The Sundarban is the largest contiguous mangrove forest presently remaining in the world, and has been declared a World Heritage site by UNESCO in 1997. However, it is now on the verge of destruction (see WRM Bulletins 44, 66, 72) despite local peoples’ determined and bold resistance --even to death-- against the destructive action of profit-led business, mainly the shrimp farming industry (see WRM Bulletin 51), as well as exploration activities of oil and gas companies (see WRM Bulletins 15 and 72).
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The Kayan Mentarang National Park situated in the interior of East Kalimantan, Indonesian Borneo, lies at the border with Sarawak to the west and Sabah to the north. With its gazetted 1.4 million hectares, it is the largest protected area of rainforest in Borneo and one of the largest in Southeast Asia.
The Philippines has been regarded as one of the most active and progressive countries in Asia in terms of developing policies and laws recognising the rights of indigenous peoples and ensuring their participation in protected area management and decision-making. However, it is indigenous peoples’ themselves that are finding the adequate ways for ensuring conservation and respect to their rights.
Jordan Ryan, the head of the United Nations Development Programme in Vietnam, is keen on sustainable development. In May 2002, at the launch of a partnership between aid agencies, NGOs and government ministries to protect Vietnam’s environment, Ryan announced, “If we succeed, one day it will be said of this new partnership: ‘It made sustainable development a reality in Vietnam.’”
A few weeks later, this time at the signing of a $2 million project called Vietnam Agenda 21, Ryan said, “The challenge is to make sustainable development a reality in Vietnam.”
Two tiny moths are at the centre of a social and environmental confrontation in New Zealand. In West Auckland, people and the environment are being subjected to aerial spraying with dangerous chemicals to protect pine plantations against the attack of the painted apple moth (Teia anartoides). In South Auckland, eucalyptus plantations are under attack from the gum-leaf skeletoniser (Uraba lugens) and it is yet unknown if chemical control will be used there.
It sometimes takes many little pieces to recognize the full picture. In the case of the continued debate about the benefits or otherwise of carbon sinks projects linked to the Kyoto Protocol's Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), many still like to envisage it as the long-sought-for funding source for community-driven, small scale forest restoration projects.
What's wrong with a company pursuing a green seal for 'sustainable forest management' and a climate-friendly credit for planting trees that help soak up carbon from the atmosphere? Potentially a lot, especially when both of these claims are rather dubious, as the WRM Bulletin coverage on the Brazilian company Plantar S/A indicates. And even more problematic if a company, when faced with criticism about its carbon sinks project, resorts to such tactics as the distortion of facts to discredit its critics.
The colonial period of South African history has left a mindset that encourages the exploitation of anything that can be dug out of the ground and shipped off to feed the rapacious appetites of first world industries and consumers. This is what drove the colonial imperative of England, Portugal, France and Spain in centuries gone by, and although there has been political transformation in previously colonised African countries, the economic forces remain largely unchanged.
In August 1996 the Tanzanian government authorities in collaboration with a Canadian-owned company called Kahama Mining Corporation Ltd. (KMCL), forcibly removed over 400,000 artisanal miners, peasant farmers, small traders and their families from their land in an area called Bulyanhulu in Shinyanga Region, central-western Tanzania. KMCL was then a wholly-owned subsidiary of Sutton Resources, based in Vancouver, Canada.
Mining is one of Indonesia's biggest revenue-earners, but it is also destroying the natural resources on which tens of millions of rural and urban Indonesians depend for their livelihoods and health. These resources include the archipelago's once vast forests which are now being destroyed faster than ever before.
The problems of mining and forest destruction cannot help but be closely intertwined in Indonesia since so much of the country's land surface is (or used to be) forest, and so much of the rock underneath contains commercially valuable minerals.
Lead mines are killing ethnic communities and contaminating water sources in the Thung Yai Naresuan Wildlife Sanctuary complex, a World Heritage site, in eastern Thailand.
Vietnam's karst landscapes are world renowned. Perhaps the country's most famous limestone scenery is at Ha Long Bay, which has been declared a World Heritage Site. In 1962, the karst landscape at Cuc Phuong in northern Vietnam became the country's first national park.
As well as producing spectacular scenery, limestone is the main raw material for cement manufacture and many karst landscapes are under threat. Vietnam is no exception.