RIO DE JANEIRO - Brazil cut its production and consumption of ozone-depleting chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), used mainly in refrigeration and aerosols, by 82.8 percent. In absolute terms, the Environment Ministry announced on Jun. 10, the total fell from 10,000 tons in 1997 to less then 2,000 tons in 2004.

The reduction was 76.3 percent in the case of methyl bromide, used in agricultural insecticides -- another substance that depletes the Earth's ozone layer. Brazil could reach its goal to eliminate CFCs even before 2010, the deadline that the 1987 Montreal Protocol set for developing countries, said ministry official Claudio Langone.

There are still some 30 million old refrigerators in Brazil that use CFCs, but equipment is being used to recover and regenerate those gases to prevent their diffusion into the atmosphere. By 2008 there will be some 35,000 technicians trained to operate that equipment.

SANTIAGO - More than 150 people took part in a workshop of the Ornithologists Union of Chile, UNORCH, in the nation's capital, and volunteers received training to count birds in wetlands and establish databases to be used in species protection.

For the Jun. 14 workshop, ''we expected only about 30 people,'' the pleasantly surprised Francisca Izquierdo, UNORCH secretary, told Tierramérica.

The first censuses will be conducted in the Metropolitan region (Santiago) and in the neighboring region of Valparaíso, along the Pacific coast, and will ultimately extend across the entire country and the different seasons of the year.

The high interest in the UNORCH initiative is likely due to the outcry from the massive die-off of swans caused by the dumping of waste from a cellulose plant into the Rio Cruces nature sanctuary, a marsh located 830 km south of Santiago.

CARACAS - Artists, environmentalists, educators and historians have proposed to set up an Ecological Museum of Lake Maracaibo, upon a platform over this body of water near the shore of the city of the same name -- oil capital of western Venezuela.

''The lake and its basin are a vast world enclosed between the extensions of the Andes Mountains, but open like an estuary to the Caribbean, and we want to provide the population with the tools to study its past, present and future -- for its conservation,'' historian and project spokesman Germán Cardozo told Tierramérica.

The museum will have exhibit halls, an audiovisual center, and a regional research center for petroleum industry history and architecture, and for the transport systems that have criss-crossed this lake that covers 12,870 square km, and which was for decades the largest source of oil in South America.

HAVANA - Two areas of southeastern Cuba hit especially hard by drought received international financing to plant trees -- cashews (Anacardium occidentale) and neems (Azadirachta indica) -- which will create new jobs and help protect both soil and biodiversity.

Planting of cashew, which fetches a good price on international markets, will take place in Granma province, and the neem, used in producing insecticides, in Guantánamo province, Fabio Fajardo, coordinator of small grants projects for the United Nations Development Project (UNDP), told Tierramérica.

The new forests will also help reduce carbon dioxide emissions, which lead to climate change, by serving as ''carbon sinks'', absorbing it in the photosynthesis process.

Both projects, also backed by the Global Environment Facility, are part of a set of sustainable development initiatives for 2005 aimed at environmental problems in small communities.