Since March 26 Bolivia has been in a state of emergency due to flooding caused by the country’s most intense rains in four decades. Rains began as usual in November, but then extended far longer than early March, when the wet season usually ends, causing particularly heavy damage in the altiplano, or high-plains region. “We are experiencing a completely anomalous phenomenon,” says Lucía Walper, chief of the country’s National Meteorological and Hydrological Service. The Bolivian government reported on April 27 that the resulting floods had left 58 people dead and 10 missing. Some 860,000 families have been affected in 277 municipalities nationwide, particularly in the departments of La Paz, Santa Cruz, Chuquisaca and Beni. The waters have destroyed thousands of homes, eroded cropland, killed livestock, and left entire communities isolated by road and bridge failures. It has created a humanitarian and agricultural crisis that has threatened food security in...
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Fifteen Darwin’s rheas have been captured in Argentina and released in Chile in what organizers of the effort are calling the first conservation project involving the relocation of wild animals from one South American country to another. Darwin’s rhea (Rhea pennata), one of two flightless ostrich-like species in South America, can run at speeds of up to 60 kilometers per hour (37 mph). The 15 captured for relocation to Chile inhabited Patagonia Park, a privately owned 180,000-hectare (445,000-acre) reserve in the Argentine province of Santa Cruz. The reserve belongs to Rewilding Argentina, a conservation nonprofit created by the late U.S. clothing entrepreneur and conservationist Douglas Tompkins and his wife Kris Tompkins, a former CEO of the Patagonia outdoor apparel company. There, the 15 rheas were captured in March from a healthy population of the birds living in the reserve and were transported 90 kilometers (56 miles) by...
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Brazil’s University of São Paulo has inaugurated the world’s first pilot plant to produce green hydrogen from sugarcane-based ethanol, an automotive biofuel. The university’s Research Center for Greenhouse Gas Innovation (RCGI), which went online in February, was funded with R$50 million ($9.5 million) from Shell Brasil and partners. The 425-square-meter (4,575-square-foot) facility produces 100 kilograms (220 pounds) of green hydrogen daily and will be used to fuel three campus buses and two light vehicles lent to RCGI by Toyota of Japan and Hyundai of South Korea. The three hydrogen-fueled buses, by replacing a similar number of diesel-powered buses, will reduce the university’s carbon emissions by 3,000 tons of CO2 per year. Hydrogen produced from ethanol, whose combustion creates far lower levels of greenhouse-gas emissions than that of gasoline, is seen to have considerable potential in Brazil. The country’s ethanol infrastructure, developing...
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The regional government of Puno, in the southern Peruvian highlands, passed an ordinance April 24 recognizing Lake Titicaca, South America’s largest freshwater lake and one of the highest lakes in the world, as having rights. The iconic body of water joins three Puno rivers that were granted rights in recent years under municipal ordinances, and the Marañón River, which was the subject of Peru’s first rights-of-nature lawsuit. Both the Lake Titicaca ordinance and the Marañón case were spearheaded by women. (See “Prize goes to woman who led fight for river’s rights”—this issue.) Straddling the border between Peru and Bolivia, Titicaca covers about 3,200 square miles (8,300 square kilometers) on the high plain known as the Altiplano, some 12,460 feet (3,800 meters) above sea level. Around 25 rivers flow into the lake, including some that carry raw sewage and mine tailings. The lake has also suffered over the...
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