Belize, Guatemala and Mexico in August agreed to jointly protect and restore the Maya Forest, an area of some 5.7 million hectares (14 million acres) that straddles the three countries and is one of the largest continuous forests north of the Amazon. The presidents of the three nations—John Antonio Briceño of Belize, Bernardo Arevalo of Guatemala, and Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico—met in Calakmul in southern Mexico to create the Great Maya Forest Biocultural Corridor. The corridor is a patchwork of national parks, private and community-owned land that stretches from northern Guatemala and Belize to the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico. Jeremy Radachowsky, director for Mesoamerica and the Caribbean at the Wildlife Conservation Society, says the agreement stems from “a recognition especially within Guatemala and Mexico that the Maya forest has been under a lot of pressure.” The forest has lost around 30% of its cover over the past...
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Following a decade-long legal campaign, Argentine environmental organizations are applauding a Sept. 2 Supreme Court ruling to halt oil drilling in a national park and require the government to carry out environmental remediation in areas affected by the activity. Drilling in the Caimancito oilfield, which covers approximately 5,700 hectares (14,000 acres) in the northwest Argentine province of Jujuy, began in 1969. In 1979, the government created a new national park that included all but 10% of the oilfield. The 76,000-hectare (188,000-acre) Calilegua National Park became Argentina’s only park to conserve mountain rainforests. Oil drilling at Caimancito, however, continued despite national legislation prohibiting all economic activity other than tourism in national parks. Nor did it stop after Argentina in 2007 enacted a landmark native-forest protection law. For 38 years—from 1969 to 2008—the oilfield was exploited by state-owned YPF, and until this year by a...
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The fires in Bolivia that in recent decades have destroyed ever-larger areas of forest are closely linked to agribusiness expansion, according to a report by a special rapporteur for the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR). “Testimony and official data suggest that in many cases the fires were set intentionally to clear land for agricultural or ranching activity, to put pressure on [collectively owned] territories, to facilitate illegal appropriation of land or for political reasons,” said the report by Javier Palummo of Uruguay, the commission’s special rapporteur on economic, social, cultural, and environmental rights. Palummo writes that since fires claimed over 3 million hectares (7.4 million acres) of land in Bolivia in 2004 and 2005, the size of the land area consumed by fires has grown larger almost every year. The destruction hit a new high last year, when fires ravaged over 10 million hectares (24.7 million acres...
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