RSS Feed
Archive for March 10th, 2011
UPDATE 1-Chevron appeals against Ecuador damages award
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on March 10th, 2011
Reuters: Chevron Corp. has filed an appeal against an $8.6 billion damages ruling by an Ecuadorean judge in one of the largest environmental lawsuit judgments ever, a local court official said on Thursday.
A judge in Ecuador's Amazon in February ruled against Chevron, demanding the company pay for contamination from petroleum drilling in the 1970s and 1980s by Texaco, which was later purchased by the U.S. oil giant.
Chevron (CVX.N) has denied the accusations and had previously said it would...
Posted in 
‘Waterproofing’ gene may also protect rice from droughts
Posted by SciDev.Net: Joel D. Adriano on March 10th, 2011
SciDev.Net: Lab tests show that the same gene might help rice survive flooding and droughts
Farmers facing extreme weather conditions associated with climate change could benefit from the finding that a gene that 'waterproofs' rice plants also appears to protect them from drought.
The Sub1a gene, which naturally occurs in some low-yielding varieties in India, was discovered in the 1990s at the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), in the Philippines. Subsequent research showed that the gene bred...
Chevron appeals against Ecuador damages award
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on March 10th, 2011
Reuters: Chevron Corp. has filed an appeal against a $8.6 billion damages ruling by an Ecuadorean judge in one of the largest environmental lawsuit judgments ever, a local court official said on Thursday.
A judge in Ecuador's Amazon in February ruled against Chevron, demanding the company pay for contamination from petroleum drilling in the 1970s and 1980s by Texaco, which was later purchased by the U.S. oil giant.
Chevron (CVX.N) has denied the accusations and had already said it would appeal the judgment,...
Belo Monte hydroelectric dam construction work begins
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on March 10th, 2011
Guardian: With most Brazilian eyes firmly fixed on the country's annual carnival, construction work officially started this week on the controversial Belo Monte hydroelectric dam in the Amazon.
In a blog post, the company leading the dam project, Norte Energia, announced that infrastructure work on roads that will provide access to the region started on Monday morning. A photograph showed lorries and a yellow road-roller moving on to the site.
The £7bn Belo Monte dam on the Amazon's Xingu river is scheduled...
Great Green African Wall Planned for Sahara
Posted by Forbes: None Given on March 10th, 2011
Forbes: Environmentalists endorsed a wildly ambitious plan to build a "green wall" measuring roughly 10 miles wide and 5,000 miles long across Africa while meeting in Bonn, Germany recently. The groups committed to investing more than $3 billion in the plan.
The pan-African Great Green African Wall (GGW), a lush strips of vegetation capable of supporting birds and other animals, would stretch from Djibouti in the Horn of Africa in the east to Dakar, Senegal in the west on the southern edge of the Sahara....
China’s shrinking lakes
Posted by U.S. News and World Report: Phillip F. Schewe on March 10th, 2011
U.S. News and World Report: China's thriving economy, already large, has been growing at a rate faster than that observed in most developed countries. But there has been a price for this growth. The air in China's largest cities is among the worst in the world because of pollution. And now comes more bad news: China's freshwater lakes have been shrinking.
A new report says that over the period from 1960-2005 Chinese lakes have shrunk in size and in number. The total area of Chinese lakes over that period shrank by 13 percent...
Fighting illegal logging in Indonesia by giving communities a stake in forest management
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on March 10th, 2011
Mongabay: Fighting illegal logging in Indonesia by giving communities a stake in forest management
Illegal logging on the edge of Gunung Palung National Park in West Kalimantan on the island of Borneo. This timber is being used to construct structures to attract swiftlets for the production of bird-nest soup, a delicacy in China. Photo taken by Rhett Butler in March 2011.
Over the past twenty years Indonesia lost more than 24 million hectares of forest, an area larger than the U.K. Much of the deforestation...
Report: corruption in Sarawak led to widespread deforestation, violations of indigenous rights
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on March 10th, 2011
Mongabay: Report: corruption in Sarawak led to widespread deforestation, violations of indigenous rights
Logging roads criss-cross Sarawak's forests. Photo courtesy of Google Earth.
At the end of this month it will be 30 years since Abdul Taib Mahmud came to power in the Malaysian state of Sarawak on the island of Borneo. Environmentalists are using the occasion, along with new revelations, to highlight corruption and nepotism they say have characterized his regime. Chief Minister Taib and his decades-long...