In Ecuador, Indigenous communities are fighting for stronger safeguards to protect their sovereignty as more oil drilling looms. A right to say no to unwanted development could revolutionize a consultation process used around the world.

“We reject this future. We want to shape our own destiny, to live well in our forests.” — Silvana Nihua, Kiwaro community

archived (Wayback Machine)

A new Glimpact study reveals that 90% of a garment's environmental impact happens before it's made, focusing on raw materials and manufacturing.

Large regions in northern, southern, and central-western Africa, as well as northern Madagascar, are experiencing severe drought conditions due to two or more years of lower-than-average rainfall and higher than usual temperatures. These are the findings of a new report from the Copernicus Global Drought Observatory, run by the European Commission's Joint Research Center (JRC).

In brief:

• A new “natural capital account” for Colombia’s Upper Sinú Basin calculates the economic value of its natural ecosystems’ erosion control services to the energy and water sectors at $100 million (1.7% of the region’s GDP). An aqueduct under consideration to support increased coastal tourism would increase the value by 12%.
• This is one of the first times outside Europe such an account has been created with locally validated models and data following the UN System of Environmental-Economic Accounting – Ecosystem Accounting framework.
• This paper’s methodology offers a practical way to develop and apply such accounts regionally, laying the groundwork for compensation programs that protect nature and support livelihoods.

archived (Wayback Machine)

🚨 BREAKING: The Trump administration just hid data that lets communities know about dangerous chemical facilities in their midst.

https://www.levernews.com/the-governments-chemical-disaster-tracking-tool-just-went-dark/

https://x.com/davidsirota/status/1914409728421122558

#trump #usa #tiktok #cdnpoli #canada #blackmastodon #indigenous @environment
@blackmastodon
@BLKNewsNow
#health #democracy #climate #ClimateCrisis #ClimateAction #environment #nature #pollution #lawfare #law #ecocide #deregulation #economy #oligarchy #capitalism #socialism #nature

• Since Myanmar’s 2021 coup, lead mining in the country’s southern Tanintharyi region has exploded, with the number of mining sites more than doubling as lawlessness enables rapid expansion.
• The environmental impact has been severe, with polluted rivers, dying crops, and communities losing access to clean water.
• Armed groups and junta officials profit from the boom by collecting bribes and taxes, turning mining into a revenue source across all control zones.
• Environmentalists warn that without immediate action and sustainable planning, the region’s ecosystems and natural resources may be permanently lost.

archived (Wayback Machine)

Honest Government Ad | Peter Dutton

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=euE8eZTyQQg

#australia #climate #ClimateCrisis #ClimateAction @environment
#tiktok #democracy #elections #peterdutton

MEXICO CITY — Officials have acknowledged the environmental damage caused by Tren Maya, and say they’re exploring ways to restore cenotes and rainforests disrupted by the railway’s construction through the Yucatán peninsula.

During a press event earlier this month, Environment Minister Alicia Bárcena said the government was looking at correcting some of the damage done by the train like deforestation of protected areas and breaking through cave walls.

“The restoration required for a project like Tren Maya is so comprehensive that reforestation is essential,” Bárcena said during the meeting. “The communities themselves can be the ones to help us restore the forest ecosystem, instead of hiring the consortiums involved in Tren Maya — companies that come, plant a tree, and it dies the next day.”

The multi-million-dollar train project stretching 1,554 kilometers (966 miles) across five states became a national controversy when it relocated local communities, drove pillars through sensitive cave ecosystems and cut into the protected rainforest of the Calakmul Biosphere Reserve — often without permits.

The project caused an estimated 6,659 hectares (16,455 acres) of forest loss, one research group found.

Now that construction is largely finished, officials with the Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources (Semarnat) reportedly want to remove fencing along the tracks, which prevents wildlife crossings. They also want to ban the construction of additional roads that would connect the train with harder-to-reach tourism activities in rainforests.

archived (Wayback Machine)

archived (Wayback Machine)

• The EU has agreed binding rules to reduce plastic pellet pollution, aiming to tackle up to 184,000 metric tons of annual leakage into the environment.
• Provisional measures will require companies to prevent spills, implement risk management, and report losses — but reliance on self-reporting may limit accountability, environmental groups argue.
• Campaigners have welcomed the deal but criticized loopholes, delays for maritime transport, and lighter rules for small businesses, warning these could undermine the regulation’s impact.

archived

...at least on paper.

One unusual characteristic of Latin American nations is their proclivity to adopt new constitutions that reflect periodic swings in political philosophies. These documents are notable for their length and the proliferation of sections addressing specific issues. Pan Amazon nations have relatively recent constitutions, and all have at least one article that obligates the state to protect the environment. Guyana (1980) and Suriname (1987) still use the constitutions adopted following their independence, which provide a brief statement assigning the state the ‘duty’ to protect [or improve] the environment. Similarly, the now-defunct constitutions of Ecuador (1978) and Peru (1979), written following military rule, committed the state to protecting the environment; following the traditions of constitutional jurisprudence, however, these constitutional iterations left the details to the legislature.

Brazil’s 1988 constitution was radically different. It includes ten articles that address nature conservation or environmental management – a thematic focus that is surpassed only by provisions detailing the federal governance structure. More importantly, it was the first country in the Pan Amazon to include access to a healthy environment as a basic human right. The national charter of Colombia of 1991 is similarly detailed, with seventeen articles mentioning rights and responsibilities linked to natural resource management and environmental protection. Peru’s 1993 constitution is less specific, but it identifies environmental management as a core government function. The Colombian Constitutional Court ruled in favor of the Indigenous authorities of Pirá Paraná in Vaupés in their legal action against the Redd+ Baka Rokarire project. Image courtesy of Mauricio Romero Mendoza.

Venezuela’s 1999 constitution is radically different from those of Peru, Colombia and Brazil, because it lays out the framework for a socialist state, but it is not substantially different on environmental issues.

The constitutions of Ecuador (2008) and Bolivia (2009) represent another radical change in constitutional law. Not only do they include a phenomenal number of provisions that are typically the domain of legislation (land, water, air, forests, and biodiversity), but they also legalize the relationship between culture and the environment. Ecuador’s is the most emphatic, stating that Mother Nature (Pachamama) has rights that must be honored by human society.

archived (Wayback Machine)

archived (Wayback Machine)

Offshore jurisdictions—commonly known as tax havens—play a central role in sustaining the fossil fuel industry through legal, financial, and regulatory frameworks. Over 68% of fossil fuel financing by the world’s 60 largest banks flows through secrecy jurisdictions. These jurisdictions serve as critical nodes in the global economy, shielding corporations from accountability from environmental and labor regulation, transparency and disclosure requirements, and banking and investment protections. This secrecy provides a veil of sovereignty for fossil fuel profits and hinders corporate accountability for environmental harms.

While the role of offshore jurisdictions in tax avoidance and financial secrecy has been extensively studied, their contribution to environmental degradation and the fossil fuel industry remains underexplored. In a recent publication, we address this gap by framing secrecy jurisdictions as regulatory havens. These havens facilitate the avoidance of financial, legal, and political liabilities central to environmental protection.

It is bitterly ironic that the Caribbean—the place where the key fossil fuel offshore jurisdictions facilitate the extraction of carbon profits—is the region that is most exposed to the devastation wreaked by climate change manifesting as hurricanes, rising sea levels, and wholesale destruction of communities. In this regard, regulatory havens also sustain neocolonial power dynamics and systemic exploitation.

archived (Wayback Machine)

Cities having higher ambient temperatures than rural surroundings (known as the urban heat island effect) could offset some of the negative effects of increased heat-related mortality by reducing the number of deaths associated with cold exposure in some global cities, according to a study in Nature Climate Change. These findings highlight the importance of developing region- and season-specific strategies to mitigate the urban heat island effect.

In 2024, Bolivia’s state-owned lithium company, signed contracts worth a combined $2 billion with Russian and Chinese companies to mine lithium from Salar de Uyuni in the country’s southwest.

Local communities already experiencing water shortages say they’re concerned the projects will divert large amounts of freshwater from agricultural lands.

Experts have pointed out inconsistencies with the contracts, including the lack of environmental impact assessments required under Bolivian law, and the lack of community consultation.

Bolivia holds an estimated 23 million metric tons of lithium reserves, or about a fifth of the global total, which is in growing demand for production of electric vehicle batteries.

archived (Wayback Machine)

The world’s largest meat company, JBS, looks set to break its Amazon rainforest protection promises again, according to frontline workers.

Beef production is the primary driver of deforestation, as trees are cleared to raise cattle, and scientists warn this is pushing the Amazon close to a tipping point that would accelerate its shift from a carbon sink into a carbon emitter. JBS, the Brazil-headquartered multinational that dominates the Brazilian cattle market, promised to address this with a commitment to clean up its beef supply chain in the region by the end of 2025.

In a project to understand the barriers to progress on Amazon deforestation, a team of journalists from the Guardian, Unearthed and Repórter Brasil interviewed more than 35 people, including ranchers and ranching union leaders who represent thousands of farms in the states of Pará and Rondônia. The investigation found widespread disbelief that JBS would be able to complete the groundwork and hit its deforestation targets.

“They certainly have the will to do it, just as we have the will to do it,” said one rancher. But the goal that all the cattle they bought would be deforestation-free was unreachable, he said. “They say this is going to be implemented. I’d say straight away: that’s impossible.”

https://archive.ph/iS7pg

Shrouded in the lush vegetation of the páramo, the Andean tundra landscape, the quiet wetlands and moorlands of Quimsacocha in southern Ecuador are at the center of a dispute. Hortensia Zhagüi, a water defender and leader of the Tarqui community in the country’s Cuenca canton, said members of her community have campaigned against a mining project on these lands for the last three decades.

“All the páramos, everything that is our life, are about to be destroyed,” Zhagüi, who is also a member of the Kimsacocha Women’s School of Agroecology, told Mongabay by phone. “That’s why we’re fighting to defend it. Our principles are formed this way because our parents and ancestors also preserved these beautiful places.”

For 30 years, the protected páramo of Quimsacocha, at an elevation of 3,000 meters (9,800 feet), between the cantons of Cuenca and Girón in Azuay province, has faced the imminent threat of underground mining. The Loma Larga mine project, owned by Canada-based Dundee Precious Metals Inc., is still prospecting for gold, silver and copper. It spans 7,960 hectares (19,669 acres) and has plans to extract 3,000 metric tons of metal-containing ore per day, and more than 14 million tons over a 12-year project life.

archived (Wayback Machine)

archived (Wayback Machine)

Like giant bones planted in the earth, clusters of tree trunks, stripped clean of bark, are appearing along the Chesapeake Bay on the United States’ mid-Atlantic coast. They are ghost forests: the haunting remains of what were once stands of cedar and pine. Since the late 19th century, an ever-widening swath of these trees have died along the shore. And they won’t be growing back.

These arboreal graveyards are showing up in places where the land slopes gently into the ocean and where salty water increasingly encroaches. Along the United States’ east coast, in pockets of the west coast and elsewhere, saltier soils have killed hundreds of thousands of acres of trees, leaving behind woody skeletons typically surrounded by marsh.

What happens next? That depends. As these dead forests transition, some will become marshes that maintain vital ecosystem services, such as buffering against storms and storing carbon. Others may become home to invasive plants or support no plant life at all — and the ecosystem services will be lost. Researchers are working to understand how this growing shift toward marshes and ghost forests will, on balance, affect coastal ecosystems.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/32910625

The UN’s International Maritime Organization [IMO] has just agreed to start charging ships for the greenhouse gases they emit. After decades of ineffective incremental tweaks to shipping emissions, the breakthrough came on April 11 at a summit in London. It makes shipping the first industry subject to a worldwide – and legally binding – emissions price.

[...]

There was sustained opposition to ambitious action from Saudi Arabia and other petrostates, as well as from China and Brazil. Second, the US had already disengaged from negotiations. Even so, from outside the meeting, the US administration’s tariff war and explicit threat to retaliate against states supporting a shipping pricing regime could have affected talks far more than they did.

But researchers are not sure that this agreement can be considered a success. While there is little traditional climate change denial at the IMO, “mitigation denial” is alive and kicking. Mitigation denial means making lofty promises, often in line with scientific evidence, but not adopting concrete measures able to deliver on these targets. This is exactly what petrostates pushed the IMO to do last week.

Ultimately, the IMO has well and truly failed the most climate vulnerable, by favouring a more gradual and less certain transition to low-carbon shipping. It’s even effectively making these countries pay the price.

[...]