Wednesday, April 11, 2007

URGENT!!!


The Chamela-Cuixmala Biosphere Reserve is one of the most important protected areas and well studied tropical dry forests!!!
Also several turtle nesting beaches are protected under the Inter-American Convention for the Protection and Conservation of Sea Turtles.
On November, 2006, the Mexican government’s Environmental and Natural Resources Secretariat ( SEMARNAT) through the General Directorate of Environmental Impact and Risk (DGIRA) authorized two tourist developments: “IEL La Huerta” (registration number 14JA2006T0018) and “Tambora” (registration number 14JA20-06T0011). Both located on lands adjacent to the Chamela-Cuixmala Biosphere Reserve along the coast in the state of Jalisco
Both project reports fail to identify the type and extent of all potential environmental and social impacts and therefore, they do not establish real mechanisms for the mitigations of any environmental impacts.
Both projects, as proposed and approved, will have serious negative impacts on the integrity and ecological functioning of the Chamela-Cuixmala Biosphere Reserve as well as other nearby protected areas and the ecosystem of the region as a whole. These developments also threaten the stability and equitable social development of the human populations in the region.

Sunday, April 8, 2007

Apocalypse Now





Floods, storms, and droughts. Melting polar ice, shrinking glaciers, oceans turning to acid. Scientists from the fields of glaciology, biology, meteorology, oceanography, and ecology reported seeing a dramatic rise over the last 50 years of all the indicators of climate change: increase in average world temperatures, extreme weather events, in the levels of CO2 and other greenhouse gases, and in the level of the oceans.

The overwhelming majority of scientists and international climate monitoring bodies now agree that climate change is taking place, that humans are responsible, and that time is running out. In fact, we could reach “the point of no return” in a decade, reported Lean.

THE CHAMELA-CUIXMALA BIOSPHERE RESERVE AND ECOLOGICAL SANCTUARIES THREATENED BY ILLEGAL DEVELOPMENT PROJECTS IN THE MEXICAN PACIFIC COAST


The unprecedented complex of legally protected areas in the Chamela-Cuixmala Biosphere Reserve region in Mexico’s Jalisco coast, south of Puerto Vallarta, encompassing the Chamela-Cuixmala Biosphere Reserve, two Marine Turtles Beach Sanctuary in Playa Teopa and Playa Cuixmala and a Migratory Birds Archipelago Sanctuary in Chamela Bay, is the result of the successful efforts of a great and unusual partnership between, on the one hand, the National Autonomous University of Mexico (“UNAM”, recognized for its excellence as the best university in Latin America and among the best 100 universities in the World) and, on the other, the Cuixmala Ecological Foundation. Together, UNAM and the Cuixmala Ecological Foundation have been able, during the last 22 years, to endow the region, one of the most biologically rich and environmentally delicate sites in the World, with various layers of legal protection, both at national and at international levels. Few other sites in the planet can claim to have achieved such degree of protection because of their environmental importance.

SEE FULL STORY: http://ecologistvoice.blogspot.com/2007/03/chamela-cuixmala-biosphere-reserve-and.html

Scientists Detail Climate Changes, Poles to Tropics

Martin Parry, the co-chairman of a scientific panel on climate change, presented a new report on global warming Friday in Brussels.

BRUSSELS, April 6 — From the poles to the tropics, the earth’s climate and ecosystems are already being shaped by the atmospheric buildup of greenhouse gases and face inevitable, possibly profound, alteration, the world’s leading scientific panel on climate change said Friday.

In its most detailed portrait of the effects of climate change driven by human activities, the panel predicted widening droughts in southern Europe and the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa, the American Southwest and Mexico, and flooding that could imperil low-lying islands and the crowded river deltas of southern Asia.