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A new salmon farm in Clayoquot Sound on Vancouver Island was dismantled and hauled away last week after being occupied by members of Ahousaht First Nation and local supporters from Tofino.
Marilyn Baptiste of the Xeni Gwet'in First Nation in British Columbia has won the prestigious $175,000 Goldman Prize for her five-year effort to prevent construction of the Prosperity gold and copper mine 600 kilometres north of Vancouver.
"I hope the Goldman award will bring world recognition to help us protect our land," Baptiste told DeSmog Canada. "We'd like to improve our lives, but our land and water comes first."
That simple statement echoes the words of millions of Indigenous peoples in Canada and around the world facing governments and industries intent on extracting minerals, oil, coal, gas and timber from their lands.
Vancouver city council's unanimous decision to commit to running on 100 per cent renewable energy is the kind of political leadership the world desperately needs says Jørgen Randers, professor of climate strategy at the Norwegian Business School in Oslo, Norway.
"Despite the looming catastrophe of climate change the market will choose to do nothing," Randers said in the keynote speech at the ICLEI World Congress 2015, the triennial sustainability summit of local governments in Seoul, South Korea.
Cities are responsible for 70 per cent of global CO2 emissions but they can save the planet by greening one community at a time said Vancouver's David Cadman at the close of the ICLEI World Congress 2015, the triennial sustainability summit of local governments in Seoul, South Korea.
"We can do it. We must do it," Cadman, the retiring president of Local Governments for Sustainability, told some 1,500 delegates from nearly 1,000 cities and local governments in 96 countries on April 11.
The majority of climate actions and most plans to reduce CO2 emissions are happening at the city level, Cadman told DeSmog Canada in Seoul.
UXBRIDGE (IPS) -- Pollution is likely to be the most pressing global health issue in the coming years without effective prevention and clean-up efforts, experts say.
Air, water and soil pollution already kills nearly nine million people a year and cripples the health of more than 200 million people worldwide. Far more people die from pollution than from malaria and HIV/AIDS combined.
Development and rising pollution levels remain closely linked, as clearly evidenced in China and India. However, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) offer a major opportunity to curb pollution and turn economies around the world towards clean and green development pathways.
UXBRIDGE, Canada (IPS) - This December, 195 nations plus the European Union will meet in Lima for two weeks for the crucial UN Conference of the Parties on Climate Change, known as COP 20. The hope in Lima is to produce the first complete draft of a new global climate agreement.
However, this is like writing a book with 195 authors. After five years of negotiations, there is only an outline of the agreement and a couple of "chapters" in rough draft.
The deadline is looming: the new climate agreement to keep climate change to less than two degrees Celsius is to be signed in Paris in December 2015.
Editor's note: This column was first published on IPS prior to the U.S.-China climate agreement being announced. In this piece, the author reports the outcome of an energy efficiency analysis for the two countries and outlines opportunities for developing integrated efficiency policies.
BONN (IPS) - China and the United States are responsible for 35 per cent of global carbon emissions but could do their part to keep climate change to less than two degrees Celsius by adopting best energy efficiency standards, a new analysis shows.
UXBRIDGE, Canada, Nov 3 2014 (IPS) - "Greenhouse gas emissions from human activity are higher than ever, and we're seeing more and more extreme weather and climate events….We can't prevent a large-scale disaster if we don't heed this kind of hard science."
Question: Is that statement about the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report from Greenpeace or the U.S. State Department?
Answer: It's by John Kerry, U.S. Secretary of State, the second most powerful official in the Barack Obama administration.
Meeting a target of keeping global temperature from rising above 2 degrees Celsius is still possible, according to 30 leading climate and energy experts.
The authors, who include former U.K. government scientific adviser Sir Bob Watson, conclude that staying under 2 C needs "immediate, urgent action" at the highest levels of governments. The Tackling the Challenge of Climate Change report was presented at Ban Ki-moon's UN climate summit in New York.
A decade into North America's fracking boom, the impact on wildlife and the environment remains largely unknown, according to a new study.
"We're conducting a giant experiment without even collecting the important data on the water, air, land or wildlife impacts," said Sara Souther, an ecologist at the University of Wisconsin, one of the co-authors of the peer-reviewed research examining the environmental impacts of shale gas development in the U.S. and Canada.
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