Environment on Earth

It is one of the key commitments in a draft climate change plan, which stops short of setting specific targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
The plan - setting out how Brazil will help prevent climate change, and how it will adapt to it - was promised nearly a year ago by President Lula.
But the environmental […]

Amazon deforestation jumped 69 percent in the past 12 months — the first such increase in three years — as rising demand for soy and cattle pushes farmers and ranchers to raze trees, officials said.
Some 8,147 square kilometers (3,145 square miles) of forest were destroyed between August 2007 and August 2008 — a 69 percent […]

Wealthy nations could help reduce greenhouse gas emissions globally by paying landowners in developing nations not to clear forested land for agriculture, finds a new study by a research team from Austria, Brazil and the United States.
The research attaches estimated dollar amounts to each metric ton of carbon that could be saved through avoided deforestation […]

South America still maintains a high percentage of the earth’s ecosystem that has not been disturbed by human activities. Unfortunately, the rate at which these are being degraded is alarming. The Amazon rainforest, spread across many countries in South America, is the world’s biggest tropical rainforest. It is home to one fifth of the planet’s […]

Environment group Greenpeace on Friday welcomed Unilever’s backing of a moratorium on palm oil deforestation in Indonesia, saying the move will help save forests in the sprawling archipelago.
The Anglo-Dutch food and consumer goods company announced Thursday it would aim to use only palm oil from fully traceable sources by 2015 in an effort to reduce […]

In the gloomy shade deep in Africa’s rain forest, the noontime silence was pierced by the whine of a far-off chain saw. It was the sound of destruction, echoed from wood to wood, continent to continent, in the tropical belt that circles the globe.
From Brazil to central Africa to once-lush islands in Asia’s archipelagos, human […]