Belo Monte will be the world´s third-largest hydroelectric project and will displace up to 20,000 people while diverting the …
Brazil
EcocentricOil
Petrol Politics: How Much Should an Oil Spill Cost?
How serious should the penalties for an oil spill be? In early November, Chevron and its drilling partner Transocean accidentally spilled some 3,000 barrels of oil into the ocean off the coast of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. As oil …
EcocentricForests
Cutting Down the Amazon: Brazil Takes a Step Backward on Deforestation
After years of allowing clear-cutting and rapid deforestation in the Amazon, Brazil has managed to save its forests. But a new law landing on the President’s desk could undo much of that — and open the door to the bad old days …
EcocentricUncategorized
Spreading the Gospel of Green Business to Latin America
You probably wouldn’t know it from the U.S. media, but there’s a whole continent south of the U.S. Latin America rarely gets the media or public attention it deserves in part because of good reasons—years of relative political stability after the civil wars and juntas of the Cold War era, along with generally prosperous …
EcocentricMedia
Series on Tropical Forests Wins Environmental Reporting Prize
An eight-part series that appeared in the Economist has won this year’s prestigious Grantham Prize for environmental reporting. Journalist James Astill reported the 14,000 word story in the forests of Brazil, Indonesia, Mexico and Uganda, assessing the state of the world’s tropical forests and what’s being done to protect them. The …
EcocentricForests
Good News and Bad News for the World’s Tropical Forests
Another day, another global report on the world’s land use. This time a wide-ranging survey from the International Tropical Timber Organization (ITTO)—an intergovernmental body that promotes the sustainable use of forest resources—has revealed that the area of the world’s tropical forests that are under some form of sustainable …
EcocentricEnergy
If You Must Build A Mega Dam: Lessons for Brazil from China
Last week environmental activists in Brazil – and Hollywood – were celebrating a victory over what is slated to become the world’s third largest hydroelectric plant. A Brazilian court in Para state ruled last Friday that the state-backed project, key to President’s Dilma Rousseff’s infrastructure push to support Brazil’s …
EcocentricUncategorized
The New Science of Telecoupling Shows Just How Connected the World Is—For Better and For Worse
I’ve got one more tidbit from last weekend’s meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and it’s nothing less than a new scientific concept: telecoupling.
This is not, as you might expect, a particular risqué form of conference call. Telecoupling refers to how connections between nature and human …
EcocentricWeather
Weather Watch: The Rains Felt Round the World
Residents of Brisbane, Australia must have woke up Thursday morning with at least some sense of relief. The swollen Brisbane River that runs through the nation’s third largest city did not reach the catastrophic levels as they were predicted to overnight. With at least 25 dead and a dozen still missing, Australia did not face an easy …
EcocentricWildlife
Wildlife: How Do We Divide Up the World’s Biological Resources?
As we wrote yesterday, the meeting of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) in Nagoya has a long agenda. That’s what happens when you convene a global meeting to save wildlife on the planet Earth. But beyond the dire warnings about disappearing animals and emptying seas—and the grand, if fuzzy promises governments will …