Group items tagged

From 1950 to 2006 the United Nation Food and Agriculture Agency (FAO) estimated that 12,700 metric tons of fish were caught in the Arctic, giving the impression that the Arctic was a still-pristine ecosystem, remaining underexploited by the world's fisheries. However, a recent study by the University of British Colombia Fisheries Center and Department of Earth and Ocean Sciences throws cold water on this widespread belief. According to the study, published in Polar Biology, the total Arctic catch from 1950 to 2006 is likely to have been nearly a million metric tons, almost 75 times the FAO's official record.

""The declines of species were so dramatic, widespread and so recent. I wish I could have seen what the country was like in 1800s with all this wildlife," Karanth says"

"Delmas, a French shipping company that has been under pressure for facilitating the destruction of Madagascar's rainforest parks, has been cleared to begin picking up contraband rosewood as soon as Monday, report local sources in the Indian Ocean island nation. Leaders behind last year's military coup - which displaced the autocratic, but democratically elected President Marc Ravalomanana - have signed off on the shipment."

Indonesia will rehabilitate degraded forests and plant millions of hectares of new forests to meet its target of reducing greenhouse gas emissions 26 percent from projected levels by 2020, reports Reuters.

"he Kasigau Corridor REDD Project aims to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 3.5 million tons over its 20-year lifetime, generating carbon credits that may receive a premium relative to other credits due to the CCB certification."

Candy and food giant Nestle is finding itself between a rock and a hard place. The online campaign against Nestle continues: today protesters once again posted thousands of negative messages on the company's Facebook page, most demanding that Nestle cut out palm oil linked to deforestation from its products. At the same time, a new problem has cropped up for Nestle: Indonesian oil palm planters are threatening to boycott Nestle products. Proving that the issues surrounding oil palm and deforestation are nothing if not complex: Facebook protestors say they will boycott Nestle if it doesn't cut out all links to Sinar Mas, a company that Greenpeace has linked to deforestation, whereas the Indonesia Palm Oil Growers Association are preparing a boycott if Nestle stops buying from Sinar Mas, according to the Jakarta Post.

Anyone who's ever squeezed a whole bag of oranges into a single glass of juice knows (at least intuitively) that a whole lot of water goes into that one little refreshing gulp - but would you believe 518 liters of water for just one carton of juice?

The State and Federal government announced today that they would "pursue other alternative sources of energy, namely gas, to meet Sabah's power supply needs." Proposed for an undeveloped beach on the north-eastern coast of Borneo, the coal plant, according to critics, would have threatened the Coral Triangle, one of the world's most biodiverse marine ecosystems, and Tabin Wildlife Reserve, home to Critically Endangered Sumatran rhinos and Bornean orangutans. Local fishermen feared that discharges from the plant would have imperiled their livelihood.

"[Forests] reduce the effects of floods, prevent soil erosion, regulate the water table and assure a high-quality water supply for people, industry and agriculture," said the Forestry Department Assistant Director General, Eduardo Rojas-Briales, with the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). "Forests are part of the natural infrastructure of any country and are essential to the water cycle."

The seed dispersal activities of many animals is essential for the Amazon and other forests, because, as Anderson explains: "plants rely on the seed dispersal activities of these animals (i.e. birds, bats, monkeys, tapirs, rodents, and fish) to move seeds away from the mother tree to good sites for germination […] For pioneer species like Cecropia (a genus of tree that we studied), seeds might need light gaps to germinate-that is, seeds might have very specific requirements for germination."