MSc. Juan Pablo Arce has over 20 years of experience working in conservation and the international development field. Currently, he is the Director of Latin America and the Caribbean Department at NatureServe.
- American trypanosomiasis
- Latin America and Caribbean Population Growth Rates
- Latin America and Caribbean Countries ordered by percentage of Protected Area
- Brazil’s WTO Case Against the U.S. Cotton Program
- Itaipú dam
- Energy profile of Caribbean
- North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)
- Latin America and Caribbean Population Growth Rates
- Andes’ Formation Was A ‘Species Pump’ For South America
- Burden Of Neglected Tropical Diseases In Latin America And Caribbean May Exceed That Of HIV/AIDS, TB And Malaria
- “Black Carbon” Chokes Chilean Towns
- Bolivia’s gas takeover
- Green Coffee-growing Practices Buffer Climate-change Impacts
- Buses May Aid Climate Battle in Poor Cities
- Virus Behind Mysterious Parrot Disease Identified
- Carribbean Frogs Started With A Single, Ancient Voyage On A Raft From South America
Welcome to the Latin America and the Caribbean Collection! This collection focuses on environmental and social issues in a diverse political, cultural, and environmental framework. As one of the highest biodiversity hotspots of the world, this collection attempts to address this complexity through three main geographic regions (Mexico and Central America, the Caribbean, and South America) by profiling each country and ecosystem. This collection is a work in progress, so please visit often to learn more about what is being done in the LAC.
Please go here to see the full collection
Below you will find good examples of the diversity of information provided in the Latin American and the Caribbean Collection
Tropical forests in Amazonia are being cleared rapidly, representing an important contribution to land-use and land-cover change. While some processes are common to forests throughout the world, others are not. Amazonian clearing is dominated by large cattle ranchers, with an increasing role being played by soybeans. Small farmers and estate crops such as oil palm have less relative importance here than elsewhere. Deforestation in Brazilian Amazonia has a significant contribution from “ulterior” motives such as land speculation, money laundering and tax evasion. Infrastructure projects, especially highway construction and improvement, represent key governmental decisions unleashing chains of activity that escape from government control. Deforestation sacrifices environmental services such as maintenance of biodiversity, water cycling and carbon stocks. The substantial impact of this deforestation on loss of environmental services has so far not entered into decision-making on infrastructure projects, making strengthening of the environmental assessment and licensing system a high priority for containing future loss of forest.
Human Development Index for Latin America and Caribbean Nations
The Human Development Index (HDI) is a summary measure of human development that is published by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). The HDI provides an alternative to the common practice of evaluating a country’s progress in development based on per capita Gross Domestic Product (GDP). The HDI is the signature trademark of the Human Development Report (HDR), an independent report commissioned by the UNDP that is written by a team of scholars, development practitioners and members of the Human Development Report Office of UNDP. The HDI has had a significant impact on drawing the attention of governments, corporations and international organizations to aspects of development that focus on the expansion of choices and freedoms, not just income.
The HDI measures the average achievements in a country in three basic dimensions of human development:
- A long and healthy life, as measured by life expectancy at birth.
- Knowledge, as measured by the adult literacy rate (with two-thirds weight) and the combined primary, secondary and tertiary gross enrollment ratio (with one-third weight).
- A decent standard of living, as measured by GDP per capita in purchasing power parity (PPP) terms in US dollars.
Columbian exchange: plants, animals, and disease between the Old and New World
For tens of millions of years the dominant pattern of biological evolution> on this planet has been one of geographical divergence dictated by the simple fact of the separateness of the continents. Even where climates have been similar, as in the Amazon and Congo basins, organisms have tended to get more different rather than more alike because they had little or no contact with each other. The Amazon has jaguars, the Congo leopards.
However, very, very recently—that is to say, in the last few thousand years—there has been a countervailing force, us, or, if you want to be scientific about it, Homo sapiens. We are world-travelers, trekkers of deserts and crossers of oceans. We have gone to and lived or at least spent some time everywhere, taking with us, intentionally, our domesticated animals and, unintentionally, our weeds, varmints, disease organisms, and such free-loaders as house sparrows.