Elsa Rodr News Today

The environmental issues facing Venezuela are serious and wide-ranging: illegal mining in the Amazon, national water shortages, mudslides and flooding exacerbated by climate change, the degradation of protected areas, oil spills and human rights violations against Indigenous communities. The list is long and, for the last decade, has basically gone unchanged. The government institutions designed […]

Venezuela sits on one of the largest deposits of proven crude oil and natural gas reserves in the world. For decades, it’s been the backbone, if not the lifeline, of the national economy. But the country also has a terrible track record of oil spills, with aging infrastructure and weak regulations resulting in near-continual environmental […]

While trying to put together a review of what happened to Venezuela’s environment in 2021, conservationists ran into a problem. The government publishes virtually no statistics on things like deforestation, infrastructure or mining, and it often actively blocks researchers from investigating threats to local ecosystems. Last year, the government appeared to lean more heavily on […]

It’s not unusual to see some rivers running black in Venezuela, or for fishermen to return home scraping dark sludge off their boots. Crumbling infrastructure and a lack of government oversight in the petroleum-rich country have made oil spills an endemic problem along the coast, according to a report published this month by the Venezuelan […]