PARIS - Investing billions today to protect threatened ecosystems and dwindling biodiversity would reap trillions in savings over the long haul, according to a UN-backed report issued Friday.
More than a billion of Earth's poorest denizens depend directly on coral reefs, forests, mangroves, aquifers and other forms of "natural capital" to eke out a living.
Unless world leaders take swift action to halt the accelerating depletion of these resources, the result could be hunger, conflict and environment refugees, the study warned.
Depletion of the Amazon Rainforest is not a new concern facing environmentalists, biologists, ecologists, and a growing number of the Amazonian indigenous peoples. For decades they have feared for the fate of the world’s most biologically diverse and species-rich hothouse.
Brazil houses the largest expanse of tropical wilderness remaining on the globe, claiming 60% of the Amazon Rainforest. This is a vast and remote stretch which thirty years ago only Indians and wild animals roamed.
We’re driving down Highway One in deep south USA, alongside Bayou Layforche in Louisiana - the old course of the Mississippi river. We’ve nearly finished filming our story about the disappearing communities of the wetlands alongside the Gulf of Mexico. They’re being forced out by a rising sea and by man’s destruction of this precious environment.
There’s one more element we need - some people speaking Cajun French. It’s proven harder than we thought - it’s a disappearing culture. Only the older folk still talk the old way.
In 1992, I attended an event that filled me with hope.
Canada and the rest of the world had just signed a climate change treaty at the United Nations Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro.
I remember being optimistic that the world could come together to fight the greatest threat to our planet and our own survival. We had done it before in overcoming other threats, like defeating Nazism in Europe and beating back horrific diseases like polio.
Bees, and particularly the European honeybee,
Apis mellifera,
have come to symbolize a deepening ecological crisis in North America.
Colony Collapse Disorder, first reported in 2006, has been described as
"an insect version of AIDS,"
ravaging honeybee colonies throughout North America. It has become a
cause célèbre of sorts, embraced by Häagen-Dazs, which features the bee
on some of its pints of ice cream and asks consumers to imagine a world
without pears, raspberries, and strawberries.
A coalition of advocacy groups this morning called on the federal
government to double its efforts to restore the wetlands, marshes and
barrier islands that help protect the Gulf Coast from hurricanes.
At noon tomorrow thousands of activists will swoop on London for this summer's
Climate Camp.
The government is busy stemming the flow of immigration from Mexico,
but it's welcoming a different kind of flood from the north. The State
Department just approved a project to pipe some of the world's dirtiest
oil from Canada into America's fuel-hungry economy.
I live a few miles from Cardigan Bay.
Whenever I can get away, I take my kayak down to the beach and launch
it through the waves. Often I take a hand line with me, in the hope of
catching some mackerel or pollock. On the water, sometimes five
kilometres from the coast, surrounded by gannets and shearwaters, I
feel closer to nature than at any other time.
WASHINGTON - Most polluted or damaged ecosystems worldwide could recover within a single lifetime if societies commit to their cleanup or restoration, according to researchers at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies.
The report, ‘Rapid Recovery of Ecosystems,' states that biotic and biophysical conditions of ecosystems become degraded from exploitation by humans to meet rising demands for resources and environmental services, or from accidents.
