brazil
Posted by jamie — 31 January 2009 at 9:38am
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by-nc. Credit: Greenpeace / Daniel Beltrá
For about three years now, we've been working on curbing the impacts of the soya industry on the Amazon rainforest in Brazil which, before the current moratorium was put into place, was replacing the forest with plantations on a massive scale.
However, there's another agricultural sector cutting deep into the forest which we're also going to tackle: cattle ranching. To assess the scale of the problem, Greenpeace researchers in Brazil have produced a new set of maps showing how the Amazon region has suffered.
Posted by jamie — 19 January 2009 at 11:27am
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The challenges of monitoring the effects of
deforestation on the Amazon are immense. The vast areas which need to be
covered means it's difficult to keep tabs on what's happening on the remote
fringes of the rainforest and news
of illegal logging and other environmental damage can take a long time to reach
the authorities, if they find out at all.
To help solve this problem, the Greenpeace
team in Brazil
has been training local people to map the impacts of the soya industry in the
Santarém region of the forest, the heart of soya production in the Amazon. It's
a collaborative project with Brazilian organisations Projeto Saude e Alegria (Health
and Happiness Project) and the Rural Workers Unions of Santarém and nearby
Belterra, training people to use GPS technology to pinpoint the damage caused
by intensive agriculture, empowering them to help defend their land and the rainforest.
Posted by jamie — 12 December 2008 at 11:11am
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High-tech smuggling operations may not be what
you'd normally associate with the ongoing clearance of the Amazon rainforest,
but logging companies intent on plundering it for timber have been using
hackers to break into the Brazilian government's sophisticated tracking system
and fiddle the records.
To monitor the amount of timber leaving the
Amazon state of Pará, the Brazilian environment ministry did away with paper dockets
and two years ago introduced an online system. Companies logging the rainforest for timber or charcoal production are only
allowed to fell a certain amount of timber every year and this is controlled by
the use of transport permits issued by the state government's computer system.
Posted by jamie — 4 December 2008 at 11:42am
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Flying over forest fires in the Amazon © Greenpeace/Beltra
With the current climate talks now underway in
Poznan, the Brazilian government has finally
fulfilled a promise it made at the previous round of talks in Bali
last year and set targets for reducing deforestation in the Amazon. It's great to
see they finally have some targets to work towards (and it's been a long time
coming) but as is often the way with these political initiatives, it all falls
short of what's really needed.
Posted by jamie — 5 September 2008 at 6:10pm
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If you haven't had your fill of news from the
Amazon lately (we've recently had live
webcasts and slideshows
from regions where fires have swept through), Monday's edition of Panorama is
dedicated to the largest rainforest on Earth, and Greenpeace will featured.
Called Can Money Grow On Trees?, it will
examine how the rising cost of food is threatening the Amazon as more forest is
converted into farmland for cattle ranching - the current dry season provides an excellent
opportunity for a bit of fire-based forest clearance. Also included will be the
question of whether financial mechanisms (like our own proposal) can be brought
in to make forests more valuable if they're left standing.
We haven't seen the final programme, but it's
on BBC1 at 8.30pm, with a repeat on Friday 12 September at 12.45am. Of course,
you can watch
it at anytime on the wondrous iPlayer after transmission (although only if you're in the UK).
Posted by jamie — 3 September 2008 at 2:19pm
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It's currently the dry season in the Amazon and, as the live webcast last week demonstrated, fires have been decimating large areas. The video crew weren't the only ones documenting the fires and last week we received images from another Greenpeace team who took to the air to photograph them and the devastated areas they leave behind. We've put together some of the most striking (not to say depressing) images into the slideshow below.
Posted by jamie — 1 September 2008 at 4:58pm
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On Friday, a Greenpeace team
broadcast a live webcast from the heart of the Amazon rainforest, in an area
which was still-smouldering after a recent forest fire. Even rainforests have dry seasons and during the current one, fires both natural and man-made are devastating huge areas.
It was an amazing
technical achievement but that wasn't the reason they did it - they were there to show how the forest is being cleared for a variety of reasons (in this case, to open
up areas for cattle).
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