The UN High Seas Treaty entered into force on Jan. 17, culminating some 40 years of international negotiation and raising hopes for effective conservation of blue-water marine migratory corridors serving Latin America and other regions. The treaty, adopted in 2023 under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (Unclos), aims to ensure the conservation and sustainable use of marine biodiversity in international waters. It is considered one of the few global ocean agreements that could aid emerging efforts by some Latin American countries to safeguard marine migratory swimways connecting their respective territorial waters. Known as the Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction (BBNJ) Agreement, the treaty was adopted with the strong support and leadership of Latin American countries. (See "Region credited for advancing High Seas Treaty" —EcoAméricas, June 2023.) “Seventy percent of the planet is...
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As left-leaning Chilean President Gabriel Boric prepares to hand over power to right-of-center President-elect José Antonio Kast in March, environmental experts are reflecting with disappointment on the trajectory of his green agenda and bracing themselves for worse under his successor. Boric took office in 2022 vowing to build the “first ecological government” in Chilean history. But green advocates including Flavia Liberona, head of Terram, a leading Chilean environmental nonprofit, say his four years in office yielded more steps backward than forward when it comes to green issues. Said Liberona in an interview with EcoAméricas: “There’s a common view that the [Boric] government has not been good on environmental issues.” Liberona asserts Kast, for his part, is poised to take office with a platform “deeply lacking in environmental issues and with no holistic view, and [promoting] disparate measures without much coherence, such as speeding environmental approvals to...
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A longstanding multi-stakeholder agreement in Brazil to prevent the expansion of soybean cultivation from causing deforestation has suffered what is likely to prove a crippling setback. On Jan. 5, fourteen members of the Brazilian Association of Vegetable Oil Industries (Abiove), a network of soybean traders and processors, withdrew from the 20-year-old voluntary agreement, called the Amazon Soy Moratorium (ASM). Under the agreement, reached in 2006, the processors and traders pledged not to buy soy grown on Brazilian Amazon land cleared after July 2008. By many accounts effectively, the moratorium aimed to disincentivize land-clearing by preventing those who farm land deforested after the deadline from selling soybeans to moratorium members further up the supply chain. Deforestation in the 124 Amazon municipalities monitored by the moratorium shrunk by 69% in the period 2009-2022, Abiove reports. Conversely, a preliminary study by the nonprofit Amazon Environmental Research Institute (IPAM) indicates...
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