A new study led by conservation charity Froglife reveals a steep 30-year long fall in populations of the common toad.

“Given the declines, this common species almost qualifies for International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) red-listing over this period despite volunteer conservation efforts”, state the scientists. “Reasons for the declines and wider impacts remain unknown.”

The data underlying the study has been gathered by ‘crowdsourcing’ with thousands of conservation volunteers in both the UK and Switzerland submitting figures on the numbers of toads in their areas.

Every year thousands of volunteers in the UK, working as part of Froglife’s ‘Toads on Roads‘ patrols, help save amphibians as they migrate to their breeding ponds across busy roads. Toads are particularly vulnerable to traffic and over 800,000 are carried to safety by volunteers each year in the UK and Switzerland.

Froglife’s conservation scientists teamed up with Swiss counterparts to analyse millions of records of common toads (Bufo bufo) collected by these patrols over more than three decades from the two countries.

Unfortunately, despite the effort of the volunteers, the researchers show that our toads have undergone huge declines. On average common toads have declined by 68% over the last 30 years in the UK. In some areas, such as the south east of England, declines have been even more pronounced.

30 years of continuous decline

The team’s results, published in the open-access journal PLOS ONE, show that toads have declined rapidly and continuously since the 1980s in both countries. It is likely that hundreds of thousands of toads have disappeared from the countryside in the past 30 years.

In the UK, south east England suffered the worst declines while in the west (including Wales, south west and west England) populations also declined but have remained stable for the past decade. The North, including northern counties and Scotland, has also seen significant toad declines in the past 20 years.

It is not clear what has caused numbers of toads to drop so dramatically but likely causes are a combination of changes to farming practices, loss of ponds, an increase in urbanisation and more deaths on roads as traffic values have increased. Climate change could also be a factor as research has shown that milder winters are detrimental for hibernating toads.

Dr. Silviu Petrovan, Conservation Coordinator at Froglife and one of the authors of the study said: “Toad declines at this scale over such large areas are really worrying. Toads are extremely adaptable and can live in many places ranging from farmland and woodland to suburban gardens.

“They are also important pest controllers eating slugs, snails and insects and are food themselves for many of our most likeable mammals such as otters and polecats.” And he emphasised the essential role of members of the public both in toad conservation, and in making the study possible:

“Without the efforts of the thousands of volunteers that go out and move amphibians across busy roads we would have no idea that these declines had occurred and the situation could be much worse. One thing that is clear is that we need to do more to look after our environment in order to protect the species that depend on it.”

‘Conservation is not just for special sites and rare species’

As the authors note in their paper, the long-term and ongoing decline of one of Europe’s most common amphibians is “a significant cause for concern and has unknown wider impacts.” However the decline “has been uncovered almost incidentally given the lack of specific long-term monitoring data for common amphibians.”

They also highlight the increasing trend of sharp population declines of once common species. For example, house sparrow and hedgehogs, one common across the UK, are also becoming increasingly rare, suggesting “a large-scale deterioration of environmental quality.”

Recent declines of common species could be explained by the fact that “common species occupy areas of land mostly outside of protected areas, including for the common toad, farmland and semi-urban areas”, the scientists report. “Their declines could be linked to the general deterioration and fragmentation of the quality of the environment on a landscape scale and which cannot be offset by smaller improvements elsewhere, such as in well managed reserves …

“Although conservation goals have moved towards a more wide-encompassing approach that incorporates ecosystem goods and services, this requires a shift in conservation practice that makes it clear that it is not sufficient to protect habitats of rare specialists. Conservation efforts need to focus more on generalist widespread and common species and the countryside as a whole if system function and resilience are to be maintained.”

Countering habitat fragmentation

Paul Edgar, Senior Amphibian and Reptile Specialist from Natural England, the government’s wildlife advisor which has funded Froglife’s road mitigation research, said: “This paper highlights a number of important issues for our native amphibians and conservation more generally in the UK. The common toad is sadly on a downward trend.

“This is partly because of habitat fragmentation, and so understanding and mitigating the impacts of this issue is vital. We need to continue to build good quality habitat links across the wider landscape if we are to offer opportunities for this species to recover. We’re working hard to do this through measures such as Countryside Stewardship in the rural setting, and ensuring good quality Green Infrastructure is included in new developments.

“This paper reinforces the vital positive role that the public play in both protecting and recording data about our wildlife. We need to build on this engagement to further help us collaboratively reverse these declines as a matter of urgency.”

Members of the public can also help conserve toads and other wildlife by improving habitat in their own gardens and local areas: by digging out ponds, for example, and leaving areas of rough, untended vegetation where toads, frogs and newts can hide out in the day and hibernate in winter.

Oliver Tickell is contributing editor at The Ecologist.

The paper: ‘Volunteer Conservation Action Data Reveals Large-Scale and Long-Term Negative Population Trends of a Widespread Amphibian, the Common Toad (Bufo bufo)‘ is by Silviu O. Petrovan & Benedikt R. Schmidt, and published in PLOS ONE (open access).

2016 has been smashing world records for heat temperatures month on month, with the Arctic as a whole looking like it will show a sea-ice minimum that is equal to the historic low of 2012.

79N Glacier is the name of the largest ice shelf that this small ice-shelf tributary, known as the Spelte Glacier, buttresses against. This upward pressure on the larger glacier causes a slowing of the loss of the melting ice flowing into the sea.

“The more ice is lost from the fronts, the less resistance there is, and the faster Greenland loses its ice”, explains Professor Box.

He goes on to explain that the ice sheet is responding to the warming of the atmosphere in complex ways that, although caused by humanity’s burning of fossil fuels, will not be advantageous to us in the long-run. This interconnectedness of the climate system is demonstrated by what we are seeing in Greenland.

The Arctic is heating much faster than other parts of the planet, and the loss of sea ice cover is rapidly accelerating this effect. The rise in temperature has a very serious effect on the Greenland ice sheet, as Professor Box explains here:

“The Greenland Ice Sheet has a kind of dome shape and warming brings more rapid melting at that point. Because the slope gets more gradual the higher you go, for every degree of warming, it actually has an exponential increase in the area of melting. This is because it is getting flatter. It eventually blows up and then you get warming at the highest points over the ice-sheet.”

Box stresses that the Greenland ice sheet has been beyond its threshold of viability for over 20 years now and the situation, far from improving, is actually worsening:

“The longer we stay beyond that threshold, then the enhanced flow [of meltwater] can lower the surface [of the ice-sheet] down into warmer parts of the atmosphere.

“Fundamentally, that is the irreversibility factor for Greenland: melting and induced thinning. If we get enough slumping and drawdown of the inland areas of the ice sheet, that in effect is irreversible. That’s the death sentence for the ice sheet.

“It then really becomes a matter of how long does the ice sheet spend beyond its threshold? Given the expected climate trajectory that we are on, it is nothing but more warming, it effectively dooms the ice sheet!”

The sheer size of Greenland demands an real effort of imagination to understand. It’s an area roughly three times the size of France and spanning three lines of latitude from 59º to 83º North. The ice sheet itself is over 3 kilometers thick in parts, with more than 200 glaciers over 1 kilometer across, and 45 glaciers over 5 kilometers across.

With such a large and complex area to survey, scientists are only just discovering what the effects of climate change will be on the ice sheet and what are the likely impacts are on human civilisation.

“There are a number of factors that are pushing Greenland beyond its threshold and one of them is the melt-water that is draining into the ice. That amount of melt-water has doubled in the last 50 years. The temperature of that water is several degrees warmer than the ice is internally. So that has an internal heating effect. Internal ice heating is softening the ice and that makes it flow faster.”

Box also explains that melt-water draining down to the bottom of the ice sheet is causing basal sliding ? literally the lubricating of the ice sheet at its base, which is causing it to further slide.

“Then there’s the ocean, there’s an interaction there. The melt-water eventually makes it out into fjords and drives a heat exchange with a warming ocean that de-stabilises the largest outlet glaciers right at their grounding line. That is where the ice begins to float.

“Because of the ice being eroded from below in the fjords, we are losing the ice shelves. Just in the last twenty years about three quarters of the area lost has been in north Greenland and those have been ice shelves. There are hardly any ice shelves remaining in the Arctic because they are very sensitive and they are eroding quickly.”

Impacts of Greenland melting

With all these processes amplifying the rate at which ice melts and as the region becomes warmer, much of the attention has focused on the risk posed to coastal areas from sea-level rise. Greenland has the potential to create a sea-level rise of over seven metres if it were to fully melt.

Considering that most of global agriculture and an enormous amount of our societal infrastructure lies at less than a metre above sea-level, it is clear that we do not need to wait centuries to be concerned about what is happening in Greenland.

The melt of the ice sheet is already a major contributor to accelerating sea-level rise, noticeably impacting places like Florida in the USA.

The ‘cold blob’

Other effects that have been observed relate to the fresh water ‘cold blob’ that is forming in the north Atlantic. This cold blob has been linked to extreme flooding events we have seen in the UK and other parts of north-west Europe.

“In the last few years we have started to think beyond the obvious impact of land ice loss, that is sea-level rise. That problem is a big, big problem, especially later in the century. There are other impacts from Greenland melting and they include the oceanographic disruption in the north Atlantic.

“There has been an accumulation of some thousands of square kilometres of freshwater in the north Atlantic and that has been contributing to a slowdown of an important ocean circulation. The effect of that is a cooling at the surface of the north Atlantic, just south of Iceland. With the cold pool, there have been record cold sea surface temperatures at a time when global temperatures have been record warm in the atmosphere.

“That temperature contrast of the cold pool with warm water adjacent to it to the south … that actually strengthens storms! So storms drifting over this cold pool are strengthened and they can run into north western Europe and this has been happening.”

A good example of this is the flooding that took place in late 2015 in the UK and Ireland, where huge floods caused chaos. These climate change induced floods coincided with the timing of the UNFCCC conference in Paris COP21 that produced the historic ‘Paris Agreement’.

As Professor Box and many others have pointed out, even if we achieve the reduction of emissions as calculated by the carbon budgets, there is still no strategy for how we reduce the current levels of atmospheric carbon that will see temperatures rising to well over 3ºC, no matter what emissions reductions are achieved.

The current warming trajectory means that Greenland’s ice sheet will stay beyond its threshold of viability for the foreseeable future. This means that a concerted determination between policymakers, civil society and investors is required if we are to reduce the risks of worsening impacts in the future:

“Greenland is being pushed beyond its threshold of viability so that if warming continues as we expect, we effectively lose the Greenland ice sheet. It takes some centuries to lose half of the volume but even losing a small fraction of that volume is already a problem.

“That brings the relevance of the matter much closer to the present… but what makes a lot more sense for people and policymakers is the next 50 years. We are already seeing threatening problems in that timescale and that just shows the severity of it, because the problem is not just going away 50 years from now, the problem is getting worse.”

Nick Breeze is a climate change journalist and interviewer. He blogs at Envisionation and tweets @NickGBreeze.

This interview with Professor Jason Box was recorded by Nick Breeze in Copenhagen, September 2016.

I have to write this piece, even as the battered soapbox of indignation is dragged out of the metaphorical dusty corner to centre stage I know I cant stop myself – I’m going to have to let this out.

Every now and again I loose my grip a little on my inner calm and there are a few common factors that stoke the embers of rage. I read with interest and great sadness the Ecologist article by Andrew Wasley and Josh Robbins a week or two ago and of course I am not in the least surprised or in fact shocked by the horrendous, seemingly systemic and callous breaches of animal welfare codes in our abattoirs.

The article states that some 4,000 severe breaches of animal welfare regulations have occurred over the past two years. And that number seems staggering when you assume that these don’t only happen during times of inspection – in fact they are possibly even more frequent when the watchful eye of authority is absent? I’ll refrain from making a leap of extrapolation here, it’s not necessary and rarely helpful.

But hold tight to the horses of indignation, rewind that tune selecta, let’s get this in context. Brace yourselves, I’m feeling a little brutal.

Now, 4000 breaches of welfare code over 2 years amounts to 2000 per year. Here’s some numbers for you courtesy of the Human Slaughter Association. Last year, the UK slaughtered for human consumption (remember these numbers exclude imported meat from as far away as South East Asia and New Zealand) approximately 2.6 million cattle, 10 million pigs, 14.5 million sheep and lambs and 950 million birds.

That’s around a billion animals. Excluding Fish. That’s a big number. A very big number.

Now this is not a defence, this is the beginning of the criticism. That we should be shocked by 4000 breaches of welfare by abattoirs is the problem. Really, we should be shocked by the vast number of overall kills. Now add to the mix the issue of an ever decreasing number of slaughter houses in the UK. According to the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (now DEFRA), there were 13,000 slaughterhouses in Great Britain in 1938. This figure had fallen to 1,000 by 1986 and to 416 by 1999.

Today there are just 336  abattoirs registered in the UK. And with so many animals to be slaughtered, they often have to travel enormous distances to be killed. This in itself will be more stressful for the animals than if we had more, smaller slaughterhouses.

Slaughterhouses then are under immense pressure because of the volume of animals brought each day for slaughter. Many of them are giant, industrial buildings, specialising in a certain type of animal, notably pigs or chicken. We are treating animals like commodities rather than living creatures, so is it any wonder that breaches occur in the welfare codes?

I would venture it is inevitable, though still shameful, that these issues occur. The problem is far bigger than faceless men and women acting disgracefully in the slaughterhouse or whilst in the employ of a haulier firm. The real problem is a wilful ignorance and greed on behalf of the vast majority of consumers, the devaluing of meat within our culture and the endless, shameless and frankly irresponsible marketing of cheap meat by our larger retailers.

I am not a vegetarian, though I eat a lot of meat-free dishes, and certainly won’t eat meat that is of dubious origin. I don’t like to complain, or be the difficult one when out to dinner with friends and so, it’s simpler by far to order the vegetarian dishes on the menu than to question the serving staff as to the whereabouts and welfare credentials of the kitchen’s meat supplier. But I also consciously consume more vegetable-based dishes than meat dishes at home and for very good reason.

I keep pigs. I also shoot animals for food. When I kill something myself I clean and butcher it myself, for my family and friends to eat. When I have my pigs killed, I get up at 5am, feed them on a trailer that they have been fed on for 3 days so it’s not different, or stressful for them, gently close the door and drive the 5.6 miles to the small, local slaughterhouse just down the road. They are dead by 7am and it’s not unusual to be making the black-pudding in time for lunch. I occasionally buy beef from a local farmer, and the odd chicken form a local grower who has their own small-scale slaughter facility on site for their properly free-range birds.

The meat in my house is very highly valued. I have worked hard to produce or acquire it. I have spent money and, importantly, lots of time to get it. I have laboured over it and cared for it while it was alive, I may well have killed it myself and so I have a connection to it, I owe it something, it has a story and sometimes it even had a name. But I hesitate to describe even this meat as expensive.

The highest of welfare meat, grown locally, and slowly with minimal antibiotics and a good feed regimen, slaughtered locally and purchased as directly as possible by you will cost you more than the ‘cheap’ meat in the supermarket. But it is not expensive. It is the right price and if you can’t afford it simply eat less of it. It will be better for you, the environment and in the end for the whole world.

You may be vegetarian and feeling pretty good about it right now, and I salute you. But I like meat, and have no problem whatsoever with killing animals for meat from the wild provided there are no conservation concerns about the species, nor do I have an issue with good quality slow-grown, properly looked after high welfare animals being raised for meat. What I do have an issue with is the wilful ignorance of the masses who pretend to care all of a sudden and feel “betrayed” by the international retailer they have learned to depend on when they inadvertently poison them with Campylobacta, or sell them horse meat. How can you pay £4.50 or less for a chicken and genuinely believe that somewhere along the line it has not suffered more than necessary? What right do you have to be the supposedly unwitting architect of the abject misery that animal may have endured?

I am saddened that there are failings in our meat production systems, and there is never an excuse for unnecessary abuse of livestock but the issue is much, much bigger and in the end it lies within the power of every shopper out there, every diner in every restaurant and every parent in every home.

Eat less meat or even none at all if you prefer, spend more on your food even if it means economising elsewhere, try to care, make the effort and above all don’t blame it on anyone else or appear too shocked when you read about the terrible abuses in abattoirs or the vast failings of antibiotic as a medicine due to over use in agribusiness. It’s down to you and your choices, which can, in the end, make the changes to these systems that will improve them. Better for you, better for the environment and better most importantly for the animals involved.

From the point of view of commerce or economics it’s always the same old argument. We need to do it like this, it’s good for the economy. No, it’s not. It’s bad for farmers and with any more public health scares it’s going to start getting pretty bad for the economy too.

So, what if we all ate half as much meat as we do now, but paid twice as much for it? So, say a chicken costs you a tenner. Doesn’t seem much really for over a kilo of animal flesh. It could have a marginally better and slightly longer life spent at least partly outdoors. The farmer could make a little more perhaps leading them to invest in an on-site kill room or just better, less cramped transport. Maybe the killsman at the abattoir could get a few more quid a year in his wage packet? I’m sure that’s not too bleak a picture for the economy is it? It looks more sustainable to me, the kind of process that would work forever without peaks and troughs in productivity and supply. But, I’m just a cook, so what do I know? Well, I know one thing for sure it would certainly taste better!

I think the best way to make a difference on an everyday basis is to simply make meat a treat, make it a celebration, treat it with great care as you would any other very precious resource. Cook it well, use up any leftovers, make a stock from the bones, use meat as a sprinkle, or a seasoning where once it was the requisite main element of your cookery and you will still get the meaty hit you want, without the cost to welfare, the environment or your health.

Celebrate good meat, enjoy it, worship it if you like – just so long as you condemn the bad stuff to the past and encourage others to do the same.

Read our original news report about breaches of animal welfare en route to and at slaughterhouses here: http://bit.ly/2cbWaT6

This Author

Tim Maddams is a passionate and creative foodie, unafraid to face the difficult arguments that surround food. Having grown up in rural Wiltshire Tim spent time cooking for various notable chefs in London before a return to the West Country to take the helm at the River Cottage canteen in Axminster, Devon, later taking on a key role within the Fish Fight campaign. Tim now works as a private chef, food writer and presenter, based in beautiful East Devon

@TimMaddamsChef

Who would have thought that at Cornell University, arguably the most highly regarded agricultural university in the world, no scientist would speak for the benefits and safety of GMOs?

Perhaps I should have known, however. Last year I was invited to debate the merits of GMOs at Colby College in Maine. Also invited were food activist Jodi Koberinski, Stephen Moose (University of Illinois), and Mark Lynas of the Cornell Alliance for Science and prominent advocate of GMOs worldwide.

Soon after Lynas heard I was coming, however, he pulled out of the debate. It’s not the first time. Most memorably, in 2001, I attended a court case in which the British government abandoned prosecution of two of its citizens who had pulled up GMOs planted for a scientific experiment.

The government preferred to lose the case rather than have the science of GMOs inspected by the judicial system. The defendants were duly and unanimously acquitted, with the judge describing them as the kind of people he would like to invite to dinner.

This avoidance of public debate is part of a pattern and the reasons are simple: in any fair fight, the arguments for the safety and benefits of GMOs fail.

Scientifically validated GMO hazards

As I have discussed elsewhere, there are strong scientific reasons to doubt the safety of GMO crops. The arguments against them are not limited to the dramatic increases in pesticide use they have engendered. GMOs also created the massive and dangerous consolidation being seen in the agriculture and seed sectors and have greatly reduced options available to farmers. Remarkably, they even yield less.

Most recently, the scientific literature has yielded new concerns over the predicted widespread use of a new generation of GMO crops resistant to the herbicide 2,4-D (Lurquin, 2016). These crops resist the herbicide by breaking it down into a known toxic metabolite called 2,4-DCP and other derivatives that probably remain in the crop until harvest. As the paper states:

“Unfortunately, much reduced phytotoxicity does not necessarily mean that … 2,4-D resistant crop plants are safe for consumption. Indeed, 2,4-DCP is cytotoxic to a variety of animals and animal cell lines.” (Lurquin, 2016).

In the final analysis, almost everyone loses from GMOs, except the makers themselves. These harms are often hidden or obfuscated, but in an unbiased debate they cannot be. Proponents of GMOs thus find themselves defending the indefensible – and sometimes they collapse into blustering idiocy.

What makes this event particularly noteworthy is that Cornell University is the home of the Cornell Alliance for Science, an organisation funded by the Gates Foundation and by agribusiness to the tune of $5.6million.

The mysterious reticence of the Cornell Alliance for Science

The purported mission of the Cornell Alliance is to explain the science underlying biotechnology and GMOs. Yet the Alliance has refused to offer a speaker despite numerous requests from Robert Schooler the student organiser of the discussion. Neither, despite numerous direct emails, was Robert able to find Cornell faculty prepared to defend them.

So he asked the Dean of its College of Agriculture, Kathryn Boor. She declined to find someone – though she “wished him luck”. Much the same applied to other notable public GMO proponents (Karl Haro von Mogel and Jon Entine of the Genetic Literacy Project). This usually vociferous duo initially accepted subject to funding. When it was offered they backed out.

Anticipating some of this reluctance I reached out to Robb Fraley, Monsanto’s chief technology officer and publicist-in-chief, and to Mark Lynas, who has a position at Cornell, and to Kevin Folta via his blog.

Kevin Folta is the go-to travelling academic of the GMO industry. Folta didn’t respond but Lynas said he was abroad. Promoting GMOs perhaps? The only Cornell academic who did respond positively was Joe Regenstein of the Food Science department. However, his conditions (“no debate” and to “request the moderator”) were declined by Robert Schooler. Robert Schooler also did not want only one speaker on one side.

So will anyone debate Michael Hanson (of the Consumers Union) and myself at Cornell University on October 5th at 7pm in Anabel Taylor Hall? If you are reading this and have a PhD in a relevant field and wish to defend GMOs we hereby invite you.

And if the Alliance for Science, funded by the Gates foundation, can’t find you travel money I am sure we can. Otherwise, the debate may constitute GMO talking points read out by cardboard cutouts.

Bill and Melinda Gates may even consider they are entitled to demand their money back from the Cornell Alliance. Or they may just infer for themselves that GMOs are indeed indefensible.

Dr Jonathan R. Latham is editor of Independent Science News.

This article was originally published by Independent Science News (CC BY-NC-ND). Its creation was supported by The Bioscience Resource Project.

References

Lurquin P. (2016) Production of a toxic metabolite in 2,4-D-resistant GM crop plants. 3 Biotech 6: 82. doi:10.1007/s13205-016-0387-9.

A new study led by conservation charity Froglife reveals a steep 30-year long fall in populations of the common toad.

“Given the declines, this common species almost qualifies for International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) red-listing over this period despite volunteer conservation efforts”, state the scientists. “Reasons for the declines and wider impacts remain unknown.”

The data underlying the study has been gathered by ‘crowdsourcing’ with thousands of conservation volunteers in both the UK and Switzerland submitting figures on the numbers of toads in their areas.

Every year thousands of volunteers in the UK, working as part of Froglife’s ‘Toads on Roads‘ patrols, help save amphibians as they migrate to their breeding ponds across busy roads. Toads are particularly vulnerable to traffic and over 800,000 are carried to safety by volunteers each year in the UK and Switzerland.

Froglife’s conservation scientists teamed up with Swiss counterparts to analyse millions of records of common toads (Bufo bufo) collected by these patrols over more than three decades from the two countries.

Unfortunately, despite the effort of the volunteers, the researchers show that our toads have undergone huge declines. On average common toads have declined by 68% over the last 30 years in the UK. In some areas, such as the south east of England, declines have been even more pronounced.

30 years of continuous decline

The team’s results, published in the open-access journal PLOS ONE, show that toads have declined rapidly and continuously since the 1980s in both countries. It is likely that hundreds of thousands of toads have disappeared from the countryside in the past 30 years.

In the UK, south east England suffered the worst declines while in the west (including Wales, south west and west England) populations also declined but have remained stable for the past decade. The North, including northern counties and Scotland, has also seen significant toad declines in the past 20 years.

It is not clear what has caused numbers of toads to drop so dramatically but likely causes are a combination of changes to farming practices, loss of ponds, an increase in urbanisation and more deaths on roads as traffic values have increased. Climate change could also be a factor as research has shown that milder winters are detrimental for hibernating toads.

Dr. Silviu Petrovan, Conservation Coordinator at Froglife and one of the authors of the study said: “Toad declines at this scale over such large areas are really worrying. Toads are extremely adaptable and can live in many places ranging from farmland and woodland to suburban gardens.

“They are also important pest controllers eating slugs, snails and insects and are food themselves for many of our most likeable mammals such as otters and polecats.” And he emphasised the essential role of members of the public both in toad conservation, and in making the study possible:

“Without the efforts of the thousands of volunteers that go out and move amphibians across busy roads we would have no idea that these declines had occurred and the situation could be much worse. One thing that is clear is that we need to do more to look after our environment in order to protect the species that depend on it.”

‘Conservation is not just for special sites and rare species’

As the authors note in their paper, the long-term and ongoing decline of one of Europe’s most common amphibians is “a significant cause for concern and has unknown wider impacts.” However the decline “has been uncovered almost incidentally given the lack of specific long-term monitoring data for common amphibians.”

They also highlight the increasing trend of sharp population declines of once common species. For example, house sparrow and hedgehogs, one common across the UK, are also becoming increasingly rare, suggesting “a large-scale deterioration of environmental quality.”

Recent declines of common species could be explained by the fact that “common species occupy areas of land mostly outside of protected areas, including for the common toad, farmland and semi-urban areas”, the scientists report. “Their declines could be linked to the general deterioration and fragmentation of the quality of the environment on a landscape scale and which cannot be offset by smaller improvements elsewhere, such as in well managed reserves …

“Although conservation goals have moved towards a more wide-encompassing approach that incorporates ecosystem goods and services, this requires a shift in conservation practice that makes it clear that it is not sufficient to protect habitats of rare specialists. Conservation efforts need to focus more on generalist widespread and common species and the countryside as a whole if system function and resilience are to be maintained.”

Countering habitat fragmentation

Paul Edgar, Senior Amphibian and Reptile Specialist from Natural England, the government’s wildlife advisor which has funded Froglife’s road mitigation research, said: “This paper highlights a number of important issues for our native amphibians and conservation more generally in the UK. The common toad is sadly on a downward trend.

“This is partly because of habitat fragmentation, and so understanding and mitigating the impacts of this issue is vital. We need to continue to build good quality habitat links across the wider landscape if we are to offer opportunities for this species to recover. We’re working hard to do this through measures such as Countryside Stewardship in the rural setting, and ensuring good quality Green Infrastructure is included in new developments.

“This paper reinforces the vital positive role that the public play in both protecting and recording data about our wildlife. We need to build on this engagement to further help us collaboratively reverse these declines as a matter of urgency.”

Members of the public can also help conserve toads and other wildlife by improving habitat in their own gardens and local areas: by digging out ponds, for example, and leaving areas of rough, untended vegetation where toads, frogs and newts can hide out in the day and hibernate in winter.

Oliver Tickell is contributing editor at The Ecologist.

The paper: ‘Volunteer Conservation Action Data Reveals Large-Scale and Long-Term Negative Population Trends of a Widespread Amphibian, the Common Toad (Bufo bufo)‘ is by Silviu O. Petrovan & Benedikt R. Schmidt, and published in PLOS ONE (open access).

2016 has been smashing world records for heat temperatures month on month, with the Arctic as a whole looking like it will show a sea-ice minimum that is equal to the historic low of 2012.

79N Glacier is the name of the largest ice shelf that this small ice-shelf tributary, known as the Spelte Glacier, buttresses against. This upward pressure on the larger glacier causes a slowing of the loss of the melting ice flowing into the sea.

“The more ice is lost from the fronts, the less resistance there is, and the faster Greenland loses its ice”, explains Professor Box.

He goes on to explain that the ice sheet is responding to the warming of the atmosphere in complex ways that, although caused by humanity’s burning of fossil fuels, will not be advantageous to us in the long-run. This interconnectedness of the climate system is demonstrated by what we are seeing in Greenland.

The Arctic is heating much faster than other parts of the planet, and the loss of sea ice cover is rapidly accelerating this effect. The rise in temperature has a very serious effect on the Greenland ice sheet, as Professor Box explains here:

“The Greenland Ice Sheet has a kind of dome shape and warming brings more rapid melting at that point. Because the slope gets more gradual the higher you go, for every degree of warming, it actually has an exponential increase in the area of melting. This is because it is getting flatter. It eventually blows up and then you get warming at the highest points over the ice-sheet.”

Box stresses that the Greenland ice sheet has been beyond its threshold of viability for over 20 years now and the situation, far from improving, is actually worsening:

“The longer we stay beyond that threshold, then the enhanced flow [of meltwater] can lower the surface [of the ice-sheet] down into warmer parts of the atmosphere.

“Fundamentally, that is the irreversibility factor for Greenland: melting and induced thinning. If we get enough slumping and drawdown of the inland areas of the ice sheet, that in effect is irreversible. That’s the death sentence for the ice sheet.

“It then really becomes a matter of how long does the ice sheet spend beyond its threshold? Given the expected climate trajectory that we are on, it is nothing but more warming, it effectively dooms the ice sheet!”

The sheer size of Greenland demands an real effort of imagination to understand. It’s an area roughly three times the size of France and spanning three lines of latitude from 59º to 83º North. The ice sheet itself is over 3 kilometers thick in parts, with more than 200 glaciers over 1 kilometer across, and 45 glaciers over 5 kilometers across.

With such a large and complex area to survey, scientists are only just discovering what the effects of climate change will be on the ice sheet and what are the likely impacts are on human civilisation.

“There are a number of factors that are pushing Greenland beyond its threshold and one of them is the melt-water that is draining into the ice. That amount of melt-water has doubled in the last 50 years. The temperature of that water is several degrees warmer than the ice is internally. So that has an internal heating effect. Internal ice heating is softening the ice and that makes it flow faster.”

Box also explains that melt-water draining down to the bottom of the ice sheet is causing basal sliding ? literally the lubricating of the ice sheet at its base, which is causing it to further slide.

“Then there’s the ocean, there’s an interaction there. The melt-water eventually makes it out into fjords and drives a heat exchange with a warming ocean that de-stabilises the largest outlet glaciers right at their grounding line. That is where the ice begins to float.

“Because of the ice being eroded from below in the fjords, we are losing the ice shelves. Just in the last twenty years about three quarters of the area lost has been in north Greenland and those have been ice shelves. There are hardly any ice shelves remaining in the Arctic because they are very sensitive and they are eroding quickly.”

Impacts of Greenland melting

With all these processes amplifying the rate at which ice melts and as the region becomes warmer, much of the attention has focused on the risk posed to coastal areas from sea-level rise. Greenland has the potential to create a sea-level rise of over seven metres if it were to fully melt.

Considering that most of global agriculture and an enormous amount of our societal infrastructure lies at less than a metre above sea-level, it is clear that we do not need to wait centuries to be concerned about what is happening in Greenland.

The melt of the ice sheet is already a major contributor to accelerating sea-level rise, noticeably impacting places like Florida in the USA.

The ‘cold blob’

Other effects that have been observed relate to the fresh water ‘cold blob’ that is forming in the north Atlantic. This cold blob has been linked to extreme flooding events we have seen in the UK and other parts of north-west Europe.

“In the last few years we have started to think beyond the obvious impact of land ice loss, that is sea-level rise. That problem is a big, big problem, especially later in the century. There are other impacts from Greenland melting and they include the oceanographic disruption in the north Atlantic.

“There has been an accumulation of some thousands of square kilometres of freshwater in the north Atlantic and that has been contributing to a slowdown of an important ocean circulation. The effect of that is a cooling at the surface of the north Atlantic, just south of Iceland. With the cold pool, there have been record cold sea surface temperatures at a time when global temperatures have been record warm in the atmosphere.

“That temperature contrast of the cold pool with warm water adjacent to it to the south … that actually strengthens storms! So storms drifting over this cold pool are strengthened and they can run into north western Europe and this has been happening.”

A good example of this is the flooding that took place in late 2015 in the UK and Ireland, where huge floods caused chaos. These climate change induced floods coincided with the timing of the UNFCCC conference in Paris COP21 that produced the historic ‘Paris Agreement’.

As Professor Box and many others have pointed out, even if we achieve the reduction of emissions as calculated by the carbon budgets, there is still no strategy for how we reduce the current levels of atmospheric carbon that will see temperatures rising to well over 3ºC, no matter what emissions reductions are achieved.

The current warming trajectory means that Greenland’s ice sheet will stay beyond its threshold of viability for the foreseeable future. This means that a concerted determination between policymakers, civil society and investors is required if we are to reduce the risks of worsening impacts in the future:

“Greenland is being pushed beyond its threshold of viability so that if warming continues as we expect, we effectively lose the Greenland ice sheet. It takes some centuries to lose half of the volume but even losing a small fraction of that volume is already a problem.

“That brings the relevance of the matter much closer to the present… but what makes a lot more sense for people and policymakers is the next 50 years. We are already seeing threatening problems in that timescale and that just shows the severity of it, because the problem is not just going away 50 years from now, the problem is getting worse.”

Nick Breeze is a climate change journalist and interviewer. He blogs at Envisionation and tweets @NickGBreeze.

This interview with Professor Jason Box was recorded by Nick Breeze in Copenhagen, September 2016.

I have to write this piece, even as the battered soapbox of indignation is dragged out of the metaphorical dusty corner to centre stage I know I cant stop myself – I’m going to have to let this out.

Every now and again I loose my grip a little on my inner calm and there are a few common factors that stoke the embers of rage. I read with interest and great sadness the Ecologist article by Andrew Wasley and Josh Robbins a week or two ago and of course I am not in the least surprised or in fact shocked by the horrendous, seemingly systemic and callous breaches of animal welfare codes in our abattoirs.

The article states that some 4,000 severe breaches of animal welfare regulations have occurred over the past two years. And that number seems staggering when you assume that these don’t only happen during times of inspection – in fact they are possibly even more frequent when the watchful eye of authority is absent? I’ll refrain from making a leap of extrapolation here, it’s not necessary and rarely helpful.

But hold tight to the horses of indignation, rewind that tune selecta, let’s get this in context. Brace yourselves, I’m feeling a little brutal.

Now, 4000 breaches of welfare code over 2 years amounts to 2000 per year. Here’s some numbers for you courtesy of the Human Slaughter Association. Last year, the UK slaughtered for human consumption (remember these numbers exclude imported meat from as far away as South East Asia and New Zealand) approximately 2.6 million cattle, 10 million pigs, 14.5 million sheep and lambs and 950 million birds.

That’s around a billion animals. Excluding Fish. That’s a big number. A very big number.

Now this is not a defence, this is the beginning of the criticism. That we should be shocked by 4000 breaches of welfare by abattoirs is the problem. Really, we should be shocked by the vast number of overall kills. Now add to the mix the issue of an ever decreasing number of slaughter houses in the UK. According to the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (now DEFRA), there were 13,000 slaughterhouses in Great Britain in 1938. This figure had fallen to 1,000 by 1986 and to 416 by 1999.

Today there are just 336  abattoirs registered in the UK. And with so many animals to be slaughtered, they often have to travel enormous distances to be killed. This in itself will be more stressful for the animals than if we had more, smaller slaughterhouses.

Slaughterhouses then are under immense pressure because of the volume of animals brought each day for slaughter. Many of them are giant, industrial buildings, specialising in a certain type of animal, notably pigs or chicken. We are treating animals like commodities rather than living creatures, so is it any wonder that breaches occur in the welfare codes?

I would venture it is inevitable, though still shameful, that these issues occur. The problem is far bigger than faceless men and women acting disgracefully in the slaughterhouse or whilst in the employ of a haulier firm. The real problem is a wilful ignorance and greed on behalf of the vast majority of consumers, the devaluing of meat within our culture and the endless, shameless and frankly irresponsible marketing of cheap meat by our larger retailers.

I am not a vegetarian, though I eat a lot of meat-free dishes, and certainly won’t eat meat that is of dubious origin. I don’t like to complain, or be the difficult one when out to dinner with friends and so, it’s simpler by far to order the vegetarian dishes on the menu than to question the serving staff as to the whereabouts and welfare credentials of the kitchen’s meat supplier. But I also consciously consume more vegetable-based dishes than meat dishes at home and for very good reason.

I keep pigs. I also shoot animals for food. When I kill something myself I clean and butcher it myself, for my family and friends to eat. When I have my pigs killed, I get up at 5am, feed them on a trailer that they have been fed on for 3 days so it’s not different, or stressful for them, gently close the door and drive the 5.6 miles to the small, local slaughterhouse just down the road. They are dead by 7am and it’s not unusual to be making the black-pudding in time for lunch. I occasionally buy beef from a local farmer, and the odd chicken form a local grower who has their own small-scale slaughter facility on site for their properly free-range birds.

The meat in my house is very highly valued. I have worked hard to produce or acquire it. I have spent money and, importantly, lots of time to get it. I have laboured over it and cared for it while it was alive, I may well have killed it myself and so I have a connection to it, I owe it something, it has a story and sometimes it even had a name. But I hesitate to describe even this meat as expensive.

The highest of welfare meat, grown locally, and slowly with minimal antibiotics and a good feed regimen, slaughtered locally and purchased as directly as possible by you will cost you more than the ‘cheap’ meat in the supermarket. But it is not expensive. It is the right price and if you can’t afford it simply eat less of it. It will be better for you, the environment and in the end for the whole world.

You may be vegetarian and feeling pretty good about it right now, and I salute you. But I like meat, and have no problem whatsoever with killing animals for meat from the wild provided there are no conservation concerns about the species, nor do I have an issue with good quality slow-grown, properly looked after high welfare animals being raised for meat. What I do have an issue with is the wilful ignorance of the masses who pretend to care all of a sudden and feel “betrayed” by the international retailer they have learned to depend on when they inadvertently poison them with Campylobacta, or sell them horse meat. How can you pay £4.50 or less for a chicken and genuinely believe that somewhere along the line it has not suffered more than necessary? What right do you have to be the supposedly unwitting architect of the abject misery that animal may have endured?

I am saddened that there are failings in our meat production systems, and there is never an excuse for unnecessary abuse of livestock but the issue is much, much bigger and in the end it lies within the power of every shopper out there, every diner in every restaurant and every parent in every home.

Eat less meat or even none at all if you prefer, spend more on your food even if it means economising elsewhere, try to care, make the effort and above all don’t blame it on anyone else or appear too shocked when you read about the terrible abuses in abattoirs or the vast failings of antibiotic as a medicine due to over use in agribusiness. It’s down to you and your choices, which can, in the end, make the changes to these systems that will improve them. Better for you, better for the environment and better most importantly for the animals involved.

From the point of view of commerce or economics it’s always the same old argument. We need to do it like this, it’s good for the economy. No, it’s not. It’s bad for farmers and with any more public health scares it’s going to start getting pretty bad for the economy too.

So, what if we all ate half as much meat as we do now, but paid twice as much for it? So, say a chicken costs you a tenner. Doesn’t seem much really for over a kilo of animal flesh. It could have a marginally better and slightly longer life spent at least partly outdoors. The farmer could make a little more perhaps leading them to invest in an on-site kill room or just better, less cramped transport. Maybe the killsman at the abattoir could get a few more quid a year in his wage packet? I’m sure that’s not too bleak a picture for the economy is it? It looks more sustainable to me, the kind of process that would work forever without peaks and troughs in productivity and supply. But, I’m just a cook, so what do I know? Well, I know one thing for sure it would certainly taste better!

I think the best way to make a difference on an everyday basis is to simply make meat a treat, make it a celebration, treat it with great care as you would any other very precious resource. Cook it well, use up any leftovers, make a stock from the bones, use meat as a sprinkle, or a seasoning where once it was the requisite main element of your cookery and you will still get the meaty hit you want, without the cost to welfare, the environment or your health.

Celebrate good meat, enjoy it, worship it if you like – just so long as you condemn the bad stuff to the past and encourage others to do the same.

Read our original news report about breaches of animal welfare en route to and at slaughterhouses here: http://bit.ly/2cbWaT6

This Author

Tim Maddams is a passionate and creative foodie, unafraid to face the difficult arguments that surround food. Having grown up in rural Wiltshire Tim spent time cooking for various notable chefs in London before a return to the West Country to take the helm at the River Cottage canteen in Axminster, Devon, later taking on a key role within the Fish Fight campaign. Tim now works as a private chef, food writer and presenter, based in beautiful East Devon

@TimMaddamsChef

Who would have thought that at Cornell University, arguably the most highly regarded agricultural university in the world, no scientist would speak for the benefits and safety of GMOs?

Perhaps I should have known, however. Last year I was invited to debate the merits of GMOs at Colby College in Maine. Also invited were food activist Jodi Koberinski, Stephen Moose (University of Illinois), and Mark Lynas of the Cornell Alliance for Science and prominent advocate of GMOs worldwide.

Soon after Lynas heard I was coming, however, he pulled out of the debate. It’s not the first time. Most memorably, in 2001, I attended a court case in which the British government abandoned prosecution of two of its citizens who had pulled up GMOs planted for a scientific experiment.

The government preferred to lose the case rather than have the science of GMOs inspected by the judicial system. The defendants were duly and unanimously acquitted, with the judge describing them as the kind of people he would like to invite to dinner.

This avoidance of public debate is part of a pattern and the reasons are simple: in any fair fight, the arguments for the safety and benefits of GMOs fail.

Scientifically validated GMO hazards

As I have discussed elsewhere, there are strong scientific reasons to doubt the safety of GMO crops. The arguments against them are not limited to the dramatic increases in pesticide use they have engendered. GMOs also created the massive and dangerous consolidation being seen in the agriculture and seed sectors and have greatly reduced options available to farmers. Remarkably, they even yield less.

Most recently, the scientific literature has yielded new concerns over the predicted widespread use of a new generation of GMO crops resistant to the herbicide 2,4-D (Lurquin, 2016). These crops resist the herbicide by breaking it down into a known toxic metabolite called 2,4-DCP and other derivatives that probably remain in the crop until harvest. As the paper states:

“Unfortunately, much reduced phytotoxicity does not necessarily mean that … 2,4-D resistant crop plants are safe for consumption. Indeed, 2,4-DCP is cytotoxic to a variety of animals and animal cell lines.” (Lurquin, 2016).

In the final analysis, almost everyone loses from GMOs, except the makers themselves. These harms are often hidden or obfuscated, but in an unbiased debate they cannot be. Proponents of GMOs thus find themselves defending the indefensible – and sometimes they collapse into blustering idiocy.

What makes this event particularly noteworthy is that Cornell University is the home of the Cornell Alliance for Science, an organisation funded by the Gates Foundation and by agribusiness to the tune of $5.6million.

The mysterious reticence of the Cornell Alliance for Science

The purported mission of the Cornell Alliance is to explain the science underlying biotechnology and GMOs. Yet the Alliance has refused to offer a speaker despite numerous requests from Robert Schooler the student organiser of the discussion. Neither, despite numerous direct emails, was Robert able to find Cornell faculty prepared to defend them.

So he asked the Dean of its College of Agriculture, Kathryn Boor. She declined to find someone – though she “wished him luck”. Much the same applied to other notable public GMO proponents (Karl Haro von Mogel and Jon Entine of the Genetic Literacy Project). This usually vociferous duo initially accepted subject to funding. When it was offered they backed out.

Anticipating some of this reluctance I reached out to Robb Fraley, Monsanto’s chief technology officer and publicist-in-chief, and to Mark Lynas, who has a position at Cornell, and to Kevin Folta via his blog.

Kevin Folta is the go-to travelling academic of the GMO industry. Folta didn’t respond but Lynas said he was abroad. Promoting GMOs perhaps? The only Cornell academic who did respond positively was Joe Regenstein of the Food Science department. However, his conditions (“no debate” and to “request the moderator”) were declined by Robert Schooler. Robert Schooler also did not want only one speaker on one side.

So will anyone debate Michael Hanson (of the Consumers Union) and myself at Cornell University on October 5th at 7pm in Anabel Taylor Hall? If you are reading this and have a PhD in a relevant field and wish to defend GMOs we hereby invite you.

And if the Alliance for Science, funded by the Gates foundation, can’t find you travel money I am sure we can. Otherwise, the debate may constitute GMO talking points read out by cardboard cutouts.

Bill and Melinda Gates may even consider they are entitled to demand their money back from the Cornell Alliance. Or they may just infer for themselves that GMOs are indeed indefensible.

Dr Jonathan R. Latham is editor of Independent Science News.

This article was originally published by Independent Science News (CC BY-NC-ND). Its creation was supported by The Bioscience Resource Project.

References

Lurquin P. (2016) Production of a toxic metabolite in 2,4-D-resistant GM crop plants. 3 Biotech 6: 82. doi:10.1007/s13205-016-0387-9.

2016 has been smashing world records for heat temperatures month on month, with the Arctic as a whole looking like it will show a sea-ice minimum that is equal to the historic low of 2012.

79N Glacier is the name of the largest ice shelf that this small ice-shelf tributary, known as the Spelte Glacier, buttresses against. This upward pressure on the larger glacier causes a slowing of the loss of the melting ice flowing into the sea.

“The more ice is lost from the fronts, the less resistance there is, and the faster Greenland loses its ice”, explains Professor Box.

He goes on to explain that the ice sheet is responding to the warming of the atmosphere in complex ways that, although caused by humanity’s burning of fossil fuels, will not be advantageous to us in the long-run. This interconnectedness of the climate system is demonstrated by what we are seeing in Greenland.

The Arctic is heating much faster than other parts of the planet, and the loss of sea ice cover is rapidly accelerating this effect. The rise in temperature has a very serious effect on the Greenland ice sheet, as Professor Box explains here:

“The Greenland Ice Sheet has a kind of dome shape and warming brings more rapid melting at that point. Because the slope gets more gradual the higher you go, for every degree of warming, it actually has an exponential increase in the area of melting. This is because it is getting flatter. It eventually blows up and then you get warming at the highest points over the ice-sheet.”

Box stresses that the Greenland ice sheet has been beyond its threshold of viability for over 20 years now and the situation, far from improving, is actually worsening:

“The longer we stay beyond that threshold, then the enhanced flow [of meltwater] can lower the surface [of the ice-sheet] down into warmer parts of the atmosphere.

“Fundamentally, that is the irreversibility factor for Greenland: melting and induced thinning. If we get enough slumping and drawdown of the inland areas of the ice sheet, that in effect is irreversible. That’s the death sentence for the ice sheet.

“It then really becomes a matter of how long does the ice sheet spend beyond its threshold? Given the expected climate trajectory that we are on, it is nothing but more warming, it effectively dooms the ice sheet!”

The sheer size of Greenland demands an real effort of imagination to understand. It’s an area roughly three times the size of France and spanning three lines of latitude from 59º to 83º North. The ice sheet itself is over 3 kilometers thick in parts, with more than 200 glaciers over 1 kilometer across, and 45 glaciers over 5 kilometers across.

With such a large and complex area to survey, scientists are only just discovering what the effects of climate change will be on the ice sheet and what are the likely impacts are on human civilisation.

“There are a number of factors that are pushing Greenland beyond its threshold and one of them is the melt-water that is draining into the ice. That amount of melt-water has doubled in the last 50 years. The temperature of that water is several degrees warmer than the ice is internally. So that has an internal heating effect. Internal ice heating is softening the ice and that makes it flow faster.”

Box also explains that melt-water draining down to the bottom of the ice sheet is causing basal sliding ? literally the lubricating of the ice sheet at its base, which is causing it to further slide.

“Then there’s the ocean, there’s an interaction there. The melt-water eventually makes it out into fjords and drives a heat exchange with a warming ocean that de-stabilises the largest outlet glaciers right at their grounding line. That is where the ice begins to float.

“Because of the ice being eroded from below in the fjords, we are losing the ice shelves. Just in the last twenty years about three quarters of the area lost has been in north Greenland and those have been ice shelves. There are hardly any ice shelves remaining in the Arctic because they are very sensitive and they are eroding quickly.”

Impacts of Greenland melting

With all these processes amplifying the rate at which ice melts and as the region becomes warmer, much of the attention has focused on the risk posed to coastal areas from sea-level rise. Greenland has the potential to create a sea-level rise of over seven metres if it were to fully melt.

Considering that most of global agriculture and an enormous amount of our societal infrastructure lies at less than a metre above sea-level, it is clear that we do not need to wait centuries to be concerned about what is happening in Greenland.

The melt of the ice sheet is already a major contributor to accelerating sea-level rise, noticeably impacting places like Florida in the USA.

The ‘cold blob’

Other effects that have been observed relate to the fresh water ‘cold blob’ that is forming in the north Atlantic. This cold blob has been linked to extreme flooding events we have seen in the UK and other parts of north-west Europe.

“In the last few years we have started to think beyond the obvious impact of land ice loss, that is sea-level rise. That problem is a big, big problem, especially later in the century. There are other impacts from Greenland melting and they include the oceanographic disruption in the north Atlantic.

“There has been an accumulation of some thousands of square kilometres of freshwater in the north Atlantic and that has been contributing to a slowdown of an important ocean circulation. The effect of that is a cooling at the surface of the north Atlantic, just south of Iceland. With the cold pool, there have been record cold sea surface temperatures at a time when global temperatures have been record warm in the atmosphere.

“That temperature contrast of the cold pool with warm water adjacent to it to the south … that actually strengthens storms! So storms drifting over this cold pool are strengthened and they can run into north western Europe and this has been happening.”

A good example of this is the flooding that took place in late 2015 in the UK and Ireland, where huge floods caused chaos. These climate change induced floods coincided with the timing of the UNFCCC conference in Paris COP21 that produced the historic ‘Paris Agreement’.

As Professor Box and many others have pointed out, even if we achieve the reduction of emissions as calculated by the carbon budgets, there is still no strategy for how we reduce the current levels of atmospheric carbon that will see temperatures rising to well over 3ºC, no matter what emissions reductions are achieved.

The current warming trajectory means that Greenland’s ice sheet will stay beyond its threshold of viability for the foreseeable future. This means that a concerted determination between policymakers, civil society and investors is required if we are to reduce the risks of worsening impacts in the future:

“Greenland is being pushed beyond its threshold of viability so that if warming continues as we expect, we effectively lose the Greenland ice sheet. It takes some centuries to lose half of the volume but even losing a small fraction of that volume is already a problem.

“That brings the relevance of the matter much closer to the present… but what makes a lot more sense for people and policymakers is the next 50 years. We are already seeing threatening problems in that timescale and that just shows the severity of it, because the problem is not just going away 50 years from now, the problem is getting worse.”

Nick Breeze is a climate change journalist and interviewer. He blogs at Envisionation and tweets @NickGBreeze.

This interview with Professor Jason Box was recorded by Nick Breeze in Copenhagen, September 2016.

I have to write this piece, even as the battered soapbox of indignation is dragged out of the metaphorical dusty corner to centre stage I know I cant stop myself – I’m going to have to let this out.

Every now and again I loose my grip a little on my inner calm and there are a few common factors that stoke the embers of rage. I read with interest and great sadness the Ecologist article by Andrew Wasley and Josh Robbins a week or two ago and of course I am not in the least surprised or in fact shocked by the horrendous, seemingly systemic and callous breaches of animal welfare codes in our abattoirs.

The article states that some 4,000 severe breaches of animal welfare regulations have occurred over the past two years. And that number seems staggering when you assume that these don’t only happen during times of inspection – in fact they are possibly even more frequent when the watchful eye of authority is absent? I’ll refrain from making a leap of extrapolation here, it’s not necessary and rarely helpful.

But hold tight to the horses of indignation, rewind that tune selecta, let’s get this in context. Brace yourselves, I’m feeling a little brutal.

Now, 4000 breaches of welfare code over 2 years amounts to 2000 per year. Here’s some numbers for you courtesy of the Human Slaughter Association. Last year, the UK slaughtered for human consumption (remember these numbers exclude imported meat from as far away as South East Asia and New Zealand) approximately 2.6 million cattle, 10 million pigs, 14.5 million sheep and lambs and 950 million birds.

That’s around a billion animals. Excluding Fish. That’s a big number. A very big number.

Now this is not a defence, this is the beginning of the criticism. That we should be shocked by 4000 breaches of welfare by abattoirs is the problem. Really, we should be shocked by the vast number of overall kills. Now add to the mix the issue of an ever decreasing number of slaughter houses in the UK. According to the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (now DEFRA), there were 13,000 slaughterhouses in Great Britain in 1938. This figure had fallen to 1,000 by 1986 and to 416 by 1999.

Today there are just 336  abattoirs registered in the UK. And with so many animals to be slaughtered, they often have to travel enormous distances to be killed. This in itself will be more stressful for the animals than if we had more, smaller slaughterhouses.

Slaughterhouses then are under immense pressure because of the volume of animals brought each day for slaughter. Many of them are giant, industrial buildings, specialising in a certain type of animal, notably pigs or chicken. We are treating animals like commodities rather than living creatures, so is it any wonder that breaches occur in the welfare codes?

I would venture it is inevitable, though still shameful, that these issues occur. The problem is far bigger than faceless men and women acting disgracefully in the slaughterhouse or whilst in the employ of a haulier firm. The real problem is a wilful ignorance and greed on behalf of the vast majority of consumers, the devaluing of meat within our culture and the endless, shameless and frankly irresponsible marketing of cheap meat by our larger retailers.

I am not a vegetarian, though I eat a lot of meat-free dishes, and certainly won’t eat meat that is of dubious origin. I don’t like to complain, or be the difficult one when out to dinner with friends and so, it’s simpler by far to order the vegetarian dishes on the menu than to question the serving staff as to the whereabouts and welfare credentials of the kitchen’s meat supplier. But I also consciously consume more vegetable-based dishes than meat dishes at home and for very good reason.

I keep pigs. I also shoot animals for food. When I kill something myself I clean and butcher it myself, for my family and friends to eat. When I have my pigs killed, I get up at 5am, feed them on a trailer that they have been fed on for 3 days so it’s not different, or stressful for them, gently close the door and drive the 5.6 miles to the small, local slaughterhouse just down the road. They are dead by 7am and it’s not unusual to be making the black-pudding in time for lunch. I occasionally buy beef from a local farmer, and the odd chicken form a local grower who has their own small-scale slaughter facility on site for their properly free-range birds.

The meat in my house is very highly valued. I have worked hard to produce or acquire it. I have spent money and, importantly, lots of time to get it. I have laboured over it and cared for it while it was alive, I may well have killed it myself and so I have a connection to it, I owe it something, it has a story and sometimes it even had a name. But I hesitate to describe even this meat as expensive.

The highest of welfare meat, grown locally, and slowly with minimal antibiotics and a good feed regimen, slaughtered locally and purchased as directly as possible by you will cost you more than the ‘cheap’ meat in the supermarket. But it is not expensive. It is the right price and if you can’t afford it simply eat less of it. It will be better for you, the environment and in the end for the whole world.

You may be vegetarian and feeling pretty good about it right now, and I salute you. But I like meat, and have no problem whatsoever with killing animals for meat from the wild provided there are no conservation concerns about the species, nor do I have an issue with good quality slow-grown, properly looked after high welfare animals being raised for meat. What I do have an issue with is the wilful ignorance of the masses who pretend to care all of a sudden and feel “betrayed” by the international retailer they have learned to depend on when they inadvertently poison them with Campylobacta, or sell them horse meat. How can you pay £4.50 or less for a chicken and genuinely believe that somewhere along the line it has not suffered more than necessary? What right do you have to be the supposedly unwitting architect of the abject misery that animal may have endured?

I am saddened that there are failings in our meat production systems, and there is never an excuse for unnecessary abuse of livestock but the issue is much, much bigger and in the end it lies within the power of every shopper out there, every diner in every restaurant and every parent in every home.

Eat less meat or even none at all if you prefer, spend more on your food even if it means economising elsewhere, try to care, make the effort and above all don’t blame it on anyone else or appear too shocked when you read about the terrible abuses in abattoirs or the vast failings of antibiotic as a medicine due to over use in agribusiness. It’s down to you and your choices, which can, in the end, make the changes to these systems that will improve them. Better for you, better for the environment and better most importantly for the animals involved.

From the point of view of commerce or economics it’s always the same old argument. We need to do it like this, it’s good for the economy. No, it’s not. It’s bad for farmers and with any more public health scares it’s going to start getting pretty bad for the economy too.

So, what if we all ate half as much meat as we do now, but paid twice as much for it? So, say a chicken costs you a tenner. Doesn’t seem much really for over a kilo of animal flesh. It could have a marginally better and slightly longer life spent at least partly outdoors. The farmer could make a little more perhaps leading them to invest in an on-site kill room or just better, less cramped transport. Maybe the killsman at the abattoir could get a few more quid a year in his wage packet? I’m sure that’s not too bleak a picture for the economy is it? It looks more sustainable to me, the kind of process that would work forever without peaks and troughs in productivity and supply. But, I’m just a cook, so what do I know? Well, I know one thing for sure it would certainly taste better!

I think the best way to make a difference on an everyday basis is to simply make meat a treat, make it a celebration, treat it with great care as you would any other very precious resource. Cook it well, use up any leftovers, make a stock from the bones, use meat as a sprinkle, or a seasoning where once it was the requisite main element of your cookery and you will still get the meaty hit you want, without the cost to welfare, the environment or your health.

Celebrate good meat, enjoy it, worship it if you like – just so long as you condemn the bad stuff to the past and encourage others to do the same.

Read our original news report about breaches of animal welfare en route to and at slaughterhouses here: http://bit.ly/2cbWaT6

This Author

Tim Maddams is a passionate and creative foodie, unafraid to face the difficult arguments that surround food. Having grown up in rural Wiltshire Tim spent time cooking for various notable chefs in London before a return to the West Country to take the helm at the River Cottage canteen in Axminster, Devon, later taking on a key role within the Fish Fight campaign. Tim now works as a private chef, food writer and presenter, based in beautiful East Devon

@TimMaddamsChef