The Rhino Mafia’s Billion Dollar Business

/ activist360 / Leave a comment
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6zGjJBy_pw&feature=youtu.be
Vince (22 September 2012 – 5 March 2017) was a Southern white rhinoceros who was killed by poachers inside a zoo in Thoiry near Paris, France.

Rhinoceros horns are among the world’s most valuable black market goods. [Online until: June 13, 2019] Rhino horns are more expensive than gold or cocaine and fetch as much as 30,000 Euros per kilogram. The illegal trade in the coveted raw material is firmly in the grip of the Mafia.

On April 7, 2017, a rhino was shot dead in the Thoiry Zoo near Paris and one of its horns sawn off. It was the first time that a rhinoceros living in Europe had become a victim of poachers, but in Africa it has become an everyday business: a rhino is killed there every eight hours. Although the trade in rhino horns has been banned for forty years, the precious raw material continues to fetch huge profits on the black market. In Asia, rhinoceroses are said to have an aphrodisiac or cancer-inhibiting effects and consumption and possession are regarded as status symbols. Well-organized crime syndicates that are also involved in global arms and drug trafficking are behind the trade in the horns. “Rhino Dollars” documents one of the least known and yet most profitable smuggling rackets in the world. Corruption, violence, and power games: not just innocent animals that are often facing extinction but also many people fall victim to their criminal operations.

Pumped Dry: The Global Crisis of Vanishing Groundwater

/ activist360 / Leave a comment
In places around the world, supplies of groundwater are rapidly vanishing. As aquifers decline and wells begin to go dry, people are being forced to confront a growing crisis.

Much of the planet relies on groundwater. And in places around the world – from the United States to Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America – so much water is pumped from the ground that aquifers are being rapidly depleted and wells are going dry.

Groundwater is disappearing beneath cornfields in Kansas, rice paddies in India, asparagus farms in Peru and orange groves in Morocco. As these critical water reserves are pumped beyond their limits, the threats are mounting for people who depend on aquifers to supply agriculture, sustain economies and provide drinking water. In some areas, fields have already turned to dust and farmers are struggling.

Climate change is projected to increase the stresses on water supplies, and heated disputes are erupting in places where those with deep wells can keep pumping and leave others with dry wells. Even as satellite measurements have revealed the problem’s severity on a global scale, many regions have failed to adequately address the problem. Aquifers largely remain unmanaged and unregulated, and water that seeped underground over tens of thousands of years is being gradually used up.

In this documentary, USA TODAY and The Desert Sun investigate the consequences of this emerging crisis in several of the world’s hotspots of groundwater depletion. These are stories about people on four continents confronting questions of how to safeguard their aquifers for the future – and in some cases, how to cope as the water runs out.

Fleeing Climate Change – The Real Environmental Disaster

/ activist360 / Leave a comment
How many millions of people will be forced to leave their homes by 2050? This documentary looks at the so-called hotspots of climate change in the Sahel zone, Indonesia and the Russian Tundra.

Lake Chad in the Sahel zone has already shrunk by 90 percent since the 1960s due to the increasing heat. About 40 million people will be forced to migrate to places where there is enough rainfall. Migration has always existed as a strategy to adapt to a changing environment. But the number of those forced to migrate solely because of climate change has increased dramatically since the 1990s. It is a double injustice: after becoming rich at the expense of the rest of the world, the industrialized countries are now polluting the atmosphere with their emissions and bringing a second misfortune to the inhabitants of the poorer regions. One of them is Mohammed Ibrahim: as Lake Chad got hotter and drier, he decided to go where the temperatures were less extreme and there was still a little water, trekking with his wife, children and 70 camels from Niger to Chad and then further south. The journey lasted several years and many members of his herd died of thirst. Now he and his family are living in a refugee camp: they only have seven camels left. Mohammed is one of many who have left their homelands in the Sahel – not because of conflict and crises, but because of the high temperatures. He’s a real climate refugee.