Environment

Caught Between Quarries and Sea Erosion

By K. S. Harikrishnan
After more than a century of fighting sea erosion by massively dumping granite boulders along the beaches of southern  Kerala state, environmentalists and administrators are beginning to see that this has been a costly and ineffective solution.

Major Extractives Firms No Longer Ignoring Community Consent

By Carey L. Biron
New research from Oxfam, an international aid agency, finds that some of the largest multinational oil and mining companies are increasingly incorporating principles of community consent into their day-to-day operations.
PLamy

Multilateralism is at a Crossroads

By Pascal Lamy
Multilateralism is at a crossroads. This is a crucial matter for environmental and sustainability issues, as we have seen in the Rio+20 Summit, and for trade and other economic matters. The G20 Summit in Los Cabos, Mexico, focused precisely on improving our collective response to the current economic turbulence, which is at the heart of developments in the European Union (EU) as well.

Serbians Unite Against Nickel Extraction

By Vesna Peric Zimonjic
A popular Serbian proverb quips that when it comes to politics there are as many opinions as there are people in this central European country of seven million.

Stevia, a Flourishing Business in Spain

By Inés Benítez
On a parcel of land a few kilometres outside the southern Spanish city of Málaga, unemployed activists are growing 2,000 seedlings of stevia, a plant used by the Guaraní indigenous people for centuries as a natural sweetener that is awakening ever greater interest in Spain.

Caribbean Islands Brace for Challenges of Climate Change

By Desmond Brown
Prime Minister Dr. Denzil Douglas remembers how quiet - even uneventful – this tiny twin-island federation was for the first four decades of his life.

Ivorians Deal With European Stink

By Robbie Corey-Boulet
Nouma Camara, a 40-year-old tailor, remembers waking up on Aug. 20, 2006 to a smell he described as “something catastrophic.” His home in Akouedo village, in Côte d’Ivoire’s commercial capital city of Abidjan, lies adjacent to a large, open-air dumpsite where toxic waste had been dumped the night before.

Easing Air Pollution Would Cool the Planet

By Stephen Leahy
The planet can be cooled a whopping 0.5 degrees C with fast action to reduce air pollution from coal-fired power plants, gas fracking, diesel trucks and biomass burning, recent studies show.

Urban Agriculture Sprouts in Brazil’s Favelas

By Fabíola Ortiz
You do not need to live in the countryside to grow vegetables, as hundreds of thousands of people involved in urban agriculture from Havana to Buenos Aires know very well. Now they are being joined by residents of Rio de Janeiro’s “favelas”.

South Invited to ‘De-Grow’

By Claudia Ciobanu
“We should find the way, with our small degrowth movement in the global North, to align ourselves with the environmental justice movement originating with indigenous peoples from the South,” Catalan ecological economist Juan Martinez-Alier said at the third international degrowth conference in Venice, Italy.

Rural Mexican Communities Rich in Resources, Poor in Capital

By Emilio Godoy
The La Ventanilla community in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca has not given up in the face of devastating hurricanes, but has organised to protect mangroves and animal species like the Olive Ridley sea turtle.

Ecobreves – BRAZIL: Coal Ash Cleans Thermoelectric Effluents

By IPS Correspondents and - -
Researchers in Brazil have discovered that the ash produced by burning coal can effectively remove heavy metals from the effluents generated by the same industries that burn it.

Ecobreves – HONDURAS: Businesspeople Learn About Sustainable Production

By IPS Correspondents and - -
Some 300 businesspeople from northern Honduras have received training on clean technologies in the energy, agriculture and water management sectors.

Ecobreves – MEXICO: IDB Finances Green Business Competitiveness

By IPS Correspondents and - -
Some 3,000 micro, small and medium-sized enterprises in Mexico will receive financing to make their production more sustainable.

A Lake of Hope and Conflict

By Manipadma Jena
Parvez Ahmad Dar climbs three hours to reach the hilltop, generator-equipped tourist centre in Ajaf village, 35 kilometres from Srinagar, to recharge his mobile phone.

Water for Phosphate, Not People

By Ihsan Bouabid

Gafsa region in the south of Tunisia was once an oasis; today the phosphate industry has plunged it into a water crisis.

Mexico, Also a Haven for Illegal Fishing

By Emilio Godoy
The authorities in Mexico seem to have thrown in the towel in the fight against illegal fishing, which is hurting fisheries, the environment, and incomes.

Ice-Free Arctic Is “Uncharted Territory”

By Stephen Leahy
The melt of Arctic sea ice has reached its lowest point this year, shrinking 18 percent from last year's near-record low.

New Study Claims Popular Herbicide Causes Tumours in Rats

By Zoha Arshad
Researchers are warning that RoundUp, a popular herbicide produced by the U.S. agro-giant Monsanto and which is used heavily on U.S. corn and soybeans, cause tumours, liver and kidney failure in rodents.
Dhananjayan (Danny) Sriskandarajah

Q&A: A New Era of Citizen Action Is Dawning

By Lindsey Walker
The Global Civil Society Network CIVICUS: World Alliance for Citizen Participation has a new secretary general - Dhananjayan (Danny) Sriskandarajah, who was appointed Monday by the board of directors following the CIVICUS World Assembly in Montreal.

EU Cap ‘Only Boosts Biofuels’

By Daan Bauwens
The European Commission has announced it will limit the amount of crop-based biofuels used in transport, but its newly proposed measures are not nearly enough to curb the disastrous impact of the EU's biofuel policy around the world. Its effects will only worsen, activists say.
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