Talks to reform energy pact blocking climate action face failure reuters.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from reuters.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
By Maya Gebeily, Thomson Reuters Foundation
6 Min Read Poorer Iraqis struggle to cope with power cuts Better-off residents bypass blackouts with generators
BEIRUT, July 6 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - No strangers to temperatures above 50 degrees Celsius (122 Fahrenheit), Iraqis are adept at finding ways to stay cool in summer. But a spate of recent power cuts has exposed a deep divide between the heatwave haves and have-nots.
While relatively well-off residents of the capital, Baghdad, can afford generators that crank into action when the national grid falters, others have been struggling to cope without air-conditioning, fridges and electric fans for days.
Government employee Sadiq Sadkan pays about $200 per month to access a generator supplying his middle-class neighbourhood during blackouts, which worsen amid surging summer demand.
RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – (Thomson Reuters Foundation) It’s a familiar story: A vast forest in South America loses huge swathes of trees each year, threatening the communities living there, destroying rare habitats, and exacerbating the effects of climate change on the region.
But this woodland is not Brazil’s Amazon – it is the Gran Chaco, the continent’s second-largest forest, where environmentalists say massive tree loss is being overlooked as the world focuses on the more famous “lungs of the planet”.
Spanning about 1 million sq km (386,000 sq miles) mainly in Argentina, with the rest in Paraguay and Bolivia, the forest is being devastated by logging and expanding soybean farming, green groups say, as they call for stronger enforcement of Argentina’s forest law.
By Arthur Neslen
BRUSSELS, July 5 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - European
Union targets to boost biofuel use are likely to have led to the
deforestation of an area roughly the size of the Netherlands
over the last decade to expand soy, palm and other oil crops, a
report said on Monday.
About 4 million hectares (9 million acres) of forests mainly
in Southeast Asia and South America have been cleared since 2011
- including about 10% of remaining orangutan habitat, according
to estimates by campaign group Transport and Environment (T&E).
That suggests efforts to replace polluting fuels such as
diesel with biofuels are paradoxically increasing planet-warming
FEATURE-The other Amazon: Soybeans drive loss of S America s second-largest forest reuters.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from reuters.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.