Dear friends and co-fighters,

Welcome to the next issue of Positive News.

Let you spread it among your friends and co-fighters in your countries and around the Earth. Now you can see it with photos and videos on our web

I will be glad to receive and publish your positive news from the fields and offices.

Sviatoslav Zabelin, SEU coordinator

Digest of Socio-Ecological Union International for October 30, 2021. №36

More than 2,600 experts and concerned citizens from 113 countries signed the Kew Declaration on Reforestation for Biodiversity, Carbon Capture and Livelihoods. We are in a moment of heightened attention and momentum around reforestation and forest restoration. In particular, tree planting is in vogue, bolstered by pop celebrity billionaires and large initiatives touting mammoth numbers such as Trillion Trees.

Although reforestation holds immense promise for slowing the dual crises of climate change and biodiversity loss, the dark side of this momentum is that, in some cases, planting trees can cause more harm than good. This is a key message of the “Kew Declaration on Reforestation for Biodiversity, Carbon Capture and Livelihoods,” published in the journal Plants, People, Planet..  Read more

New Zealand passed a landmark climate reporting law. Legislation passed in New Zealand this week means that financial firms will have to come clean about their exposure to the climate crisis. Under the law, banks, insurers and investment companies will have to disclose the risks and opportunities presented to them by global heating. “Climate-related disclosures will bring climate risks and resilience into the heart of financial and business decision-making,” said climate change minister James Shaw. “It will encourage entities to become more sustainable by factoring the short, medium, and long-term effects of climate change into their business decisions.” New Zealand is the first country to pass such legislation. Read more

Earlier this month, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed five sustainability bills into law. These are aimed at supporting a circular economy within the state and reducing plastic waste, reported Upstream Solutions. Plastics — and how to deal with them once they've been used — are an issue of global concern. Too often, consumers and municipalities think that "recycling" will save us from our plastic addiction. The reality, however, is that recycling in the U.S. is broken. Upstream Solutions originally compiled the list of five bills and voiced their support.

A recycling bin on a California beach. smodj / iStock / Getty Images Plus     

Policy director Miriam Gordon told EcoWatch, "Single-use plastics are really bad for the environment and our health and throughout their lifecycle — from extraction of oil and gas to manufacturing and disposal, they harm communities that live on the fenceline of these industrial operations." Read more

England’s second city committed to a post-car future. Last week Positive News reported on Birmingham’s plan to drive cars out of the city. This week those plans were approved, paving the way for a large-scale, low-traffic neighbourhood in the heart of ‘Brum’. Under the plans, many roads will be closed to traffic, cycle infrastructure will be expanded and zero-emissions buses will be deployed to provide an alternative to driving. It’s quite a turnaround for the city, which was once the engine room of the UK car industry, but now has one of the most ambitious plans to reclaim the public realm from motor vehicles.  Read more

Much of Mexico gets 300 days of sunshine out of the year which is helping make the country a solar energy pioneer. With the current government showing little interest in the clean sustainable technology, a range of entrepreneurs is leading the way, especially in the food industry. In the southern state of Oaxaca, Victoria Aguilera studied sustainable energy at the regional university and founded Sazón del Sol, a grassroots project that includes a solar farm, solar restaurant, and solar food processing workplace. She designed and now sells a solar kitchen for use in homes and restaurants.  In central Mexico’s Hidalgo state, Gregor Schäpers’ company, Trinysol, achieved initial success with solar-powered water heaters.

Gregor Schäpers in his backyard in Cardonal, Mexico, with his Scheffler solar panels. Image by Sandra Weiss.

Now he’s experimenting with solar cooking using Scheffler modules — solar dish reflectors to run kitchens in restaurants, hotels, mezcal distilleries and tortilla bakeries. In the state of Jalisco, Angel Mejía and Aldo Agraz co-founded Inventive Power in 2010, specializing in thermal solar systems. Local food factories and dairies were their first clients. Since then, Mexican and international companies Nestlé, Barcel, Unilever, and tequila producer José Cuervo have all commissioned projects. 

Banner image: Victoria Aguilera and her solar cooking pots in Oaxaca, Mexico. Image courtesy of Victoria Aguilera.  Read more

The Great Pacific garbage patch cleanup began. A mission to clear up the Great Pacific garbage patch – a swirling mass of floating rubbish twice the size of Texas – returned with its first haul this week. A ship operated by The Ocean Cleanup, a non-profit, brought almost 30,000kg (30 tonnes) of trash ashore. The organisation was trialling technology that skims the water to remove rubbish. “While it’s just the tip of the iceberg, these kilograms are the most important ones we will ever collect, because they are proof that cleanup is possible,” said Boyan Slat, CEO of The Ocean Cleanup. “With a small fleet of these systems, we can clean this up.” Read more

The urgent need for immediate structural reform at FSC to adequately reflect the global deforestation crisis. We are writing to express our concern about the integrity of the FSC label and its continued relevance to a climate-conscious future. We are a group of national and international NGOs working to protect forests, some of whom are FSC members and all of whom support FSC’s original aims and mean it well. FSC could be a powerful tool to protect and help restore the world’s forests and has had beneficial effects in some regions.
However, we share urgent and serious concerns over its failure to transform in response to the challenges forests face in the 21st century, and believe it is increasingly serving to undermine rather than support its own stated goals. Some of us, as world experts on the illegal timber trade, were at the forefront of efforts that prompted lawmakers in consuming countries to ban illegally sourced wood. Faced with the failure of voluntary industry efforts to protect forests, some of these consuming countries are now considering extending these laws to require importers to also ensure that their wood was harvested from a ‘sustainable’ source. Read more

Pablo Escobar’s hippos have a lawyer. And a good one at that. In a U.S. first, a court recognized the animals as legal persons. That could be the hippos’ salvation in the ongoing fight about what to do with one of the world’s most rotund and dangerous invasive species. Three decades ago, drug kingpin and narcoterrorist Escobar smuggled dozens of animals, including elephants, ostriches, zebras, camels, giraffes, and hippopotamuses, into a zoo on his private ranch.

Hippos are seen at the Hacienda Napoles theme park, once the private zoo of drug kingpin Pablo Escobar at his Napoles ranch, in Doradal, Antioquia department, Colombia on June 22, 2016. Photo: Raukl Arboleda (Getty Images)

When Colombia’s cops killed Escobar in 1993, they seized the ginormous estate, including the zoo. When they did, they shipped all of Escobar’s other creatures off to live in other zoos, save for his four hippos. Since they were so difficult to capture and presumed to not be an issue, they merely let them stay on the land. All was well until the hippos started fucking. Last July, Colombian attorney Luis Domingo Gómez Maldonado filed a lawsuit on the hippos’ behalf to save them from being euthanized. Instead, the case recommends sterilization. Colombian officials announced a plan to use a chemical contraceptive developed by the U.S. Agriculture Department to sterilize “the main group” of the hippos, and the region’s environmental agency Cornare began to implement the plan on Friday, darting 24 hippos. The suit, though, argues for the use of a different contraceptive drug, which it says is safer. And it also notes that the proposal to deal with the hippos could still leave the door open for some of them to be killed. Read more