Because hydrocarbons are now being exploited at a rate 7 times higher than in 2003, the impacts of oil and gas activities need to be scientifically studied. These studies should rigorously identify and measure the effects on biodiversity, indigenous groups and wilderness areas in this region. This view was expressed to SciDev.Net by Martí Orta-Martinez from the Universidad Autonoma de Barcelona (UAB) and co-author of a study on the predation of the Peruvian Amazon in this century by the granting of land for gas exploration and oil.

China and India joined almost all other major greenhouse gas emitters Tuesday in signing up to the climate accord struck in Copenhagen, boosting a deal strongly favored by the United States. More than 100 nations have now endorsed the Copenhagen Accord, a non-binding agreement reached after two weeks of tortuous wrangling at a 194-nation summit in December. The accord plans $100 billion a year in climate aid for developing nations from 2020 and seeks to limit global warming to below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6F) above pre-industrial times, but produced no timetable of emission limits to reach that goal.

Salt is precious in poverty-stricken coastal West Africa, but conservation experts say efforts to extract it are laying waste to mangrove swamps, causing erosion and ravaging fish stocks. In Sierra Leone, one of Africa's poorest nations still recovering from a 1991-2002 civil war, lawmakers are preparing a bill to join a seven-nation charter to protect the region's mangrove forests. Conservation group Wetlands International says the initiative is essential for West Africa to save the 800,000 hectares (2 million acres) of mangrove swamps it has left, less than a third of the 3 million hectares it started with.

China's western Qinghai Province, containing major deposits of the country's "combustible ice," will see increased explorations for this emerging clean energy, Provincial Governor Luo Huining said on Saturday. The plateau province plans to allow large energy companies along with researchers to tap this new source of energy while minimizing environmental threats, Luo said on the sidelines of the annual session of the National People's Congress (NPC), China's top legislature. "Combustible ice," or natural gas hydrate, is mainly found in deep seas and atop plateaus. Approximately one cubic meter of "combustible ice" equals 164 cubic meters of regular natural gas.

U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu said on Friday that the United States needs to come up with a better system for storing or disposing of radioactive nuclear waste than a planned repository near Las Vegas. "The president has made it very clear that we are going to go beyond Yucca mountain. You should go beyond Yucca mountain," Chu said. "But instead of wringing my hands, let's go forward and do something better." The Obama administration, in January, announced it was stopping the license application for a long-planned multi-billion dollar nuclear waste storage site at Yucca Mountain near Las Vegas, which is opposed by environmental groups.

In Switzerland, two pioneers are coming closer and closer to a flight around the world powered only by solar energy. It doesn't make good business sense, physics sense, or much of any kind of sense, to try to fly an airplane on solar power. Not yet. With the state of the technology, and how relatively young the solar sector still is, such an endeavor would be considered quixotic today—let alone in 2003, when Bertrand Piccard and André Borschberg, co-founders of Solar Impulse, announced they would design a solar-powered aircraft and fly it around the world. It would be a statement, they said, about our global dependence on fossil fuels and the untapped promise of burgeoning green technologies. The Swiss pilot-entrepreneurs were after "perpetual flight": a plane that could climb to 9,000 feet and fly on the sun's energy by day, then descend below cloud cover to lower altitudes, where it would cruise on stored battery power by night.

Investors want oil giants to answer questions on their involvement in the environmentally damaging extraction of oil from tar sands Shareholders at BP and Shell will get the chance to vote at upcoming AGMs on whether to force oil giants to come clean on their Canadian tar sands involvement. Institutional investors including The Co-operative Asset Management and Rathbone Greenbank have co-signed a 'special resolution,' which would force the two companies to fully disclose and justify their involvement in Canadian tar sands.

Two senior Democrats in the U.S. House filed a resolution to block the Obama administration from regulating greenhouse gases on its own if a climate change bill fails to pass Congress soon. The resolution of disapproval, filed on Thursday, is identical to a controversial resolution by Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski. Both resolutions offer a fairly quick way to overturn Environmental Protection Agency proposals to regulate emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases blamed for global warming.

With a public-private investment of $ 31.6 million, Chile will bet this year for research and development of technologies that can produce biofuels from algae. The funds will support three consortia - Desert Bionergy, Biofuels AlgaFuels and BAL-Biofuels -integrated by private companies and universities. These were awarded in a competition launched last January by the National Energy Commission and the state development corporation of productive CORFO.

As Mongolia cowers under the brutal thrall of its worst winter in decades, questions are being asked as to whether the country should end its reliance on nomadic herders and dig deeper into its mineral reserves instead. Some 800 years ago, Mongolia's nomadic herdsmen were surging across the steppe under the leadership of Genghis Khan and conquering China, Tibet and much of central Asia. Today, most of their descendents are at the mercy of the hostile Mongolian weather or crammed in the capital, Ulan Bator, where they struggle to make a living even though the country sits on some of the world's richest mineral reserves.

The Global Wind Energy Council, a trade association based in Brussels, estimates that wind power capacity grew by 31 percent worldwide in 2009, with 37.5 additional gigawatts installed, bringing global wind power capacity to 157.9 gigawatts. China accounted for a third of the new capacity, and the Chinese market experienced more than 100 percent growth. According to the trade group, more than 500,000 people are now employed by the wind power industry around the world, and the market for wind turbine installations last year was worth about $63 billion. The primary markets today are in Asia, Europe and North America.

Less than two months after it was hastily drafted to stave off a fiasco, the Copenhagen Accord on climate change is in a bad way, and some are already saying it has no future. The deal was crafted amid chaos by a small group of countries, led by the United States and China, to avert an implosion of the UN's December 7-18 climate summit. Savaged at the time by green activists and poverty campaigners as disappointing, gutless or a betrayal, the Accord is now facing its first test in the political arena -- and many views are caustic.

The President remains committed to advancing his stalled legislative agenda. Addressing the Democratic National Committee in Washington last Saturday, Obama insisted he is not going to let go of his aspirations for America. "I'm not going to walk away from the American people," he said. "I'm not going to walk away on any challenge." However, Senators from Red States, Coal States, and Rust Belt States are concerned about job losses and increased costs associated with a climate bill. Many lawmakers are also concerned about controlling the emissions of rapidly developing nations like India and China.

Plans to use concentrating solar power plants in the Sahara to generate and export electricity have been on the table for years. Now, it looks as though political will might help move things forward The logic of the idea would seem obvious to a child: the human race needs to wean itself off fossil fuels, so why don't we build solar power plants in the world's deserts, to give us all the energy we need?

Gold medals are not handed out for architectural design, but the environmentally friendly speed skating arena built for the Vancouver Olympics is being called a winner by the bladed athletes who will compete there this month. The Richmond Olympic Oval, considered the signature building of the Games, contains salvaged wood damaged by a pine-beetle infestation and has a massive roof shaped like a wave. "We compete in some nice ovals that have been built as Olympic facilities in the past," defending 5,000 meters champion Chad Hedrick of the United States told Reuters. "This one here obviously outdoes all of them. They went big on this.

A team of scientists said in a report on Friday that they had found the strongest evidence yet linking a devastating mud volcano in Indonesia to drilling at a gas exploration well by local energy firm PT Lapindo Brantas. Lapindo has denied triggering the disaster through its drilling activities, arguing the mud volcano near Indonesia's second-biggest city of Surabaya was triggered by an earthquake. The hot mud started spewing from the East Java drilling site in 2006 and has now displaced nearly 60,000 people. A scientific team led by Richard Davies of Britain's Durham University said data released by Lapindo provided new evidence indicating that drilling caused the disaster.

We live in a strongly climate-oriented era, where each one of us is called to choose between sides; are we among the "believers" or the "infidels" of the "Global Warming?". Two decades ago, a part of the scientific community started engaging in intense discussions around the "unusual" temperature trends which, for the northern hemisphere, had been going undoubtedly uphill. The first serious counter arguments regarding the validity of these findings targeted the inherited errors that all observational tools possess. New observations and improved algorithms started to appear fairly quickly, a fact that partially appeased debates and concerns. Skeptics of the global warming theory try to find other kinds of evidence to second-guess the mainstream CO2 increase and steer away from anthropocentric related theories. And suddenly, along came a cloud...

A fresh coat of paint can change a room from dreary to divine. Stains, sealants, caulks, and adhesives help you build everything from a new bathroom to a bookcase. But all these useful products can also introduce unhealthy chemicals into your home and your body. Low-VOC paint The biggest culprit is VOCs, or "volatile organic compounds," a large class of chemicals that readily evaporate at room temperature. If you walk into a room and notice that new-paint smell, you’re breathing VOCs. Paints, stains, sealants, caulks, and adhesives release the highest levels of VOCs when wet. But even when they feel dry to the touch, they may keep releasing these gases for days, weeks, months, even years. Meanwhile your upholstery, carpets, and drapes act like sponges, absorbing VOCs and releasing them over time. While not everyone may be bothered by exposure to these gases, they can be a serious health risk for people with chemical sensitivities, asthma, or other respiratory conditions.

China plans to build a national renewable energy center to enhance the country's clean energy development, the China Daily reported, citing a government official. The center, still at a preliminary planning stage, would be responsible for policymaking, key projects, program management, market operations and international coordination, said Han Wenke, director general of the Energy Research Institute under the National Development and Reform Commission, the country's top economic planning agency, the newspaper reported on Wednesday.

Wind and solar technology made up over half of Europe’s new electricity generating capacity in 2009, as the number of new coal and nuclear facilities fell More wind capacity was installed in Europe during 2009 than any other electricity-generating technology, according to statistics released today by the European Wind Energy Association (EWEA). Wind accounted for 39 per cent of increased European energy capacity, ahead of gas (26 per cent) and solar (16 per cent). In contrast, the nuclear and coal power sectors decommissioned more megawatts of capacity than they installed in 2009, with a total of 1,393 MW of nuclear and 3,200 MW of coal decommissioned.