environment

Over the last 50 years, oil spills from tankers at sea have decreased by more than 90%.From the peaks of the 1970s, a period in which cases of large oil spills at sea occurred up to once every almost three days, problems relating to oil disasters have in fact decreased drastically, so much so that in 2023 there were just a case of a large spill.Furthermore, the 2023 data is not a mere isolated case, but is part of a general trend of containment of the phenomenon which has been going on for decades and which since the end of the early 2000s has never seen the number of averages and large spills reach double figures.This result was made possible by international policies and scientific progress, which led to the implementation of oil plants and cargo ships which made transport and storage systems more efficient, making them also safer. Data relating to oil spills on board oil vessels are provided by International Tanker Owners Pollution Federation (ITOPF), which publishes a report on the...

Only by knowing the sea is it possible to protect it.For this reason, on 7 June, in Venice, the United Nations delegates will meet together with sector experts in the Ocean Literacy World Conference with the aim of bringing ocean education into the school curricula of member countries.A fundamental step in a journey that began over ten years ago, as oceanographer Francesca Santoro, responsible for ocean education activities for the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC) of UNESCO, explains to Open

The water that is dispersed in Italy every year in distribution networks could satisfy the water needs of 43.4 million people for an entire year

For the first time in history, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has condemned a nation for failing to meet climate obligations.We are talking about Switzerland, which was notably condemned after an association made up of over 2,000 elderly women sued it for climate inaction.The ECHR, more specifically, condemned the Swiss State for violating Article 8 of the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights, i.e. the right to respect for private and family life, since it did not adopt adequate measures to mitigate the effects of climate change.A judgment which, by linking the protection of human rights to compliance with climate obligations, she is destined to do law.The ruling is, among other things, binding and has the potential to influence the law in the 46 countries of the Council of Europe, i.e. all those belonging to the European human rights jurisdiction.On the same day, the ECHR also expressed its opinion on two other climate justice cases, however, both of which...

Thanks to the political choices made by the governments of Brazil and Colombia last year, the deforestation of the Amazon has definitely slowed down.The decisions of the government of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva have in fact recorded a 36% decrease in the loss of primary forests in 2023 (the lowest level since 2015), while in Colombia, under the presidency of Gustavo Petro, the loss of primary forests halved (-49%) compared to the previous year.Similar data demonstrate how environmental protection constitutes in all respects a viable political choice, and how the decision to pursue these objectives can lead, in just one year, to achieving extraordinary results. In the first 9 months of 2023, deforestation in the Colombian region is collapsed of 70% compared to the same period of the previous year, when the trend was already decreasing compared to 2021 (-21%).The government of Gustavo Petro, which took office in June 2022, had made environmental protection one of the cruc...