Posted by jamie — 3 October 2007 at 6:29pm
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A burnt area of the Amazon rainforest in Itaituba 2, a protected area (Photo: Daniel Beltra)
Seven years? It's a tall order but we have a cunning plan. Together with eight other national campaigning organisations, our Brazilian team have launched an ambitious proposal with a goal of zero deforestation by 2015.
The plan sets out specific targets that could see deforestation drop gradually over the next seven years, pushing for a cut of 25 per cent in the first year compared to figures for 2005/6. It's thinking on a massive scale, but we believe it can be done - with deforestation rates already falling and with a concerted effort it really could happen.
Posted by jamie — 30 August 2007 at 3:48pm
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As the narrator of this startling video states, "working in the Amazon forest is not for the faint of heart." In the past, people from campaigning organisations have been bullied by land owners and workers, facing intimidation, violence, death threats and even murder.
Posted by jamie — 29 August 2007 at 10:39am
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There have been further developments in the Amazon. As we reported last week, Greenpeace Brazil published its investigation into deals between a Brazilian government agency and logging companies over areas of rainforest under the guise of a land settlement programme.
Posted by jamie — 23 August 2007 at 4:13pm
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Our exposé earlier this week about how a Brazilian government agency is handing out areas of the Amazon rainforest to logging companies under the guise of a land settlement programme has set the proverbial cat among the pigeons. The government, has been stressing that deforestation levels are falling but has also said it will launch a full investigation into the situation.
Andre Muggiati, one of our Amazon campaigners, has been doing a slew of interviews for the Brazilian and international media, including the main national radio station in Brazil where he was followed by Guilherme Kassel, the Minister for Rural Development who is responsible for the National Institute of Colonisation and Land Reform (Incra). An impromptu debate ensued during which Muggiati invited the minister to join him on a visit to Santarém to see for himself the impact these underhand deals are having on the rainforest.
An agency of the Brazilian Federal Government, which only days ago was celebrating reductions in Amazon deforestation, is allowing logging companies to destroy large areas of the rainforest by assigning them 'land settlements' for poor communities, according to an eight-month Greenpeace investigation(1).
Posted by jamie — 21 August 2007 at 10:18am
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It was almost too good to be true. When the Brazilian government announced last week that deforestation rates in the Amazon had dropped for the third year running, it was certainly a cause for celebration. But it now transpires that one of the government's own agencies is colluding with logging companies so they can gain access to areas of high-value timber that would otherwise be off limits.
Posted by jamie — 24 July 2007 at 4:13pm
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Memories of the giant chickens that invaded branches of McDonald's last year might be fading fast, but it's one year since a moratorium was agreed on buying soya from the Amazon rainforest. It was our chicken-led campaign that helped spur McDonald's and UK supermarkets into putting pressure on the soya traders in Brazil, who were trading in beans grown in newly deforested areas of the rainforest.
As the largest remaining rainforest on the globe, the Amazon rainforest is one of the most diverse ecosystems in the world. It is vast, stretching across 7.8 million km2, 5 per cent of the Earth's surface and several South American countries. However, over 60 per cent lies within Brazil's borders, and it's here that we're focusing our efforts to protect this rainforest.
Posted by jamie — 9 May 2007 at 12:00am
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As you may have already seen, along with WWF, the RSPB, Friends of the Earth and enoughsenough.org, we've placed an advert in several of today's papers warning the government about the environmental risks of biofuels as an alternative to petrol and diesel. Hang on, I imagine some of you are saying right now, aren't they supposed to be clean and green with the power to save us from the tyranny of fossil fuels? Well, yes... and no.