Colombia lost over two million hectares of forests since 1960s

Millions of hectares of woodlands equivalent to the size of a province, were destroyed in Colombia between 1967 and 2012 thanks to farming, war, mining and a range of criminal activities. The Agustín Codazzi Geographical Institute (IGAC) and IDEAM, two public research bodies, found in the recently published Suelos y tierras de Colombia, a paper on the state of the Colombia's natural landscapes, that the country lost just over 2.4 million hectares (24,000 square kilometres) of forest cover in that period, about equivalent to the size of the central department of Cundinamarca that includes Bogotá, El Espectador reported on 30 August. The bodies found that in 1967 the country had 68, 223,717 hectares of forests - or 60 per cent of its entire area - and this dropped to 65,767,667 hectares in 2012, or 58 per cent of the country's surface. About 60 million hectares consisted of primary or secondary forests and the rest, woodlands interspersed with farmed land. The worst damage was done from the 1960s to the 1980s, the IGAC found. Caracol radio cited its head, Juan Antonio Nieto Escalante, as urging more efforts to protect the forest now, as the country's civil war winds down.

Salta in Argentina to ban plastic bags

The district of Salta in northern Argentina is phasing out the sale and use of plastic bags by the end of 2016 to curb pollution, the regional daily El Tribuno reported on 30 August. The daily stated that single-bag use had already fallen by 70 per cent since early 2016, when the municipality began discouraging their use in coordination with supermarkets. Their sale or distribution will be forbidden from 30 December, it stated, while shops and supermarkets were to starting selling and promoting the use of cloth or reusable bags from 1 September. Plastic, which takes hundreds of years or longer to disappear, has become one of the world's main pollutants, in spite of its utility.