Tag • #deforestation

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‘Dirty political games’: Suriname is selling its gold and timber – at the cost of tribal land rights

news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Wednesday, 21 February - 11:39

Communities such as the Saamaka are vocal in opposition to increased mining and logging – but has the country’s claim to fame as the most forested in the world already been fatally undermined?

Photographs by Bram Ebus

“Welcome to Suriname – the most forested country in the world!” reads a billboard above the entrance of Suriname’s international airport terminal. Numerous signs remind travellers that more than 90% of its territory is covered by lush jungle, and the country takes pride in its environmental track record.

However, legal and illegal gold mining and expanding logging operations increasingly threaten this statistic, putting forests at risk and undermining the rights of tribal and Indigenous people to the land.

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Where have all the grasshoppers gone?: Uganda’s insect traders struggle to find protein-rich bugs

news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Thursday, 7 December - 06:00

Professional trappers find it increasingly hard to fill their sacks for market as the country’s forests, grassland and swamps where the insects breed are lost

As night falls on Masaka’s industrial zone, Karim Damba’s work begins. He hauls large corrugated steel sheets into place and attaches them to empty oil drums lined with black polythene bags, propped up by long pieces of wood. At 8pm, he flicks on the fluorescent lights and waits for the grasshoppers to arrive.

“I have been doing this since 25 October,” says Damba, adjusting his skullcap. Damba is a grasshopper trapper in central Uganda. Between October and December his nights are spent waiting for the insects to hit the metal sheets and fall into the drums. The protein-rich bugs are wrapped and transported to market.

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Why is the Amazon rainforest drying up? - podcast

news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Thursday, 9 November - 05:00

Ian Sample talks to Guardian global environment editor Jon Watts about the withering drought currently devastating the Amazon rainforest. Jon explains the complex mix of factors that are driving the drought, and considers whether it might be a catalyst for more concerted climate action in Brazil and beyond

Clips: Freesounds archive

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Environmental crime money easy to stash in US due to loopholes, report finds

news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Thursday, 26 October, 2023 - 16:00

Secrecy and lax oversight mean illegal loggers and miners in Amazon can park billions in real estate and other assets

Secrecy and lax oversight have made the US a hiding place for dirty money accrued by environmental criminals in the Amazon rainforest, a report says.

Illegal loggers and miners are parking sums ranging from millions to billions of dollars in US real estate and other assets, says the report, which calls on Congress and the White House to close loopholes in financial regulations that it says are contributing to the destruction of the world’s biggest tropical forest.

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Study: Carbon offsets aren’t doing their job, overstate impact

news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Saturday, 26 August, 2023 - 10:43

Paiter-Surui volunteers alongside "forest engineers" from a Brazillian Government support program using GPS equipment to map and measure the trees and vegetation in the "7th September Indian Reserve" Rondônia, Brazil. This information is intended to later be used to calculate the forest carbon content. Indigenous people have contributed less to climate change than has any other section of the population, yet they are among those most in jeopardy from its impact.

Enlarge / Paiter-Surui volunteers alongside "forest engineers" from a Brazillian Government support program using GPS equipment to map and measure the trees and vegetation in the "7th September Indian Reserve" Rondônia, Brazil. This information is intended to later be used to calculate the forest carbon content. Indigenous people have contributed less to climate change than has any other section of the population, yet they are among those most in jeopardy from its impact. (credit: Craig Stennett/Getty Images )

This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News , a nonprofit, independent news organization that covers climate, energy, and the environment. It is republished with permission. Sign up for their newsletter here .

Carbon offset projects claiming to curb deforestation are significantly overestimating their impact, according to a new study published in Science on Thursday.

Sold as a way to lessen the impact of greenhouse gas emissions by allowing polluters or consumers to purchase offsets or credits that allow them to keep emitting in return for funding projects that decrease emissions elsewhere, offsets have become a high-profile model for corporate climate action.

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Cocoa production linked to major deforestation in Africa

news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Friday, 26 May, 2023 - 16:33

Image of a yellow fruit growing on a small tree.

Enlarge / A cocoa pod, this one grown in Asia. (credit: Tan Dao Duy )

Cocoa farmers in Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire make less than a dollar a day. And there are almost 2 million of them; the two countries are the world’s largest cocoa producers, supplying two-thirds of the global supply. Cocoa is the primary perennial crop in both places.

However, there are no up-to-date, accurate maps of their cocoa plantations. This is a problem since cocoa is known to be a primary driver of deforestation in the region. Besides decimating biodiversity that may never recover, clear-cutting forests to plant cocoa (or for any other reason) makes it hotter and makes storms stronger, both locally in Africa and across the planet .

So a team of European researchers made a deep neural network to collate publicly available satellite images of both countries with georeferenced cocoa farms, identified by their regular polygons. They then had a team in Côte d'Ivoire trekking around for three months to visit the farms and verify their results.

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