Six Chilean and international organizations announced in September a “Declaration of Rights of the Biobío River” that aims to spark a locally based movement to protect and restore Chile’s second-largest river. “We want to create a new movement, a new foundation, for the protection of the Biobío River,” said Constanza Prieto, Latin America legal director for the Earth Law Center. Modeled on similar initiatives elsewhere in Latin America and worldwide recognizing the rights of nature through laws or the courts, the document, which arose out of workshops at an environmental conference in November 2023 in the central Chilean city of Concepción, was crafted through a regional public consultation process over several months. The organizers—local citizen and environmental organizations Defensa Ribera Norte Chiguayante, Malen Leubü, Defensa Ambiental and Manzana Verde from Chile, and two U.S.-based environmental groups, International Rivers and Earth Law Center—say the declaration “asserts that...
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Certain upland tree species in Brazil’s Atlantic Forest are migrating to higher elevations, an adaptive response to the temperature-rise caused by climate change, a new study says. The study, published in July in the Journal of Vegetation Science, finds that various tree species in mountain forests are moving towards cooler high ground, threatening the existence of other species there as the world continues to warm. The study examined 627 tree species across 96 locations in Brazil’s portion of the Atlantic Forest, a once-vast but now highly fragmented ecosystem stretching from northeast Brazil south along the Atlantic coast, then inland to eastern Paraguay and northeastern Argentina. Elevations covered by the study ranged from two meters (6.6 feet) to 1,160 meters (3,806 feet) above sea level. It notes that as seeds of warm-weather trees are dispersed by animals or wind, saplings that grow from them in higher-elevation environments...
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In June, experts formally declared an end to the latest El Niño, the weather pattern that spurred record-breaking global temperatures over the past year. Now the stage is set for El Niño’s cooler counterpart—La Niña, which the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) expects to begin emerging in October and last until March. El Niño’s abnormally high sea-surface temperatures in the central and eastern tropical Pacific Ocean and, at other times, La Niña’s unusually low temperatures in those waters, produce contrasting climate effects that span the entire world. Collectively known as the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), their recurring patterns drive what is considered to be the world’s most powerful climate fluctuation. NOAA considers La Niña underway when surface-water temperatures in the Eastern Pacific Ocean along the equator west of South America are 0.5 degrees centigrade (0.9°F) below average for three consecutive months and...
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Over 5,000 people took part in the latest Monarch Monitoring Blitz, an annual exercise in which members of the public in Canada, Mexico, and the United States count migratory monarch butterflies and milkweed plants that the insects depend on as a key food source. The Blitz has been staged for eight years with support from the Commission for Environmental Cooperation (CEC), the trilateral, Montreal-based entity that fosters environmental coordination and research in connection with the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement on free trade (USMCA). In this year’s edition, held from July 26 to Aug. 4, nearly 5,800 volunteer citizen scientists in the three countries reported sightings of 16,000 monarchs and 68,000 milkweed plants. The 2024 participation far outstripped that of last year, when 1,800 observers reported seeing 13,000 monarchs and 40,000 milkweed stems. Data collected during the Blitz will be deposited in the Trinational Monarch Knowledge Network and made...
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