21 September marks the International Day of Struggle against Monoculture Tree Plantations. This day was declared in 2004 by rural communities in Brazil, to expose the impacts of industrial tree plantation projects expanding in their territories and to reaffirm their determination to resist plantations and recover their territories from corporations. Together with Isaac Rojas, we mapped how monoculture plantations are…
The current COVID-19 pandemic is a symptom of the environmental imbalances that have resulted from treating nature as a commodity. We could argue that the impact of the pandemic would not have reached this magnitude if it weren’t for decades of neoliberalism, which has privileged business over lives: promoting agribusiness and extractivism, cutting down forests, and destroying vital water ecosystems.…
Environmental federation Friends of the Earth International reaffirms its concern over the lack of ambition in the new framework currently under negotiation at the UN, which will set the basis for the protection of biodiversity globally from 2020 to 2030. A Friends of the Earth International delegation will participate in the second meeting of the Open Ended Working Group of…
"Australia is experiencing an unprecedented fire crisis. 10 million hectares have been burned already. Nearly 2000 homes have been destroyed and many lives lost. The fires are so immense they have created their own weather systems, sparking more fires by generating their own dry electrical storms. Firefighters have never seen anything like it. Scientists are now saying many billions of…
"How agribusiness and financial markets profit from the devastation of the world´s largest tropical forest". In this first part of a series of two audio-visual reports, Friends of the Earth Brazil unravels the forces behind the crimes that take place in Brazilian forests. In its second part, the organization analyzes, together with allied movements, the future of the affected communities…
“As fires rage across the Amazon, a report released today reveals that BlackRock, the world’s largest institutional investor with $6.5 trillion USD in assets, is deeply invested in the sectors most responsible for tropical forest destruction in the Amazon and around the world”, reads a press release issued by Friends of the Earth US about the new report. The report BlackRock’s Big…
Take a journey through our campaigns and top moments from 2017 and 2018: demonstrations and public actions, work programs and the hottest topics, the painful and most rewarding moments. This film was shared in November 2018 at Friends of the Earth International’s General Meeting - the highest decision-making body of the federation, as part of a communications’ report.
The UN Convention on Biological Diversity urged the governments on November 29th to conduct strict risk assessments and consult indigenous people and other local communities before releasing organisms into the environment with “exterminator technology” such as gene drives. The decision to consult the people about this dangerous genetic modification of organisms was celebrated by Friends of the Earth and the…
Monday marks the first anniversary of the massacre of eight indigenous people in Datal Bonglangon village, South Cotabato province, on the southern Philippine island of Mindanao. The inhabitants of the small community paid with their lives the demands for their ancestral lands and the resistance to the coffee and mining industry for export. Their blood taints the company and Rodrigo…
With certain advances in the recognition of the role of indigenous people and local communities in terms of the conservation of biological diversity, the 14th Conference of the Parties (COP 14) to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity came to an end in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt. Nevertheless, some environmental organizations are worried about the role of corporations in the official…
