Greenpeace divers protesting against the planned oil shale mine

Australia has stepped back from the brink of madness and decided to shelve plans to mine oil shales right on the doorstep of the Great Barrier Reef.

Proposals to extract millions of tonnes of oil shales from the Whitsunday Islands threatened to drain precious water supplies, and to risk toxic leaching and air pollution - as well as increasing Australia's greenhouse gas emissions.

Fortunately, following a strong protest campaign led by the local Save Our Foreshore group, common sense has prevailed and last week Queensland premier Anna Bligh announced a 20-year moratorium, effectively ending the threat for the immediate future.

The Governor of the province of Riau on the island of Sumatra in Indonesia has pledged to halt deforestation, which could help protect Riau's vast peatlands and forests that store 14.6 billion tonnes of carbon. Just to give you an estimate of what that figure means, it's the equivalent of an entire year's greenhouse gas emissions for the entire planet. Moreover, aside from being an important carbon store, this area is also important for biodiversity and critical for the people that depend upon these forests for their survival.

There have been some great developments around our Congo rainforest campaign, as the FT reported on its website this morning that one of the arms of the World Bank will offload the shares it owns in a company known to be destroying the forest of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

The International Finance Corporation (IFC) has announced that it will divest its holdings in Olam International, a Singapore-based company which has operations in the DRC. The Congo report we released earlier this year showed how Olam was holding forest land granted in breach of the current moratorium which the World Bank itself helped establish and that it was also trading in dodgy timber. As a result, Olam has since given back its forest holdings to the DRC government, but it still buys illegal timber cut by local companies.

Forest officials in the Democratic Republic of Congo are woefully under-resourced

It's not a trick question, and the answer is simple: when a moratorium is failing to stop the problem it was originally designed to address, then it's not much of a moratorium at all. There's one in place right now in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) that is supposed to help prevent the destruction of the country's rainforest, and yet it has been repeatedly breached until the moratorium itself is practically worthless.

Bottom trawling - it's not big and it's not clever. An upcoming UN vote could see a moratorium on this fishing method which is destroying life on the ocean bed, but Canada and Spain are opposing it. If the video below doesn't inspire you to take action, you've misplaced your funny bone.

It's been a hectic year in the Amazon. Following three years of research into the activities of the soya industry, in April 2006 we launched a very public campaign to expose how those little beans are chewing up the Brazilian rainforest. Or to be more precise, how the demands of European markets for cheap meat are being met by huge plantations growing soya for animal feed in the ashes of rampant deforestation.

John Sauven, campaign special projects director for Greenpeace UK, explains how Greenpeace worked with McDonald's to change the food industry's attitude towards Amazon soya.

"Huge chickens invaded fast food stores in London and started to ask customers if they knew they were eating soya from deforested areas of the Amazon. That was in April. The chickens were noisy Greenpeace activists... It took McDonald's only six hours between the first 'homo chickenacius' invasion of its restaurants and the phone call to Greenpeace to discuss the issue. Why? Because fast-food consumers started to be choked with McNuggets and McChickens. Ethical consumption's appeal is increasing."

In an historic deal that has impacts far beyond the golden arches and into the global agricultural market, McDonald's is now the leading company in the campaign to halt deforestation for the expansion of soya farming in the Amazon.

Whalers poised to seize control of the International Whaling Commission

International Whaling Commission 58th meeting
St. Kitts & Nevis, June 16th-20th 2006