The withdrawal from the European Union will shape this country’s future for decades to come.

In the case of the UK farming industry and our rural environment, the consequences could be devastating and permanent.

Theresa May’s commitment to leaving the Single Market will hit UK farmers especially hard. They will be most heavily impacted by two aspects of the Single Market: tariffs and subsidies.

First, because tariffs for agricultural products tend to be far higher than tariffs in other sectors, UK farmers will find it far harder to export their goods to the EU, by far their largest market, after leaving the Single Market.

Second, the level of farming subsidies is likely to be significantly reduced. Although Chancellor Philip Hammond has committed to continue CAP (Common Agricultural Policy) payments until 2020, it is uncertain what will happen to farming subsidies after that point.

Undoubtedly, there will be calls to divert the £3 billion a year our farmers currently receive away from agriculture, especially if the Government is feeling pressure to alleviate the costs of Brexit or to live up to promises made during the EU referendum campaign. Who can forget that infamous Brexit bus with its promise of £350 million a week for the NHS?

Trump trade deal will drive down farming and environment standards

The effects of leaving the Single Market would alone be devastating for rural communities throughout our country. The ‘double whammy’ of increased tariffs and reduced subsidies will likely put huge pressures on our farmers, and some will surely be forced out of business.

However, these consequences are further heightened by the election of Donald Trump as US President. A free trade deal with the US may sound good to some in theory, but in practice it could lead to a reduction in the UK’s farming standards and undercut British farmers.

If we have a free trade deal with the US that allows agricultural exports into the UK under current US regulations, then the EU may not allow UK produce to be imported at all. This is because otherwise US produce could simply be re-exported as UK produce, while not meeting the higher European standards.

Then within the UK, cheap exports from the US (and elsewhere) could undercut UK farmers, making them less competitive both domestically and abroad. More widely, Brexit and Trump pose an even greater risk to farming by threatening our natural environment and our sustainability.

Withdrawing from the European Union means withdrawing from European directives on the environment as well. Some have celebrated this fact. The Farming Minister, George Eustice, has attacked “spirit-crushing” EU directives, including the Birds and Habitats Directives.

This attack has been echoed by many of his Conservative colleagues. I, however, am not celebrating.

What did the EU ever do for us?

EU directives and the associated compliance frameworks have been responsible for huge improvements in UK environmental protection. There are numerous examples in which the UK government was forced to take a stronger approach to climate change and protecting the environment because of the EU.

Recycling targets, for example, were finally adopted by the Government only because of the fines threatened by the European Commission. Similarly, as Alan Andrews of Client Earth points out, the European Commission’s compliance framework was the “main driver” behind the Government’s development of an air quality plan.

Ignoring the environmental impact for a moment, even on a purely economic level, a low regulation approach to the UK economy cannot work outside the EU. This is because the UK will never be able to compete with the lower levels of regulations and cheaper labour costs of developing countries.

And even these countries will find it harder to compete in the future as automation replaces more and more low-skilled jobs. Instead, all that a low-regulation UK economy will achieve is damage to Britain’s and the world’s natural environment.

Beyond that, it is a complete wrong to assume there is a universal cry from either industry or shoppers to cut costs by reducing environmental, animal welfare and safety standards. Many British companies recognise the benefits of high standards and a good reputation. And consumers remain deeply sceptical of US-style industrial agriculture and the quality of the food it produces.

Two governments bent on corporate deregulation

As Secretary of State for the Environment Andrea Leadsom has pointed out, the UK courts will still be able to enforce environmental legislation. However, I am still not convinced. The Conservative Government and the Trump administration have not signalled any willingness to raise the level of environmental protection.

In fact, the opposite is true. Since the Liberal Democrats left Government in 2015, the Conservatives have instituted a series of devastating steps for sustainability and the environment.

This includes cutting subsidies for solar and onshore wind, abandoning Zero Carbon Homes, announcing plans to sell off the Green Investment Bank, and crapping the Green Deal. In addition we have seen scrapping of £1 billion of Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) projects, reducing tax breaks for clean cars and allowing fracking under National Parks.

Since Brexit, the Conservative Government has avoided questions about the future of environmental protection. For example, Government ministers were asked seven times if the government would retain EU air quality limits following Brexit. They still declined to make a commitment.

Meeting the climate challenge

Trump, on the other hand, has been very explicit about his plans for the environment, having referred to climate change as a “hoax” cooked up by the Chinese. Trump has pledged to scrap restrictions on the production of American fossil fuels and to cut subsidies for clean energy.

Moreover, a Trump administration may try to weaken the Paris Agreement by withdrawing from it altogether, or by avoiding America’s financial commitments aimed at helping other countries cope with climate change.

More generally, the election of climate change deniers like Trump and his cabinet are bad news for the fight against climate change. The more mainstream these delusional views become, the higher the risk of environmental catastrophe.

It was too easy during the populist campaigns of Brexit and Trump to paint regulations as bureaucratic and costly, while the other side failed to put forward a positive case. This is what we must do now. We need to show how an ambitious climate change and environmental strategy is good for jobs, growth and prosperity across the UK.

We need to call on Theresa May to insist on high environmental, animal welfare, health and safety standards in any potential trade deal with Trump. And we need to show that protecting the environment is vital for our future.

Kate Parminter is the Liberal Democrat Deputy Leader in the Lords and Shadow Secretary for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. During her time in the Lords, Kate has campaigned on a diverse range of issues including the environment, equality, animal welfare and education. Kate successfully campaigned to introduce a 5p charge on plastic bag usage to reduce the over reliance on a product that is incredibly damaging to the environment.

The withdrawal from the European Union will shape this country’s future for decades to come.

In the case of the UK farming industry and our rural environment, the consequences could be devastating and permanent.

Theresa May’s commitment to leaving the Single Market will hit UK farmers especially hard. They will be most heavily impacted by two aspects of the Single Market: tariffs and subsidies.

First, because tariffs for agricultural products tend to be far higher than tariffs in other sectors, UK farmers will find it far harder to export their goods to the EU, by far their largest market, after leaving the Single Market.

Second, the level of farming subsidies is likely to be significantly reduced. Although Chancellor Philip Hammond has committed to continue CAP (Common Agricultural Policy) payments until 2020, it is uncertain what will happen to farming subsidies after that point.

Undoubtedly, there will be calls to divert the £3 billion a year our farmers currently receive away from agriculture, especially if the Government is feeling pressure to alleviate the costs of Brexit or to live up to promises made during the EU referendum campaign. Who can forget that infamous Brexit bus with its promise of £350 million a week for the NHS?

Trump trade deal will drive down farming and environment standards

The effects of leaving the Single Market would alone be devastating for rural communities throughout our country. The ‘double whammy’ of increased tariffs and reduced subsidies will likely put huge pressures on our farmers, and some will surely be forced out of business.

However, these consequences are further heightened by the election of Donald Trump as US President. A free trade deal with the US may sound good to some in theory, but in practice it could lead to a reduction in the UK’s farming standards and undercut British farmers.

If we have a free trade deal with the US that allows agricultural exports into the UK under current US regulations, then the EU may not allow UK produce to be imported at all. This is because otherwise US produce could simply be re-exported as UK produce, while not meeting the higher European standards.

Then within the UK, cheap exports from the US (and elsewhere) could undercut UK farmers, making them less competitive both domestically and abroad. More widely, Brexit and Trump pose an even greater risk to farming by threatening our natural environment and our sustainability.

Withdrawing from the European Union means withdrawing from European directives on the environment as well. Some have celebrated this fact. The Farming Minister, George Eustice, has attacked “spirit-crushing” EU directives, including the Birds and Habitats Directives.

This attack has been echoed by many of his Conservative colleagues. I, however, am not celebrating.

What did the EU ever do for us?

EU directives and the associated compliance frameworks have been responsible for huge improvements in UK environmental protection. There are numerous examples in which the UK government was forced to take a stronger approach to climate change and protecting the environment because of the EU.

Recycling targets, for example, were finally adopted by the Government only because of the fines threatened by the European Commission. Similarly, as Alan Andrews of Client Earth points out, the European Commission’s compliance framework was the “main driver” behind the Government’s development of an air quality plan.

Ignoring the environmental impact for a moment, even on a purely economic level, a low regulation approach to the UK economy cannot work outside the EU. This is because the UK will never be able to compete with the lower levels of regulations and cheaper labour costs of developing countries.

And even these countries will find it harder to compete in the future as automation replaces more and more low-skilled jobs. Instead, all that a low-regulation UK economy will achieve is damage to Britain’s and the world’s natural environment.

Beyond that, it is a complete wrong to assume there is a universal cry from either industry or shoppers to cut costs by reducing environmental, animal welfare and safety standards. Many British companies recognise the benefits of high standards and a good reputation. And consumers remain deeply sceptical of US-style industrial agriculture and the quality of the food it produces.

Two governments bent on corporate deregulation

As Secretary of State for the Environment Andrea Leadsom has pointed out, the UK courts will still be able to enforce environmental legislation. However, I am still not convinced. The Conservative Government and the Trump administration have not signalled any willingness to raise the level of environmental protection.

In fact, the opposite is true. Since the Liberal Democrats left Government in 2015, the Conservatives have instituted a series of devastating steps for sustainability and the environment.

This includes cutting subsidies for solar and onshore wind, abandoning Zero Carbon Homes, announcing plans to sell off the Green Investment Bank, and crapping the Green Deal. In addition we have seen scrapping of £1 billion of Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) projects, reducing tax breaks for clean cars and allowing fracking under National Parks.

Since Brexit, the Conservative Government has avoided questions about the future of environmental protection. For example, Government ministers were asked seven times if the government would retain EU air quality limits following Brexit. They still declined to make a commitment.

Meeting the climate challenge

Trump, on the other hand, has been very explicit about his plans for the environment, having referred to climate change as a “hoax” cooked up by the Chinese. Trump has pledged to scrap restrictions on the production of American fossil fuels and to cut subsidies for clean energy.

Moreover, a Trump administration may try to weaken the Paris Agreement by withdrawing from it altogether, or by avoiding America’s financial commitments aimed at helping other countries cope with climate change.

More generally, the election of climate change deniers like Trump and his cabinet are bad news for the fight against climate change. The more mainstream these delusional views become, the higher the risk of environmental catastrophe.

It was too easy during the populist campaigns of Brexit and Trump to paint regulations as bureaucratic and costly, while the other side failed to put forward a positive case. This is what we must do now. We need to show how an ambitious climate change and environmental strategy is good for jobs, growth and prosperity across the UK.

We need to call on Theresa May to insist on high environmental, animal welfare, health and safety standards in any potential trade deal with Trump. And we need to show that protecting the environment is vital for our future.

Kate Parminter is the Liberal Democrat Deputy Leader in the Lords and Shadow Secretary for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. During her time in the Lords, Kate has campaigned on a diverse range of issues including the environment, equality, animal welfare and education. Kate successfully campaigned to introduce a 5p charge on plastic bag usage to reduce the over reliance on a product that is incredibly damaging to the environment.

“It’s time to go beyond GDP” claimed Manuel Baroso, President of the European Commission in 2007, but for over 60 years GDP has remained the obsession, and some have said fetish, of most Governments and most commentators.

GDP is a measure of inflation-adjusted value that is added in an economy and, although it was first devised in the 17^th century, it was only after the Second World War that it became widely and routinely used. Despite this long history, the Economist magazine recently published a pretty scathing attack on the ability of GDP to tell us all that much about anything at all.

It’s becoming increasingly difficult to calculate, and indeed increasingly irrelevant in modern, service-based, economies which feed off the immense growth of the internet, social media, and new business models like Airbnb and Uber. It’s a measure that also tells us nothing about inequalities, innovation or expanding consumer choice; it’s a rather old-fashioned measure of production, not welfare. It has no means, for example, of including housework or caring for a relative. It does, however, capture major pollution events and their clean-up, such as Deepwater Horizon in the Gulf of Mexico, as positive additions to economic activity.  Yes – it’s certainly time to go beyond GDP.

In Scotland, the Government has adopted as its main purpose the creation of “a more successful country, with opportunities for all of Scotland to flourish, through increasing sustainable economic growth”. Note that the emphasis is on providing the capacity for the nation to flourish, not on economic growth for its own sake. The economy, even if it is sustainable, is an enabler for a higher purpose. However, the Nobel prize-winning economist and adviser to the Scottish Government, Joseph Stiglitz has commented that “GDP tells you nothing about sustainability”.  So how do we know whether things are going well or badly, whether policies are working or not?

It’s worth thinking, first, about sustainable development. There are many definitions, but the original from the UN Brundtland Report in 1987 still serves well – development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. So, we’re immediately faced with considering what sorts of economic activity can satisfy social requirements, can result in us all living well, but within the natural limits of the planet we inhabit. Very often these ideas are summarised and visually represented by a Venn diagram (see image above) in which sustainability is delivered by those activities or developments, which lie in the central area of overlap. These developments then contribute to economic, social and environmental growth, all at the same time.

We need a better way to measure and monitor progress

The great American architect Buckminster Fuller said (more or less) “The trouble with Planet Earth is that it didn’t come with an instruction manual”. Perhaps as we think through what sustainable development means, how to achieve it, and what tools we need, then we’re starting to write that instruction manual.

The Scottish Government’s current economic strategy aims to accelerate economic recovery, following the global setback of 2008, but also aims to tackle unemployment, particularly through learning and skills development, and to promote a transition to a low-carbon economy. So captured within the strategy are those essential features of economic, social and environmental growth.

It’s certainly clear that we need urgently to find a better way than GDP to measure and monitor Scotland’s progress, but that’s when things become just a bit more complicated. 

There are numerous ways to estimate whether we are living within the limits of the planet. Environmental foot-printing is one and it suggests that, in Scotland, each person is using three times what would be an equitable share of the planet’s available resources: so-called three-planet living, whereas sustainability would ultimately require a one-planet lifestyle. 

Taking a different approach, an analysis of the nine fundamental planetary life-support systems indicates that safe limits have already been breached for the global nitrogen cycle, for loss of global biodiversity, and of course for climate change. Pope Francis recently reflected that Nature is a “sister with whom we share our life” but that she is “among the most abandoned and maltreated of our poor”.

Then we also have to determine what “living well” means.  Oxfam Scotland has done great work on this, launching its so-called Humankind Index which collects data across eighteen individually-weighted sub-domains – assessing attributes like having satisfactory work to do, having good relationships with family & friends, or feeling part of a community. The Index has rather limited environmental content which mostly concerns having access to a clean and healthy environment and, more specifically, access to play areas or green space. Criticism has been levelled at this index because the factors are unavoidably ideologically defined and so they may not be universally appropriate in our pluralist and multi-cultural society.

Can all these numerous factors, across society, environment and the economy, be brought nicely together to tell us whether Scotland, or any other country, is doing well on sustainable economic growth, or not?

Again there are various methods that can be used. One, for example, is the Genuine Progress Indicator, which is loosely defined as GDP minus social and environmental costs. It is formed of 26 indicators including things like the costs of crime and of pollution, the costs of depleting natural resources, or family breakdown. It is pretty complex to compute and very demanding of input data and so it hasn’t been used all that much routinely around the world.  Criticism of such a composite indicator is, again, that the contributory factors and their weightings can be too subjective and culturally biased, and also that any internal positive or negative shifts within each factor can be obscured beneath the headline figure and therefore strong, unambiguous, messages don’t emerge to stimulate appropriate policy action by government.

More widely used, and indeed published annually for a large number of countries, are the World Development Indicators which include the measure known as Adjusted Net Savings. This is derived from net national savings, modified to include the addition of national investment in education and the subtraction of national depletion of various natural resources and the damage caused by carbon and particulate emissions. It’s really a long-term measure of the growth, or indeed running down, of a wide basket of national economic, social and environmental assets.

Stiglitz has argued in favour of a dashboard of separate measures to capture human welfare and, indeed, the Scottish Government has been highly innovative in setting out its own National Performance Framework which sets 11 high-level purpose targets and tracks 55 indicators of progress comprising a broad range of measures such as improving mental well-being, reducing criminal re-offending, reducing drug use, reducing the pay gap, increasing renewable energy generation, reducing waste, increasing exports.  Very sensibly, there is no attempt to combine these into one headline measure.

With all of these options available to us, and many more besides, it might be reasonable to ask if we need yet another one?  Well possibly. There is no single, easily understood and readily calculable and comparable number that gives a feel for different countries’ relative progress in that overlapping space on the Venn diagram of Figure 1.

How might such a number be derived?  First of all we should consider what makes a good indicator. The Bellagio Principles suggest that it must:

• Consider the social/economic and environmental system as a whole, including its governance
• Be able to monitor dynamical change, so that appropriate authorities can make near real-time decisions
• Make clear where and how decisions should be made
• Have an appropriate geographical scope
• Have appropriate time horizons, from short to long
• Use standardised measurement methods to allow for inter-comparability
• Allow comparison with targets
• Set a baseline from which to monitor progress
• Use data widely available to the public
• Use data that are clear, simple, and understandable, with good visualisation
• Be reflective of public views and priorities
• Be responsive to change and readily repeatable and replicable

Now think back to those three elements that make up the Scottish economic strategy:  economic growth, unemployment and the low-carbon economy. They are themselves ideally suited to creating a single, very simple measure of sustainable economic growth that is, in effect, a product of economic efficiency (GDP per head), social inefficiency (percentage unemployment) and environmental inefficiency (carbon dioxide emissions CO₂ per head).  So:

Index of sustainable economic growth = GDP per head, divided by percentage unemployment and divided by carbon dioxide emissions per head

This proposed index meets all the Bellagio Principles except perhaps one – because the national carbon dioxide emissions data are usually released more than a year late. However, it’s worth remembering that even GDP figures are quite often revised a year or so after first publication. If unemployment drops then the index will rise; if climate change action is successful then the index will rise; if GDP increases then, again, the index will rise. The balance between these three factors will determine the overall rate of increase or decrease in the index.

The three factors that make up the index are readily available for nearly every country so it’s simple to work out the values of the index year-by-year, for various countries.  Since we are thinking about sustainable economic growth and because sustainable development itself is often referred to as a journey, it seems sensible to normalise the index values so that all countries start with a value of one in the initial year.  Figure 2 shows how several countries have been doing on their sustainability journey.

This seems like a useful and quite illuminating index because it has focus on the elements that politically are important not only in Scotland right now, but around the world; it’s also constructed of three elements which are, to a degree, amenable to Government action; and most importantly it’s easy to understand.

Numerically, the index also performs well as a Bellagio-compliant indicator because the three components have a similar impact on its change year-on-year.  For example, across the fifteen years 2000 to 2014, for Scotland, GDP per head changed 93%, percentage unemployment changed 74%, and CO₂ emissions per head changed 69%.  The biggest change is not always driven by GDP either – for example for the USA percentage unemployment changed by 140%, whereas GDP per head only changed by 49%.

How do the three separate factors relate to economic, social and environmental performance? It’s evident that GDP per head is a reasonable measure of how efficient the economy is in producing valuable output for a given national population; it reflects national productivity and is often used as short-hand for a narrow economically-defined standard of living. Indeed raising GDP is one of the Scottish Government’s own eleven purpose targets.

Equally, it’s well recognised that national unemployment rate is related to a very wide range of social ills including social exclusion and restriction of personal choices, skills loss, psychological damage including feelings of helplessness, anxiety and self-doubt, ill health and reduced life expectancy, loss of motivation, undermining of human relations and family life, added racial and gender inequalities, loss of social values and responsibility, and increased crime rates.  Unemployment is therefore related to either growth or decline of many aspects of national social assets.

In 2014 Scotland made the biggest advance in sustainable growth

Care about, and action on, climate change, at both the personal and the government levels, is symptomatic of wider concern about the environment. A recent survey in the USA showed a majority of Americans believed climate change was related to other environmental problems such as water shortages, wildfires, and food production. The same poll revealed general agreement that Americans exhibited a range of values which underpinned their desire to protect the environment including living up to the responsibility to protect future generations, respecting and taking care of the Earth, preventing human suffering and harm, and living up to our responsibility to protect other species. The global Environmental Performance Index compares countries around the world and it’s clear that those that score well on climate change action generally score well on other environmental actions as well.

Admittedly the three factors are not totally independent of each other. For example, unemployment is a source of economic inefficiency, and lower economic performance quite often negatively impacts on care about the environment.

The end result is that Scotland and the UK appear to be doing rather well on their sustainability journey. Scotland is a small economy, with a high exposure to the global crisis in the financial sector in 2008, so the indicator plotted in Figure 2 is quite volatile compared to other bigger economies.  But, by 2014, Scotland has made the biggest advance in sustainable growth of all six nations. There have been 13 years of sustainable growth and two of decline. By contrast, the UK has done slightly less well overall and experienced four individual years of decline. On the single measure of GDP per head alone, Scotland started in fourth place and ended in fourth place, with four individual years of decline over the period. So Scotland’s policy ambition seems to be having an effect in promoting sustainable economic growth, compared to the more traditional economic growth in isolation.

Could this new indicator supplant the dominance of GDP in the minds of politicians, commentators and the public? Could it appear in the newspaper headlines of the future? Well – just possibly and particularly so since both the UK and Scotland are doing relatively well by international standards. It looks like there is a shift to strike a healthier balance between support for the economy, and care for essential social and environmental systems.  That certainly matters, and matters particularly for the long term, because my own definition of sustainability is “living on the planet as if we mean to stay here”.

This Author

Professor James Curran retired recently as Chief Executive of the Scottish Environment Protection Agency.  He researches, writes and talks on climate change and sustainability

 

 

 

 

Señor Ángel Fernández is precisely the sort of person you want in charge of a project where failure is not an option. Meticulous, knowledgeable, patient and, above all, determined, this is not a man prone to exaggeration nor one likely to overlook an important detail.

I am sitting with Mr. Fernández in his modern, glass-walled and – mercifully, given the midday heat – air-conditioned office in San Sebastian, the main town on the island of La Gomera, a beautiful, volcanic outpost 18 miles west of Tenerife.  In 2012, the island was hit by a huge fire – ‘El Gran Fuego’ – which devastated around a fifth of Garajonay National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage site and the undisputed jewel in La Gomera’s already sparkling crown.

The forest that defines the park is the best-surviving example of an ancient eco-system that once covered much of Europe and North Africa, but is now found only on the Canaries, the Azores and Madeira. Its trees are central to all life on the island, capturing the daily clouds of the trade winds and transforming them into precious water. It is this process which turns this hot, jagged rock at the edge of the old world into a lush and vibrant paradise.

But, like so many natural wonders, this magical forest is at the mercy of human beings.

Mr. Fernandez – the director of the park and the man charged with overseeing its recovery – explains that in summer of 2012 around 30 relatively small fires were detected and extinguished. Almost all of these, he says, were started by people, and while some were caused by carelessness – a thoughtlessly discarded cigarette or a poorly-controlled camp fire – many were the work of “incendiarios” – arsonists.

In the case of El Gran Fuego, which started in late summer, Mr Fernández is in no doubt about what happened.

“It was deliberate,” he says gravely, his shoulders dropping just a little.

“The conditions were very dry that year, so when the fire was started it spread extremely quickly and was very difficult to stop.”

“It came in two waves, disappearing for a few days – hiding – before coming back to do more damage. It was not completely extinguished until the rains came in October.”

“But the problem is not just the people starting the fires,” he adds. “You really have to understand what has happened here as part of the global change taking place.”

Discussions around the effects of climate change tend to focus on the planet’s polar extremes, expanding deserts or low-lying areas; but here, a subtropical forest perched more than a thousand metres above the ocean is at risk due to humanity’s impact on the fabric of our world.

“Human activity means that all around the world environments are changing,” Mr Fernández says. “Many countries are experiencing problems with fire as temperatures go up. It is the same for us and we have to find a way to respond.”

Conscious, perhaps, that he is speaking to a citizen of ‘Brexit Britain’, Mr. Fernández points out that the EU has been crucial to the recovery effort so far. In particular, money from the little-known ‘Life+ Programme’ – which distributes billions of Euros to support ‘environment and climate action’ – has helped fund initiatives and experiments in areas such as fire prevention, soil restoration and tree regrowth.

Some of the most effective solutions have been relatively simple, for instance, the creation of ‘barricados’ – a series of dam-like structures, formed of the blackened remains of trees and designed to prevent the fragile soil from being washed off the slopes – and the decision to replace highly-flammable plants with native, slow-burning alternatives in critical areas.

Other ideas are more high-tech. Mr. Fernández tells me of plans to establish fire-response systems which make use of linked, automated water-cannons. These arrays, he says, will be moved rapidly into areas threatened by future fires and then used to block the path of the flames.

Above all, Mr. Fernández emphasises the complexity of the challenges faced by the people of La Gomera. There is no one-size-fits-all solution.

“You cannot approach this as being a single problem,” he says, leaning forward in his chair. “Instead we see it as lots of connected problems affecting particular areas. We are making good progress and in time the forest will recover, but a range of different actions will be necessary to protect the forest for the future.”

That complexity is made real for me the next day when I meet Ricardo, a park ranger who shows me some of the areas directly affected by the flames. We meet at Laguna Grande, a remarkable clearing high in the forest and the symbolic centre of the island.

“It is actually like a miracle that this is still here,” Ricardo tells me, smiling.

When the fire was at its most destructive, huge walls of flame raged all around this area. In some instances the inferno was so intense that when it reached a barrier – a wider section of road, for instance, or a sudden rocky ridge – it simply leapt into the sky (“like a nuclear bomb”) and then swept forward to consume a new patch of pristine, priceless forest.

Yet amidst the destruction, the Laguna itself remained untouched, as though the heart of La Gomera had been somehow protected.

Many other areas were not so lucky. Over the next few hours we visit a number of sites where the impact of the fire is visible at first-hand.

The first stop is down a tree-lined path that drops from the roadside into the forest.

“This part here is a sort of sanctuary, but just a little further… , ” Ricardo says, leaving the sentence hanging in the still, early-morning air as we walk on.

Minutes later it’s like we’ve stumbled into another world. All around us the remains of thirty-foot heather trees stand, blackened and broken, the charred skeletons frozen in their final, terrifying moments, reaching up to the sky and calling out for help that never came.

“Some of the burned trees had to be cut down but we have learned that it is better for the new plants to leave some standing, especially the heather. Even like this they bring water to the soil and allow new life.”

Other areas reveal similar themes but with different details. Echoing Mr Fernandez, Ricardo believes a range of approaches is necessary to treat the diverse problems that scatter the park.

“In some places the trees are re-growing on their own and, in time, the forest will be fine. In others we have planted a lot of trees to help nature recover a little faster.”

A little later, and just a few miles down the road, we are walking through another of the fire-damaged sites when a familiar looking shrub catches my eye. It is a variety of gorse native to the Canary Islands which, according to Ricardo, is both a blessing and curse.

“It helps to repair the soil by providing nitrogen,” he tells me. “In some areas we have to let it grow because without it other plants will not be able to survive, but it is also dangerous. It burns very quickly and we are always worried about another fire.”

“We have to be careful to get it right.”

He pauses for a moment, looking out over valley below.

Then, with the same blend of confidence and determination that I saw twenty-four hours earlier, he adds: “Some areas will take many years to recover but it will be ok. We will keep working.”

“The forest belongs to everyone and we must protect it for the future.”

This Author

James McEnaney is a lecturer and writer based in Glasgow, Scotland. A columnist for the CommonSpace news website, he writes regularly for other publications including the Daily Record, often with a focus on education and politics. Follow him here @mrmcenaney.

WITNESS is our new Blog series, which invites contributors to explore the ecological and social impact of issues currently on their radar

At the end of last year, Ecotricity announced that they had found an alternative to fracking: green gas from grass, “grown on marginal farmland, of which Britain has enough to heat almost every home“.

Ecotricity’s bioenergy vision looks far more attractive than many others: it does not involve importing any feedstock, converting food to energy, or cutting down any trees.

Instead, Ecotricity wants to see millions of hectares of low-biodiversity grasslands restored to species-rich flowering meadows which would support wildflowers and the pollinators and many other species that depend on them.

With 97% of England’s and 90% of Scotland’s species-rich grassland having been lost since the 1940s, this seems an enticing idea. The mown grass would be turned first into silage, then into biogas, and then be upgraded to biomethane, which would be fed into the National Gas Grid.

Biofuelwatch usually investigates destructive bioenergy investments, often by corporations or start-up companies with little regard for people or the environment. We decided to investigate Ecotricity’s proposal for a very different reason: we wanted to find out whether such an attractive proposition, made by a company with an excellent environmental track record, might indeed be able to deliver genuinely low-carbon and sustainable bioenergy.

The land take: ‘just’ 10 million hectares

The biggest problem with bioenergy is always its land footprint: Generating one unit of energy from plants requires many times more land than generating it from any other source of energy, including wind and solar power. We therefore asked how much land would be required to replace all natural gas currently used to heat UK homes at present.

Just one peer-reviewed study seems to have been published on this topic and its key land use figure closely resembles information contained in Ecotricity’s successfully planning application for a ‘green gas mill’ near Winchester.

By using the figure in the study and Government figures for UK natural gas use for heating, we calculated that replacing all of that gas with biomethane from grass would require at least 10.2 million hectares of land.

Ecotricity claims that, by 2035, they could replace all gas used for home heating by using 5 million hectares of land for grass, but their estimate relies on the assumption that domestic gas use will fall by around 50% between now and 2035.

But this is a very optimistic assumption, given that the Government has all but abolished support for the home energy efficiency measures and solar roofs. The only driver behind falling domestic gas use which they have not removed is fuel poverty.

This area, 10.2 million hectares, is equivalent to 92% of the UK’s grassland area, and is more than double the UK’s area of cropland.

What about the livestock?

Turning most UK grasslands over to biomethane production would all but end livestock grazing, at a time when UK meat and dairy consumption are rising. It would make the UK almost entirely dependent either on meat and dairy imports, or on animal feed imports for domestic factory farms.

Intensive livestock farming, including growing soya and other feed, is a major cause of deforestation, particularly in Latin America. Excess nitrogen from factory farms and dense cattle ranches pollutes water and harms biodiversity as well as the climate (via nitrous oxide emissions).

However biodiverse and climate friendly the UK impacts of ‘green gas from grass’ might be, the indirect greenhouse gas emissions and impacts on biodiverse ecosystems would be anything but benign.

Ecotricity’s vision of flowering meadows grown for biomethane in the UK seems highly unlikely, too: to maximise yields and thus income, farmers will have to select the highest-yielding grass species, use nitrogen fertilisers which, even if they are made from biogas residues, will still reduce species richness, and they will likely have to use herbicides, too. Maximising grass silage yields is not compatible with managing grasslands for wildlife.

So, the indirect impacts on biodiversity and greenhouse gas emissions are likely to be severe.

The fugitive methane problem

What about the direct greenhouse gas emissions from biomethane plants? Nitrogen fertilisers are the main reason why atmospheric levels of the powerful greenhouse gas nitrous oxide (N₂O) are rising worldwide. And compared to most ‘energy crops’ for biofuels or biogas, biomethane from grass would result in lower N₂O emissions.

Grass requires much less nitrogen fertilisers than crops, and residues from biogas digestion can replace some nitrogen fertilisers, cutting nitrous oxide emissions from fertiliser production, though not eliminating such emissions from soils. Furthermore, the proposed biomethane plants would be small enough to keep transport distances and thus transport fuel use down.

Unfortunately, however, producing biogas and upgrading it to biomethane carries a different and potentially serious climate risk: that of methane leaks. Methane is 28 times as powerful as carbon dioxide over a 100-year period, so any significant methane losses will not only cancel out any greenhouse gas savings from ‘green gas from grass’, but could turn it into a high-carbon fuel.

Methane can leak from silage clamps, from biogas digesters and from the plants in which the biogas is upgraded. Methane leaks from biogas digesters range from 0.1% to 6%. The technology which Ecotricity wants to use to upgrade the biogas is designed for 1-1.5% methane leakage, though a Swedish study published in 2003 reported 10% of methane leaking from an upgrading plant.

Methane leaks, of course, are a major concern for fracking, too, with one study suggesting a 12% leakage rate from US fracking. Any fuel associated with significant methane leaks – even a ‘green’ one – is bad news for the climate.

Leaks from biogas and biomethane production can be minimised with good practice, but without any requirement to monitor them, there are no guarantees of that happening. We are concerned that Ecotricity has not acknowledged methane leakage as a serious concern to be addressed, either on their website or in their successful planning application for a first plant of this type.

The limits of photosynthesis

Ultimately, Ecotricity’s ‘green gas’ vision must fail because it comes up against the fundamental limits of photosynthesis: no plant converts as much solar radiation to chemical energy as sugar cane growing in the tropics, which can convert up to 2.4% of the energy from the sun. In the temperate UK climate, the maximum is 1.3%. Much of that energy is then lost during conversion to bioenergy.

For example, biogas contains around 45% carbon dioxide, all of which is vented straight into the atmosphere during biomethane production. Solar PV is of course most efficient closer to the equator, yet even in the UK, it easily achieves a conversion rate of 9%.

This is the reason why bioenergy will always require far more land than any other source of energy, including wind and solar power.

It’s also why sustainable large-scale bioenergy will always remain wishful thinking. There is a case to be made for biogas from genuine waste, such as sewage or food waste (as long as it does not compete with composting), but these sources will only ever be able to supply a very small fraction of current energy use.

But we shouldn’t be too tough on Ecotricity. Clearly, it would be far better if the company was to continue investing in wind turbines alone. Sadly, this choice has been taken away from them by the Government, which has removed subsidies from virtually all new onshore wind as well as solar capacity, and which has skewed planning rules in England against wind power and in favour of fracking.

At the same time, the Government has made the most obvious solution to UK dependence on gas – insulating our leaky, inefficient housing stock – impossible by removing support for that, too, while failing to comply with or enforce EU and UK energy efficiency laws that require all new buildings to be “nearly zero-energy buildings” by 2020.

Almuth Ernsting is a co-director of Biofuelwatch and has been reseasrching and campaigning against large-scale industrial biofuels and biomass electricity since 2006.

More information: Please see Biofuelwatch for a fully referenced briefing on this topic.

As consumers we have a habit of buying too much food, often more than we can consume within specified use-by dates. This leads to mountains of food being ditched in the bin – adding to waste and impacting on resources such as energy, water and manpower, not to mention the impact on global warming.

Around 795 million people go hungry on any given day around the world, yet if we all did more to alleviate food waste we could get closer to dealing with world hunger. In one year a third of all food produced globally is binned; that’s 1.3 billion tons in weight, worth more than $1 trillion.

A new study conducted by SaveOnEnergy has revealed that the average American wastes enough food in a year to power a lightbulb for two weeks yet according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) global hunger could be alleviated if just 25 percent of food wasted each year was saved instead.

Rachel Wallach, a spokesperson for the Creative Team at SaveOnEnergy.com, which produced this report, says: “The majority of food waste in the U.S. comes from homes. Consumers generate a whopping $144 billion worth of discarded food, so taking steps to reduce waste can start at home. Composting, a common method of recycling organic material, can convert food waste into humus. This can then be used to nourish growth in gardens and crops. Consumers can also plan meals in advance to only buy necessary groceries and rearrange the fridge so the most perishable items are in front and in reach!

“Recycling all materials is important for the environment and the economy, but food waste is often overlooked. Food loss along the production line is also a key  contributor to waste but most food wastage tends to occur at the consumer level. Consumers stock up their refrigerators with more food than they can eat before recommended “best-by” dates. As a result, a large portion of uneaten food is thrown out and replaced by more food– which may later go uneaten.”

In the UK 10 million tonnes of food is wasted each year, with 50% of that coming from our own homes according to the website lovefoodhatewaste.com.

The UK Government is working with the Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP) and businesses on voluntary agreements to reduce food and packaging waste but more could be done to bring in a recognised framework to reduce food waste from homes and businesses.

The main culprits for ending up in the garbage pile are dairy products, fresh fruit and vegetables, however these foods can all be composted so easily, putting nutrients back into the soil. It could also be turned into biogas as a fuel, or used as animal feed.

Currently in America just nine of the top 25 most populated cities have some form of food waste policy. A Mandatory Commercial Organics Recycling law was recently passed in California which requires all businesses to recycle their organic waste, with the Californian Government initiative CalRecycle including online resources that help consumers manage food waste. Workshops have also been taking place in support of a newly proposed Food Waste Prevention Grant Program.

Austin, Texas is also leading the war on waste as voters unanimously called for a city ordinance that requires all restaurants to sort their compostable waste.

Many businesses in New York City have taken part in a Zero Waste Challenge. For this initiative restaurants composted organic waste, trained chefs to improve meal planning, reduced the amount of food produced after peak periods, and donated surplus food to an NGO that provides meals to the city’s homeless shelters. An incredible 37,000 tonnes of waste was diverted thanks to the 31 companies that took part in the challenge, more than 24,5000 tonnes of organic material was composted and 322 tonnes of food was donated.

A list of organisations working to fight food waste in the US can be found here.

In developed countries the main contributor to food waste is consumers who make up 43 % of the problem. This cycle of buying too much and then throwing food away could waste as much as 74 billion pounds of food a year.

All the way along the supply chain food is being thrown with less than 10% of food waste generated by consumer-facing businesses and consumers is recycled annually – that’s around 52 million tonnes.

Just small changes can make a huge impact to the level of food waste created.

In Europe better policies are needed according to a recent report by the European Court of Auditors.

In the UK, Wrap offers guidance on lessening food waste and America has the Food Waste Alliance.

Read Saveonenergy.com’s full report on food waste in America here.

For advice on how we as consumers can minimize the amount of food waste we produce, visit http://www.lovefoodhatewaste.com/

This Author

Laura Briggs is the Ecologist UK-based news reporter. You can follow her here @WordsbyBriggs

At the end of last year, Ecotricity announced that they had found an alternative to fracking: green gas from grass, “grown on marginal farmland, of which Britain has enough to heat almost every home“.

Ecotricity’s bioenergy vision looks far more attractive than many others: it does not involve importing any feedstock, converting food to energy, or cutting down any trees.

Instead, Ecotricity wants to see millions of hectares of low-biodiversity grasslands restored to species-rich flowering meadows which would support wildflowers and the pollinators and many other species that depend on them.

With 97% of England’s and 90% of Scotland’s species-rich grassland having been lost since the 1940s, this seems an enticing idea. The mown grass would be turned first into silage, then into biogas, and then be upgraded to biomethane, which would be fed into the National Gas Grid.

Biofuelwatch usually investigates destructive bioenergy investments, often by corporations or start-up companies with little regard for people or the environment. We decided to investigate Ecotricity’s proposal for a very different reason: we wanted to find out whether such an attractive proposition, made by a company with an excellent environmental track record, might indeed be able to deliver genuinely low-carbon and sustainable bioenergy.

The land take: ‘just’ 10 million hectares

The biggest problem with bioenergy is always its land footprint: Generating one unit of energy from plants requires many times more land than generating it from any other source of energy, including wind and solar power. We therefore asked how much land would be required to replace all natural gas currently used to heat UK homes at present.

Just one peer-reviewed study seems to have been published on this topic and its key land use figure closely resembles information contained in Ecotricity’s successfully planning application for a ‘green gas mill’ near Winchester.

By using the figure in the study and Government figures for UK natural gas use for heating, we calculated that replacing all of that gas with biomethane from grass would require at least 10.2 million hectares of land.

Ecotricity claims that, by 2035, they could replace all gas used for home heating by using 5 million hectares of land for grass, but their estimate relies on the assumption that domestic gas use will fall by around 50% between now and 2035.

But this is a very optimistic assumption, given that the Government has all but abolished support for the home energy efficiency measures and solar roofs. The only driver behind falling domestic gas use which they have not removed is fuel poverty.

This area, 10.2 million hectares, is equivalent to 92% of the UK’s grassland area, and is more than double the UK’s area of cropland.

What about the livestock?

Turning most UK grasslands over to biomethane production would all but end livestock grazing, at a time when UK meat and dairy consumption are rising. It would make the UK almost entirely dependent either on meat and dairy imports, or on animal feed imports for domestic factory farms.

Intensive livestock farming, including growing soya and other feed, is a major cause of deforestation, particularly in Latin America. Excess nitrogen from factory farms and dense cattle ranches pollutes water and harms biodiversity as well as the climate (via nitrous oxide emissions).

However biodiverse and climate friendly the UK impacts of ‘green gas from grass’ might be, the indirect greenhouse gas emissions and impacts on biodiverse ecosystems would be anything but benign.

Ecotricity’s vision of flowering meadows grown for biomethane in the UK seems highly unlikely, too: to maximise yields and thus income, farmers will have to select the highest-yielding grass species, use nitrogen fertilisers which, even if they are made from biogas residues, will still reduce species richness, and they will likely have to use herbicides, too. Maximising grass silage yields is not compatible with managing grasslands for wildlife.

So, the indirect impacts on biodiversity and greenhouse gas emissions are likely to be severe.

The fugitive methane problem

What about the direct greenhouse gas emissions from biomethane plants? Nitrogen fertilisers are the main reason why atmospheric levels of the powerful greenhouse gas nitrous oxide (N₂O) are rising worldwide. And compared to most ‘energy crops’ for biofuels or biogas, biomethane from grass would result in lower N₂O emissions.

Grass requires much less nitrogen fertilisers than crops, and residues from biogas digestion can replace some nitrogen fertilisers, cutting nitrous oxide emissions from fertiliser production, though not eliminating such emissions from soils. Furthermore, the proposed biomethane plants would be small enough to keep transport distances and thus transport fuel use down.

Unfortunately, however, producing biogas and upgrading it to biomethane carries a different and potentially serious climate risk: that of methane leaks. Methane is 28 times as powerful as carbon dioxide over a 100-year period, so any significant methane losses will not only cancel out any greenhouse gas savings from ‘green gas from grass’, but could turn it into a high-carbon fuel.

Methane can leak from silage clamps, from biogas digesters and from the plants in which the biogas is upgraded. Methane leaks from biogas digesters range from 0.1% to 6%. The technology which Ecotricity wants to use to upgrade the biogas is designed for 1-1.5% methane leakage, though a Swedish study published in 2003 reported 10% of methane leaking from an upgrading plant.

Methane leaks, of course, are a major concern for fracking, too, with one study suggesting a 12% leakage rate from US fracking. Any fuel associated with significant methane leaks – even a ‘green’ one – is bad news for the climate.

Leaks from biogas and biomethane production can be minimised with good practice, but without any requirement to monitor them, there are no guarantees of that happening. We are concerned that Ecotricity has not acknowledged methane leakage as a serious concern to be addressed, either on their website or in their successful planning application for a first plant of this type.

The limits of photosynthesis

Ultimately, Ecotricity’s ‘green gas’ vision must fail because it comes up against the fundamental limits of photosynthesis: no plant converts as much solar radiation to chemical energy as sugar cane growing in the tropics, which can convert up to 2.4% of the energy from the sun. In the temperate UK climate, the maximum is 1.3%. Much of that energy is then lost during conversion to bioenergy.

For example, biogas contains around 45% carbon dioxide, all of which is vented straight into the atmosphere during biomethane production. Solar PV is of course most efficient closer to the equator, yet even in the UK, it easily achieves a conversion rate of 9%.

This is the reason why bioenergy will always require far more land than any other source of energy, including wind and solar power.

It’s also why sustainable large-scale bioenergy will always remain wishful thinking. There is a case to be made for biogas from genuine waste, such as sewage or food waste (as long as it does not compete with composting), but these sources will only ever be able to supply a very small fraction of current energy use.

But we shouldn’t be too tough on Ecotricity. Clearly, it would be far better if the company was to continue investing in wind turbines alone. Sadly, this choice has been taken away from them by the Government, which has removed subsidies from virtually all new onshore wind as well as solar capacity, and which has skewed planning rules in England against wind power and in favour of fracking.

At the same time, the Government has made the most obvious solution to UK dependence on gas – insulating our leaky, inefficient housing stock – impossible by removing support for that, too, while failing to comply with or enforce EU and UK energy efficiency laws that require all new buildings to be “nearly zero-energy buildings” by 2020.

Almuth Ernsting is a co-director of Biofuelwatch and has been reseasrching and campaigning against large-scale industrial biofuels and biomass electricity since 2006.

More information: Please see Biofuelwatch for a fully referenced briefing on this topic.