Environmental News Network

Climate change causes forced migration
Johannesburg - Forced migration is to be discussed at a two-day Climate Change Summit starting on Monday, hosted by the City of Johannesburg in partnership with the SA Local Government Association. "The issue of the link between the way climate change will impact on Africa and the political implications thereof is a burning one. >> Read the Full Article
Last Flight of the Honeybee?
Dave Hackenberg's bees have been on the road for four days. To reach the almond orchards of California's Central Valley, they pass through the fertile plains of the Mississippi, huge cattle ranches and oilfields in Texas, and the dusty towns of New Mexico on their 2,600-mile journey from Florida. The bees will have seen little of the dramatic landscape, being cooped up in hives stacked four high on the back of trucks. >> Read the Full Article
U.S. Sets Policy to Protect the Arctic from Industrial Fishing
President Bush today established a U.S. policy halting the expansion of industrial fishing into the Arctic until we have more information. The policy in part states that "the decline of several commercially valuable fish stocks throughout the world's oceans highlights the need for fishing nations to conserve fish stocks and develop management systems that promote fisheries sustainability," and also states that until international agreement for managing Arctic fishing are in place, "...the United States should support international efforts to halt the expansion of commercial fishing activities in the high seas of the Arctic Ocean." >> Read the Full Article
Desert is claiming southeast Spain
Lush fields of lettuce and hothouses of tomatoes line the roads. Verdant new developments of plush pastel vacation homes beckon buyers from Britain and Germany. Golf courses - 54 of them, all built in the past decade and most in the past three years - give way to the beach. At last, this hardscrabble corner of southeast Spain is thriving. >> Read the Full Article
Brazil minister says Amazon trend worrying
Brazil's newly appointed environment minister drew a bleak picture of the Amazon rain forest's future on Monday, saying the latest figures for deforestation in April were worrying and that this year would likely be worse than last. "The worst is to come. Now is the test," Carlos Minc told reporters, noting the period with the highest deforestation was historically from June to September when farmers prepared for planting by burning ground cover. >> Read the Full Article
Rich countries 'failed to heed' food crisis warnings
The UN Food and Agriculture Organization asked the world's countries today for $30 billion a year to "re-launch world agriculture" and deal with food shortages that have caused soaring food prices, hunger and unrest worldwide. The call came at the start of a three-day intergovernmental meeting at FAO headquarters in Rome to deal with the doubling of average world food prices since 2000, which has accelerated sharply in the past six months. In an indication of the seriousness of the situation, 44 heads of government are attending. >> Read the Full Article
Ecological globalization
Ecosystems are constantly exchanging materials through the movement of air in the atmosphere, the flow of water in rivers and the migration of animals across the landscape. People, however, have also established themselves as another major driver of connectivity among ecosystems. In the June 2008 Special Issue of Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, titled â€œContinental-scale ecology in an increasingly connected world,â€ ecologists discuss how human influences interact with natural processes to influence connectivity at the continental scale. The authors conclude that networks of large-scale experiments are needed to predict long-term ecological change. >> Read the Full Article
The Lacey Act: Protecting American Wildlife
The recently passed Farm Bill included an amendment to the Lacey Act which extends protection to plants and trees illegally harvested outside of the U.S. TheLacey Act, named after congressman, Rep. John Lacey, the Congressman who introduced it, and signed into law in 1900, authorized the Secretary of the Interior to restore "game and other birds...where where they have become scarce or extinct and to regulate the introduction of birds and animals in areas where they had not existed." >> Read the Full Article
UN 2010 biodiversity target in the balance
The biggest ever United Nations conference held to tackle worldwide biodiversity loss closed today without producing a clear roadmap to achieve the 2010 target to substantially reduce biodiversity loss, WWF said. The 9th Conference of Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD COP9) held in Bonn, covering 191 countries and nearly 7000 participants, needed to achieve significant progress and to provide the necessary impetus for countries to implement biodiversity conservation measures and turn round the rate of biodiversity loss worldwide. >> Read the Full Article
New WTO Fisheries Subsidies Document Creates Path for Negotiations
The World Trade Organization (WTO) today issued a new working document by Rules Negotiating Group Chairman Guillermo Valles Galmes. The document covers all areas of the Rules group negotiations, which includes fisheries subsidies, general subsidies and anti-dumping. The document provides a description of the views and proposals of WTO members related to the Rules text that was presented by Chairman Valles in November 2007. >> Read the Full Article