International Update Volume All, Issue All

Between August and September, fires caused by slash-and-burn agriculture destroyed over 3,212 acres of forest in Ankarafantsika National Park in northwestern Madagascar. Madagascar’s environment minister Alexandre Georget told reporters that the country needs help from the international community, especially in securing fire-fighting aircraft. “Every year, around 120,000 hectares [297,000 acres] of forest disappear, mostly as a result of slash-and-burn farming. If the destruction continues at this rate, Madagascar will be completely deforested in 40 years,” said Georget.

A huge floating device designed by Dutch scientists to clean up garbage in the Pacific Ocean successfully picked up plastic for the first time. The device is intended to trap the 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, an island of trash in the Pacific Ocean three times the size of France, without disturbing marine life. In a previous four-month trial, the cleaning system fell apart and failed to pick up plastic. The Ocean Cleanup project predicts that selling items made from plastic reclaimed from the ocean will eventually cover all operational costs.

On October 3, the Brazilian government announced plans to present a bill later this month that would allow building of mines on indigenous lands. The bill would also look to legalize independent mines that are currently operating illegally. This past July, the Ministry of Mines and Energy announced the creation of a working group to simplify the mining process. Critics of conservative President Jair Bolsonaro’s mining policies have stated that opening indigenous lands for mining, logging, and farming helped fuel this year’s Amazon fires.

On September 25, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued a report detailing the effects of climate change on oceans, ice sheets, mountain snowpack, and permafrost. Written by 100 international experts and based on over 7,000 studies, the report finds that the oceans are becoming hotter, more acidic, and less oxygen-rich. Extreme flooding that was once rare could start occurring annually this century. The frequency of marine heat waves, which kill fish and coral reefs among other life forms, have doubled since the 1980s, and are expected to increase 20-50 times.