Greenpeace News

Ban Ki-Moon knows a thing or two about climate change and, as head of the UN, the world’s top diplomat knows a thing or two about politics. When our own executive director, Dr. Gerd Leipold, got in the lift at the UN bound for the 38th floor, he came to ask Ban for strong leadership at the UN climate change meeting on Monday (24th).

The latest edition of our quarterly Guide to Greener Electronics shows that major electronics firms have made large, green strides since the guide was first launched in August 2006. Nokia still leads, closely followed by Sony Ericsson, Dell and Lenovo.

Our planet's oceans are in deep, deep, peril, says a new report from the Worldwatch Institute. The only road to recovery may be to declare 40 percent of the world's oceans off-limits to human exploitation to ensure the restoration of life in depleted areas.

All drinks at the Olympics are on us, kind of. Soft drinks giant Coca-Cola today announced a commitment to use coolers and vending machines free of HFC gases in all official venues of the 2008 Olympic Games, demonstrating climate-friendly technology developed by Greenpeace. Getting to here has been an amazing journey over 20 years involving the most unlikely characters and situations -- even George W. Bush makes a last-minute appearance.

Jaguars are tree climbers, but there is no federal law to protecting their forest - so our activists have taken to the trees themselves. Dressed as jaguars, they're camped in the treetops of the Yungas in a bid to block the bulldozers until a federal law can be passed.

Earlier this month a group of Islamic scholars and clerics, the Ulamas of Jepara, issued a fatwa against a proposed nuclear plant in their community. We've been supporting the thousands of locals already protesting against this plant. And yesterday, we took the protest to the energy company's own headquarters with one of our classic banner hanging actions.

Environmental activists today placed an entire island under strict quarantine after finding illegal genetically modified (GMO) soya being grown there.

After officials from 158 countries meeting in Vienna agreed the next steps for negotiating phase two of Kyoto, the world now turns its gaze southward towards the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) meeting in Sydney to see if some of the world's biggest emitters of greenhouse gases can rise to the challenge.

Back in April, at the World Bank's spring meeting, there was much talk about the plight of the Congo rainforest. We'd just published a big report detailing how in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) logging titles were being granted in breach of a moratorium that the bank had been instrumental in establishing. The report launch was so high profile, we were able to force DRC's rainforest high onto the agenda of the World Bank meeting and have also managed to secure another session at the upcoming autumn meeting.

Global warming is melting the Arctic at an alarming pace. This summer the Arctic ice cover was the smallest ever recorded. As a result, a host of countries are seeking to drill for the oil and gas once protected by ice.

In a setback to the whaling industry worldwide, Iceland's fisheries minister has just announced he will not issue further commercial whale-hunting quotas.

It was almost too good to be true. When the Brazilian government announced last week that deforestation rates in the Amazon had dropped for the third year running, it was certainly a cause for celebration. But it now transpires that one of the government's own agencies is colluding with logging companies so they can gain access to areas of high-value timber that would otherwise be off limits.

An emergency provokes extreme responses: human beings in danger will abandon social niceties, etiquette, and the norms of acceptable behaviour to raise an alarm any way they can when lives are in danger. Today, six hundred people shed their clothes on a glacier in the Swiss Alps to bodily cry out for help against a planetary emergency: global warming.

Parental warning: the story below contains nudity

Our good ship Esperanza is currently out in the Bering Sea, one of the world's wildest oceans. Situated between Alaska and Kamchatka at the western edge of Russia, the Bering covers over 2 million square km of the northernmost region of the Pacific Ocean, and is home to some of the largest unexplored submarine canyons on the planet.

Designers of Finland's Olkiluoto 3 nuclear reactor knew as far back as 2001 that it must be able to withstand an airplane attack. That's what the Finnish public was promised when the construction license was issued. Yet today, the company announced further delays in construction due to problems with reinforcing the reactor building to withstand an airplane crash.

Over the past two weeks, our India office has been ramping up their climate change campaign with a series of protests set to the backdrop of massive flooding across South Asia.

From the Executive Director of our office in Japan, Jun Hoshikawa, comes this appeal to the government of Japan to maintain that country's constitutional renunciation of war:

Sixty-two years ago on August 6th, a uranium-type atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, and a Plutonium-type atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki three days later on August 9th. Both were indiscriminate bombings, both targeted the two city’s civilians and both starkly violated international law. We offer our deepest sympathy to the families of the people who lost their lives on not only August 6th and August 9th but also those who died from the fallout of the two bombs – over 400,000 people - and share the suffering of those who have survived through various levels of the radiation contamination.

Conservation forces have won round one of the battle for the Rospuda valley -- but the fight isn't over.

One of the last wild places in Europe, the Rospuda Valley is located in the far north-east of Poland, near the border with Lithuania. With its wetlands surrounded by forest, the Rospuda is not only beautiful but full of wildlife that is now rare in much of Europe. Wolf, lynx and moose all roam freely here. But if a planned road development goes ahead, a freeway will cut across this refuge, spoiling it forever.

So it's official. Climate change is in. Global warming is hip. Pop stars are urging action. It seems not a day passes without another big business making a green pronouncement. The scale of the problem is clear but there are still very few big companies walking their climate talk.

Computer models of how our world will react to climate change have long predicted extreme and shifting weather patterns. More heavy rains in some areas, crippling drought in others. A new study, published this week in the journal Nature, compared recorded precipitation to predicted precipitation - and confirmed we're changing our weather.