The UN’s cultural arm UNESCO has appealed to Democratic Republic of the Congo’s (DR Congo) President Joseph Kabila to guarantee there will be no oil exploration in the forest home of rare gorillas where two UK-listed firms hold drilling rights.
SOCO International and Dominion Petroleum were awarded a presidential decree to Block 5 of east DR Congo’s Albertine Graben in June. Plans for a seismic survey include exploding dynamite, despite the fact that the rebel-heavy area overlaps with the protected Virunga National Park.
UNESCO chief Irina Bokova warned Kabila in a letter of “extremely damaging repercussions” of oil activity and asked him to ensure no exploration took place in the park, which is also home to chimpanzees, lions, elephants and migratory birds so rare it has special wetland status.
“I call on you to guarantee that no oil exploration or production will be committed at the heart of the Virunga National Park,” she said in the letter dated Aug. 6, which noted past commitments by DR Congo to protect the World Heritage site.
Local environmentalists say that any exploration would be contrary to DR Congo’s own laws.
“Congolese legislation does not authorize mineral and petrol [gasoline] production in national parks,” said a Nov. 15 letter to Congolese Environment Minister Jose Endundo from the Congolese Institute for the Conservation of Nature.
It said SOCO’s environmental impact assessment, required by law, made no reference to the park’s status as a protected zone.
Separately, a World Bank official said it and other donors were planning to express concern to the government and question how oil development was compatible with Congo’s commitments.
Calls to Kabila’s office for -comment went unanswered on Friday. However, Endundo played down the concerns.
“We’ll do everything to preserve the park, but the Congolese people also have to benefit from the riches under the soil,” he said by telephone.
Endundo said that if oil activities were excluded from the park, he might seek compensation along the lines of a pact signed by Ecuador in August, under which the Andean nation expects payments from rich nations in return for not drilling for oil in a wildlife reserve in the Yasuni National Park.
Operator SOCO, which has 38.25 percent of the block, and Dominion, with 46.75 percent, said in July they would start seismic exploration this year with a view to production after three years. Congo has the remaining share.
Company maps indicate drilling will take place throughout the park and the companies have sent in teams.
“I don’t see any problem if it’s done correctly,” deputy chief executive and chief financial officer for SOCO Roger Cagle said by telephone, adding the company’s partner Dominion was already working in Uganda’s Queen Elizabeth National Park.
PHISHING: The con might appear convincing, as the scam e-mails can coincide with genuine messages from Apple saying you have run out of storage For a while you have been getting messages from Apple saying “your iCloud storage is full.” They say you have exceeded your storage plan, so documents are no longer being backed up, and photos you take are not being uploaded. You have been resisting Apple’s efforts to get you to pay a minimum of ￡0.99 (US$1.33) a month for more storage, but it seems that you cannot keep putting off the inevitable: You have received an e-mail which says your iCloud account has been blocked, and your photos and videos would be deleted very soon. To keep them you need
For two decades, researchers observed members of the Ngogo chimpanzee group of Kibale National Park in Uganda spend their days eating fruits and leaves, resting, traveling and grooming in their tropical rainforest abode, but this stable community then fractured and descended into years of deadly violence. The researchers are now describing the first clearly documented example of a group of wild chimpanzees splitting into two separate factions, with one launching a series of coordinated attacks against the other. Adult males and infants were targeted, with 28 deaths. “Biting, pounding the victim with their hands, dragging them, kicking them — mostly adult males,
Filipino farmers like Romeo Wagayan have been left with little choice but to let their vegetables rot in the field rather than sell them at a loss, as rising oil prices linked to the Iran war drive up the cost of harvesting, labor and transport. “There’s nothing we can do,” said Wagayan, a 57-year old vegetable farmer in the northern Philippine province of Benguet. “If we harvest it, our losses only increase because of labor, transportation and packing costs. We don’t earn anything from it. That’s why we decided not to harvest at all,” he said. Soaring costs caused by the Middle East
The Israeli military has demolished entire villages as part of its invasion of south Lebanon, rigging homes with explosives and razing them to the ground in massive remote detonations. The Guardian reviewed three videos posted by the Israeli military and on social media, which showed Israel carrying out mass detonations in the villages of Taybeh, Naqoura and Deir Seryan along the Israel-Lebanon border. Lebanese media has reported more mass detonations in other border villages, but satellite imagery was not readily available to verify these claims. The demolitions came after Israeli Minister of Defense Israel Katz called for the destruction of
RSS