wood

Phnom Penh Post: Illegal logging of staggering proportions abetted by military personnel is decimating stocks of luxury rosewood in the Central Cardamom Protected Forest, while the conservation group tasked with protecting the area and its government counterparts deny the trade is even happening. In a period of several hours beginning late on Sunday night, the Post witnessed at least nine industrial transport trucks, seven pick-up trucks and one Land Rover packed with timber drive out of Koh Kong province’s Thma...

New York Times: A federal proposal to ban the construction of coal-fired power plants that release all of their carbon dioxide into the atmosphere would seem to smooth the way for carbon capture, a budding technology that traps the greenhouse gas for storage or other uses. But even as the Environmental Protection Agency prepares to open hearings on the proposed rule, unveiled in March, industry experts say the persistently low price of natural gas is threatening the viability of the nation’s carbon capture projects....

Mail and Guardian: Divisions over who should lead the fight against climate change should be laid aside say ministers from some of the world's poorest countries. The vexed issue of which countries should bear the greatest responsibility for cutting greenhouse gas emissions has been a sticking point in international negotiations for two decades. Under the original settlement reached in 1992 at the Rio Earth Summit and formalised in the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, some rapidly emerging economies such as China were left out...

AfriqueJet: Africa stresses ‘fair emission cuts’ as key to moving climate talks forward - African countries attending the opening of the 'Durban Platform' climate talks in Bonn, Germany, on Thursday expressed worry that there had been no change in proposed emission cuts, even though the current inadequate pledges risk 2.5-5C of warming. In the first session of discussions on the second commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol, the European Union and other developed countries' proposed emission that cuts remained...

Inter Press Service: The 18,000 litres of clean water that Jakarta consumes per second are expected to hit 26,000 litres by 2015. The solution? A 54-km stretch of toll road cut through prime paddy land to access the water resources of this salubrious hill district. Jakarta’s administrators expect the capital city to be a show window for its efforts in achieving the United Nations Millennium Development Goals, including those for water supply and sanitation. The government, by stated policy, is looking to private-public...

New York Times: One problem with Treece, Kan., is that the ground keeps caving in. It has happened more than a hundred times over the last century. On most occasions, the subsidences — that’s what the scientists call them — are small, like when a sofa-size crater opened up on 10th Street last year. Other times, they are much worse. In 1966, a 300-foot-wide, 200-foot-deep abyss swallowed up the road out on the edge of town. Somehow no one died. I first visited Treece in 2010. From the airport in Kansas City, it’s...

Irish Times: CLIMATE CHANGE has the potential to bring 20 new breeding species of birds to Ireland, according to a new book. Bird Habitats in Ireland is one of the most comprehensive attempts to date to document the location of the entire bird population in Ireland, ranging from cities to bogs, sea cliffs and wetlands. It features the work of 25 academics and 12 photographers and was launched yesterday at a symposium in the RDS on bird species in Ireland. The chapter on climate change warns that hotter, drier...

New Zealand Herald: We are heading for hell in a fossil-fuelled handcart, spinning towards implosion. Planet Earth is not able to keep pace with humanity's demands nor cope with its wasteful by-products. And the gap - the "ecological overshoot" - is growing. This bleakest of prognoses for our planet's future comes from the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), which this week released its ninth Living Planet Report. It is a cry for help (if anyone is listening): * Biodiversity - the number and range of species - is in freefall,...

Reuters: Large stretches of salmon-spawning streams and thousands of acres of wetlands would be wiped out if a large-scale mining project were to be built in southwestern Alaska's copper-rich Bristol Bay region, according to a report issued Friday by the Environmental Protection Agency. The report, while not directly addressing it, is a potential blow to the massive Pebble copper and gold mine operation proposed by an international alliance of mining interests, and opposed by environmentalists and local...

Mongabay: Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon is lower in 2012 relative to the same period last year according to satellite-based data released by Imazon, an NGO. Imazon's Deforestation Alert System (SAD) detected 830 square kilometers of clearing between August 2011 to April 2012, down about 35 percent from the 1268 square kilometers recorded at this time last year. Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon last year was the lowest since annual record keeping began in the late 1980s. Imazon's deforestation...

Guardian: Just like any other aspect of the modern world, urban wildlife is subject to change. Species come and go, as their populations rise and fall. There are new arrivals, sometimes by natural means, others through human intervention. And from time to time a once thriving species will simply disappear. I was born in 1960 and grew up in the west London suburbs, described by naturalist Kenneth Allsop as "that messy limbo which is neither town nor country". Allsop was writing just after the end of the...

Mongabay: The palm oil industry has hired lobbying powerhouse Holland & Knight to help overturn the Environmental Protection Agency’s finding that palm oil-based biodiesel fails to meet greenhouse gas emissions targets under the country's Renewable Fuels Standard, reports The Hill. "Lobbying disclosure records show that the Malaysian Palm Oil Council, the Indonesian Palm Oil Board and Neste Oil have brought on Holland & Knight, which is among K Street’s highest revenue lobby shops," writes Ben Geman on...

Reuters: After a decade of promise, advanced biofuels makers are entering a crucial make-or-break period with the first of a new generation of production facilities about to come on line. The new facilities are designed to take biofuels beyond corn-based ethanol and begin to shift the industry to "advanced" fuels made with a lower carbon footprint derived from products that will not compete with demand for food. Many of the companies are turning to cellulosic plant materials, animal waste and plant...

MSNBC: Rivers and streams in the world's premier wild salmon fishery would be greatly degraded for decades should a vast gold and copper mine be built and then see a failure in the dam holding back its mine waste, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said in a draft report Friday. The proposed Pebble Mine in Alaska has stirred passions for and against, with fishermen and native tribes in the Bristol Bay watershed generally against the project. If the tailings dam were to break, the draft report...

Agence France-Presse: Next month's Rio summit on sustainable development will discuss how to strengthen the UN Environment Program (UNEP), Brazil's environment minister said Friday. France, backed by at least 100 countries, is proposing to turn the second-string UNEP into a global super-agency on a par with other UN specialized agencies such as the World Health Organization or the Food and Agricultural Organization. But Washington is strong opposed to the idea. "There is no consensus in international organizations...

Telegraph: It was not an invitation to decline. "Come to our conference and Jamie Oliver and Sir Richard Branson will together cook dinner.' Indeed, the prospect of discovering how the two icons would get on in the kitchen was even more alluring than the promise of an exceptional meal. I accepted, of course. Yet when I turned up at the erstwhile naked chef's Fifteen restaurant in Shoreditch, east London, earlier this week, I found that celebrity cooking was off the menu; the titans merely arranged one course...

BBC: The annual meeting of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) in Panama is about six weeks away, and it's shaping up to be an important and perhaps defining moment. A recent change of rules means resolutions have to be posted on the organisation's website 60 days before meetings begin, so we have more advance notice of countries' real intentions than formerly. The Latin American bloc - known as the Buenos Aires Group for these purposes - has lodged a bid to create a whale sanctuary in the...

Inter Press Service: The latest session of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), taking place May 15-25 in the former German capital Bonn, is the perfect opportunity to reaffirm the enormous and growing body of scientific expertise on policies to tackle global warming. During the current session, attended by hundreds of scientists, environmental activists, and government delegates from all over the world, the UNFCCC – the agency tasked with fulfilling the obligations of the Kyoto Protocol...

National Geographic: Insects-and aquatic bugs in particular-could be key to understanding how the opening of an ambitious new highway connecting Brazil and Peru will affect the Amazon rain forest. Earlier this year, stretches of the approximately 1,600-mile (2,600-kilometer) long Transoceanic Highway opened to public vehicles for the first time. The east-west passageway stretches from the Atlantic Ocean in Brazil to the Pacific Ocean in Peru via two different branches and cuts through the heart of the Amazon rain...

SciDev.Net: Talks on the proposed outcome document for nations to sign at the UN Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20) in Brazil next month (20-22 June), have been marked by divisions on some of the key concepts such as a green economy, and the institutional framework for sustainable development -- as well as individual words and phrases. The latest round of 'informal-informal' negotiations in New York this month (27 April--4 May) finished with little agreement and the outcome document was running...