Forests in Developing Countries

Chevron said Friday that it had no intention of apologizing for the environmental damage to the Amazon rain forest for which an Ecuadorean court ruled it responsible. Attorneys for both sides have said that if Chevron apologized, its legal liability of $18 billion would have been cut to $9.5 billion. Ecuador’s judiciary had set Friday as the deadline for an apology. James Craig, a Chevron spokesman, said an apology would be “a false admission of responsibility.” Chevron has no assets in Ecuador, so the plaintiffs must to try to collect the award abroad.

Gangtok, Feb. 3: The Sikkim forest department will receive Rs 13.12 crore from a Japanese government agency to rebuild the infrastructure damaged in last year’s earthquake. The amount has been sanctioned by the Japanese International Co-operation Agency that is funding a project to ensure alternative livelihood for people living on forest fringes in Sikkim. The release of the amount was announced by JICA representative Vineet Sarin during a review of the Sikkim Biodiversity Conservation and Forest Management Project (SBFP) here today.

The Government has announced the creation of six projects in public-private partnership mode in non-timber forest produce (NTFP), covering around 60 Naxal-affected districts in the country.

The projects, to be executed within six months, will cover Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Odisha, Madhya Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra, according to a Rural Development Ministry release here on Friday.

‘Concerted efforts necessary to prevent human-elephant conflict'

A day-long sensitisation programme under the Tamil Nadu Biodiversity and Greening Project for members of Village Forest Councils and anti-poaching watchers was organised by the Nilgiris North division of the Forest Department here on Friday.Listing the objectives and use of such programmes, District Forest Officer, the Nilgiris North, S. Ramasubramaniam said that without the support of people particularly those residing in villages located in and around the forests, conservation would become an uphill task.

JAMMU: Highlighting the State's rich bio-diversity and uniqueness of being land of rich fauna and flora, Chief Minister, Omar Abdullah on Friday emphasized the need for protection and preservation of this individuality of Jammu and Kashmir.

Chairing the 2nd meeting of State Board for Wildlife (SBW), the Chief Minister, who is also its Chairman, said that measures should be in place to minimize wild animal-human conflict.

The objective of this paper is to analyse and share a critique of forest sector governance in Nepal, particularly with forest law enforcement. This paper will also explore types of illegal practices and examine the degree to which forest law enforcement is contributing to or hindering effective forest governance in Nepal. The constraint and challenges of forest governance and strategy for improving forest governance is also presented.

Main Topic: 

• Forests

thesaurus: 

• Forest Policy
• Nepal
• Forest Management
• Governance
• Community Forest Management (CFM)
• Illegal Trade
• Forest Encroachments
• Timber Smuggling
• Forest Products

Publisher : 

• Forestry Nepal

Author: 

• N. P. Yadav

Attachment(s):  Yadav_2012_forest_governance.pdfMark Content Private(Internal): Email Alert: 9Publication Date: 30/01/2012

Early next month, the Obama administration will finalize important and long overdue rules for the management of 155 national forests covering nearly 200 million acres. The rules will guide individual forest managers as they decide which parts of the forest can safely be opened to logging, mining and recreation, and which parts must be set aside to protect wildlife and the health of the forest.

Company violating guidelines, says MoEF panel

The Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF) Committee, which visited the mini-hydel power project sites in the Western Ghats following an order of the High Court of Karnataka, has found glaring violation of the Wildlife Act by privately owned Maruthi Power (Gen) India Private Limited (MPIPL).

Ensuring that the poor or the most vulnerable sections of society benefit from REDD+ projects is crucial to building both national and international legitimacy and to fostering successful delivery of conservation and social objectives. In both academic and non-academic literature, issues of the equity of benefit-sharing at a community or household level are overlooked compared with distributional issues at the national and international level. Therefore, this paper aims to look at some of the issues related to benefit distribution at village and household level.

Attachment(s):  Pro-poor benefit distribution in REDD.pdf thesaurus: 

• REDD
• Benefit Sharing
• Ecosystem Services
• Landless
• Carbon Dioxide
• Climate Change
• Forests
• Environment Economics

Main Topic: 

• Climate Change

Publisher : 

• IIED

Author: 

• Essam Yassin Mohammed

Place of Publication: 

• London

Mark Content Private(Internal): Email Alert: 36Publication Date: 01/12/2011

Sri Lanka's overall environmental performance is improving and the country has been ranked as a modest performer according to a study on global environment released during this year's World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland last week.

Sri Lanka has been ranked at the 55th place, six places below the United States ranked at 49th, in the 2012 Environmental Performance Index (EPI) prepared by the Yale University in the United States.

The UN High-Level Panel Global Sustainability released its report in Addis Ababa yesterday entitled Resilient People, Resilient Planet: A Future Worth Choosing.

Kannada movie on brigand’s life being shot inside elephant habitat

violation: Crew members of ‘Attahaasa’ shooting in a forest in Chamarajanagar district. ‘Attahaasa’, a Kannada film based on slain forest brigand Veerappan, is again in the news for the wrong reasons. The movie by A M R Ramesh of ‘Cyanide’ fame is being shot in the forest area in violation of the Forest Act.

The High Court of Karnataka on Wednesday chided the Forest department for attempting to award ''huge'' punishment for a ''trivial'' offence.

The Division Bench consisting Chief Justice Vikramjit Sen and Justice B V Nagarathna did not agree with the government advocate’s claim that Fayaz Khan, a resident of Channapatna, was guilty of illegally stocking sandalwood nine years ago.

The FAO and the Center for People and Forests (RECOFTC) have released a brief that describes the role of forests and forestry in the prevention and rehabilitation of landslides in Asia, noting that landslides may increase over the coming decades, in part due to climate change. The brief outlines the impacts of landslides on populations across Asia, noting that the poor are disproportionally affected. It underscores the role of forests in preventing landslides, and describes how in some areas of China and Mongolia, climate change is causing landslides due to rapidly thawing permafrost.

thesaurus: 

• Forests
• Landslides
• Asia
• Climate Change
• Rehabilitation
• Extreme Weather Events

Publisher : 

• FAO

Place of Publication: 

• Rome

Attachment(s):  Landslide_PolicyBrief.pdfMark Content Private(Internal): Email Alert: 4Publication Date: 01/01/2012

New Delhi: The Indian economy grew 8.4% in 2010-11, marginally lower than the previous estimate of 8.5%, on the back of strong farm sector and services sector growth, data showed on Tuesday. The Central Statistics Office (CSO) released the quick estimates of national income, which showed that the farm sector grew 7% in 2010-11, while the services sector, which accounts for more than 52% of the economy, rose 9.3%.

Dispur has decided to draft a new legislation to ban construction of multi-storied buildings in some areas like Sonapur, Chandrapur, Rani and Deepor Beel to save greenery as well as execute projects to attract tourists. An Assam government official told The Telegraph that chief minister Tarun Gogoi had already instructed the departments concerned to start preparing the draft bill of the proposed legislation. He said the legislation was expected to be tabled during the monsoon session of the Assembly.

A year after Jairam Ramesh's final environmental clearance, Korean giant waits for state govt to hand over land
Last January, the Union environment ministry's approval for the Rs 52,000-crore mega steel project by Korean giant Posco at Orissa’s Jagatsinghpur district made headlines.

The world is running out of time to make sure there is enough food, water and energy to meet the needs of a rapidly growing population and to avoid sending up to 3 billion people into poverty, a U.N. report warned on Monday.

As the world's population looks set to grow to nearly 9 billion by 2040 from 7 billion now, and the number of middle-class consumers increases by 3 billion over the next 20 years, the demand for resources will rise exponentially.

The U.S. Forest Service today released a new proposal for the nation's 193-million-acre national forest system that will weaken rules protecting fish and wildlife from logging, livestock grazing, mining and off-road vehicles. The new proposal, which was released as part of the final environmental impact statement for the rule, is the Forest Service's fourth attempt since 2000 to revise nationwide regulations governing national forests. All three previous attempts were challenged in court by the Center for Biological Diversity and allies, and all three prior attempts were found unlawful.