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Archive for December 16th, 2014
After Oil Spill in Bangladesh’s Unique Mangrove Forest, Fears About Rare Animals
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on December 16th, 2014
National Geographic: Oil from a wrecked tanker is creating a disaster in the waters of Bangladesh's Sundarbans, the largest contiguous tidal mangrove forest in the world and a haven for a spectacular array of species, including the rare Irrawaddy and Gangetic dolphins and the highly endangered Bengal tiger.
"This catastrophe is unprecedented in the Sundarbans, and we don't know how to tackle this," Amir Hossain, chief forest official of the Sundarbans in Bangladesh, told reporters.
Named for the native sundari...
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Quebec premier says not interested exploiting shale gas deposits
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on December 16th, 2014
Canadian Press: Quebec Premier Philippe Couillard says he is not interested in exploiting the province`s shale gas reserves.
He tells the CBC`s French-language service that Quebecers are largely against hydraulic fracturing.
Couillard made the comments shortly after Quebec`s environmental review board concluded the environmental and social risks associated with hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking," outweigh the financial benefits.
Fracking is a process whereby a pressurized fluid is injected into shale rock...
Thailand fails to clean lead-poisoned creek despite court order: HRW
Posted by Reuters: Thin Lei Win on December 16th, 2014
Reuters: Hundreds of families in western Thailand are suffering from lead poisoning near a polluted creek that the government has failed to clean up despite a court order two years ago, Human Rights Watch said on Tuesday. In 1998, Lead Concentrates (Thailand) closed a mine in Klity Creek in Kanchanaburi province, but the 400 or so ethnic Karen subsistence farmers living in a nearby village struggle with health problems and continue to fight for a cleanup, the watchdog group said in a report. In what activists...
Belo Monte, Brazil: The tribes living in the shadow of megadam
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on December 16th, 2014
Guardian: By the Great Bend of the Xingu river in the depths of Amazonia, the Juruna tribe is being drowned by what seems at first sight to be a flood of TV game-show prizes. There’s a shiny new motorboat moored by the old canoe, the latest four-wheel drive parked beside a chicken coop, satellite dishes outside every home and wide-screen plasma TVs inside. But these are not the spoils of victory. They are the consolations for defeat in an existential battle against Brazil’s biggest engineering project, the...
Most carbon-dense ecosystem in Amazonia mapped first time
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on December 16th, 2014
PhysOrg: The highest concentration of carbon in parts of Amazonia is not stored in trees, but below the ground as peat, according to new University of Leeds research.
Mapping and quantifying carbon stored in the largest area of peatland forest in Amazonia, a geological basin almost the size of England, the researchers estimated that more than three billion tonnes of carbon is stored within this ecosystem.
While Amazonian forests are known to harbour large stores of carbon in their trees, the findings...
Trees are fed up with our carbon, refuse to grow faster
Posted by Grist: Sam Bliss on December 16th, 2014
Grist: tists have long expected extra carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to boost tree growth - the climate-changing waste product of our fuel-burning ways is plant food, after all. But a new study suggests that trees in tropical rainforests around the world are not in fact growing any faster, even as CO2 levels in the air shoot past 400 parts per million.
This conclusion isn`t just bad news for trees, though. All species threatened by climate change - that`s you, humans - should be worried.
You see,...