Welcome to our news section, with relevant articles on the Guiana Shield, Payment for Ecosystem Services or other issues of interest. Registered users can directly submit articles to the website. Others are kindly requested to send interesting articles or web links to the
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. Thank you very much! Please note that this section is meant as a background information database, to give a full overview from different perspectives on Guiana Shield-related issues and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the Guiana Shield Initiative, its staff or its partners. Each article contains a link to the site where it was originally published, and the name of the author.
On show.mappingworlds.nl, SHOW® launched an online informational tool in May 2008 by Mapping Worlds. The website offers users a new way to look at the world by resizing countries on the map according to a series of global issues, for example forest cover (as shown here).
SHOW® covers a wide scope of subjects based on datasets provided by the most authoritative sources in their fields. New subjects are periodically added, and users are free to send suggestions. SHOW® allows people to easily download datasets, maps and animations. These can be shared across the Internet through websites, blogs and email.
SHOW® is an independent project, liaising users with data publishers, online press & media, and implicated world organisations across the globe.
We are pleased to inform you that Mr. Claude Suzanon has officially joined the GSI Phase II Project Steering Committee as the French Guiana representative. It is thanks to the efforts of our SC member Dominiek Plouvier and Project Manager Patrick Chesney that Claude Suzanon became familiar with the GSI Phase II project, and enthusiastic to become an SC member. Claude has expressed an interest in working towards transboundary collaboration on environmental issues between French Guiana, Brazil and Suriname.
Mr. Suzanon is the President of the Association Sepunguy (Société d’ Etudes de Protection et d’Aménagement de la Nature en Guyane / Society for the Protection and Development of Nature in French Guiana) and First Vice-President of Le Conseil d’Administration of the Parc Amazonien de Guyane.
We welcome Mr. Claude Suzanon as the French Guiana representative on the GSI Project Steering Committee and look forward to working together with him on this important and interesting project!
The commercial harvest of herbal medicine to meet the growing urban demand has become an environmentally destructive activity in many countries. Non-sustainable harvesting not only threatens the survival of medicinal plant species, but also the people that depend on them. In Suriname, the urbanization of Maroons has created a lively trade in medicinal plants, but little is known on the ecological effects of this trade. To find out whether this commercial harvest was a destructive activity, we carried out a market survey and followed commercial extractors into the forest to look for signs of overharvesting. We analyzed our results from three perspectives: the market, the harvesters and the post-harvest survival of the particular plants. Of the 249 commercial species, less than half was harvested exclusively from the wild. Most extraction took place in secondary forest or man-made vegetation close to the capital. Leaves were the main product. Apart from a few primary forest-based species (e.g., Begonia glabra), we found little evidence for declining resources. Maroons were actively cultivating and managing wild plants. Our three-way analysis enabled us to distinguish between species without sustainability problems (abundant, domesticated, cultivated, limited market value, disturbance species or surviving harvest) and species with conservation priorities. This study illustrates that the increased commercialization of medicinal plants due to urbanization does not invariably lead to declining resources and species loss. With its low population density and market dominated by disturbance species, Suriname offers good possibilities for sustainable medicinal plant extraction.
In 2006, Guyana's President Bharrat Jagdeo outlined an offer to place almost the entirety of Guyana's rainforest under international supervision as part of the world's battle against climate change. In the Green Room this week, President Jagdeo sets out his views on how to reduce the 18% of greenhouse gas emissions caused by tropical deforestation.
"Imagine a business which invested 80% of its profits in products with the lowest rate of return.
Is this business destined to succeed? Unlikely.
Yet global efforts to combat climate change bear a worrying similarity.
While each person in the UK drinks, hoses, flushes and washes their way through around 150 litres of mains water a day, they consume about 30 times as much in "virtual" water embedded in food, clothes and other items - the equivalent of about 58 bathtubs full of water every day. Launching the report, UK Water Footprint: the impact of the UK's food and fibre consumption on global water resources, at World Water Week in Stockholm on 20 September 2008, Stuart Orr, WWF-UK's water footprint expert, said the UK was the sixth largest importer of water in the world.
"Only 38% of the UK's total water use comes from its own rivers, lakes and groundwater reserves," he said. "The rest is taken from water bodies in many countries across the world to irrigate and process food and fibre crops that people in Britain subsequently consume.
On Thursday the 14th of August, the first "Micro-Capital Grant Agreement" between the UNDP and the Iwokrama International Centre (IIC) has been signed, witnessed by staff of the GSI-PMU as well as the leaders of the NRDDB; the local communities organization. As such, this is the first PES contract signed with a GSI pilot site within this phase of the GSI Phase II project "Ecologically and Financially Sustainable Management of the Guiana Shield Eco-Region", mainly sponsored by the European Union. It is thanks to the combined efforts of GSI staff and related organizations in Georgetown, Oxford, Amsterdam, Wageningen and The Hague that this all came about.
The formal agreement between UNDP and the IIC for payment for ecosystem services (PES), worth up to USD200,000, is complemented by a Management Plan, which details the necessary requirements for the management of the Iwokrama Programme site within the framework of the GSI project. The plan also provides operational details for sustainable resource use. IIC’s mandate as a sustainable resource utilization entity will be supported by state of the art remote sensing monitoring and “ground truthing”. Each resource use activity will be defined and monitored to ensure consistency within its defined user limits. Limits to resource exploitation will include harvest limits, seasonal restrictions, and road travel/use restrictions among many others.
News
We are pleased to inform you that Mr. Claude Suzanon has officially joined the GSI Phase II Project Steering Committee as the French Guiana representative. It is thanks to the efforts of our SC member Dominiek Plouvier and Project Manager Patrick Chesney that Claude Suzanon became familiar with the GSI Phase II project, and enthusiastic to become an SC member. Claude has expressed an interest in working towards transboundary collaboration on environmental issues between French Guiana, Brazil and Suriname.
VIEWPOINT
While each person in the UK drinks, hoses, flushes and washes their way through around 150 litres of mains water a day, they consume about 30 times as much in "virtual" water embedded in food, clothes and other items - the equivalent of about 58 bathtubs full of water every day. Launching the report, UK Water Footprint: the impact of the UK's food and fibre consumption on global water resources, at World Water Week in Stockholm on 20 September 2008, Stuart Orr, WWF-UK's water footprint expert, said the UK was the sixth largest importer of water in the world.