Since 1979, more than 100 oil spills have occurred along the North Peruvian pipeline – a mega construction, stretching a massive 1,106 km from the Amazon to the Peruvian coast, operated and owned by state company Petroperu. The large majority of the spills happened after 2008 in Loreto, home of 27 different indigenous peoples, including indigenous groups living in voluntary isolation.
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Four years after the collapse of Samarco’s tailings dam in Mariana, organizations and movements presented a case before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. The objective is to condemn the Brazilian State for human rights violations that it committed throughout the Doce River basin, including violations of the rights to: life, due process and judicial protection, freedom of association, private and collective property, equality before the law and a decent life.
This recent publication from War on Want and London Mining Network highlights the immediate need for a full and rapid transition away from fossil fuels. But this transition, they argue, will not succeed, nor will it bring about justice or ecological wellbeing if it is predicated on indefinite economic growth among the world’s wealthiest and persistent inequality globally. The damage that would be brought on by the scale of projected material extraction to meet the demand of growth would be deleterious to the aims of the transition.
The UN Inter-governmental Working Group (IGWG) discussing a treaty on “transnational corporations and other business enterprises with respect to human rights,” enters its fifth round of negotiations at the UN.
The Centre for accompanying Pygmy Autochthones peoples and Vulnerable Minorities (CAMV, for its French acronym) alerts on the disturbing and disastrous situation at the Kahuzi Biega National Park, DRC. There already have been violent incidents in April and July 2019, where people have been seriously injured and killed. And on August 1, 2019, a Pygmy and an eco-guard were killed as a result of another altercation in a territory occupied by the Pygmies inside the park. Other clashes between eco-guards and pygmies are reported daily.
At the end of July 2019, UPM confirmed that it will install a second pulp mill in Uruguay. This megaproject will produce up to 2.33 million tons of cellulose per year, this means significant environmental, social, and cultural damage. This project does not have social license. Several social organizations, local citizens’ groups, and stakeholders have expressed their concerns about the ways in which the megaproject will affect their lives and their concerns have not been properly addressed by the public consultation process.
The campaign, “Territorial Voices on the MAPA Project: Testimonies about the mega-expansion of Celulosa Arauco,” seeks to shine a light on testimonies about the impacts of this project that aims to triple the production of the Celuloca Arauco plant in Chile. The Ojo de Treile Collective has produced a series of micro audiovisual capsules to take a stand against the most ambitious plantation industry project in the history of the country, which is threatening to further interfere with forests and ancestral territories.
TV Yle, Finland’s national public broadcasting channel, has produced a documentary about the participation of Stora Enso, a Swedish-Finnish pulp giant that is part of Veracel Celulose. Veracel Celulose is a company in Brazil accused of land grabbing, bribery and environmental and labor crimes. It is worrisome that the police have arrested people interviewed in the documentary, such as farmer Geraldo Pereira.
RSPO is the most widely used voluntary certification system for palm oil companies and it hold its 3rd African Sustainable Palm Oil Conference in Accra, Ghana on August 2019. But Friends of the Earth Africa groups exposed it as a greenwashing label. Cases of environmental degradation and rights violations remain visible in many of the plantations that have the label. They also blame the activities of oil palm plantation companies for biodiversity loss, increased poverty, human rights violations and the climate disaster in Africa, among others.
This report -by Anne Petermann and Orin Langelle, Global Justice Ecology Project- examines events and research publicized between 23 June and 4 July 2019 that discuss the mass-use of trees to enable the unsustainable lifestyles of the world’s top 1% in the face of looming ecological catastrophe: from trees genetically engineered to feed the “green” manufacture of energy, plastics and chemicals; the planting of trillions of trees to reduce global atmospheric carbon levels; and “reforms” to the economic system to allow future profit-making under the guise of biodiversity pr
An inteview with Winnie Overbeek, the International Coodinator of the WRM, about the causes and the impacts of the deforestation in the Amazon.
It should be clear for society that this is not an isolated phenomenon. In fact, it is the result of a series of actions taken by agribusinesses and big miners.