Welcome ! As a young French Marketing professional with a Master's in International Management I have been selecting since January 2007 the latest headlines and best researches on sustainable development, climate change, cleantech and the world energy sector. Sounds great ? Don't hesitate to subscribe now !
I noted last year that Amazon deforestation was at its lowest. Well it decreased again. To Grist : ” a study on deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon found that the number of square kilometers disappearing each year has hit a record low. “
However, these good news might be only temporary. Originally Grist was mentioning a vote that was due to weaken the local forest code and thus, increase deforestation.
Luckily, this vote has been postponed until March 2012 as the WWF noted today on its blog. We gotta campaign to keep the current forest code and protect our rainforests !
To the WWF : “ It’s possible to reduce deforestation to near zero by 2020, but delaying action to save forests by even a decade means double the area of forests lost by 2030 “
” The report finds that reducing deforestation to near zero would also bring global emissions from forest destruction close to zero, but delaying this reduction until 2030 would mean sacrificing 69 million hectares of forest worldwide. “
Such a delay would bring an additional 24 gigatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. In comparison, 33 gigatons of this gas were released in 2010 alone worldwide… Continue »
To TreeHugger : ” Last year, the Amazon rainforest experienced the worst drought on record, reducing normally flowing rivers to sun-baked stretches of dried mud and pushing the fragile ecosystem to the brink. “
” (…) As a result of 2010′s Amazon drought, experts say, some 1.8 billion tons of carbon dioxide was released into the atmosphere — more than is produced by India’s entire population in a year. “
The more we put greenhouse gases in our atmosphere, the more our Planet answers back and carbon reserves like the Russian permafrost or the Amazon Rainforest start emitting even more… Continue »
To Sustainablog : ” It turns out we’ve been underestimating the benefits created by forests in the last case: a new study published in Science shows that “Forests play an even greater role in Earth’s climate system than previously known.”
” According to an AP report on the study, “Wooded areas across the planet soak up fully a third of the fossil fuels released into the atmosphere each year, some 2.4 billion [tons] of carbon…”
” Reforested land soaks up an additional 1.6 tons. But, of course, deforestation is still a massive trend, and it costs us 2.9 billion tons of carbon emissions every year. ” Continue »
To TreeHugger : “ That’s a lot of species. And it’s roughly 9,000 more than were endangered just over ten years ago, in 2000. That’s the finding of the latest report from the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN).”
” There are now roughly 19,000 species that are currently threatened with extinction around the world. So why the jump? The usual suspects – deforestation, poaching, climate change, pollution, and invasive species – are largely to blame. ”
But the situation is not completely dark as to The Economist “The news is best for mammals, whose complete dataset has made evaluation easier. The percentage of endangered species has actually fallen since 2000. “
What do you get when Hillary Clinton and Julia Roberts work together? An article on clean cookstoves : “Some 3 billion people live in homes where food is cooked on stoves or over fires burning fuels like wood, dung, charcoal, or waste.”
” According to the World Health Organization, smoke from dirty stoves and fires kills almost 2 million people each year, most of them women and children. It kills more than twice as many people as malaria. “
If you are interested in this important issue, please check out the website of the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves. Continue »
Just a couple of weeks after I was writing about the catastrophic floods in Australia, similar dramatic events claimed the lives of more than 500 people in the Rio de Janeiro State of Brazil.
To the Telegraph, this makes it “ the country’s worst-ever natural disaster. “ What actually claimed most lives were mudslides as the equivalent of a month of rain fell in less than a day.
Brazil has been willing to cut its greenhouse gases emissions by slashing deforestation. I believe that after such events the new President, Dilma Rousseff, will be willing to do even more…
This weekend ended the 16th conference of parties (COP16) due to prepare the future of the Kyoto Protocol. Albeit it didn’t end as badly as the Copenhagen meeting did, we are still pretty far from solving the climate / energy equation.
In today’s post I propose you a selection of the most interesting articles related to this event that lasted no less than two weeks and brought forward some progress, notably on forests with REDD+. (cf. my previous post on the matter).
This was a critical success but the road to solving the coming triple crisis (peaking fossil fuel resources, massive unemployment and climate change) is still long. Continue »
Last year the deforestation of the Brazilian part of the Amazon rainforest was slowing dramatically. It keeps doing so: ” Brazil’s government says deforestation in the Amazon rain forest has dropped to its slowest pace in 22 years.”
” Environment Minister Izabella Teixeira says satellite imagery of the National Institute for Space Research shows that 6,450 square kilometers of the Amazon was deforested between 2009 and 2010, a 14 percent drop from a year earlier.“
” (…) the area deforested is the least since 1988. “ These sure are great news that show that Brazil is committed more than ever it protecting the lungs of the planet. (Source : Huffington Post)
I know it since I read Collapse, Jared Diamond’s fantastic book about how various societies disappeared : trees matter ! Between soil erosion prevention and climate change mitigation, there are many reasons for keeping forests alive.
Now comes a British study noting that the annual cost of deforestation is five trillion dollar. This research is carried out under the UNEP program known as The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB)
We have seen it here on multiple occasions, protecting Nature and its fantastic biodiversity is as a matter of fact the best way to protect ourselves. Continue »
