and rural farmers.” And the second, he asserted, is “Peru’s extreme vulnerability to climate change in the area of water and sanitation, exacerbated by the dominant extractive model.” After listening to women from communities in the northeastern region of Loreto, where an oil spill in September fouled the Marañón River, their main source of drinking water, Arrojo appeared to fight back tears as he thanked them for their testimony...
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