A seven year old tribal boy is reportedly in a critical condition after being shot by a park guard in a national park in northeast India, notorious for its brutal ‘shoot to kill’ policy towards suspected poachers.

The boy, named in reports as Akash Oram, is a member of the Oroan tribe who live around Kaziranga national park. He sustained serious injuries to his legs, and is being treated in hospital.

Two park guards have been suspended after the shooting, following an outcry from local tribal people. Akash’s village is facing eviction. Ther issue was recently highlighted in The Ecologist after Prince William and Kate visited the park earlier this year.

The incident raises serious concerns over the advisability of the ‘shoot to kill’ policy, which has seen at least 62 people killed in the park over a nine year period. This militarized approach to conservation has had serious consequences for local tribal people, who face arrest and beatings, torture and even death in the name of conservation.

Madegowda C, a tribal rights activist from the Soliga people in southern India, said: “The Kaziranga park director is violating the human rights and constitutional rights of the tribal people … Forest conservation is not possible without tribal and local communities. Most of the forest officials do not understand the relationship between the forest and tribal peoples – they need to understand tribal cultures and our lifestyles in the forest. Tribal peoples are the indigenous people of this country and they are human beings.”

The Hindustan Times has reported that other tribal people in the area have been shot as ‘poachers’ just for wandering over the park boundaries to retrieve cattle or collect firewood. A 2014 report by the park’s director revealed that Kaziranga park guards are encouraged to execute suspected ‘poachers’ on sight with slogans including “must obey or get killed” and “never allow any unauthorized entry (kill the unwanted).”

Locals near the park are reportedly paid to inform on suspected poachers. If someone is subsequently killed, the informant is given up to $1,000.

Government should tackle the real criminals!

Former Environment and Forests minister Prakash Javadeka from Narendra Modi’s BJP party, planned to implement the policy nationwide, despite human rights concerns and the acute risk of guards killing or wounding innocent people.

This is despite the fact that in BRT tiger reserve in southern India, where tribal peoples have won the right to stay on their ancestral land and militarized conservation tactics are not used, tiger numbers have increased at well above the Indian national average, demonstrating that militarization is not necessary for successful conservation.

Targeting tribal people diverts action away from tackling the true poachers – criminals conspiring with corrupt officials. Earlier this year, four Kaziranga officials were arrested on suspicion of poaching and involvement in the illegal wildlife trade.

Militarized conservation tactics are not only used in India. In Cameroon for example, Baka ‘Pygmy’ people haverepeatedly testified to beatings and torture at the hands of eco-guards. Likewise in Botswana, Bushmen are criminalized when they hunt to feed their families, and face arrest and beatings.

Survival’s Director Stephen Corry said: “It’s time for a global outcry to stop innocent tribal people being shot and killed in the name of conservation. Why are the big conservation organizations complicit in these lethal policies which are useless at tackling the true poachers – criminals conspiring with corrupt officials? It’s no good pretending this is an isolated accident, it’s an integral part of the murderous regime running this tiger reserve.”

Draft Forest Policy foresees mass evictions of tribal communities

The shocking attack comes just a month after the Indian Government’s environment ministry published what it announced was the ‘draft national forest policy 2016‘, which made no mention of tribal peoples’ existing rights to live in their forests, and would have led to more tribes being evicted from their homes.

The draft policy proposed that: “Voluntary and attractive relocation packages of villages from within national parks, other wildlife rich areas and corridors should be developed.” The proposal to evict people from the vaguely described “other wildlife rich areas” and “corridors” as well as National Parks and Tiger Reserves would cover a huge area affecting millions of tribal people who have have been dependent on and managed their environments for millennia.

However the ‘policy’ was removed a few days later after it caused an outcry from indigenous groups, and a statement was issued claiming that the document was merely a study by the Indian Institute of Forest Management (IIFM), which had been “inadvertently uploaded.” Indian news website Live Mint quoted an anonymous ministry official: “[The] U-turn came after intense criticism of the draft policy from civil society.”

Across India tribal peoples are being illegally evicted from their ancestral homelands in the name of conservation. Most so-called ‘voluntary relocations’ are far from voluntary, with tribal people often given no choice – they face arrest and beatings, harassment, threats and trickery and feel forced to ‘agree’ to leave their forest homes.

The speedy withdrawal of this ‘draft policy’ has been welcomed, but huge concern remains at what lies ahead for the tens of millions of India’s tribal people who live in forests, and other forest dwellers – concerns that have only been fuelled by the shooting of an indigenous child at Kazaringa.

Also on The Ecologist: ‘India’s ‘shoot on sight’ conservation terrorises indigenous communities‘.

A seven year old tribal boy is reportedly in a critical condition after being shot by a park guard in a national park in northeast India, notorious for its brutal ‘shoot to kill’ policy towards suspected poachers.

The boy, named in reports as Akash Oram, is a member of the Oroan tribe who live around Kaziranga national park. He sustained serious injuries to his legs, and is being treated in hospital.

Two park guards have been suspended after the shooting, following an outcry from local tribal people. Akash’s village is facing eviction. Ther issue was recently highlighted in The Ecologist after Prince William and Kate visited the park earlier this year.

The incident raises serious concerns over the advisability of the ‘shoot to kill’ policy, which has seen at least 62 people killed in the park over a nine year period. This militarized approach to conservation has had serious consequences for local tribal people, who face arrest and beatings, torture and even death in the name of conservation.

Madegowda C, a tribal rights activist from the Soliga people in southern India, said: “The Kaziranga park director is violating the human rights and constitutional rights of the tribal people … Forest conservation is not possible without tribal and local communities. Most of the forest officials do not understand the relationship between the forest and tribal peoples – they need to understand tribal cultures and our lifestyles in the forest. Tribal peoples are the indigenous people of this country and they are human beings.”

The Hindustan Times has reported that other tribal people in the area have been shot as ‘poachers’ just for wandering over the park boundaries to retrieve cattle or collect firewood. A 2014 report by the park’s director revealed that Kaziranga park guards are encouraged to execute suspected ‘poachers’ on sight with slogans including “must obey or get killed” and “never allow any unauthorized entry (kill the unwanted).”

Locals near the park are reportedly paid to inform on suspected poachers. If someone is subsequently killed, the informant is given up to $1,000.

Government should tackle the real criminals!

Former Environment and Forests minister Prakash Javadeka from Narendra Modi’s BJP party, planned to implement the policy nationwide, despite human rights concerns and the acute risk of guards killing or wounding innocent people.

This is despite the fact that in BRT tiger reserve in southern India, where tribal peoples have won the right to stay on their ancestral land and militarized conservation tactics are not used, tiger numbers have increased at well above the Indian national average, demonstrating that militarization is not necessary for successful conservation.

Targeting tribal people diverts action away from tackling the true poachers – criminals conspiring with corrupt officials. Earlier this year, four Kaziranga officials were arrested on suspicion of poaching and involvement in the illegal wildlife trade.

Militarized conservation tactics are not only used in India. In Cameroon for example, Baka ‘Pygmy’ people haverepeatedly testified to beatings and torture at the hands of eco-guards. Likewise in Botswana, Bushmen are criminalized when they hunt to feed their families, and face arrest and beatings.

Survival’s Director Stephen Corry said: “It’s time for a global outcry to stop innocent tribal people being shot and killed in the name of conservation. Why are the big conservation organizations complicit in these lethal policies which are useless at tackling the true poachers – criminals conspiring with corrupt officials? It’s no good pretending this is an isolated accident, it’s an integral part of the murderous regime running this tiger reserve.”

Draft Forest Policy foresees mass evictions of tribal communities

The shocking attack comes just a month after the Indian Government’s environment ministry published what it announced was the ‘draft national forest policy 2016‘, which made no mention of tribal peoples’ existing rights to live in their forests, and would have led to more tribes being evicted from their homes.

The draft policy proposed that: “Voluntary and attractive relocation packages of villages from within national parks, other wildlife rich areas and corridors should be developed.” The proposal to evict people from the vaguely described “other wildlife rich areas” and “corridors” as well as National Parks and Tiger Reserves would cover a huge area affecting millions of tribal people who have have been dependent on and managed their environments for millennia.

However the ‘policy’ was removed a few days later after it caused an outcry from indigenous groups, and a statement was issued claiming that the document was merely a study by the Indian Institute of Forest Management (IIFM), which had been “inadvertently uploaded.” Indian news website Live Mint quoted an anonymous ministry official: “[The] U-turn came after intense criticism of the draft policy from civil society.”

Across India tribal peoples are being illegally evicted from their ancestral homelands in the name of conservation. Most so-called ‘voluntary relocations’ are far from voluntary, with tribal people often given no choice – they face arrest and beatings, harassment, threats and trickery and feel forced to ‘agree’ to leave their forest homes.

The speedy withdrawal of this ‘draft policy’ has been welcomed, but huge concern remains at what lies ahead for the tens of millions of India’s tribal people who live in forests, and other forest dwellers – concerns that have only been fuelled by the shooting of an indigenous child at Kazaringa.

Also on The Ecologist: ‘India’s ‘shoot on sight’ conservation terrorises indigenous communities‘.

On 22 June, 100s of people came together in Brussels to mourn for Jo Cox. There was a minute of silence even in the Belgian Parliament. Jo wanted justice and fairness, for example for the people fleeing war in Syria. She stirred emotions far beyond her local constituency. Among those mourning were people who never heard of Jo before she was killed. It’s her message of solidarity and justice that resonated beyond borders. And Jo is not alone.

Something similar happened after the 3 March murder of Berta Caceres, a local leader from Honduras. Foreign entities fund a destructive dam that the central government tries to heap on the locals. She tried to protect them from mayhem.

Berta’s name was found on a military hitlist, in a country where over 100 environmental activists have been killed in the past five years. Nelson Garcia, a colleague of Berta’s who assisted locals whose houses were bulldozed to make place for the dam, was killed two weeks later. Many organisations, such as RightsAction, have described in great detail the illegal land acquisitions, criminalisation of land rights defenders and bypassing of World Bank safeguard policies. Sadly enough, the conflict on the Zarca dam fits in a pattern that has no borders.

But this time, the killers miscalculated. In 2015, Berta won the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize. By the time Nelson was killed, an international network of environmental groups had already started to organise dozens of demos at the Embassies of Honduras all over the world. This author was one of thousands who got in touch with the Dutch FMO Development bank manager that invested in the dam. The fact that this last sentence can now be written in the past tense is testimony to the power of the global environmental justice movement: after intense pressure FMO withdrew.

Every week, three more “Bertas” are killed. Ten years ago this figure was one a week. No parliament that I’m aware of held a minute of silence for any of them. Most murders go unnoticed beyond the local community, despite efforts by Global Witness to track and report them. Global Witness’ world map of killed environmentalists in the 2010 to 2015 period is deep red in Latin America, South-Asia and South-East-Asia.

But there’s hope that more Bertas are reaching our radars. As differing environmental justice struggles connect with each other, their power to ensure that environmental martyrs don’t die for nothing is increasing. The rise of social media is no stranger to that trend and another new and mighty weapon supporting this growing movement and better global awareness is the Atlas of Environmental Justice. The EJAtlas is packed with qualitative information about almost 1800 environmental conflicts. The story they tell is like the story of climate change told through 1800 weather events. One hurricane doesn’t prove climate change is real – but when you analyse 1800 hurricanes, there are things you can begin to tell about trends.

What the scientists involved in the EJAtlas do is to look beyond the local particulars and investigate the root cause of all this. Political ecologists at the Autonomous University of Barcelona sifted through the 10,000 pages of information that the Atlas entails to distil a couple of key global trends that are reflected in these local conflicts. In the past decade I’ve spend most of my time translating their findings to a wider audience.

They speak of material flows, the metabolism of the global economy and the unequal ecological exchange between continents, causing all kinds of local conflicts. But cutting through their jargon, I think that one main conclusion boils down to this: as the easier material and energy reserves have been tapped already and as the need for new materials and energy only keeps rising, the battle lines of extraction are shifting to places where communities depend on the regional environment for their survival. The only structural solution to these rising conflicts is to reverse the trend and to dig, trade, use and dump a lot less stuff. Everything else is kicking the can down another road. 

They’ve come up with a diarrhoea load of data but one statistic stands out: Between 1945 and today world trade multiplied by a factor of 17. What used to be a trickle is now a constant tsunami. But there’s more to that figure. Professor Alf Hornborg from LUND University in Sweden has done some math to reveal that there is no other continent that lives so much on the materials and energy of other continents than Europe. Even worse: the trend is upwards. What started with a few raids on the Americas and later some massive cotton plantations in Pakistan to feed the mills of the English Midlands has grown into a massive stream of materials and energy flowing to Europe. Basically they’re saying that from a global perspective, Europe is now a super-sized leach.

While France used to have over 100 uranium mines, they now import it from Niger and send the army when some rebel groups come too close for comfort. We’d rather import dirty Niger delta oil than lower our oil consumption. In Europe we now give billions in EU subsidies for cutting full-grown trees in US wetlands and the Amazon rainforest to get enough pellets in our mega bio-energy-plants in order to claim a climate policy and even a moral high ground.

The EU’s sucking strategy is now falling apart even on it’s own terms. Increased trade flows and the resulting economic growth have been good for Europe’s higher income groups … but the buying power of the lowest incomes in the UK has not increased in the past 30 years. It’s precisely this group that just voted to leave the EU. It’s also this income group that hates the neo-liberal EU project everywhere in the EU, from Poland to France and from Greece to Denmark. The neoliberal ideology ever increasing environmentally and socially destructive trade flows is bound to become a pretty damn big boomerang and at present it’s heading at full speed to Europe’s face.

Non-Europeans are engaged in life or death battles on the outer frontiers of this obsolete economic model. Europeans from both the left and right raise their voice (and middle finger) to the crown jewel that the neo-liberals are melting: CETA and TTIP. Regardless of the other problems these inter-continental “free trade” agreements have (such as using the lowest common denominator on environmental and social protections): it’s designed to increase intercontinental trade. It’s designed to double up in the spiral of violence to people and environment that these flows create.

The time for a great rethink of the economy has come and in the age of climate change and resource depletion, the only sensible and workable road is a radical shift to a much smaller, greener and fairer economy.

There’s no point going back to the industrial age of the 20th century: we just no longer have the resources and atmospheric absorption capacity to do that. But ecological economists have macro-economic post-growth economic models that can work for all of humanity, on a planet that has its limits.

Maybe it’s a good time for EU leaders to get their hands on a classic from Victor Hugo, from whom we remember the line that you can kill people, but you can’t kill an idea whose time has come.

This Author:

Nick Meynen is one of The Ecologist New Voices contributors. He writes blogs and books http://www.epo.be/uitgeverij/boekinfo_auteur.php?isbn=9789064455803 on topics like environmental justice, globalization and human-nature relationships.

When he’s not wandering in the activist universe and his Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/nick.meynen
is dead, he’s probably walking in nature.   

@nickmeynen

For people worried about British efforts to tackle climate change, reading the reports of Theresa May’s reorganisation of Whitehall would have sent a shiver down the spine.  On the face of it, losing a dedicated department with ‘climate change’ in its title doesn’t bode well. But despite the great work achieved by DECC, its narrow remit sometimes meant it lost out to more powerful departments such as the Treasury. DECC’s limited scope meant that it perhaps didn’t have the impact required on central Government decisions crucial for turning our climate ambitions into reality.

A more optimistic view is that its replacement may be able to change all that. The Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy has the potential to be a true heavyweight. (Such is its ‘big beast’ status perhaps the shorthand term for it could be BEISt). Combining all the functions of DECC as well some from the former Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS), it will have a powerful role in determining the shape of the nation’s economy and infrastructure.  Such will be its importance in leading the economic recovery of Britain, the Spectator has suggested it may even rival the Treasury itself in terms of financial muscle and influence.

Crucially, leading it will be Secretary of State, Greg Clark, one of the most green-minded of all the Conservatives, who spent a number of years as Shadow DECC minister. Born in Middlesbrough, Clark married his wife Helen in a charity hostel for homeless women, for which he is a trustee. He is on record as promoting the benefits of the green economy, has raised concerns about coal burning and bemoaned the fact that British homes are some of the least energy efficient in Europe. In 2009 he witnessed the impacts of climate change first-hand when visiting Bangladesh with Christian Aid (the video can be watched here).

Joining Clark at BEISt will be a number of other ‘green Tories’; junior minister Nick Hurd, the former Co-Chair of the Conservative Environment Network and advocate of African renewable energy in his previous role at DFID, Margot James, who worked to promote the Green Deal energy efficiency scheme and Jesse Norman.

Adding to this cautious optimism is the appointment of Philip Hammond as Chancellor. As Foreign Secretary he set out the grave challenges of climate change as well as the opportunities of greening the UK economy. “Many of the losses caused by climate change could be irreversible, regardless of our resources,” he told the climate sceptic American Enterprise Institute last year. “Unchecked climate change, even under the most likely scenario, could have catastrophic consequences – a rise in global temperatures …leading in turn, to rising sea levels, huge movements of people fuelling conflict and instability, pressure on resources, and a multitude of new risks to global public health.”

The departure of George Osborne as Chancellor has also seen Theresa May dispense with his fiscal targets, to be replaced with a more investment focused approach. Former BIS Secretary Savid Javid has suggested a £100 billion investment fund be used to overhaul and improve the nation’s infrastructure. If such funding is channeled through Greg Clark’s department, there could be a chance for a wave of sustainable infrastructure investment to transform the British economy.  

The potential has already been spotted by some: The climate economist Lord Stern said he was happy with the change and WWF has said the new department could be a “real powerhouse for change” if climate change was “hardwired” into it.

But this potential still needs to be delivered. The loss of DECC’s dedicated climate label has its dangers and it’s vital that the Government doesn’t backslide on its commitments.

Hopefully this week will see the 5^th Carbon Budget agreed. What is needed from this new department, by the end of this year, is a low carbon investment plan which sets out not just the level of ambition but the tangible steps we will take in the UK to reduce emissions in line with these targets.  

Fortunately, hundreds of ‘Speak Up‘ events will be held across the country in the Autumn (October) at which people can ask their MP what progress has been made on the UK’s promised carbon reduction plan – a perfect opportunity to send a message to this new Government. 

For years green groups have called for climate action to be baked into the core of Government policy, rather than operate in a kind of advisory capacity on the fringes. They may finally have their wish.

There is still much to do, but the death of the UK’s climate change ambition may have been greatly exaggerated.

 This Author

Joe Ware is a journalist and ‘New Voices’ writer for The Ecologist. He can be found on twitter at @wareisjoe. To find out more about the Speak Up events visit this link.

A couple of months ago I took a trip to the world’s newest global biodiversity hotspot: the North American Coastal Plain of North Carolina.

And it didn’t disappoint. On a kayaking trip along the Black River and a boat trip along the Roanoke River we watched golden eagles circling above us and huge black and white belted kingfishers peeling out of the bushes to race downriver away from us.

The dogwood trees were just coming into bloom, adorning the sides of the highways with occasional polka dots of white. The wetland and hardwood forests in this part of the world are home to an amazing array of wildlife.

However, in many places along roads and rivers a thin screen, only three or four trees deep, hides a darker, shameful truth: huge clearcuts that are being driven by a new industry that has recently arrived in this part of the world. These clearcuts often lie right next to remaining stands of pristine forests, making the contrast and the impacts all the clearer.

The effects and scale of this industry were at their most stark when we saw the pellet mills with their huge stacks of logs piled up. These are turned into wood pellets and, in most cases, shipped to the UK to be burned in our power stations in response to our own renewable energy policies. Drax power station in Yorkshire, which is converting its boilers from coal to biomass, receives over £1 million per day in renewable energy subsidies for the practice.

Our friends at Dogwood Alliance, a US NGO, have followed trucks carrying whole trees from the clearcuts to the wood pellet mills. In turn, the pellet mills publicly declare that their supply contracts are for power stations in the UK. So the chain of supply is very easy to establish and we can directly link the burning of these trees for power in the UK to the impacts we saw on the ground.

I had a conversation with Adam Macon, the Campaign Director of Dogwood Alliance, which you can listen to here (or in embed, below). We spoke about his love of the forests, the threats they face from the wood pellet industry and the work he does to try to save them.

When we speak of renewable energy in the UK, we think of green, low impact technologies like wind and solar. But in fact, 72% of the electricity we count as ‘renewable’ comes from bioenergy – that is from burning plant matter (biomass) including trees. In 2015 the UK imported 2.7 million oven dried tonnes of wood from North America.

This isn’t just an issue in the UK though. Across the EU as a whole around two thirds of all renewable energy generated comes from bioenergy. In the case of the EU there is a smaller dependence on imports and a greater reliance on the EU’s own forests, although often with similar consequences. The UK’s own use of biomass for power generation has been driven to date by EU renewable energy legislation.

Dirtier than coal

As well as the devastating impact on forests and wildlife, evidence now shows that the use of whole trees such as these could be resulting in increases in emissions relative to the fossil fuels they replace.

Bioenergy is often assumed to be a climate friendly energy source for two reasons. First, there is a public perception that bioenergy is carbon neutral because any emissions released when it is used will be reabsorbed by plant or tree regrowth. But trees grow slowly and in many cases it can take many years, decades or even centuries for the emissions to be recaptured, if ever.

Second, policy makers often assume that bioenergy can be counted as carbon neutral within the energy sector because the emissions will be counted under UN rules for harvesting forests. Unfortunately, problems with these rules mean that this simply isn’t the case making it both incorrect, and highly misleading, to count bioenergy as carbon neutral in the energy sector.

One of the most obvious of these problems is that some countries, like the US, aren’t even signed up to the UN’s Kyoto Protocol, and so don’t account for the emissions from harvesting their forests at all. This means the emissions from biomass imported from the US to the UK are not accounted for anywhere, by anyone, and simply end up in the atmosphere, treated as if they didn’t exist.

But, despite such loopholes, the practice of defining biomass as carbon neutral persists – even receiving subsidies from the UK Government for it role in delivering supposedly low carbon energy. In fact, because wood is less energy dense than fossil fuels, it can often be more polluting.

Energy input can be 96% of energy produced

Despite this policy blind-spot, this situation has been recognised for a number of years in the scientific literature. The European Union’s Joint Research Council concluded in 2011 that the assumption that bioenergy is carbon neutral is wrong. The UK Government’s own science in 2013 showed that the use of whole trees from new harvesting in US forests can be up to four times more polluting than coal even 40 years after it has been burned. In a large number of cases bioenergy is a false solution for reducing emissions.

One specific problem highlighted in the government report is the high energy input that goes into producing the wood pellets – in harvesting, transport, drying (often using natural gas) and manufacturing, which can be as much as 96% of the delivered energy:

“The energy input requirement of biomass electricity generated from North American wood used by the UK in 2020 is likely to be in the range 0.13 to 0.96MWh energy carrier input per MWh delivered energy, significantly greater than other electricity generating technologies, such as coal, natural gas, nuclear and wind.”

Many argue that if the overall size of the forest is growing (as it is in the EU and the US) then taking some trees out and burning them doesn’t matter. But this overlooks the fact that if they hadn’t been burned then the size of the forest would otherwise have been larger and more carbon would have been sequestered and stored.

It also overlooks the fact that in the US’s case, for example, they are also relying on the growth of their forests to offset the emissions from their own economy. So counting bioenergy as carbon beneficial double counts this service that the forests provide by growing.

Using forms of renewable energy that potentially increase emissions rather than reducing them undermines the integrity of efforts to limit global temperature rises. Since the Paris conference the world has set a new goal to limit temperature rises not to 2C but to 1.5C. If we are to achieve this then utilising bioenergy that increases emissions is a mistake we cannot afford to keep making.

The solution: a limited and safe role for biomass

Bioenergy can play an important but limited role in the energy mix of many countries. However, it needs to be based on genuine emissions reductions, rather than false and unscientific claims.

The use of the highest carbon risk feedstocks, such as whole trees, needs to be ruled out almost entirely. A cap is needed on the use of bioenergy in line with available sustainable supply. And the use of bioenergy needs to be in line with the principle of a circular economy and optimum use (i.e. reuse and recycling need to be prioritised over energy uses).

The EU is due to introduce new sustainability criteria for the use of all bioenergy. However, because of the Brexit referendum result these may never apply to the UK. And the UK’s own sustainability criteria fail to adequately protect nature, and treat biomass as if it were carbon neutral: they urgently need improving.

The UK’s forthcoming Emissions Reduction Plan will set out how we will achieve our carbon budgets, the legally binding emissions reductions that the UK is signed up to under its Climate Change Act. Within this plan, bioenergy needs to play a limited role based on genuine emissions reductions.

These policy options will be essential if we are to stop driving the unnecessary destruction of forests such as those I visited in the spring. Only in this way can the great blue herons and pileated woodpeckers of North Carolina continue to thrive and prosper.

Matt Williams is a Policy Officer for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. He leads on their bioenergy and fracking policy. He’s also the Associate Director of A Focus on Nature, the UK’s youth nature network. Follow him @mattadamw and mattadamwilliams.co.uk.

More information

• The RSPB has produced scenarios showing how the UK could meet its energy needs and its emissions reductions targets by 2050 in harmony with nature.

• Find out more about the work of Dogwood Alliance.

• The UK Government’s Department of Energy and Climate Change has produced its own science showing the carbon impacts of using whole trees.

For people worried about British efforts to tackle climate change, reading the reports of Theresa May’s reorganisation of Whitehall would have sent a shiver down the spine.  On the face of it, losing a dedicated department with ‘climate change’ in its title doesn’t bode well. But despite the great work achieved by DECC, its narrow remit sometimes meant it lost out to more powerful departments such as the Treasury. DECC’s limited scope meant that it perhaps didn’t have the impact required on central Government decisions crucial for turning our climate ambitions into reality.

A more optimistic view is that its replacement may be able to change all that. The Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy has the potential to be a true heavyweight. (Such is its ‘big beast’ status perhaps the shorthand term for it could be BEISt). Combining all the functions of DECC as well some from the former Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS), it will have a powerful role in determining the shape of the nation’s economy and infrastructure.  Such will be its importance in leading the economic recovery of Britain, the Spectator has suggested it may even rival the Treasury itself in terms of financial muscle and influence.

Crucially, leading it will be Secretary of State, Greg Clark, one of the most green-minded of all the Conservatives, who spent a number of years as Shadow DECC minister. Born in Middlesbrough, Clark married his wife Helen in a charity hostel for homeless women, for which he is a trustee. He is on record as promoting the benefits of the green economy, has raised concerns about coal burning and bemoaned the fact that British homes are some of the least energy efficient in Europe. In 2009 he witnessed the impacts of climate change first-hand when visiting Bangladesh with Christian Aid (the video can be watched here).

Joining Clark at BEISt will be a number of other ‘green Tories’; junior minister Nick Hurd, the former Co-Chair of the Conservative Environment Network and advocate of African renewable energy in his previous role at DFID, Margot James, who worked to promote the Green Deal energy efficiency scheme and Jesse Norman.

Adding to this cautious optimism is the appointment of Philip Hammond as Chancellor. As Foreign Secretary he set out the grave challenges of climate change as well as the opportunities of greening the UK economy. “Many of the losses caused by climate change could be irreversible, regardless of our resources,” he told the climate sceptic American Enterprise Institute last year. “Unchecked climate change, even under the most likely scenario, could have catastrophic consequences – a rise in global temperatures …leading in turn, to rising sea levels, huge movements of people fuelling conflict and instability, pressure on resources, and a multitude of new risks to global public health.”

The departure of George Osborne as Chancellor has also seen Theresa May dispense with his fiscal targets, to be replaced with a more investment focused approach. Former BIS Secretary Savid Javid has suggested a £100 billion investment fund be used to overhaul and improve the nation’s infrastructure. If such funding is channeled through Greg Clark’s department, there could be a chance for a wave of sustainable infrastructure investment to transform the British economy.  

The potential has already been spotted by some: The climate economist Lord Stern said he was happy with the change and WWF has said the new department could be a “real powerhouse for change” if climate change was “hardwired” into it.

But this potential still needs to be delivered. The loss of DECC’s dedicated climate label has its dangers and it’s vital that the Government doesn’t backslide on its commitments.

Hopefully this week will see the 5^th Carbon Budget agreed. What is needed from this new department, by the end of this year, is a low carbon investment plan which sets out not just the level of ambition but the tangible steps we will take in the UK to reduce emissions in line with these targets.  

Fortunately, hundreds of ‘Speak Up‘ events will be held across the country in the Autumn (October) at which people can ask their MP what progress has been made on the UK’s promised carbon reduction plan – a perfect opportunity to send a message to this new Government. 

For years green groups have called for climate action to be baked into the core of Government policy, rather than operate in a kind of advisory capacity on the fringes. They may finally have their wish.

There is still much to do, but the death of the UK’s climate change ambition may have been greatly exaggerated.

 This Author

Joe Ware is a journalist and ‘New Voices’ writer for The Ecologist. He can be found on twitter at @wareisjoe. To find out more about the Speak Up events visit this link.

A couple of months ago I took a trip to the world’s newest global biodiversity hotspot: the North American Coastal Plain of North Carolina.

And it didn’t disappoint. On a kayaking trip along the Black River and a boat trip along the Roanoke River we watched golden eagles circling above us and huge black and white belted kingfishers peeling out of the bushes to race downriver away from us.

The dogwood trees were just coming into bloom, adorning the sides of the highways with occasional polka dots of white. The wetland and hardwood forests in this part of the world are home to an amazing array of wildlife.

However, in many places along roads and rivers a thin screen, only three or four trees deep, hides a darker, shameful truth: huge clearcuts that are being driven by a new industry that has recently arrived in this part of the world. These clearcuts often lie right next to remaining stands of pristine forests, making the contrast and the impacts all the clearer.

The effects and scale of this industry were at their most stark when we saw the pellet mills with their huge stacks of logs piled up. These are turned into wood pellets and, in most cases, shipped to the UK to be burned in our power stations in response to our own renewable energy policies. Drax power station in Yorkshire, which is converting its boilers from coal to biomass, receives over £1 million per day in renewable energy subsidies for the practice.

Our friends at Dogwood Alliance, a US NGO, have followed trucks carrying whole trees from the clearcuts to the wood pellet mills. In turn, the pellet mills publicly declare that their supply contracts are for power stations in the UK. So the chain of supply is very easy to establish and we can directly link the burning of these trees for power in the UK to the impacts we saw on the ground.

I had a conversation with Adam Macon, the Campaign Director of Dogwood Alliance, which you can listen to here (or in embed, below). We spoke about his love of the forests, the threats they face from the wood pellet industry and the work he does to try to save them.

When we speak of renewable energy in the UK, we think of green, low impact technologies like wind and solar. But in fact, 72% of the electricity we count as ‘renewable’ comes from bioenergy – that is from burning plant matter (biomass) including trees. In 2015 the UK imported 2.7 million oven dried tonnes of wood from North America.

This isn’t just an issue in the UK though. Across the EU as a whole around two thirds of all renewable energy generated comes from bioenergy. In the case of the EU there is a smaller dependence on imports and a greater reliance on the EU’s own forests, although often with similar consequences. The UK’s own use of biomass for power generation has been driven to date by EU renewable energy legislation.

Dirtier than coal

As well as the devastating impact on forests and wildlife, evidence now shows that the use of whole trees such as these could be resulting in increases in emissions relative to the fossil fuels they replace.

Bioenergy is often assumed to be a climate friendly energy source for two reasons. First, there is a public perception that bioenergy is carbon neutral because any emissions released when it is used will be reabsorbed by plant or tree regrowth. But trees grow slowly and in many cases it can take many years, decades or even centuries for the emissions to be recaptured, if ever.

Second, policy makers often assume that bioenergy can be counted as carbon neutral within the energy sector because the emissions will be counted under UN rules for harvesting forests. Unfortunately, problems with these rules mean that this simply isn’t the case making it both incorrect, and highly misleading, to count bioenergy as carbon neutral in the energy sector.

One of the most obvious of these problems is that some countries, like the US, aren’t even signed up to the UN’s Kyoto Protocol, and so don’t account for the emissions from harvesting their forests at all. This means the emissions from biomass imported from the US to the UK are not accounted for anywhere, by anyone, and simply end up in the atmosphere, treated as if they didn’t exist.

But, despite such loopholes, the practice of defining biomass as carbon neutral persists – even receiving subsidies from the UK Government for it role in delivering supposedly low carbon energy. In fact, because wood is less energy dense than fossil fuels, it can often be more polluting.

Energy input can be 96% of energy produced

Despite this policy blind-spot, this situation has been recognised for a number of years in the scientific literature. The European Union’s Joint Research Council concluded in 2011 that the assumption that bioenergy is carbon neutral is wrong. The UK Government’s own science in 2013 showed that the use of whole trees from new harvesting in US forests can be up to four times more polluting than coal even 40 years after it has been burned. In a large number of cases bioenergy is a false solution for reducing emissions.

One specific problem highlighted in the government report is the high energy input that goes into producing the wood pellets – in harvesting, transport, drying (often using natural gas) and manufacturing, which can be as much as 96% of the delivered energy:

“The energy input requirement of biomass electricity generated from North American wood used by the UK in 2020 is likely to be in the range 0.13 to 0.96MWh energy carrier input per MWh delivered energy, significantly greater than other electricity generating technologies, such as coal, natural gas, nuclear and wind.”

Many argue that if the overall size of the forest is growing (as it is in the EU and the US) then taking some trees out and burning them doesn’t matter. But this overlooks the fact that if they hadn’t been burned then the size of the forest would otherwise have been larger and more carbon would have been sequestered and stored.

It also overlooks the fact that in the US’s case, for example, they are also relying on the growth of their forests to offset the emissions from their own economy. So counting bioenergy as carbon beneficial double counts this service that the forests provide by growing.

Using forms of renewable energy that potentially increase emissions rather than reducing them undermines the integrity of efforts to limit global temperature rises. Since the Paris conference the world has set a new goal to limit temperature rises not to 2C but to 1.5C. If we are to achieve this then utilising bioenergy that increases emissions is a mistake we cannot afford to keep making.

The solution: a limited and safe role for biomass

Bioenergy can play an important but limited role in the energy mix of many countries. However, it needs to be based on genuine emissions reductions, rather than false and unscientific claims.

The use of the highest carbon risk feedstocks, such as whole trees, needs to be ruled out almost entirely. A cap is needed on the use of bioenergy in line with available sustainable supply. And the use of bioenergy needs to be in line with the principle of a circular economy and optimum use (i.e. reuse and recycling need to be prioritised over energy uses).

The EU is due to introduce new sustainability criteria for the use of all bioenergy. However, because of the Brexit referendum result these may never apply to the UK. And the UK’s own sustainability criteria fail to adequately protect nature, and treat biomass as if it were carbon neutral: they urgently need improving.

The UK’s forthcoming Emissions Reduction Plan will set out how we will achieve our carbon budgets, the legally binding emissions reductions that the UK is signed up to under its Climate Change Act. Within this plan, bioenergy needs to play a limited role based on genuine emissions reductions.

These policy options will be essential if we are to stop driving the unnecessary destruction of forests such as those I visited in the spring. Only in this way can the great blue herons and pileated woodpeckers of North Carolina continue to thrive and prosper.

Matt Williams is a Policy Officer for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. He leads on their bioenergy and fracking policy. He’s also the Associate Director of A Focus on Nature, the UK’s youth nature network. Follow him @mattadamw and mattadamwilliams.co.uk.

More information

• The RSPB has produced scenarios showing how the UK could meet its energy needs and its emissions reductions targets by 2050 in harmony with nature.

• Find out more about the work of Dogwood Alliance.

• The UK Government’s Department of Energy and Climate Change has produced its own science showing the carbon impacts of using whole trees.

For people worried about British efforts to tackle climate change, reading the reports of Theresa May’s reorganisation of Whitehall would have sent a shiver down the spine.  On the face of it, losing a dedicated department with ‘climate change’ in its title doesn’t bode well. But despite the great work achieved by DECC, its narrow remit sometimes meant it lost out to more powerful departments such as the Treasury. DECC’s limited scope meant that it perhaps didn’t have the impact required on central Government decisions crucial for turning our climate ambitions into reality.

A more optimistic view is that its replacement may be able to change all that. The Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy has the potential to be a true heavyweight. (Such is its ‘big beast’ status perhaps the shorthand term for it could be BEISt). Combining all the functions of DECC as well some from the former Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS), it will have a powerful role in determining the shape of the nation’s economy and infrastructure.  Such will be its importance in leading the economic recovery of Britain, the Spectator has suggested it may even rival the Treasury itself in terms of financial muscle and influence.

Crucially, leading it will be Secretary of State, Greg Clark, one of the most green-minded of all the Conservatives, who spent a number of years as Shadow DECC minister. Born in Middlesbrough, Clark married his wife Helen in a charity hostel for homeless women, for which he is a trustee. He is on record as promoting the benefits of the green economy, has raised concerns about coal burning and bemoaned the fact that British homes are some of the least energy efficient in Europe. In 2009 he witnessed the impacts of climate change first-hand when visiting Bangladesh with Christian Aid (the video can be watched here).

Joining Clark at BEISt will be a number of other ‘green Tories’; junior minister Nick Hurd, the former Co-Chair of the Conservative Environment Network and advocate of African renewable energy in his previous role at DFID, Margot James, who worked to promote the Green Deal energy efficiency scheme and Jesse Norman.

Adding to this cautious optimism is the appointment of Philip Hammond as Chancellor. As Foreign Secretary he set out the grave challenges of climate change as well as the opportunities of greening the UK economy. “Many of the losses caused by climate change could be irreversible, regardless of our resources,” he told the climate sceptic American Enterprise Institute last year. “Unchecked climate change, even under the most likely scenario, could have catastrophic consequences – a rise in global temperatures …leading in turn, to rising sea levels, huge movements of people fuelling conflict and instability, pressure on resources, and a multitude of new risks to global public health.”

The departure of George Osborne as Chancellor has also seen Theresa May dispense with his fiscal targets, to be replaced with a more investment focused approach. Former BIS Secretary Savid Javid has suggested a £100 billion investment fund be used to overhaul and improve the nation’s infrastructure. If such funding is channeled through Greg Clark’s department, there could be a chance for a wave of sustainable infrastructure investment to transform the British economy.  

The potential has already been spotted by some: The climate economist Lord Stern said he was happy with the change and WWF has said the new department could be a “real powerhouse for change” if climate change was “hardwired” into it.

But this potential still needs to be delivered. The loss of DECC’s dedicated climate label has its dangers and it’s vital that the Government doesn’t backslide on its commitments.

Hopefully this week will see the 5^th Carbon Budget agreed. What is needed from this new department, by the end of this year, is a low carbon investment plan which sets out not just the level of ambition but the tangible steps we will take in the UK to reduce emissions in line with these targets.  

Fortunately, hundreds of ‘Speak Up‘ events will be held across the country in the Autumn (October) at which people can ask their MP what progress has been made on the UK’s promised carbon reduction plan – a perfect opportunity to send a message to this new Government. 

For years green groups have called for climate action to be baked into the core of Government policy, rather than operate in a kind of advisory capacity on the fringes. They may finally have their wish.

There is still much to do, but the death of the UK’s climate change ambition may have been greatly exaggerated.

 This Author

Joe Ware is a journalist and ‘New Voices’ writer for The Ecologist. He can be found on twitter at @wareisjoe. To find out more about the Speak Up events visit this link.

A couple of months ago I took a trip to the world’s newest global biodiversity hotspot: the North American Coastal Plain of North Carolina.

And it didn’t disappoint. On a kayaking trip along the Black River and a boat trip along the Roanoke River we watched golden eagles circling above us and huge black and white belted kingfishers peeling out of the bushes to race downriver away from us.

The dogwood trees were just coming into bloom, adorning the sides of the highways with occasional polka dots of white. The wetland and hardwood forests in this part of the world are home to an amazing array of wildlife.

However, in many places along roads and rivers a thin screen, only three or four trees deep, hides a darker, shameful truth: huge clearcuts that are being driven by a new industry that has recently arrived in this part of the world. These clearcuts often lie right next to remaining stands of pristine forests, making the contrast and the impacts all the clearer.

The effects and scale of this industry were at their most stark when we saw the pellet mills with their huge stacks of logs piled up. These are turned into wood pellets and, in most cases, shipped to the UK to be burned in our power stations in response to our own renewable energy policies. Drax power station in Yorkshire, which is converting its boilers from coal to biomass, receives over £1 million per day in renewable energy subsidies for the practice.

Our friends at Dogwood Alliance, a US NGO, have followed trucks carrying whole trees from the clearcuts to the wood pellet mills. In turn, the pellet mills publicly declare that their supply contracts are for power stations in the UK. So the chain of supply is very easy to establish and we can directly link the burning of these trees for power in the UK to the impacts we saw on the ground.

I had a conversation with Adam Macon, the Campaign Director of Dogwood Alliance, which you can listen to here (or in embed, below). We spoke about his love of the forests, the threats they face from the wood pellet industry and the work he does to try to save them.

When we speak of renewable energy in the UK, we think of green, low impact technologies like wind and solar. But in fact, 72% of the electricity we count as ‘renewable’ comes from bioenergy – that is from burning plant matter (biomass) including trees. In 2015 the UK imported 2.7 million oven dried tonnes of wood from North America.

This isn’t just an issue in the UK though. Across the EU as a whole around two thirds of all renewable energy generated comes from bioenergy. In the case of the EU there is a smaller dependence on imports and a greater reliance on the EU’s own forests, although often with similar consequences. The UK’s own use of biomass for power generation has been driven to date by EU renewable energy legislation.

Dirtier than coal

As well as the devastating impact on forests and wildlife, evidence now shows that the use of whole trees such as these could be resulting in increases in emissions relative to the fossil fuels they replace.

Bioenergy is often assumed to be a climate friendly energy source for two reasons. First, there is a public perception that bioenergy is carbon neutral because any emissions released when it is used will be reabsorbed by plant or tree regrowth. But trees grow slowly and in many cases it can take many years, decades or even centuries for the emissions to be recaptured, if ever.

Second, policy makers often assume that bioenergy can be counted as carbon neutral within the energy sector because the emissions will be counted under UN rules for harvesting forests. Unfortunately, problems with these rules mean that this simply isn’t the case making it both incorrect, and highly misleading, to count bioenergy as carbon neutral in the energy sector.

One of the most obvious of these problems is that some countries, like the US, aren’t even signed up to the UN’s Kyoto Protocol, and so don’t account for the emissions from harvesting their forests at all. This means the emissions from biomass imported from the US to the UK are not accounted for anywhere, by anyone, and simply end up in the atmosphere, treated as if they didn’t exist.

But, despite such loopholes, the practice of defining biomass as carbon neutral persists – even receiving subsidies from the UK Government for it role in delivering supposedly low carbon energy. In fact, because wood is less energy dense than fossil fuels, it can often be more polluting.

Energy input can be 96% of energy produced

Despite this policy blind-spot, this situation has been recognised for a number of years in the scientific literature. The European Union’s Joint Research Council concluded in 2011 that the assumption that bioenergy is carbon neutral is wrong. The UK Government’s own science in 2013 showed that the use of whole trees from new harvesting in US forests can be up to four times more polluting than coal even 40 years after it has been burned. In a large number of cases bioenergy is a false solution for reducing emissions.

One specific problem highlighted in the government report is the high energy input that goes into producing the wood pellets – in harvesting, transport, drying (often using natural gas) and manufacturing, which can be as much as 96% of the delivered energy:

“The energy input requirement of biomass electricity generated from North American wood used by the UK in 2020 is likely to be in the range 0.13 to 0.96MWh energy carrier input per MWh delivered energy, significantly greater than other electricity generating technologies, such as coal, natural gas, nuclear and wind.”

Many argue that if the overall size of the forest is growing (as it is in the EU and the US) then taking some trees out and burning them doesn’t matter. But this overlooks the fact that if they hadn’t been burned then the size of the forest would otherwise have been larger and more carbon would have been sequestered and stored.

It also overlooks the fact that in the US’s case, for example, they are also relying on the growth of their forests to offset the emissions from their own economy. So counting bioenergy as carbon beneficial double counts this service that the forests provide by growing.

Using forms of renewable energy that potentially increase emissions rather than reducing them undermines the integrity of efforts to limit global temperature rises. Since the Paris conference the world has set a new goal to limit temperature rises not to 2C but to 1.5C. If we are to achieve this then utilising bioenergy that increases emissions is a mistake we cannot afford to keep making.

The solution: a limited and safe role for biomass

Bioenergy can play an important but limited role in the energy mix of many countries. However, it needs to be based on genuine emissions reductions, rather than false and unscientific claims.

The use of the highest carbon risk feedstocks, such as whole trees, needs to be ruled out almost entirely. A cap is needed on the use of bioenergy in line with available sustainable supply. And the use of bioenergy needs to be in line with the principle of a circular economy and optimum use (i.e. reuse and recycling need to be prioritised over energy uses).

The EU is due to introduce new sustainability criteria for the use of all bioenergy. However, because of the Brexit referendum result these may never apply to the UK. And the UK’s own sustainability criteria fail to adequately protect nature, and treat biomass as if it were carbon neutral: they urgently need improving.

The UK’s forthcoming Emissions Reduction Plan will set out how we will achieve our carbon budgets, the legally binding emissions reductions that the UK is signed up to under its Climate Change Act. Within this plan, bioenergy needs to play a limited role based on genuine emissions reductions.

These policy options will be essential if we are to stop driving the unnecessary destruction of forests such as those I visited in the spring. Only in this way can the great blue herons and pileated woodpeckers of North Carolina continue to thrive and prosper.

Matt Williams is a Policy Officer for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. He leads on their bioenergy and fracking policy. He’s also the Associate Director of A Focus on Nature, the UK’s youth nature network. Follow him @mattadamw and mattadamwilliams.co.uk.

More information

• The RSPB has produced scenarios showing how the UK could meet its energy needs and its emissions reductions targets by 2050 in harmony with nature.

• Find out more about the work of Dogwood Alliance.

• The UK Government’s Department of Energy and Climate Change has produced its own science showing the carbon impacts of using whole trees.

For people worried about British efforts to tackle climate change, reading the reports of Theresa May’s reorganisation of Whitehall would have sent a shiver down the spine.  On the face of it, losing a dedicated department with ‘climate change’ in its title doesn’t bode well. But despite the great work achieved by DECC, its narrow remit sometimes meant it lost out to more powerful departments such as the Treasury. DECC’s limited scope meant that it perhaps didn’t have the impact required on central Government decisions crucial for turning our climate ambitions into reality.

A more optimistic view is that its replacement may be able to change all that. The Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy has the potential to be a true heavyweight. (Such is its ‘big beast’ status perhaps the shorthand term for it could be BEISt). Combining all the functions of DECC as well some from the former Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS), it will have a powerful role in determining the shape of the nation’s economy and infrastructure.  Such will be its importance in leading the economic recovery of Britain, the Spectator has suggested it may even rival the Treasury itself in terms of financial muscle and influence.

Crucially, leading it will be Secretary of State, Greg Clark, one of the most green-minded of all the Conservatives, who spent a number of years as Shadow DECC minister. Born in Middlesbrough, Clark married his wife Helen in a charity hostel for homeless women, for which he is a trustee. He is on record as promoting the benefits of the green economy, has raised concerns about coal burning and bemoaned the fact that British homes are some of the least energy efficient in Europe. In 2009 he witnessed the impacts of climate change first-hand when visiting Bangladesh with Christian Aid (the video can be watched here).

Joining Clark at BEISt will be a number of other ‘green Tories’; junior minister Nick Hurd, the former Co-Chair of the Conservative Environment Network and advocate of African renewable energy in his previous role at DFID, Margot James, who worked to promote the Green Deal energy efficiency scheme and Jesse Norman.

Adding to this cautious optimism is the appointment of Philip Hammond as Chancellor. As Foreign Secretary he set out the grave challenges of climate change as well as the opportunities of greening the UK economy. “Many of the losses caused by climate change could be irreversible, regardless of our resources,” he told the climate sceptic American Enterprise Institute last year. “Unchecked climate change, even under the most likely scenario, could have catastrophic consequences – a rise in global temperatures …leading in turn, to rising sea levels, huge movements of people fuelling conflict and instability, pressure on resources, and a multitude of new risks to global public health.”

The departure of George Osborne as Chancellor has also seen Theresa May dispense with his fiscal targets, to be replaced with a more investment focused approach. Former BIS Secretary Savid Javid has suggested a £100 billion investment fund be used to overhaul and improve the nation’s infrastructure. If such funding is channeled through Greg Clark’s department, there could be a chance for a wave of sustainable infrastructure investment to transform the British economy.  

The potential has already been spotted by some: The climate economist Lord Stern said he was happy with the change and WWF has said the new department could be a “real powerhouse for change” if climate change was “hardwired” into it.

But this potential still needs to be delivered. The loss of DECC’s dedicated climate label has its dangers and it’s vital that the Government doesn’t backslide on its commitments.

Hopefully this week will see the 5^th Carbon Budget agreed. What is needed from this new department, by the end of this year, is a low carbon investment plan which sets out not just the level of ambition but the tangible steps we will take in the UK to reduce emissions in line with these targets.  

Fortunately, hundreds of ‘Speak Up‘ events will be held across the country in the Autumn (October) at which people can ask their MP what progress has been made on the UK’s promised carbon reduction plan – a perfect opportunity to send a message to this new Government. 

For years green groups have called for climate action to be baked into the core of Government policy, rather than operate in a kind of advisory capacity on the fringes. They may finally have their wish.

There is still much to do, but the death of the UK’s climate change ambition may have been greatly exaggerated.

 This Author

Joe Ware is a journalist and ‘New Voices’ writer for The Ecologist. He can be found on twitter at @wareisjoe. To find out more about the Speak Up events visit this link.