Author: postMigrator

New forest to follow £1.6m deal
Wood ants
The area that has been bought is home to wood ants

Hundreds of thousands of trees are to be planted following a charity’s purchase of
Dundreggan Estate in Glen Moriston in the Highlands.

Trees for Life, which is based in Findhorn, Forres, has taken over 10,000 acres in a
£1.6m deal.

It plans to plant 500,000 native trees and re-connect the forest between Glen
Moriston and Glen Affric.

The organisation said the move would help protect declining numbers of wood ants and
black grouse.

The purchase is Trees for Life’s most important project to date and followed more
than two years of negotiations.

Founder and executive director, Alan Watson Featherstone, said: “This is a massive
step forward in achieving our vision of a renewed Caledonian Forest.

“It is a huge milestone for us, and we look forward to restoring
Dundreggan into a wild landscape that the UK and Scotland can be proud of.”

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“Slowing economic growth in many nations, along
with high food and fuel prices, makes it harder
to find cash for forest protection.

“Friends of the Earth environmental group said
there were risks that an inflow of funds would
push up the value of forests and lead to a land
grab by foreign investors that could threaten the
rights of indigenous peoples on the land.”
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Reuters
Fri Aug 22, 2008 10:18pm BST

U.N. climate talks split over deforestation funds
By Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent

ACCRA (Reuters) – A 160-nation U.N. climate
conference in Ghana split on Friday over ways to
pay poor countries to slow deforestation, blamed
for producing up to 20 percent of the greenhouse
gases caused by human activities.

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Published on Wednesday, August 20, 2008 by Environmental News Service (ENS)
World Water Crisis Underlies World Food Crisis

STOCKHOLM, Sweden – The world’s supplies of clean, fresh water cannot sustain
today’s “profligate” use and inadequate management, which have brought shrinking
food supplies and rising food costs to most countries, WWF Director General James
Leape told the opening session of World Water Week in Stockholm [on Monday].

“Behind the world food crisis is a global freshwater crisis, expected to rapidly
worsen as climate change impacts intensify,” Leape said. “Irrigation-fed agriculture
provides 45 percent of the world’s food supplies, and without it, we could not feed
our planet’s population of six billion people.”

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