Photo source: Business Insider By Naveed Qazi | Editor, Globe UpFront 2019 Amazon wildfires, that lit up in August, led to an international concern about the fate of the rainforests, responsible for world’s twenty percent oxygen, often called as the ‘lungs of the world’. Some 1,202 square kilometers (464 square miles) of forest — an area more than twenty times the size of Manhattan — was destroyed from January 2020 to April 2020, according to Brasil's National Space Research Institute. It’s the highest figure for the first four months of the year since 2015. The same agency reported that there were more than eighty thousand fires in 2019, the most that it had ever recorded. It was nearly an eighty percent jump with what the country had experienced in 2018: the sky over Sao Paulo, Brasil’s largest city, went dark with smoke clouds that blocked out the sun. After bowing to pressure, president Jair Bolsonaro announced a 60-day ban on setting fires to clear land. The environmen...

Photo source:  The Conversation By Naveed Qazi | Editor, Globe UpFront   The most widely used vegetable oil, in the world, over the years, has become available to consumers, at a harrowing price. Its production not only makes our planet warmer, but is also destroying the habitat of Sumatran Tigers, Sumatra Rhinos, and Orangutans driving these species, to near extinction. Global financial institutions, such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), has pushed Malaysia and Indonesia, on track, to produce more of this crop, leading to severe environmental degradation, in its low-lying tropical regions, that source rainforests, and peatlands. It is because these leading global institutions view its production, as a poverty reduction scheme. In fact, various Dutch banks itself have provided various loans to Indonesian farmers, between 1995 to 1999. The business expansion has been vital to regional companies because it not only gives a higher shelf life, to processed ...