RSS Feed
Author Archive
Tasmania forest logging bid dropped
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on March 20th, 2016
BBC: The Australian and Tasmanian authorities are abandoning their bid to have logging permitted in the Tasmanian Wilderness, a World Heritage site.
The decision comes after a report by the UN cultural agency Unesco said the area "should be off-limits to commercial logging in its entirety".
The Tasmanian Wilderness covers about a fifth of the island and is one of the world's last big temperate forests.
Conservation groups have welcomed the Unesco report and the logging decision.
In 2014 the...
Posted in 
Coral bleaching at Barrier Reef ‘severe’: Australia
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on March 20th, 2016
Agence France-Presse: Australian authorities said Sunday coral bleaching occurring in the World Heritage-listed Great Barrier Reef had become "severe", the highest alert level, as sea temperatures warm.
Australian Environment Minister Greg Hunt said while the bleaching at this stage was not as severe as in 1998 and 2002, also El Nino-related events, "it is however, in the northern parts a cause for concern".
"The reef is 2,300 kilometres (1,429 miles) long and the bottom three-quarters is in strong condition, but...
Australian government abandons campaign to log World Heritage forest
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on March 20th, 2016
Reuters: The Australian government ended its push to log World Heritage-listed forests on the southern island state of Tasmania on Sunday, after the United Nations cultural agency UNESCO issued a report calling for the area to remain protected from logging.
Australia's government in 2014 sought unsuccessfully to have parts of the Tasmanian wilderness, some one million hectares (2.47 million acres) or a fifth of the island, removed from UNESCO's World Heritage listing to enable logging.
A United Nations...
Environmental Activists Take to Local Protests for Global Results
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on March 19th, 2016
New York Times: They came here to get arrested. Nearly 60 protesters blocked the driveway of a storage plant for natural gas on March 7. Its owners want to expand the facility, which the opponents say would endanger nearby Seneca Lake. But their concerns were global, as well. “There’s a climate emergency happening,” one of the protesters, Coby Schultz, said. “It’s a life-or-death struggle.” The demonstration here was part of a wave of actions across the nation that combines traditional not-in-my-backyard protests...
New US support for Indonesia’s climate change goals
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on March 19th, 2016
Jakarta Post: US Ambassador Robert Blake revealed two new projects aimed at bolstering the work of the newly formed Peatland Restoration Agency during the Environment and Forestry Ministry-sponsored climate festival. He said the two projects, funded under the Millennium Challenge Corporation's compact with Indonesia, were part of the US government's strong support for Indonesia's climate change goals. "The projects will help restore and protect the country's peatland areas, which have been threatened by fire...
El Niño Upsets Seasons, and Upends Lives, Worldwide
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on March 19th, 2016
New York Times: In rural villages in Africa and Asia, and in urban neighborhoods in South America, millions of lives have been disrupted by weather linked to the strongest El Niño in a generation. In some parts of the world, the problem has been not enough rain; in others, too much. Downpours were so bad in Paraguay’s capital, Asunción, that shantytowns sprouted along city streets, filled with families displaced by floods. But farmers in India had the opposite problem: Reduced monsoon rains forced them off the...
February was the warmest month in recorded history, climate experts say
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on March 19th, 2016
Guardian: Our planet went through a dramatic change last month. Climate experts revealed that February was the warmest month in recorded history, surpassing the previous global monthly record – set in December. An unprecedented heating of our world is now under way.
With the current El Niño weather event only now beginning to tail off, meteorologists believe that this year is destined to be the hottest on record, warmer even than 2015.
Nor is this jump in global temperature a freak triggered by an unusually...
Vanishing wetlands: Indiscriminate development & poor regulation
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on March 19th, 2016
Economic Times: Vidhya Krishnan, a 30-year-old software engineer in Bengaluru, likes to take an early-morning walk around the city's Ulsoor Lake before an hour-long commute to work. However, in early March this year, she and other walkers got a rude shock: floating on the surface of the lake were hundreds of dead fish. Ulsoor Lake looked set to meet the fate of many such water bodies in India's information technology capital - one estimate stated that over 80 of them had disappeared in the last couple of decades....
Surge in 2016 Temps Adds Urgency to Climate Deal
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on March 19th, 2016
Reuters: A record surge in temperatures in 2016, linked to global warming and an El Niño weather event in the Pacific, is adding urgency to a deal by 195 governments in December to curb greenhouse gas emissions to slow climate change, scientists said.
Average global temperatures last month were 2.4°F above normal for February, the biggest temperature excess recorded for any month against a baseline of 1951-80, according to NASA data.
The previous record was set in January, stoked by factors including...
Argentina’s ‘Shale Capital’ Suffers from Slowdown
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on March 18th, 2016
Inter Press Service: The dizzying growth of Añelo, a town in southwest Argentina, driven by the production of shale oil and gas in the Vaca Muerta geological reserve, has slowed down due to the plunge in global oil prices, which has put a curb on local development and is threatening investment and employment.
Vaca Muerta, a 30,000-sq-km geological reserve rich in unconventional fossil fuels in the province of Neuquén, began to be exploited in mid-2013 by the state-run oil company Yacimientos Petroliferos Fiscales...