[RIO DE JANEIRO] Brazil’s Paiter Suruí community has become the first indigenous group in the country to receive international certification to sell carbon credits in return for protecting and restoring forests in their Amazonian territory.The Suruí community, which numbers around 1300 people, was first contacted by outsiders in 1968. Over the past decade, with assistance from environmental advocates, they have conducted a sophisticated campaign to prove to the world that they are helping to preserve their 248,000 hectare forest territory.Four years ago, they established the Suruí Forest Carbon Project, with a view to selling carbon credits under the so-called REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) mechanism.

Indigenous Brazilian group certified to trade carbon credits – SciDev.Net

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Migration and growing ethnic diversity pose new questions for forest and nature policy and research, especially on the equality of access to natural areas. This paper compares national approaches in policy and research on ethnic minority groups’ access to natural areas in four Western-European countries: the United Kingdom (UK), The Netherlands, Germany and Denmark. It shows that powerful linkages exist between immigration history, national research traditions and national policy regarding the attention given to this issue, the topics of interest and the ethnicity categories used. The main forest and nature policy documents in The Netherlands, Germany and Denmark address issues of access to nature generally, while in the UK reducing discrimination of ethnic minority groups in access to nature is a formalised objective to be addressed by public bodies. Research in the UK focuses on evidences of under-representation, discrimination and barriers to access. In turn, German and Danish research emphasises different recreational uses of ethnic groups and is less oriented towards the implementation of targeted management objectives. The Netherlands occupy an intermediary position. We argue that international exchange of scientific results and cross-national studies could improve our understanding of cultural differences in recreational patterns, experiences, barriers, images of nature, and planning and design strategies.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.forpol.2011.12.008

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Climate change poses threats to human health, safety, and survival via weather extremes and climatic impacts on food yields, fresh water, infectious diseases, conflict, and displacement. Paradoxically, these risks to health are neither widely nor fully recognized. Historical experiences of diverse societies experiencing climatic changes, spanning multicentury to single-year duration, provide insights into population health vulnerability—even though most climatic changes were considerably less than those anticipated this century and beyond. Historical experience indicates the following. (i) Long-term climate changes have often destabilized civilizations, typically via food shortages, consequent hunger, disease, and unrest. (ii) Medium-term climatic adversity has frequently caused similar health, social, and sometimes political consequences. (iii) Infectious disease epidemics have often occurred in association with briefer episodes of temperature shifts, food shortages, impoverishment, and social disruption. (iv) Societies have often learnt to cope (despite hardship for some groups) with recurring shorter-term (decadal to multiyear) regional climatic cycles (e.g., El Niño Southern Oscillation)—except when extreme phases occur. (v) The drought–famine–starvation nexus has been the main, recurring, serious threat to health. Warming this century is not only likely to greatly exceed the Holocene’s natural multidecadal temperature fluctuations but to occur faster. Along with greater climatic variability, models project an increased geographic range and severity of droughts. Modern societies, although larger, better resourced, and more interconnected than past societies, are less flexible, more infrastructure-dependent, densely populated, and hence are vulnerable. Adverse historical climate-related health experiences underscore the case for abating human-induced climate change.

doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1120177109

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In the past two decades, rapid population and economic growth on the U.S.–Mexico border has spurred a dramatic increase in electricity demand. In response, American energy multinationals have built power plants just south of the border that export most of their electricity to the U.S. This development has stirred considerable controversy because these plants effectively skirt U.S. air pollution regulations in a severely degraded international airshed. Yet to our knowledge, this concern has not been subjected to rigorous scrutiny. This paper uses a suite of air dispersion, health impacts, and valuation models to assess the human health damages in the U.S. and Mexico caused by air emissions from two power-exporting plants in Mexicali, Baja California. We find that these emissions have limited but nontrivial health impacts, mostly by exacerbating particulate pollution in the U.S., and we value these damages at more than half a million dollars per year. These findings demonstrate that power-exporting plants can have cross-border health effects and bolster the case for systematically evaluating their environmental impacts.

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.enpol.2011.12.055

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Ocean acidification may have severe consequences for marine ecosystems; however, assessing its future impact is difficult because laboratory experiments and field observations are limited by their reduced ecologic complexity and sample period, respectively. In contrast, the geological record contains long-term evidence for a variety of global environmental perturbations, including ocean acidification plus their associated biotic responses. We review events exhibiting evidence for elevated atmospheric CO2, global warming, and ocean acidification over the past ~300 million years of Earth’s history, some with contemporaneous extinction or evolutionary turnover among marine calcifiers. Although similarities exist, no past event perfectly parallels future projections in terms of disrupting the balance of ocean carbonate chemistry—a consequence of the unprecedented rapidity of CO2 release currently taking place.

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1208277

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