The head of the European Parliament’s environmental commission recently declared himself “impressed” by pollution at the Dock Sud petrochemical complex just south of Buenos Aires, and he pledged to raise the issue in the European Union. Karl-Heinz Florenz of Germany said he would highlight the problem at home because some of the companies using the complex, which includes refining and terminal facilities, are based in Europe. Among them are Royal-Dutch Shell and Repsol-YPF. “What we can do is pressure them to act in Argentina under the same quality standards as in Europe,” said Florenz, who toured the complex while in Buenos Aires for the Cop-10 climate-change conference last month. “[In Europe] they show up with clean clothes, but here they...
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A Chilean appeals court has ruled in favor of a national senator who alleges his public image sustained “serious injuries” when one of Chile’s leading environmental advocates accused him of helping enact the country’s fishing law despite a conflict of interest. The lawsuit by Sen. Andrés Zaldivar, a member of the centrist Christian Democrat party and former president of the Chilean Senate, targets claims made by Marcel Claude, South America director of the Washington-based green group Oceana and former president of Chile’s Terram Foundation, an environmental think tank. While doing commentary on Chilean television in October 2002, Claude criticized advocacy of the then-pending fishing legislation by Zaldivar and his brother Adolfo Zaldivar, also a member of the national Senate, as a conflict of...
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Argentina’s lower house of Congress has approved a bilateral accord that includes a controversial provision under which Argentina could process waste from a small nuclear reactor its National Institute of Applied Research (Invap) is building in Australia. The 20-megawatt reactor, being built in the Sydney suburb of Lucas Heights for Australia’s Nuclear Science and Technology Organization (Ansto), will be used for research and making radioisotopes. Invap signed a US$180 million contract for the work in 2000, and officials say the project is now more than 80% complete. But not until last month did a related Argentine-Australian nuclear-cooperation agreement win final approval in the Argentine Congress. That approval came in the form of a Dec. 16 vote by Congress’ lower house—the...
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The list of Peru’s endangered or threatened mammals, birds, reptiles and amphibians has grown, but experts attribute the increase to better data-gathering rather than to a greater threat of extinctions. Some 100 Peruvian scientists helped draft the list over the past year, providing data and developing common criteria for evaluating threat levels. A listing of threatened and endangered Peruvian plants is due out early this year, and there are plans to publish a “Red Book” of Peruvian species at risk of extinction, says Rosario Acero, director of conservation and biodiversity at Peru’s National Institute of Natural Resources (Inrena). She and other experts hope the effort will spur research that will help officials draft more detailed conservation plans. Peru’s critically endangered list comprises five mammals...
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