The filibuster has gone international.
The Convention for the Conservation of Antarctic Living Marine Resources spent the past ten days in Hobart, Australia attempting, for the third time, to pass a measure designating what would be the world’s largest marine protected areas — conservation zones in the Southern Ocean that rings the world’s least populated continent. After failing at last year’s annual meeting, and at a special meeting in Bremerhaven, Germany last summer, the U.S. and New Zealand delegations which had championed the proposal were hopeful that the third time would be the charm.
Instead, according to multiple reports, as the meeting wound down, the delegates from Russia and Ukraine effectively borrowed a page from the Ted Cruz playbook. They ran out the clock, refusing to end debate on the measure, thereby preventing it from coming up for a vote before the meeting drew to a close.
The Guardian quoted Andrea Kavanagh, director of the Pew Charitable Trust’s Southern Ocean sanctuaries project, saying Russia and Ukraine blocked the measure because they, “wanted to open up more areas for fishing and set a time limit of 10 years. Given that it has taken that amount of time to draw up the protected zones, we would’ve spent more time planning this than protecting it, which is ridiculous.”
John Podesta, Chair of the Center for American Progress, referenced the international agreement setting aside the Antarctic continent as a global commons focused on scientific research, and called out the proposal’s detractors for “engaging in a new cold war over Antarctic marine protected areas, meaning those universally accepted principals that prioritize conservation and collaboration will senselessly continue to stop at the water’s edge.”
For the complete article, please see Climate Progress.
French environment minister Nicolas Hulot has resigned live on national radio in a surprise move that will come as a blow to president Emmanuel Macron’s green credentials. Nicolas Hulot had not made the French president aware of his decision to quit, he told radio presenters, adding his time in office had been an ‘accumulation of disappointments’.
Liberia’s largest palm oil producer, Golden Veroleum Liberia (GVL) pulls out of the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) – how can rural communities cope with the impacts? The forests near GVL’s Liberian plantations are not only sacred sites of the region's people but also heavily populated with chimpanzees, leopards, pygmy hippopotamus and forest elephants which are significant not only to the local ecosystem but globally.
Mine closures have caused social and political turmoil in many regions, for example in South Africa. But there are ways of planning and managing the phase-out so that when the inevitable happens, people are better prepared. A new study looks at opportunities beyond mining and finds that infrastructure that supports mining can also be put to new use.
Population pressure, a lack of economic opportunities, environmental degradation, and new forms of travel are contributing to human displacement and unsafe migration on an unprecedented scale. And as millions more people see climate change erode their livelihoods, the problem will get worse in the absence of visionary global leadership.