Ecuador | Energy minister says government will not abide by referendum banning drilling in Yasuní NP

After Ecuadorians overwhelmingly voted to ban new oil wells in a prized national park, the government challenged the legitimacy of the referendum and said it would continue drilling.

On Sunday, nearly 60 percent of voters approved halting new oil drilling in Yasuní National Park, which sits on the eastern edge of the Amazon rainforest and is home to two isolated tribes. The park is a hotspot for wildlife, with 121 reptile species, 139 amphibian species, and 610 bird species. The vote was hailed as a historic victory for forest protection.

https://e360.yale.edu/digest/ecuador-oil-drilling-vote

Uganda launches restoration of degraded portions of Mabira Central Forest Reserve

Conservationists are working to restore Uganda’s threatened Mabira Central Forest Reserve, a refuge for hundreds of species of birds, mammals and plants in the center of the country. In April, the NGO Nature Uganda launched a forest restoration project aimed at reducing illegal harvesting of forest products and replanting degraded sections of Mabira with indigenous tree species.

The work will focus on 570 hectares (1,400 acres) of the reserve, whose roughly 30,000 hectares (74,000 acres) are a remnant of a much greater ecosystem that once stretched from the Kakamega Forest in western Kenya, across the breadth of Uganda.

https://news.mongabay.com/2023/08/conservationists-work-to-restore-last-remnant-of-a-once-great-ugandan-forest/

Nations agree to fund aimed at restoring global biodiversity

Yesterday, representatives of 185 countries officially agreed to launch a new fund to ramp up investment in meeting major global biodiversity goals.

The new Global Biodiversity Framework Fund (GBFF) was ratified at the Global Environmental Facility’s (GEF) seventh assembly in Vancouver, Canada, with wildfires in British Columbia as a backdrop. This comes eight months after global delegates at the U.N. biodiversity conference (COP15) committed last December in Montreal to meet a set of goals inked into a global biodiversity framework. This framework is designed to help halt and reverse biodiversity loss and put nature on a path to recovery by 2030.

https://news.mongabay.com/2023/08/new-global-biodiversity-fund-to-restore-nature-worldwide-by-2030-officially-launches/