Deforestation in Brazilian Amazon Drops
Friday, January 23rd, 2009Brazil’s Environment Minister, Carlos Minc, just announced at a press conference that the pace of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon fell 82% in the last five months of 2008 compared to a similar period in 2007. Minc attributes the drop to two factors: policies put into place by the federal government and regional authorities, and […]
Giving LAC’s First Plastic Packaging Law Teeth
Saturday, November 3rd, 2007An interesting thing happened over the last two weeks. Well, interesting to people like me who’ve been following the packaging waste debate for decades, at least. Environment enforcement officials for Rio de Janeiro (RJ) state “blitzed” supermarkets in Rio de Janeiro city — first on 19 October in the well-to-do Leblon section, then on 23 […]
Digitizing Monitoring and Enforcement of Protected Areas
Monday, September 10th, 2007In a prior post I discussed how the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais (MG) is digitizing its environmental enforcement efforts, and in one of my “Combating Deforestation” series posts I discussed a World Bank report that recommended, among other things, recruiting the help of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and indigenous and local communities in deforestation frontiers […]