Source: Brookings Institution
Spain now has one of the lowest rentership rates compared to European countries, with 23% of households renting their homes. Around 70 years ago, renters made up half of the housing market, according to Brookings Institution. Now, of the 18.6 million households in Spain, fewer than one in four contain renters.
Over the last 20 years, the number of renters in Spain had actually been gradually increasing due to job insecurity and caution around banks granting mortgages. But the COVID-19 pandemic caused rental prices to drop significantly marking the first drop since the 2009 financial crisis. Brookings states that “the supply of rental homes in Spain increased 52% between September 2019 and September 2020.”
Brazil’s Bolsonaro vowed to work with Indigenous people. Now he’s investigating them
by Mongabay.com on 4 May 2021
At least two top Indigenous leaders in Brazil, Sônia Guajajara and Almir Suruí, were recently summoned for questioning by the federal police over allegations of slander against the government of President Jair Bolsonaro.
Both probes were prompted by complaints filed by Funai, the federal agency for Indigenous affairs, just a week after Bolsonaro pledged at a global leaders’ climate summit to work together with Indigenous peoples to tackle deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon.
The NGO Human Rights Watch said it’s “deeply concerned” about the government’s moves and called any retaliation against Indigenous peoples a “flagrant abuse of power,” while APIB, Brazil’s main Indigenous association, called the government’s approach a “clear attempt to curtail freedom of expression.”
Source: Brookings analysis of NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information data
Note: Climate disasters refer to droughts, floods, freezes, winter storms, severe storms, tropical cyclones and wildfires costing at least $1 billion each
Climate disasters in the United States have accounted for over $1.8 trillion in economic costs since 1980. The country has endured over 285 climate-related catastrophes in the past 41 years that cost at least $1 billion each, according to Brookings Institute. These disasters are becoming more frequent and intense: In the 2010s alone, they cost $81 billion per year up from $18 billion per year in the 1980s.
Flooding is emerging as one of the most frequent threats, impacting coastal communities more severely than other communities. Brookings states that “mitigating and adapting to these pressures will require more resilient infrastructure systems.”
ksuadminApril 30, 2021 1
A week after the end of the Climate Leaders Summit, organized by Joe Biden, the US government’s special climate envoy, John Kerry, met this Friday 30 with Brazilian ministers Ricardo Salles (Environment) and Carlos França (Relations exterior). Biden’s aide announced the meeting on his social media and said it served to meet Brazil’s “important new goals” in the climate realm.
“We look forward to continuing to work together to put our world on the path to a safer, more prosperous and more sustainable future,” Kerry wrote.
At the summit last week, President Jair Bolsonaro gave a speech that has caused, at the very least, some strangeness to anyone observing environmental policy considered negligent by his government. The Brazilian president said he had determined the duplication of resources for environmental inspection actions in Brazil, pledged to achieve climate neutrality by 2050 – ten years ahead of the previously set target – an
Deforestation in Brazil is out of control. Bolsonaro is asking for billions to stop it. Vox.com 2 hrs ago
This story is part of
, a new Vox reporting initiative on the science, politics, and economics of the biodiversity crisis.
We’re just four months into the year and things are already looking bleak in the Brazilian Amazon.
About 430,000 acres of its lush, species-rich forests have been logged or burned so far in 2021, according to a new analysis of satellite imagery by the Monitoring of the Andean Amazon Project (MAAP). That’s an area roughly 30 times the size of Manhattan.
The analysis, published earlier this week, comes as Brazil’s president, Jair Bolsonaro, is negotiating a deal with US officials to funnel what could be billions of dollars into his administration to eliminate illegal deforestation within the decade.