The rarest and most endangered butterfly in Britain – the High Brown Fritillary – has been thrown a lifeline for 2018 in a new conservation project by the National Trust and its partners.

The charity is embarking on ambitious plans to develop 60 hectares of lowland heath and wood pasture – the butterfly’s principle habitat – to give it a fighting chance for the future. The project has been made possible as part of a £750,000 award made to the Trust by players of People’s Postcode Lottery.

Over the last 50 years, Britain’s population of High Brown Fritillaries has declined rapidly, due to changes in woodland management and, more recently, the abandonment of marginal hill land.

Natural landscape

Butterflies, including the High Brown Fritillary, need large areas of the countryside to survive in good numbers, and their populations have struggled where these habitats have been overwhelmed by pressures from agriculture and development.

Now, climate change and nitrogen deposition from the atmosphere are almost certainly contributing to the High Brown’s demise. Overall, the UK population has declined by 66% since the 1970s.

The exquisite Heddon Valley, on the Exmoor coast, is one of the few remaining strongholds where the Trust, with partners including Butterfly Conservation, has been working for years to save the species from extinction.

The £100k project will focus on restoring parts of the natural landscape along the Exmoor and North Devon coast to make it more suitable for the butterfly. Other wildlife including the Heath Fritillary, Nightjar and Dartford warbler will also benefit. High Brown Fritillaries can also be found on Dartmoor, in South Lakeland, Cumbria and at Morecambe Bay, Lancashire.

Matthew Oates, National Trust nature expert and butterfly enthusiast, said: “We’ve witnessed a catastrophic decline of many native butterfly populations in recent decades but initiatives like this can really help to turn the tide. Combined with increased recording and monitoring efforts, there is significant hope for some of our most threatened winged insects.

Reverse the declines

“The support we have from players of People’s Postcode Lottery for nature conservation, alongside continued support for Heritage Open Days, is a wonderful boost to our work in 2018.”

Clara Govier, Head of Charities at People’s Postcode Lottery, said: ‘We are thrilled that funding from players of  People’s Postcode Lottery to the National Trust has increased in 2018, supporting the charity’s nature programme for the first time, alongside continued support for Heritage Open Days.

“We are delighted to see players’ funding supporting significant conservation activity across England and Wales to improve a range of priority habitats, from coastal slopes and chalk grasslands, to woodland pasture, and to safeguard species that call these places home.”

Jenny Plackett, Butterfly Conservation’s Senior Regional Officer, said: “We’ve been working with the National Trust for many years to reverse the declines in the High Brown Fritillary on Exmoor, and I’m thrilled that players of People’s Postcode Lottery are supporting important management work in this landscape.

“Exmoor’s Heddon Valley supports the strongest population of High Brown Fritillary in England, but even here the butterfly remains at risk, and ongoing efforts to restore habitat and enable the butterfly to expand are crucial to its survival.”

As well as helping secure the future of High Brown Fritillaries, the £750k award from players of People’s Postcode Lottery will be used to fund several other National Trust conservation projects, along with continuing support for Heritage Open Days.

The National Trust is working with its tenants and partners to reverse the alarming decline in UK wildlife, aiming to restore 25,000 hectares of wildlife-rich habitat by 2025.

Matthew Oates added: “We are dedicated to protecting struggling wildlife like the High Brown Fritillary, and saving our beautiful countryside for future generations. Policy-makers and supporters have key roles in helping us to achieve that ambition.”

This Author

Harry Shepherd is a spokesperson for the National Trust. 

Taking the mountain lift from the main promenade in Davos almost vertically upward, the commotion of the Open Forum falls steadily away, replaced by the majestic panorama of the Swiss Alps. 

It is here, not so far from the madding crowd, that a collaboration between Lancaster University, British Antarctic Survey (BAS) and the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest Snow and Landscape Research (WSL) have set-up their Arctic Basecamp, with the intention of reminding world leaders of the risks posed by drastic changes that are taking place in the polar Arctic.

But the question is, against the backdrop of the US President’s daft and misinformed commentary on climate change: is the agenda moving fast enough in the right direction to avoid global catastrophe?

All angles

Throughout the week the Arctic Basecamp have been posting videos from visitors that include Al Gore and Christiana Figueres. The night before, Dr Jennifer Francis dropped by. Francis is the scientist linking the loss of Arctic sea ice to changes in the jet stream, which is turn is driving extreme weather events. 

Professor Gail Whiteman from Lancaster University is holding fort when I arrive and is upbeat about the attention they have been getting in Davos.

“I think that is the interesting thing about Davos – both the informal and the organised events. Last night there was a lot of people walking passed the Basecamp who didn’t know very much about the Arctic or climate change. That gives us the chance to give them a bit of information and show them the data that we have.”

Whiteman adds that, just before I arrived, Benjamin Netanyahu had stopped by and was asking questions about their work. That is certainly high-profile but one imagines that his reasons for being in Davos have little to do with Arctic change.

When I ask Whiteman if the momentum for climate discussion is growing, she replies: “Well I think the World Economic Forum has seen the risks from climate change for the last few years.

“The global risk report has been listing climate change as an important risk to pay attention to. So for the forum staff that is not news. I think what is news is how climate change is increasingly part of the agenda discussions and that it is coming in from all angles.”

Raising the spectre

While that is true, the big driver of Arctic change is global emissions from our use of fossil fuels, and currently we still do not have a price on carbon pollution that can accelerate global environmental restoration on the scale required. 

It is well known here that many of the big institutional investors remain loath to drop their high carbon polluting investments, and governments are still very slow to stop giving subsidies to high polluting industries. 

President Trump’s arrival here in Davos, as reported in the US media, is an opportunity for him to gloat about his tax cuts given to the wealthiest people in the US, whilst signalling to foreign businesses that America is open for just about anything profit making.

These incumbent forces, including world leaders in business and politics, are still committed to their economic models of continuing growth at whatever cost. Earth systems, conversely, are strained and climate change is kicking in.

“These impacts raise the spectre of a global food crisis that could lead to a cascade through the World Economic Forum’s ‘global risk report’ list, that includes economic collapse, “profound social instability” and “large-scale involuntary migration”,  that we are not by any means prepared for.

Getting graphene

The promenade in Davos is lined with corporate giants, as well as national economic and commercial delegations, hosting all manner of meetings and panels. It is surreal and lively at the same time.

The CryptoHQ is a pop-up networking and event hub for the newly minted blockchain generation. These young trendier visitors are talking about decentralising payments systems, making them cheaper, faster and safer, as well as a myriad of other mind boggling projects.

I interviewed Juan Boluda Soler, CFO at Climate Coin, a new blockchain initiative that is gearing itself to be in step with the growth of global carbon markets, predicted to become a key mechanism for building trust in how carbon fees are collected and then delivered directly to environmental restoration projects around the world. Soler highlights the implementation of the Paris Agreement as a signal that carbon pricing is on the way.

In the ‘Ukrainian House Davos’, a panel of investors discuss the merits of investing in the Ukraine. Blockchain and clean energy storage seem to be on peoples minds.

One of the panelists says that “whoever cracks getting graphene cheaply will be the first trillion dollar company!” Although he doesn’t expand on this discussion it is a powerful statement when it comes to abundant clean energy storage.

The same speaker observes that a generation ago the big players in Davos were the guys with assets in the ground. Today the big companies are those whose assets are in the cloud, in the form of data.

Joining the dots

As it stands, everyone knows that the Paris Agreement falls well short of safeguarding the world against climate impacts. The rhetoric now tends toward words like “ratcheting up ambition”, meaning that efforts to lower the rates of carbon emissions will need to be exponentially increased if we are to stay below 1.5ºC (itself reckoned to cause a very dangerous level of global warming).

Blockchain maybe the buzz of many tech-savvy young people, but these same people are having to design their future from the ground up. It’s a future they will inherit from my own and previous generations in very poor condition.

It is heartening to meet the people joining the dots on climate change and endeavouring to solve issues like linking carbon pricing to global restoration.

The climate change summit in California in September of this year should lay the foundation for setting a price on carbon that could make subsequent agreements at the UNFCCC’s COP24 in November, a much easier gambit. It will be at the COP that the ratchet mechanism for reducing carbon emissions is enacted and those blockchain experts with solutions at the ready could well be finding themselves in great demand for generations to come.

Tremendous support

Looking out from the Basecamp at the frozen rugged landscape, the trends that dominate political and commercial agendas also have enormous consequences for us as individuals, where ever we live in the world. 

The World Economic Forum needs an avalanche of youth contributing to the conversation that is defining their future. What does the world they want to live in look like? What are the steps to achieving it? 

Trump has just arrived and I ask Professor Gail Whiteman what she thinks the impact of his dismantling America’s climate polices will be. She doesn’t seem too disheartened.

“My experience is that globally there is a tremendous support for the low carbon economy and the transformation that we need amongst business leaders. I think that is unstoppable. While there is always going to be some who are behind the curve of change, even in the North American context, we are still in. You see how strong that is and it contains both governmental actors at the state level, or city level, or civil society, as well as business leaders.

So I think that fixing the problem is not dependent on one administrations actions. I think it is about the global movement forward and I think that that is continuing.”

This Author

Nick Breeze is a climate change reporter and interviewer and co-founder of the Cambridge Climate Lecture Series taking place at Trinity College, Cambridge starting on 12th February at 7:30. Lectures will be live streamed. Follow Nick on Twitter: @NickGBreeze

The rarest and most endangered butterfly in Britain – the High Brown Fritillary – has been thrown a lifeline for 2018 in a new conservation project by the National Trust and its partners.

The charity is embarking on ambitious plans to develop 60 hectares of lowland heath and wood pasture – the butterfly’s principle habitat – to give it a fighting chance for the future. The project has been made possible as part of a £750,000 award made to the Trust by players of People’s Postcode Lottery.

Over the last 50 years, Britain’s population of High Brown Fritillaries has declined rapidly, due to changes in woodland management and, more recently, the abandonment of marginal hill land.

Natural landscape

Butterflies, including the High Brown Fritillary, need large areas of the countryside to survive in good numbers, and their populations have struggled where these habitats have been overwhelmed by pressures from agriculture and development.

Now, climate change and nitrogen deposition from the atmosphere are almost certainly contributing to the High Brown’s demise. Overall, the UK population has declined by 66% since the 1970s.

The exquisite Heddon Valley, on the Exmoor coast, is one of the few remaining strongholds where the Trust, with partners including Butterfly Conservation, has been working for years to save the species from extinction.

The £100k project will focus on restoring parts of the natural landscape along the Exmoor and North Devon coast to make it more suitable for the butterfly. Other wildlife including the Heath Fritillary, Nightjar and Dartford warbler will also benefit. High Brown Fritillaries can also be found on Dartmoor, in South Lakeland, Cumbria and at Morecambe Bay, Lancashire.

Matthew Oates, National Trust nature expert and butterfly enthusiast, said: “We’ve witnessed a catastrophic decline of many native butterfly populations in recent decades but initiatives like this can really help to turn the tide. Combined with increased recording and monitoring efforts, there is significant hope for some of our most threatened winged insects.

Reverse the declines

“The support we have from players of People’s Postcode Lottery for nature conservation, alongside continued support for Heritage Open Days, is a wonderful boost to our work in 2018.”

Clara Govier, Head of Charities at People’s Postcode Lottery, said: ‘We are thrilled that funding from players of  People’s Postcode Lottery to the National Trust has increased in 2018, supporting the charity’s nature programme for the first time, alongside continued support for Heritage Open Days.

“We are delighted to see players’ funding supporting significant conservation activity across England and Wales to improve a range of priority habitats, from coastal slopes and chalk grasslands, to woodland pasture, and to safeguard species that call these places home.”

Jenny Plackett, Butterfly Conservation’s Senior Regional Officer, said: “We’ve been working with the National Trust for many years to reverse the declines in the High Brown Fritillary on Exmoor, and I’m thrilled that players of People’s Postcode Lottery are supporting important management work in this landscape.

“Exmoor’s Heddon Valley supports the strongest population of High Brown Fritillary in England, but even here the butterfly remains at risk, and ongoing efforts to restore habitat and enable the butterfly to expand are crucial to its survival.”

As well as helping secure the future of High Brown Fritillaries, the £750k award from players of People’s Postcode Lottery will be used to fund several other National Trust conservation projects, along with continuing support for Heritage Open Days.

The National Trust is working with its tenants and partners to reverse the alarming decline in UK wildlife, aiming to restore 25,000 hectares of wildlife-rich habitat by 2025.

Matthew Oates added: “We are dedicated to protecting struggling wildlife like the High Brown Fritillary, and saving our beautiful countryside for future generations. Policy-makers and supporters have key roles in helping us to achieve that ambition.”

This Author

Harry Shepherd is a spokesperson for the National Trust. 

Taking the mountain lift from the main promenade in Davos almost vertically upward, the commotion of the Open Forum falls steadily away, replaced by the majestic panorama of the Swiss Alps. 

It is here, not so far from the madding crowd, that a collaboration between Lancaster University, British Antarctic Survey (BAS) and the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest Snow and Landscape Research (WSL) have set-up their Arctic Basecamp, with the intention of reminding world leaders of the risks posed by drastic changes that are taking place in the polar Arctic.

But the question is, against the backdrop of the US President’s daft and misinformed commentary on climate change: is the agenda moving fast enough in the right direction to avoid global catastrophe?

All angles

Throughout the week the Arctic Basecamp have been posting videos from visitors that include Al Gore and Christiana Figueres. The night before, Dr Jennifer Francis dropped by. Francis is the scientist linking the loss of Arctic sea ice to changes in the jet stream, which is turn is driving extreme weather events. 

Professor Gail Whiteman from Lancaster University is holding fort when I arrive and is upbeat about the attention they have been getting in Davos.

“I think that is the interesting thing about Davos – both the informal and the organised events. Last night there was a lot of people walking passed the Basecamp who didn’t know very much about the Arctic or climate change. That gives us the chance to give them a bit of information and show them the data that we have.”

Whiteman adds that, just before I arrived, Benjamin Netanyahu had stopped by and was asking questions about their work. That is certainly high-profile but one imagines that his reasons for being in Davos have little to do with Arctic change.

When I ask Whiteman if the momentum for climate discussion is growing, she replies: “Well I think the World Economic Forum has seen the risks from climate change for the last few years.

“The global risk report has been listing climate change as an important risk to pay attention to. So for the forum staff that is not news. I think what is news is how climate change is increasingly part of the agenda discussions and that it is coming in from all angles.”

Raising the spectre

While that is true, the big driver of Arctic change is global emissions from our use of fossil fuels, and currently we still do not have a price on carbon pollution that can accelerate global environmental restoration on the scale required. 

It is well known here that many of the big institutional investors remain loath to drop their high carbon polluting investments, and governments are still very slow to stop giving subsidies to high polluting industries. 

President Trump’s arrival here in Davos, as reported in the US media, is an opportunity for him to gloat about his tax cuts given to the wealthiest people in the US, whilst signalling to foreign businesses that America is open for just about anything profit making.

These incumbent forces, including world leaders in business and politics, are still committed to their economic models of continuing growth at whatever cost. Earth systems, conversely, are strained and climate change is kicking in.

“These impacts raise the spectre of a global food crisis that could lead to a cascade through the World Economic Forum’s ‘global risk report’ list, that includes economic collapse, “profound social instability” and “large-scale involuntary migration”,  that we are not by any means prepared for.

Getting graphene

The promenade in Davos is lined with corporate giants, as well as national economic and commercial delegations, hosting all manner of meetings and panels. It is surreal and lively at the same time.

The CryptoHQ is a pop-up networking and event hub for the newly minted blockchain generation. These young trendier visitors are talking about decentralising payments systems, making them cheaper, faster and safer, as well as a myriad of other mind boggling projects.

I interviewed Juan Boluda Soler, CFO at Climate Coin, a new blockchain initiative that is gearing itself to be in step with the growth of global carbon markets, predicted to become a key mechanism for building trust in how carbon fees are collected and then delivered directly to environmental restoration projects around the world. Soler highlights the implementation of the Paris Agreement as a signal that carbon pricing is on the way.

In the ‘Ukrainian House Davos’, a panel of investors discuss the merits of investing in the Ukraine. Blockchain and clean energy storage seem to be on peoples minds.

One of the panelists says that “whoever cracks getting graphene cheaply will be the first trillion dollar company!” Although he doesn’t expand on this discussion it is a powerful statement when it comes to abundant clean energy storage.

The same speaker observes that a generation ago the big players in Davos were the guys with assets in the ground. Today the big companies are those whose assets are in the cloud, in the form of data.

Joining the dots

As it stands, everyone knows that the Paris Agreement falls well short of safeguarding the world against climate impacts. The rhetoric now tends toward words like “ratcheting up ambition”, meaning that efforts to lower the rates of carbon emissions will need to be exponentially increased if we are to stay below 1.5ºC (itself reckoned to cause a very dangerous level of global warming).

Blockchain maybe the buzz of many tech-savvy young people, but these same people are having to design their future from the ground up. It’s a future they will inherit from my own and previous generations in very poor condition.

It is heartening to meet the people joining the dots on climate change and endeavouring to solve issues like linking carbon pricing to global restoration.

The climate change summit in California in September of this year should lay the foundation for setting a price on carbon that could make subsequent agreements at the UNFCCC’s COP24 in November, a much easier gambit. It will be at the COP that the ratchet mechanism for reducing carbon emissions is enacted and those blockchain experts with solutions at the ready could well be finding themselves in great demand for generations to come.

Tremendous support

Looking out from the Basecamp at the frozen rugged landscape, the trends that dominate political and commercial agendas also have enormous consequences for us as individuals, where ever we live in the world. 

The World Economic Forum needs an avalanche of youth contributing to the conversation that is defining their future. What does the world they want to live in look like? What are the steps to achieving it? 

Trump has just arrived and I ask Professor Gail Whiteman what she thinks the impact of his dismantling America’s climate polices will be. She doesn’t seem too disheartened.

“My experience is that globally there is a tremendous support for the low carbon economy and the transformation that we need amongst business leaders. I think that is unstoppable. While there is always going to be some who are behind the curve of change, even in the North American context, we are still in. You see how strong that is and it contains both governmental actors at the state level, or city level, or civil society, as well as business leaders.

So I think that fixing the problem is not dependent on one administrations actions. I think it is about the global movement forward and I think that that is continuing.”

This Author

Nick Breeze is a climate change reporter and interviewer and co-founder of the Cambridge Climate Lecture Series taking place at Trinity College, Cambridge starting on 12th February at 7:30. Lectures will be live streamed. Follow Nick on Twitter: @NickGBreeze

The rarest and most endangered butterfly in Britain – the High Brown Fritillary – has been thrown a lifeline for 2018 in a new conservation project by the National Trust and its partners.

The charity is embarking on ambitious plans to develop 60 hectares of lowland heath and wood pasture – the butterfly’s principle habitat – to give it a fighting chance for the future. The project has been made possible as part of a £750,000 award made to the Trust by players of People’s Postcode Lottery.

Over the last 50 years, Britain’s population of High Brown Fritillaries has declined rapidly, due to changes in woodland management and, more recently, the abandonment of marginal hill land.

Natural landscape

Butterflies, including the High Brown Fritillary, need large areas of the countryside to survive in good numbers, and their populations have struggled where these habitats have been overwhelmed by pressures from agriculture and development.

Now, climate change and nitrogen deposition from the atmosphere are almost certainly contributing to the High Brown’s demise. Overall, the UK population has declined by 66% since the 1970s.

The exquisite Heddon Valley, on the Exmoor coast, is one of the few remaining strongholds where the Trust, with partners including Butterfly Conservation, has been working for years to save the species from extinction.

The £100k project will focus on restoring parts of the natural landscape along the Exmoor and North Devon coast to make it more suitable for the butterfly. Other wildlife including the Heath Fritillary, Nightjar and Dartford warbler will also benefit. High Brown Fritillaries can also be found on Dartmoor, in South Lakeland, Cumbria and at Morecambe Bay, Lancashire.

Matthew Oates, National Trust nature expert and butterfly enthusiast, said: “We’ve witnessed a catastrophic decline of many native butterfly populations in recent decades but initiatives like this can really help to turn the tide. Combined with increased recording and monitoring efforts, there is significant hope for some of our most threatened winged insects.

Reverse the declines

“The support we have from players of People’s Postcode Lottery for nature conservation, alongside continued support for Heritage Open Days, is a wonderful boost to our work in 2018.”

Clara Govier, Head of Charities at People’s Postcode Lottery, said: ‘We are thrilled that funding from players of  People’s Postcode Lottery to the National Trust has increased in 2018, supporting the charity’s nature programme for the first time, alongside continued support for Heritage Open Days.

“We are delighted to see players’ funding supporting significant conservation activity across England and Wales to improve a range of priority habitats, from coastal slopes and chalk grasslands, to woodland pasture, and to safeguard species that call these places home.”

Jenny Plackett, Butterfly Conservation’s Senior Regional Officer, said: “We’ve been working with the National Trust for many years to reverse the declines in the High Brown Fritillary on Exmoor, and I’m thrilled that players of People’s Postcode Lottery are supporting important management work in this landscape.

“Exmoor’s Heddon Valley supports the strongest population of High Brown Fritillary in England, but even here the butterfly remains at risk, and ongoing efforts to restore habitat and enable the butterfly to expand are crucial to its survival.”

As well as helping secure the future of High Brown Fritillaries, the £750k award from players of People’s Postcode Lottery will be used to fund several other National Trust conservation projects, along with continuing support for Heritage Open Days.

The National Trust is working with its tenants and partners to reverse the alarming decline in UK wildlife, aiming to restore 25,000 hectares of wildlife-rich habitat by 2025.

Matthew Oates added: “We are dedicated to protecting struggling wildlife like the High Brown Fritillary, and saving our beautiful countryside for future generations. Policy-makers and supporters have key roles in helping us to achieve that ambition.”

This Author

Harry Shepherd is a spokesperson for the National Trust. 

The rarest and most endangered butterfly in Britain – the High Brown Fritillary – has been thrown a lifeline for 2018 in a new conservation project by the National Trust and its partners.

The charity is embarking on ambitious plans to develop 60 hectares of lowland heath and wood pasture – the butterfly’s principle habitat – to give it a fighting chance for the future. The project has been made possible as part of a £750,000 award made to the Trust by players of People’s Postcode Lottery.

Over the last 50 years, Britain’s population of High Brown Fritillaries has declined rapidly, due to changes in woodland management and, more recently, the abandonment of marginal hill land.

Natural landscape

Butterflies, including the High Brown Fritillary, need large areas of the countryside to survive in good numbers, and their populations have struggled where these habitats have been overwhelmed by pressures from agriculture and development.

Now, climate change and nitrogen deposition from the atmosphere are almost certainly contributing to the High Brown’s demise. Overall, the UK population has declined by 66% since the 1970s.

The exquisite Heddon Valley, on the Exmoor coast, is one of the few remaining strongholds where the Trust, with partners including Butterfly Conservation, has been working for years to save the species from extinction.

The £100k project will focus on restoring parts of the natural landscape along the Exmoor and North Devon coast to make it more suitable for the butterfly. Other wildlife including the Heath Fritillary, Nightjar and Dartford warbler will also benefit. High Brown Fritillaries can also be found on Dartmoor, in South Lakeland, Cumbria and at Morecambe Bay, Lancashire.

Matthew Oates, National Trust nature expert and butterfly enthusiast, said: “We’ve witnessed a catastrophic decline of many native butterfly populations in recent decades but initiatives like this can really help to turn the tide. Combined with increased recording and monitoring efforts, there is significant hope for some of our most threatened winged insects.

Reverse the declines

“The support we have from players of People’s Postcode Lottery for nature conservation, alongside continued support for Heritage Open Days, is a wonderful boost to our work in 2018.”

Clara Govier, Head of Charities at People’s Postcode Lottery, said: ‘We are thrilled that funding from players of  People’s Postcode Lottery to the National Trust has increased in 2018, supporting the charity’s nature programme for the first time, alongside continued support for Heritage Open Days.

“We are delighted to see players’ funding supporting significant conservation activity across England and Wales to improve a range of priority habitats, from coastal slopes and chalk grasslands, to woodland pasture, and to safeguard species that call these places home.”

Jenny Plackett, Butterfly Conservation’s Senior Regional Officer, said: “We’ve been working with the National Trust for many years to reverse the declines in the High Brown Fritillary on Exmoor, and I’m thrilled that players of People’s Postcode Lottery are supporting important management work in this landscape.

“Exmoor’s Heddon Valley supports the strongest population of High Brown Fritillary in England, but even here the butterfly remains at risk, and ongoing efforts to restore habitat and enable the butterfly to expand are crucial to its survival.”

As well as helping secure the future of High Brown Fritillaries, the £750k award from players of People’s Postcode Lottery will be used to fund several other National Trust conservation projects, along with continuing support for Heritage Open Days.

The National Trust is working with its tenants and partners to reverse the alarming decline in UK wildlife, aiming to restore 25,000 hectares of wildlife-rich habitat by 2025.

Matthew Oates added: “We are dedicated to protecting struggling wildlife like the High Brown Fritillary, and saving our beautiful countryside for future generations. Policy-makers and supporters have key roles in helping us to achieve that ambition.”

This Author

Harry Shepherd is a spokesperson for the National Trust. 

Bees across Europe can take a buzz of relief: it now looks likely there will be a total ban on harmful neonicotinoid pesticides before the year is out.

Last week, MEPs from the Agriculture and Rural Affairs committee in the European Parliament, voted unanimously to safeguard our valuable pollinators from destructive noenicitinoids in a report on the Prospects and Challenges in the Apiculture Sector.

The European Commission look set to follow suit and implement a total ban on the harmful pesticides, that have been shown to decimate bees and other pollinating insects. Noenicitinoids are already banned on flowering crops in EU countries.

Record on pesticides

This move has been far less publicised than Michael Gove’s announcement late last year that he plans to ban neonicotinoids in the UK.

Many were cautiously delighted to hear that, after years of campaigning, an environment minister was willing to sound the death knell on these toxins.

Noenicitinoids have been proven to alter bees’ navigation ability – vital for tracking down the pollen that is their key food source – as well as hampering their ability to fly.

Large scale field trials have shown conclusively that these pesticides have led to overall decline in the numbers of bees and other insects.

But before the bees get too carried away, let’s not lose sight of the Tories’ record on pesticides and environmental legislation.

Public domain

To understand the generalised scepticism around Gove’s new-found love of bees we have to look back only as far as 2013, when his good friend, and then environment secretary, Owen Paterson, tried to block the European Commission’s proposal to restrict the use of neonics.

That attempt failed, but in 2015 the government gagged its own Expert Committee on Pesticides (ECP) after they refused to back an application by the National Farmers Union to lift the EU ban on bee-harming chemicals.

Defra blocked the publication of minutes from a meeting on whether to authorise the use of neonics on rapeseed crops for ‘emergency’ use.

The government subsequently granted the use of these harmful chemicals on oil rapeseed crops. Given the record of successive Tory governments, we have to question who will be calling the shots on pesticides post-Brexit.

Will Defra, the NFU and the ECP publish what they wish to and withhold anything that they don’t want in the public domain?

Precautionary approach

The UK’s pesticide experts have since reviewed scientific evidence. In October last year they advised the government that the ‘extension of the current restrictions [on neonicotinoids] could be justified’ based on new scientific evidence that has emerged.

This is a positive development of sorts, but we should beware the agri-lobby, who are constantly circling like angry bees ready to pounce.

On the one hand they claim a lack of ‘science-based’ research, while on the other they seize upon industry-funded studies claiming a substance to be safe for use in agricultural production.

This is where the precautionary principle is so important – and why Greens are deeply concerned that the amendment to include this fundamentally important legal principle, enshrined in EU law, never even got to be discussed or voted on during debates on the EU Withdrawal Bill.

We have to remain sceptical of Gove et al who have heeded the warnings made by scientists and NGOs on neonicotinoids but refuse to adopt the precautionary approach towards other harmful substances.

New chemicals

As the government slowly unveil their plans for post-Brexit environmental legislation, we have to read between the blurred lines. For instance, the ‘commitments’ laid out in the 25-year plan on biodiversity, plastic waste reduction and air quality are vague at best.

On chemicals regulation the lack of mention of the REACH (registration, evaluation, authorisation and restriction) programme is deeply worrying. This could signal the government’s intention to rebuff expertise and regulation from the EU on chemicals and pesticides.

With no regulatory Body in sight to replace the European Chemicals and Health Agency (ECHA) what is to stop the agri-chemical companies having a ‘field day’; letting loose a range of new chemicals that will further destroy insect populations?

There are serious questions of competence and capacity at government level after the UK has left the EU. Over the decades, the EU has developed complex and thorough (albeit flawed) mechanisms for evaluating and authorising chemical substances that find their way into our food chain and into other products that we consume.

The EU evaluates pesticides through its REACH programme, under which the EU has the largest database on the properties of chemical substances in the world.

Protective legislation

According to the ECHA, “the United Kingdom will no longer have access to [those] databases or participate in… regulatory, enforcement coordination or other processes” after Brexit.

Where will the government source its research and expertise now? Will the UK have to rely on its own government-funded institutes, or contract studies from elsewhere?

And how much will this cost? I fear that industry-funded studies will become the backbone of UK policymaking on pesticides and environmental legislation in the coming years.

Against the background of a government that has repeatedly blocked protective legislation at EU level; has done nothing to defend the precautionary principle, and has no plan for a system of chemicals regulation outside the EU, is it any wonder that Greens greet Gove’s new green pose with such scepticism?

This Author

Molly Scott Cato is Green MEP for the South West of England and sits on the European Parliament’s Agriculture and Rural Affairs committee.

It is a mistake to think of Donald Trump as a climate change sceptic. If we believe Michael Wolff’s new insider account of the Trump White House, it is a mistake to think that Trump has any fixed view on climate change at all. 



In Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, Wolff paints a picture of a man who cannot or does not absorb information of any kind. A man who is too irritable and bored to talk about policy. And a man who is happy to leave complex decisions to anyone who seems able to take them off his hands. 



If we believe Wolff’s gossipy and salacious account, Trump is not a man on a mission to wreck climate policy. Rather, he’s a man who refuses to engage with it. A man who is happy to delegate ‘dealing’ with climate change to any of the bitter rivals surrounding him who will take the issue away. 



Reactionary populism

Wolff’s account leads us to believe that Trump is not a man with deeply held political views. Instead he argues we should understand Trump as a man with gut reactions that are as reactionary as they are random.

They are often – according to Wolff’s sources – not even in line with some of the most basic tenets of Republican thinking. Apparently during a meeting about how to repeal ObamaCare, Trump blurted out that free health care should be extended to everyone. 



Understanding the Trump administration’s approach to climate change is not about understanding Trump’s views on climate change. Instead it is about understanding how the power battles inside Trump’s White House shaped the administration’s decisions. 



Forming one part of the power battle around Trump is his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and daughter, Ivanka Trump.

Kushner was part of the campaign team, and then appointed senior advisor when Trump entered the White House. Kushner is a man with liberal political views and is an ex-Democrat supporter. Kushner disliked Trump’s reactionary populism. But the post was a chance for Kushner to propel himself to the highest levels of  global politics and business.

Protest at airports

According to Wolff, it was Kushner and Ivanka who choreographed Trump’s more presidential moments. Their goal was to present a more moderate, restrained globally acceptable version of Trump.

This put him on a conflict course with Steve Bannon, Trump’s now departed chief stategist. Bannon’s goal was the exact opposite. He wanted to make sure that the heart and soul of the Trump White House was fully bought into his vision of Trumpism.

For Banon, Trumpism meant nationalist, identitarian and populist. He believed that Trump supporters had voted for the absolute disruption of Washington elites.  Bannon wanted to show them this by creating as much chaos and disruption as possible. 



Bannon was not just interested in pushing through policies. He wanted to do so in a way that would antagonise American liberals as much as possible. Wolff claims that Bannon deliberately carried out no consultation the first ‘travel ban’.

This was a deliberate attempt to maximise chaos at airports. The ban came in on a Friday to make sure that its opponents would be able to protest at airports over the weekend.

Angry and losing

The aim was to create chaos and to draw out Trump’s opponents into angry demonstrations. This was all for the benefit of what Bannon saw as Trump’s core supporters. 



It is in this context that we have to see the US exit from the Paris Accord. Trump didn’t decide to take the US out of the agreement because of deeply held climate scepticism.

Nor did he do it because he believed it was what his supporters wanted. Or because he believed it was holding back the US economy. Wolff discourages us from thinking that Trump himself did it at all. 



Rather, it was an instance in which Bannon won out over Kushner in their bitter rivalry. Leaving the Paris Accord was something that would send “Social Justice Warriors” into protest and outrage.

This was exactly what Bannon was hoping for. News coverage of protesting liberals would speak powerfully to Trump’s supporters. They would see liberals angry and losing, and Trump fighting their corner and winning. 



Object of hate

For Kushner and Ivanka Trump, the Paris climate agreement had been something they wanted to protect.  For them it was a chance to present the administration as more responsible and less reactionary.

It was a chance for them to present an acceptable face of the administration to the world on an important international issue. The fact that Kushner saw it as such only fuelled Bannon’s desire to make sure the US left the agreement.

Bannon pushed to leave the agreement partly to enrage liberals, but also partly to enrage Kushner and Ivanka Trump. 



In the aftermath of the US exit from the Paris Accord, Elon Musk – CEO of solar power company Tesla – resigned from Trump’s business advisory committee. According to Wolff this was exactly the kind of reaction Bannon was hoping for.

Musk represented the wealthy, liberal, coastal elites that had become an object of hate for Trump supporters. To see this kind of person offended, protesting and walking away was a key part of Bannon’s motivation. 



Fighting for power

We need to be careful with Wolff’s account of how all this happened. Most of the sources of the book are unnamed. The book has also been written to maximise intrigue and drama.

Wolff’s inside sources are extensive, but we shouldn’t imagine that the Bannon-Kushner war was the only thing driving the exit from the Paris Accord.

We know little – for example – about the rest the Republican establishment in this debate. Or about the involvement of any lobbyists in the decision. This version of events is compelling, it may be true but it probably isn’t the entire story of why the US left the climate change agreement.   


Fire and Fury gives some insight into how the Paris exit unfolded. But it doesn’t provide much insight into the underlying reasons climate change has become so polarised.

The focus of the book is dysfunction in the White House, rather than the political landscape of the rest of the US. 

Wolff’s account tells us little about the political shifts of the last few years that landed an Alt-Right nationalist (Bannon), and a Democrat (Kushner) fighting for power around a disinterested President.

Wolff’s focus on rivalries leaves little space for understanding how this assortment of people ended up fighting each other inside the world’s most powerful office.

So while Wolff’s account tells us the details of how the Trump administration exited the Paris Accord, it doesn’t really tell us why. 



Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House
Michael Wolff
Henry Holt and Co
January 2018

This Author

Alex Randall is the programme coordinator at the Climate and Migration Coalition.

Theresa May has a moral duty as prime minister to ensure the country has good air quality, according to three quarters of the public who responded to a survey.

A total of 73 percent of those surveyed in the YouGov poll said they thought that the May had a “moral responsibility to ensure the UK has good air quality for future generations”.

The news comes as environmental lawyers at ClientEarth bring their third case against the UK government at the High Court over illegal and harmful levels of air pollution across the country.

Its lawyers will argue that government plans still fail to deal with the problem of toxic air, which is at illegal levels in 37 of 43 zones across the country.

The hearing is owned today in Court 2 of the High Court before Mr Justice Garnham. It will also see the Welsh Government defend its record on air pollution, after it was named as a defendant in the case.

ClientEarth won its other two air pollution legal challenges against the UK government at the Supreme Court in 2015 and High Court in 2016.

This Author

Brendan Montague is editor of The Ecologist. He tweets at @EcoMontague. This article is based on a press release from ClientEarth. 

It is a mistake to think of Donald Trump as a climate change sceptic. If we believe Michael Wolff’s new insider account of the Trump White House, it is a mistake to think that Trump has any fixed view on climate change at all. 



In Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, Wolff paints a picture of a man who cannot or does not absorb information of any kind. A man who is too irritable and bored to talk about policy. And a man who is happy to leave complex decisions to anyone who seems able to take them off his hands. 



If we believe Wolff’s gossipy and salacious account, Trump is not a man on a mission to wreck climate policy. Rather, he’s a man who refuses to engage with it. A man who is happy to delegate ‘dealing’ with climate change to any of the bitter rivals surrounding him who will take the issue away. 



Reactionary populism

Wolff’s account leads us to believe that Trump is not a man with deeply held political views. Instead he argues we should understand Trump as a man with gut reactions that are as reactionary as they are random.

They are often – according to Wolff’s sources – not even in line with some of the most basic tenets of Republican thinking. Apparently during a meeting about how to repeal ObamaCare, Trump blurted out that free health care should be extended to everyone. 



Understanding the Trump administration’s approach to climate change is not about understanding Trump’s views on climate change. Instead it is about understanding how the power battles inside Trump’s White House shaped the administration’s decisions. 



Forming one part of the power battle around Trump is his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and daughter, Ivanka Trump.

Kushner was part of the campaign team, and then appointed senior advisor when Trump entered the White House. Kushner is a man with liberal political views and is an ex-Democrat supporter. Kushner disliked Trump’s reactionary populism. But the post was a chance for Kushner to propel himself to the highest levels of  global politics and business.

Protest at airports

According to Wolff, it was Kushner and Ivanka who choreographed Trump’s more presidential moments. Their goal was to present a more moderate, restrained globally acceptable version of Trump.

This put him on a conflict course with Steve Bannon, Trump’s now departed chief stategist. Bannon’s goal was the exact opposite. He wanted to make sure that the heart and soul of the Trump White House was fully bought into his vision of Trumpism.

For Banon, Trumpism meant nationalist, identitarian and populist. He believed that Trump supporters had voted for the absolute disruption of Washington elites.  Bannon wanted to show them this by creating as much chaos and disruption as possible. 



Bannon was not just interested in pushing through policies. He wanted to do so in a way that would antagonise American liberals as much as possible. Wolff claims that Bannon deliberately carried out no consultation the first ‘travel ban’.

This was a deliberate attempt to maximise chaos at airports. The ban came in on a Friday to make sure that its opponents would be able to protest at airports over the weekend.

Angry and losing

The aim was to create chaos and to draw out Trump’s opponents into angry demonstrations. This was all for the benefit of what Bannon saw as Trump’s core supporters. 



It is in this context that we have to see the US exit from the Paris Accord. Trump didn’t decide to take the US out of the agreement because of deeply held climate scepticism.

Nor did he do it because he believed it was what his supporters wanted. Or because he believed it was holding back the US economy. Wolff discourages us from thinking that Trump himself did it at all. 



Rather, it was an instance in which Bannon won out over Kushner in their bitter rivalry. Leaving the Paris Accord was something that would send “Social Justice Warriors” into protest and outrage.

This was exactly what Bannon was hoping for. News coverage of protesting liberals would speak powerfully to Trump’s supporters. They would see liberals angry and losing, and Trump fighting their corner and winning. 



Object of hate

For Kushner and Ivanka Trump, the Paris climate agreement had been something they wanted to protect.  For them it was a chance to present the administration as more responsible and less reactionary.

It was a chance for them to present an acceptable face of the administration to the world on an important international issue. The fact that Kushner saw it as such only fuelled Bannon’s desire to make sure the US left the agreement.

Bannon pushed to leave the agreement partly to enrage liberals, but also partly to enrage Kushner and Ivanka Trump. 



In the aftermath of the US exit from the Paris Accord, Elon Musk – CEO of solar power company Tesla – resigned from Trump’s business advisory committee. According to Wolff this was exactly the kind of reaction Bannon was hoping for.

Musk represented the wealthy, liberal, coastal elites that had become an object of hate for Trump supporters. To see this kind of person offended, protesting and walking away was a key part of Bannon’s motivation. 



Fighting for power

We need to be careful with Wolff’s account of how all this happened. Most of the sources of the book are unnamed. The book has also been written to maximise intrigue and drama.

Wolff’s inside sources are extensive, but we shouldn’t imagine that the Bannon-Kushner war was the only thing driving the exit from the Paris Accord.

We know little – for example – about the rest the Republican establishment in this debate. Or about the involvement of any lobbyists in the decision. This version of events is compelling, it may be true but it probably isn’t the entire story of why the US left the climate change agreement.   


Fire and Fury gives some insight into how the Paris exit unfolded. But it doesn’t provide much insight into the underlying reasons climate change has become so polarised.

The focus of the book is dysfunction in the White House, rather than the political landscape of the rest of the US. 

Wolff’s account tells us little about the political shifts of the last few years that landed an Alt-Right nationalist (Bannon), and a Democrat (Kushner) fighting for power around a disinterested President.

Wolff’s focus on rivalries leaves little space for understanding how this assortment of people ended up fighting each other inside the world’s most powerful office.

So while Wolff’s account tells us the details of how the Trump administration exited the Paris Accord, it doesn’t really tell us why. 



Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House
Michael Wolff
Henry Holt and Co
January 2018

This Author

Alex Randall is the programme coordinator at the Climate and Migration Coalition.