Around the Region

Correa to make 11th-hour pitch for payments at UN

Hoping to attract the funds he says Ecuador needs to forego oil drilling in a national park rich in biodiversity, President Rafael Correa will request support from international leaders in a meeting convened by United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon. The session, a side meeting to be held next month during a gathering of the UN General Assembly, comes four years after Correa, in a UN speech, offered to cancel plans for drilling in the so-called Ishpingo-Tambococha-Tiputini (ITT) concession area. That area is believed to contain 20% of Ecuador’s oil reserves, and the vast majority of it is located within the rainforest of Yasuní National Park, regarded by scientists as among the most biodiverse places in the world. In his 2007...

[ Log in to read more | Subscribe ]

Extension for oil operations in Guatemalan national park

Despite reversals in court, green advocates vow they’ll continue their fight to overturn the 15-year extension of a contract under which the Anglo-French company Perenco extracts oil in Guatemala’s Laguna del Tigre National Park. Laguna del Tigre, located in the northern department of Petén, forms the heart of the Maya Biosphere Reserve. Created in 1990 to protect Central America’s largest expanse of tropical forest, the United Nations Educational and Scientific Organization (Unesco)-recognized biosphere reserve seeks to balance human activities with conservation by establishing three zones, each with a different protection status. The reserve includes four major parks. Laguna del Tigre is located in the “nucleus zone” of highest protection, and is listed as a wetland of international importance under the Ramsar Convention...

[ Log in to read more | Subscribe ]

Re-licensing of Brazilian rail project is questioned

Environmentalists are criticizing the reinstatement of a license for one of the country’s biggest current infrastructure projects—a 1,527-kilometer (948-mile) railway linking the north-central state of Tocantins to port facilities in the northeastern state of Bahia. Brazilian environmental officials on July 18 suspended the license for the R$7.43-billion (US$4.6-billion) project, which will move grain and iron-ore from the country’s interior eastward to Bahia’s coast for shipment abroad. They said the government railway-development company building the line, Valec Engenharia, Construções e Ferrovias, had failed to comply with environmental conditions it had agreed to meet in return for the license, which was originally granted last December. The move effectively froze work on the first, R$4 billion ($2.5...

[ Log in to read more | Subscribe ]

Amid protest and lawsuits Belo Monte project begins

Efforts to block the R$19.4 billion (US$12 billion), 11,233-megawatt Belo Monte dam in the eastern Amazon state of Pará, continue apace, even though experts doubt they will halt the plant’s construction, which got underway in June. If completed as planned in 2015-16, the power station on the Xingú River is slated to rank third in installed capacity worldwide behind China’s 22,000-megawatt Three Gorges Dam and Brazil’s 14,600-megawatt Itaipú Dam. First, though, it must contend with determined opposition. On Aug. 20, 4,000 street protesters in three Brazilian cities—São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and Belém, the Pará state capital—took to the streets to boost public opposition to the dam. Three days earlier, a request aimed at halting construction of the...

[ Log in to read more | Subscribe ]