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RABAT, Morocco (AFP) – Morocco said Wednesday it will launch a nearly $1 billion aid programme to help its agriculture industry, which has been hit hard by a particularly acute drought in recent years. The emergency plan “aims to mitigate the effects of delay in rainfall, to alleviate the impact on agricultural activity and to provide assistance to the farmers and livestock breeders affected”, the royal palace said in a statement. The plan will cost […]
BEIJING, China (AFP) – China will help its coal-fired power plants run at full capacity, the government has announced, raising further alarm about the fate of Beijing’s climate pledges. Swathes of the world’s second-biggest economy were paralysed last year because of power shortages, partly caused by a drop in coal supply as global prices of the fossil fuel soared. China is the world’s biggest emitter of the greenhouse gases responsible for climate change, and has pledged […]
KINSHASA, DR Congo (AFP) – Environmental group Greenpeace on Tuesday said the Democratic Republic of Congo has failed to respect a multi-million-dollar agreement signed with Britain last year to finance protecting its ecologically vital forests. The DRC and Britain approved funds worth $500 million as part of the Central African Forest Initiative (CAFI) two months ago in Glasgow, which hosted the COP26 climate change conference. Greenpeace said Congo’s environment ministry failed to publish before the […]
UNITED NATIONS, United States (AFP) – An ‘agreement in principle’ has been reached to transfer the toxic cargo from a rusting oil tanker abandoned off the coast of war-torn Yemen to another ship, the UN said Tuesday. Experts warn of the risk of a major environmental disaster posed by the 45-year-old FSO Safer, moored since 2015 off Yemen’s western port of Hodeida. An oil spill could destroy ecosystems in the Red Sea, shut down the […]
COPENHAGEN, Denmark (AFP) – The Faroe Islands, a Danish autonomous territory, said Tuesday it had begun discussions about the future of its controversial dolphin hunt, with a decision expected in the coming weeks. A petition with almost 1.3 million signatures calling for a ban on the traditional hunt was submitted to the Faroese government on Monday, the prime minister’s office and whale conservation groups told AFP. At a meeting on Tuesday in Torshavn, the government […]
PARIS, France (AFP) – French energy giant Engie warned Tuesday that a conflict between Russia and Ukraine would be “bad news” for Europe’s gas supplies and defended the controversial Nord Stream 2 pipeline as being “in all our interests”. Engie is one of five European partners in the massive Russian pipeline running under the Baltic Sea from Russia to Germany. The pipeline, which has been completed but is still awaiting regulatory approval in Germany, has […]
WASHINGTON, United States (AFP) — The US coastline is expected to experience up to a foot (30 centimeters) of sea-level rise by the year 2050 because of climate change, making damaging floods far more common than today, a US government study said Tuesday. The Sea Level Rise Technical Report combined tide gauge and satellite observations with climate modeling from the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to make projections for the next 100 years. […]
by Marc PRÉEL Agence France-Presse STOCKHOLM, Sweden (AFP) – The torrent of man-made chemical and plastic waste worldwide has massively exceeded limits safe for humanity or the planet, and production caps are urgently needed, scientists have concluded for the first time. There are an estimated 350,000 different manufactured chemicals on the market and large volumes of them end up in the environment. “The impacts that we’re starting to see today are large enough to be […]
by Marlowe HOOD Agence France-Presse PARIS, France (AFP) – The megadrought that has parched southwestern United States and parts of Mexico over the last two decades is the worst to hit the region in at least 1,200 years, researchers said Monday. Human-caused global heating accounts for more than 40 percent of the dry spell’s intensity, they reported in the journal Nature Climate Change. “The turn-of-the-21st-century drought would not be on a megadrought trajectory without anthropogenic […]
TUNIS, Tunisia (AFP) – Tunisia will return more than 280 containers of waste illegally imported from Italy in 2020, the north African country’s environment ministry said Monday. The containers were brought in by a Tunisian company that falsely claimed that the household waste — barred from import under Tunisia law — was in fact plastic scrap to be recycled. The importation had sparked widespread anger, resulting in protests in Tunisia as people demanded that Italy […]
LONDON, United Kingdom (AFP) – European banks, while pledging to tackle carbon emissions, are heavily financing companies involved in the expansion of oil and gas production, activist group ShareAction said on Monday. A total 25 lenders, led by HSBC, Barclays and BNP Paribas, last year provided fossil fuel groups with a total of $55 billion (48.5 billion euros), ShareAction said in a report. The activist group urged investors to use their shareholder rights to push […]
Brasília, Brazil (AFP) – Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro launched a plan Monday to expand gold mining in the Amazon rainforest, drawing criticism from environmentalists for bolstering an industry accused of rampant deforestation, pollution and attacks on indigenous peoples. Bolsonaro signed a decree creating a program to support the development of artisanal mining, a controversial activity known as “garimpo” that occupies something of a legal gray area in Brazil. The decree says the aim is to “propose […]
