Yesterday BBC Latin America featured the ESI’s agenda for the Amazon. In June 2011, the ESI launched an agenda that sees the land-use changes responsible for deforestation in the Amazon as an important risk for long-term investors in the Amazonian basin countries, especially in southern Brazil, where the rainfall generated by the Amazon primarily falls.
The agenda, we argued, is a priority for institutional investors in the hydropower and agribusiness sectors (see BBC news here). This has become an influential new narrative in Latin America, with investors, banks, and governments taking up the main arguments in a series of new initiatives.
More…
The high-profile campaign by Oxfam International on land-grabs, which focused on claims of forced evictions by the Ugandan government following a deal involving the UK-based New Forests Company (NFC) has taken a positive turn. More…
According to the Earth Policy Institute (EPI), 2011 was a record year for extreme weather events worldwide. Brazil, Australia, Mexico and Central America all suffered from the devastating effects. Floods in Thailand, which EPI rates as the most expensive weather-related disaster of the year, cost USD $45 billion worth of damages (~14% of Thailand’s GDP). In the US only, the hurricane season claimed damages of approximately USD $7.3 billion. More…
In November 2011 the BMW Foundation, the vehicle through which the German carmaker advances global leadership and social innovation, hosted a workshop on the Earth Security Initiative at their 3rd World Young Leaders Summit in Buenos Aires.
The foundation’s staff prepared and edited an excellent 2 min video of the session, which profile people like Germany’s former Secretary of State and other leaders from around the world discussing an Earth Security agenda.
Watch the movie.
We are delighted that Fundacion Gaia Amazonas (FGA) in Colombia, with whom we collaborated throughout 2011 to define a security agenda for Amazonia, has been ranked among the 100 best NGOs in the world in a recent study by Global Journal. More…
