The destruction of Brazil's Amazon rainforest reached its highest level in a decade this year, government data released on Friday showed, driven by illegal logging and the encroachment of agriculture in the jungle.
Brazil’s President-elect Jair Bolsonaro said on Thursday his future administration may keep the agriculture and the environment ministries separate, backtracking from a proposal to combine the two that had alarmed environmentalists.
Brazil’s environment and agriculture ministers on Wednesday criticized President-elect Jair Bolsonaro’s plans to merge their departments, saying it would hurt the country’s agenda on both fronts. Bolsonaro has pledged to roughly halve the number of existing ministries in an effort to reduce bureaucracy and government bloat. He also vowed to merge the planning, finance and industry ministries into one super ministry.
An effort to create a safe haven for whales in the South Atlantic was defeated at the meeting of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) in Florianopolis, Brazil. The proposal, which was introduced by Brazil in 2001, received support from 39 countries but was opposed by 25, denying it the three-quarters' majority it needed to pass.
Pro and anti-whaling nations locked horns on Monday as the International Whaling Commission (IWC) began meeting in Brazil amid outrage over Japan's proposal to end a three-decade moratorium on commercial whale hunting.