Despite ongoing controversy in its flagship Southern Cardamom REDD+ project, Cambodia is driving forward with plans to greatly expand climate finance schemes across its officially protected areas. When Cambodia’s rainy season turns dirt roads into rutted mud, the villages tucked into rugged folds of the western Cardamom Mountains can feel far from just about everything....
Category: Environment
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Blueprint for disaster: Singapore’s carbon hub threatens global climate targets
An ambitious plan to re-engineer the carbon market in Singapore could play havoc with net zero goals and raises questions about human rights in places like Cambodia. The wedding was just ending when the motorbike chase began. Rangers had arrested Meng Sotear, a 62-year-old rice and cashew farmer, ordered her aboard a motorbike and raced...
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The fear of a gold rush looms large along Peru’s Nanay River
The upper basin of the Nanay River in Loreto provides drinking water to the population of Iquitos. It is also rich in 24 carat gold and threatened by mining activities. It is an ordinary Sunday in the area surrounding the Nanay River in Loreto, Peru. A man named Nicolas plays a soccer match that will...
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‘Get Out of Jail Free’: How plastics offsetting is giving industry a license to pollute
Unwanted plastic is clogging seas and rivers. A ‘green’ scheme involves burning it to make cement. (Editor’s Note: This story was produced with support from Internews’ Earth Journalism Network for the “It’s a Wash” special report. SourceMaterial, a nonprofit investigative journalism organization, was a partner in the story’s production.) After a gruelling day paddling along...
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10 years after ‘Yolanda’: When need met generosity through the Star of Samar
“There was no electricity, no fuel, no internet, or any other way to communicate. There was a severe shortage of all kinds of commodities.” This was how the lawyer Byron Bocar, who was in Eastern Samar when Supertyphoon “Yolanda” (international name: Haiyan) made first landfall in Guiuan in the early hours of Nov. 8, 2013,...
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Environmental concerns stall wind farm expansion in Panay natural park
Had the rain still poured last Sept. 3 when volunteer inspectors arrived at a rugged hilly portion of Panay’s northwestern mountain range, a government-declared protected area, the road being carved out would have become messy swathes of uprooted grasses and shrubs, fallen trees, mud pools and protruding rocks. The earth-moving activities pushed on despite the...
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Plastic producers should help Philippine towns, cities pay high cost of waste management
(Second of two parts) The Philippines is finally going after plastic producers, but some companies are not cooperating Tucked in a corner of the Dultra family’s garage are sacks full of used plastic packaging. There are water bottles and bubble wraps—remnants of the family’s daily living consumption. “Our family has made a practice of keeping...
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The Philippines is finally going after plastic producers, but some companies are not cooperating
(First of two parts) Environmental groups in the Philippines have long advocated for a single-use plastics ban, and hundreds of proposed laws and resolutions were filed in Congress in the past decade to support the call. Nothing prospered. Instead, Congress required the country’s biggest plastic-producing companies to pay to collect and recycle their materials. The...
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Green currency in the ‘era of global boiling’
Green currency serves as a means of exchange at a new park in the central business district (CBD) of Alabang, Muntinlupa City, to propagate trees and plants and promote recycling at the onset of what the United Nations chief calls “the era of global boiling.” UN Secretary General António Guterres’ declaration that “the era of...
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‘Green lanes’ directive seen to speed up $1.2-B floating solar project
SunAsia Energy Inc. and its partner and investor Blueleaf Macquarie Capital have been recognized as the first beneficiary of President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s Executive Order No.18 “constituting green lanes for strategic investments.” At the ceremonial launch of the green lanes attended by the President and held at Sofitel Philippine Plaza Manila last July 13, the...
