Environment

• Friday, July 24th 2020 - 09:05 UTC

  Ecuador promotes mining but with stricter regulation for waste dams

  

  Ecuador unveiled new, tighter regulations for the design and construction of mining waste dams, seeking to avoid disasters like the tailings dam collapse that killed hundreds at a Vale site in Brazil last year.

• Thursday, July 23rd 2020 - 07:34 UTC

  Scientists confirm active methane seep from Antarctica's seabed

  

  Scientists have discovered an active methane seep from Antarctica's sea bed that could shed light on the potent greenhouse gas trapped beneath frozen continent. Marine ecologist Andrew Thurber first glimpsed what a colleague described as a “microbial waterfall” during a dive in the icy waters of the Ross Sea in 2012.

• Wednesday, July 22nd 2020 - 08:00 UTC

  Parana river insufficient water level benefitted exports from Brazilian ports

  

  Due to the Paraná river drought, which affected Argentina’s soy oil-exporting capacity, Cattalini Terminais Marítimos, which handles almost 70% of Brazil’s soy oil exports through its facilities in the port of Paranaguá, predicts a 25% increase in shipments this year.

• Tuesday, July 21st 2020 - 08:50 UTC

  A fifth of Brazilian soy exports to EU may have come from illegally deforested land

  

  A study published by Science magazine on July 16 indicated that a fifth of Brazilian soy imports received by the European Union may come from land that has been illegally deforested.

• Tuesday, July 21st 2020 - 08:44 UTC

  Climate change starving polar bears to extinction, according to latest report

  

  Climate change is starving polar bears into extinction, according to research published on Monday that predicts the apex carnivores could all but disappear within the span of a human lifetime.

• Tuesday, July 21st 2020 - 08:41 UTC

  Italian frogmen try to free a sperm whale caught in abandoned fishing net

  

  The Italian coastguard has been working for days to free a massive sperm whale caught in an abandoned fishing net in open sea off the Sicilian Aeolian Islands. The whale was spotted on Saturday struggling to get free of a net usually used for fishing illegally for swordfish.

• Friday, July 17th 2020 - 04:41 UTC

  Falklands Seafood industry faces environment of uncertainty

  

  The Falkland Islands Seafood industry continues to face an environment of great uncertainty, Falkland Islands Fishing Companies Association (FIFCA) Executive Secretary James Bates told Penguin News this week.

• Thursday, July 16th 2020 - 07:40 UTC

  Report on per capita carbon “food prints” criticizes beef and dairy consumption

  

  If everyone alive ate steaks and dairy the way Brazilians and Americans do, we would need an extra five planets to feed the world, according to the first report to compare the carbon emissions from food consumption in Group of Twenty (G20) nations, released on Thursday.

• Saturday, July 11th 2020 - 10:01 UTC

  Despite Bolsonaro's pledges, Amazon deforestation continues to increase

  

  Deforestation in Brazil's Amazon rose for the 14th consecutive month in June, preliminary government data on Friday showed, heaping further pressure on President Jair Bolsonaro who is under fire for worsening destruction of the rainforest on his watch.

• Saturday, July 11th 2020 - 08:05 UTC

  Illegal trade of ivory shrinks but pangolin scales trafficking soars, UN report

  

  The illegal global trade in ivory has shrunk while the trafficking of pangolins has soared, a UN report on wildlife crime based on four years' data said on Friday. National bans on selling ivory, particularly China's in 2017, appear to have helped further erode ivory trafficking after it peaked around 2011-2013, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) said in its World Wildlife Crime Report, which was last published in 2016.