HORIZON INTERNATIONAL SOLUTIONS SITE

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on 7 December 2011 announced it will provide up to $1.8 million for projects across the country to protect Americans’ health and help restore urban waters by improving water quality and supporting community revitalization. The funding is part of EPA’s Urban Waters program, which supports communities in their efforts to access, improve and benefit from their urban waters and the surrounding land. Urban waters are canals, rivers, lakes, wetlands, aquifers, estuaries, bays and oceans.

The Republic of the Marshall Islands is now home to the world’s largest shark sanctuary. The Nitijela, the Marshallese parliament, unanimously passed legislation last week  that ends commercial fishing of sharks in all 1,990,530 square kilometers (768,547 square miles) of the central Pacific country’s waters, an ocean area four times the landmass of California.

Conservation action involving several countries brings large scale benefits to nature and helps resolve social and political conflicts, a new IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature) publication shows.

Thousands of hectares of tropical dry forests in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais are now safe from logging, thanks to scientists affiliated with a project called Tropi-Dry.