Businesses of all types and sizes have environmental issues to consider. We all rely on having a healthy planet, and as climate issues become more prominent in our lives, addressing them is more important than ever. There’s also a strong business case for sustainability initiatives.

Environmental issues are complex, however, so what if you don’t have the expertise or resources to address them yourself?

In this common situation, turning to an environmental consulting firm is often the right move. How could working with an environmental consultant benefit your business?

Stay compliant

As environmental problems worsen or more people call for change, businesses face more environmental compliance rules. These regulations, laws and ordinances can come from federal, state and local governments, regulatory bodies, industry groups and others and cover many different aspects of a business’s operations.

Keeping up with these requirements is time-consuming, and making a mistake can be costly. Avoid these problems by having an expert on your side who understands the legal requirements and how best to manage compliance.

An environmental compliance consultant can assess your operations for compliance issues and help you create a plan for reaching and maintaining compliance. They can also monitor changing requirements so you remain up to date.

To do this, they must track a wide range of sources of regulations, which can be a very time-consuming task. Consulting firm Red-On-Line says it monitors 700 international sources and analyses 1,100 legal texts every year.

Environmental targets

Consultants can also assist you in reaching voluntary environmental goals such as using more clean energy, using more recycled material or sourcing ingredients from sustainable farming operations.

These initiatives are becoming more common among businesses as customers increasingly seek out brands that prioritize sustainability.

Environmental consulting firms can help you to assess your current operations, create a plan to reach your goals, track your progress and manage environmental reporting, which helps you communicate your sustainability performance to your stakeholders.

Consultants can share their expertise on these issues with your company through training sessions. Environmental, health & safety and sustainability consulting firm Keramida, for example, offers training sessions on environmental reporting.

The company is a CDP Certified Silver Climate Change Education and Training Partner in the U.S. and a Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) Certified Training Partner.

Health and safety

Projects that produce environmental concerns also often create concerns about health and safety. Working with an expert consulting firm can help you to manage and minimize environmental and workplace hazards related to indoor air quality, exposure to hazardous substances such as asbestos, silica, formaldehyde, paint vapors and welding fumes.

They can also support the development of plans for risk management and emergencies as well as compliance with Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) standards.

In addition to being crucial to employee well-being, improving the health and safety conditions of your workplace will improve worker satisfaction and productivity, process efficiency and prevent legal problems from arising.

Companies such as Handex Consulting and Remediation help their clients to assess, manage and remove environmental, health and safety risks at their worksites. In one such project, the company helped to clean up a gun range and training center that had become overloaded with lead from spent ammunition.

The remediation team cleared around two feet of soil and removed and recycled about 40,000 pounds of spent bullets from the Lithia, Florida site, which was owned by the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office.

Why consulting?

Working with a consulting company has numerous benefits over taking care of environmental concerns entirely on your own.

The professionals that work for these consulting firms already have the expertise needed to get the job done. This means they can complete related tasks much more efficiently, and with fewer mistakes, than your company could by itself.

If your staff were to learn the required skills themselves, it would take a substantial amount of their work time, as would actually completing the related tasks. Hiring an outside expert allows your company to focus instead on its core business activities and on growing the business.

You could hypothetically hire an employee to handle the environmental aspects of your business operations. While this is a valid route to take, working with a consultant does have some benefits over this option.

A consultant is more flexible than an employee. Rather than paying them for a set amount of hours, you can contract with them for specific projects, which helps you use your financial resources more efficiently. This kind of contract work is also easily scalable.

Consultants may also have more relevant experience than an employee. They may also work for a reputable firm and have relevant certifications, which makes it easy to gauge their aptitude.

Next time your company has a project related to environmental compliance, sustainability or health and safety, considering hiring a consultant. Working with a consultant can also help you to evaluate your current environmental performance and develop plans for how to improve it. Contracting with someone who is already an expert on these issues will help to achieve your targets more efficiently and with improved results.

This Author

Emily Folk is a conservation and sustainability writer and the editor of Conservation Folks.

The Columbian government has signed a decree that ensures indigenous communities in the Amazon will now enjoy local governance over their territories – 30 years after they first received legal title to their lands.

Juan Manuel Santos, the Colombian president, signed a Decree of Non-Municipalized Areas in the presence of local indigenous leaders and Erna Solberg, the Prime Minister of Norway in the Amazon city of Leticia.

Martin von Hildebrand is founder of Gaia Amazonas and has devoted his life to the protection of the Colombian Amazon, working for more than 45 years alongside indigenous groups for the recognition of their rights. He said: “This is the most important thing that has happened to the indigenous Amazonians in 30 years.” 

System of governance

The decree strengthens the autonomy of indigenous peoples of Guainía, Vaupés and Amazonas – three political-administrative departments of Colombia’s Amazon region.

It effectively allows indigenous communities – through their Associations of Traditional Indigenous Authorities – to execute and administer state resources. It has been welcomed widely by local indigenous leaders present at the signing of the decree.

Libardo Bolivar Martín, from the Tatuyo ethnic group, said: “Right now, we are content because we will have a legitimate autonomy and self-government. It is a recognition by the government of our fundamental rights.”

Guillermo Rodriguez Macuna, from the Association of Traditional Authorities of Pirá Paraná River (ACAIPI), Vaupés, said: “This decree is an opportunity for us to govern our own territory with our own policies; and we now have a responsibility with the state for the administration of state funds”.

Felix Matapí, of the Association of Indigenous Captains of Mirití Amazonas (ACIMA), Amazonas, said: “We are very pleased. This is a step forward that we have been fighting for over many years, and the responsibility going forward is now in our hands, and we are organised to administrate education, health and our own system of governance.” 

Conserving their forests

Dario Silva Cubeo, of the Indigenous Association of La Pedrera Amazonas (AIPEA), of the Lower Caquetá River, Amazonas, added: “This is an historic moment for us. This decree is a legal instrument that relates to our autonomy and decentralisation. This regulatory decree is also important for the defence of our territory and biodiversity”.

This historic decree is three decades in the making. In 1988, the Colombian government of Virgilio Barco returned more than 18 million hectares of Amazon territory to indigenous communities – a area that has since increased to more than 26 million hectares.

Another important step was taken in the 1991 Constitution’s recognition of Colombia as a multi-ethnic and pluricultural nation. However, while the Amazon was divided into political-administrative departments and municipalities, the indigenous territories remained ‘non-municipalized areas’ – 37.6 percent of the Colombian Amazon did not have a local government, or at least not one which was formally recognised.

President Santos acknowledged the fundamental role of indigenous peoples as guardians of the environment during the signing ceremony. 

He explained that they are the ones “most interested in conserving their forests, in conserving their rivers, in not contaminating, they are our best allies.” He added: “That is why it is very important to see their autonomy, which today we give them, with the preservation of our environment.”

Future generations

President Santos also referred in his speech to von Hildebrand´s work as being instrumental to this decree for indigenous groups of the Colombian Amazon to govern their lands, according to their worldview and customs; and being persistent in explaining how strengthening the governance of these ethnic groups is key for protecting the forest.

This new decree is a major part of President Santos’ governmental plan to safeguard the Colombian Amazon, which includes expanding Chiribiquete National Park by an additional 3 million hectares to establish limits for the agricultural frontier and colonisation.

Colombia can now claim that 85 percent of its Amazon territory is under some form of protection. That fact, alongside the recent ruling by Colombia’s Supreme Court of Justice on the Amazon as being subject of rights, and the peace agreement reached with the FARC guerrilla, are important steps for a better world, for future generations.

This Author

Brendan Montague is editor of The Ecologist, founder of Request Initiative and co-author of Impact of Market Forces on Addictive Substances and Behaviours: The web of influence of addictive industries (Oxford University Press). He tweets at @EcoMontague. This story is based on a press release from The Gaia Foundation. 

Geoengineering is the deliberate, large-scale manipulation of the climate in the hope of regulating global temperature.

A wide variety of technologies are commonly divided into solar radiation management (SRM) techniques such as spraying sulphates into the upper atmosphere on an ongoing basis to simulate the cooling effects of volcanoes, and carbon dioxide removal (CDR) such as carbon capture and storage.

Other proposals range from the possible to bizarre and dangerous, and include marine cloud brightening, space-based mirrors, terrestrial and ocean surface-whitening, and a giant sunshade in the sky.

Unintended and uncontrollable

Scientists have recently proposed mammoth engineering projects in Greenland and Antarctica to slow down the disintegration of glaciers and prevent inundation of low-lying, densely populated areas in Bangladesh, Japan and the Netherlands.

These include underwater giant walls, artificial islands and huge pumping stations to channel cold water into the bases of glaciers to stop them from melting and sliding into the sea.

They accept that “potential risks, especially to local ecosystems, need careful analysis”, but argue that “in our view, however, the greatest risk is doing nothing”.

Proponents argue that geoengineering may be the only way of preventing climatic harms in the absence of substantial emissions reductions – a form of insurance to keep the Earth habitable that would be negligent and unethical to spurn.

Sceptics contend that manipulating our planet’s climate may provoke unforeseen, unintended and uncontrollable consequences.

Intrinsically uncertain

SRM is relatively cheap but technically difficult and riskier than CDR, which is safer but more expensive. CDR is unproven and probably impossible to deploy at scale in time to prevent catastrophic global warming.

SRM is fast but uncertain and could have unintended effects that cannot be unwound. SRM is designed to offset the effects of emissions without reducing them, whereas CDR addresses the cause of climate change.

Since we cannot know how the biosphere will respond to forced interventions, we don’t know whether SRM will increase acid rain and ocean acidification or, paradoxically, reduce global rainfall but increase flooding.

Disruption to the Asian monsoon would threaten the food and water security of nearly two billion people. CDR is risky because bioenergy capture and sequestration could require diverting arable land from food production, consume significant amounts of water and energy, and lead to severe soil degradation and land grabs in the global South.

Because scientists are unsure whether SRM can be safely deployed in large-scale field trials, they rely on modelling that is intrinsically uncertain.

Markets and technology

There is a danger that SRM could lead to technological lock in because sudden withdrawal might result in rapid and unmanageable warming.

We cannot be confident that average global temperature will not spiral if climate engineering is suddenly terminated, meaning perpetual dependence on risky technologies.

In 2014, researchers compared five geoengineering methods and concluded they were relatively ineffective and carried potentially severe side effects. Conventional cost-benefit analyses are ethically problematic when applied to risks that cannot be reflected in monetary terms such as threats to food and water security.

Another risk is that geoengineering creates a moral hazard by fostering false hopes that science will produce a ‘get-out-of-jail-free’ card that obviates the need to cut emissions and benefits free riders willing to gamble with humanity’s future in the expectation that climate change is containable.

They include ecomodernists who believe that markets and technology provide solutions to every environmental problem.

Effective remedy

This delusion reflects a powerful strand of hubristic, Promethean Western thought in which humanity’s separation from and mastery over nature is considered normal rather than the perverse rationality that has brought us to the brink of ecological catastrophe.

Three of nine planetary boundaries — biodiversity loss, climate change, and the nitrogen and phosphorous cycle — have been breached in the Anthropocene and the remainder are under threat.

So how should we respond? Is it ethical or wise to entrust control of the planet’s thermostat to unilateralists like Trump or Putin? Should we permit geoengineering research but place a moratorium on its deployment in the hope emissions reductions will succeed?

If they don’t, how should we respond to pressures that will inevitably increase to engineer the climate? Is it possible to secure agreement through democracy and procedural justice?

Consent might be expected if the benefits of a technology outweigh its risks, if it provides an effective remedy that is containable and reversible, avoids moral hazards, and protects human rights and minimises harms to future generations – who cannot be consulted.

End-of-pipe solutions

The history of climate governance suggests that the consent of the most vulnerable is likely to be restricted, given under duress and ethically unacceptable.

Women, indigenous peoples, social movements and NGOs have historically been excluded from effective participation in climate governance.

Entrusting decisions on geoengineering to a small, expert geoclique would be undemocratic, unaccountable, disturbingly technocentric and thoroughly depoliticising.

Geoengineering may be a lesser evil than climate change but still be so deeply harming that it should be regarded as a ‘marring evil’.

Mike Hulme describes climate change as a wicked problem that science cannot and should not try to fix. He argues that “the dream of a global thermostat in the sky is undesirable, ungovernable and unattainable”, and stratospheric aerosol injection “is the wrong sort of solution to the wrong sort of problem”.

Viable alternative

He added: “Human-induced climate change is not the sort of problem that lends itself to technological end-of-pipe solutions”.

Albert Einstein observed that no problem can be solved at the same level of consciousness that created it, but it is simpler and more ethical to fix our attitudes rather than attempting to fix the climate?

After all, Stephen Gardiner asks “if the problem is social and political, why isn’t the solution social and political as well?” The alternative is the risk of unknowable harm to the conditions of life and survival for humans and other species.

Resisting the siren calls of unproven technologies is prudent rather than Luddite, especially now that renewable energy enables us to decarbonise the global economy by the middle of the century with sufficient political will.

In the absence of a technological silver bullet there is no viable alternative to reducing greenhouse gas emissions and the burden of proof is on those who want to engineer the climate.

This Author

Dr Sam Adelman was speaking at Climate Change: Is It Time for Extreme Measures? at Edinburgh International Science Festival earlier this week. More information and tickets can be found online.

“In the whole of my life I have never experienced anything more nerve-shaking than to hear the deep roars of these dreadful monsters growing gradually nearer and nearer, and to know that someone or other of us was doomed to be their victim before the morning dawned.”

So wrote Lt. Col. John Henry Patterson in his 1907 book, The Man Eating Lions of Tsavo, a spine-chilling account of a pair of maneless male lions who reportedly killed scores of railway workers during a nine-month reign of terror near the Tsavo River.

The episode described took place during the construction of a railway bridge over the Tsavo River in 1898 and ended when the lions were killed by Patterson, an Anglo Irish soldier commissioned by the Uganda Railway committee in London to supervise the construction of the bridge.

Un-natural appetite

More than a century later, scientists and wildlife experts are continuing to investigate why these lions switched from their traditional prey and began eating people.

In 1998, the centenary year of the Tsavo man-eater’s reign of terror, scientific investigation into answering this mystery began with the collaboration of the University of Chicago’s Field Museum, where the lions are currently on display, the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) and the National Museums of Kenya.

One possible explanation could be that the Tsavo lions developed a taste for humans after being ‘provisioned’ with dead ones. For example, a slave trade route passed through Tsavo during the 19th century and this would have contributed to a large number of abandoned bodies.

Epidemic diseases also led to high death rates of indigenous communities. During the 1860’s cholera and plague brought by Swahili caravans, transporting elephant ivory, slaves, gold and animal skins to the coast, ravaged the region, affecting ethnic groups such as the Maasai, who lived further inland.

Environmental factors could also have been a decisive factor. Drought and famine conditions in the following decades of the late 19th Century might also played a prominent role. The Mwakisenge Drought and Famine of 1897-1900 was the worst of such episodes. Thousands of Kambas are said to have died from starvation at the same time the railway was being constructed through Tsavo. 

Caravan crossing

The quest for elephant ivory during the mid to late 19th Century had virtually eliminated elephants from much of eastern Kenya, including most of Tsavo. Reduced elephant populations led to the expansion of woodlands and the reduction of grazing herbivores such as buffaloes and zebras.

The Tsavo of the 1890s was composed of a nearly impenetrable, thorn thicket known as ‘nyika’ – Uunlike the Tsavo of today with large tracts of open savanna. In this thicket environment, the Tsavo lions were able to stalk and ambush their human prey. 

The Tsavo man-eaters episode closely followed a devastating outbreak of rinderpest. This decimated countless herds of cattle, buffalo, wildebeest, and zebra- the primary prey of Africa’s lions. The epidemic would have left a low population of traditional food source for Tsavo’s lion population.

‘Man-eating’ behavior, however, was not an isolated incident at Tsavo. Humans were attacked and killed by lions in the Tsavo vicinity long before the construction of the railway.

In 1886, for example, there had been an attack on a caravan crossing the Tsavo River. Such attacks have continued into modern times according to records of the Kenya Wildlife Service (experts are beginning to suspect that man-eating might have evolved into a local behavioral tradition).

Prey handling

Until the 1980s, the skulls of the our two man eating lions had not been differentiated from one another. In 1987, however, Thomas Patrick Gnoske, a zoologist at Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History in the US, rediscovered these skulls and subsequently deduced which was the first man-eater shot by referring to J.H. Patterson’s testimony.

“I was just looking through the extensive research collections in the Zoology Department’s Mammal Division, which are arranged in taxonomic order, and I came across those two skulls and immediately recognized those by date, location and the collector’s name – J.H. Patterson,”  says Gnoske.

Having identified the lion skulls, the main focus of the research then focused on the teeth of the two lions. An initial analysis of the skull and lower jaw of the first Tsavo lion (known as FMNH 23970 in Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History catalogue) revealed that they were malformed because of a severely broken canine with an expose root (the canine teeth are used primarily for firmly holding food in order to tear it apart).

This malformation led to the remodeling of the animal’s jaws, which could have prevented the lion from efficiently killing its normal prey. 

The second lion (FMNH 23969) also had teeth and jaw damage which might have also hampered its effort to eat hard food items and/or reduced prey handling ability.

Buffalo, zebras and oryx

“Tooth breakage per se does not produce dietary shifts as older lions display some sort of wear or breakage to their dentition, says Larisa R. G. DeSantis  and Bruce D. Patterson in their 2017 paper, Dietary Behaviour of Man-Eating Lions Revealed by Dental Microwear Textures.

These researchers also examined another man-eating lion from Mfuwe, Zambia – a ten feet long mane-less lion that ate six individuals.   “However, dental disease is another matter, and incapacitation via an abscessed or a fractured mandible may have prompted the Tsavo and Mfuwe lions to seek more easily subdued prey.” 

One disputed fact of the Tsavo legend has been the exact numbers of railway workers who were killed and eaten by the two lions. In The Maneaters of Tsavo Patterson says the two lions – “prowling demons” he called them – ate 135 individuals over the course of almost one year. By contrast, railway records officially attribute only 28 worker deaths to the two lions.

In 2009, Bruce Patterson and Justin D. Yekal of the University of California, Santa Cruz, and their colleagues at the University of Cambridge examined hair samples preserved in the broken and exposed cavities of their canines. The hairs are an indication of what the lions ate. 

These investigators concluded that throughout much of its life, the second lion, FMNH 23969, had a diet similar to modern Tsavo lions and was heavily reliant on Tsavo West National Park (TWNP) grazers such as buffalo, zebras and oryx.

Lions left

Toward the end of its life, the lion continued to rely on grazing animals, although subsisted on herbivores from TWNP and Tsavo East National Park (TENP) to similar extents.

By contrast, the first lion, FMNH 23970, progressed from a diet focused on grazers to one emphasizing browsers, browser/mixed-feeders, and humans toward the end of 1898. This latter result verifies historical accounts that assigned the lion’s share of human deaths to FMNH 23970. 

The researchers estimated that over the nine-months, the first Tsavo man-eater devoured 10.5 individuals and the second lion ate 24.2 individuals, which gives a total of 34.7 humans consumed. A dietary specialisation on humans or human ancestors, some wildlife experts speculate, may be a long standing fallback strategy among lions.

Tsavo’s lions – like most lion populations across the African continent – are in trouble. A century ago, there were an estimated 200,000 lions roaming the African wilderness.

Today, there are only 20,000 lions left in the wild, according to H. Bauer and colleagues in their 2015 publication: Panther Leo. The IUCN red List of Threatened Species 2015.

Commercial trade

Lion habitats have vanished due to a rise in human population and consequently to agricultural expansion to feed more human mouths. Today, lions occupy only about eight percent of their historical range and are reported to have already vanished from 12 African countries of the 47 African countries in which they were once present.

One factor that has led to the dramatic decline in Africa’s lion populations has been the depletion of their prey through hunting. While bushmeat was once obtained primarily for subsistence in rural communities, today it is also sold commercially within African urban markets and internationally to markets in the United States and Europe.

As bushmeat hunting expands from the forests to the savannas, vast areas have been emptied of large wildlife, especially the medium to large ungulates such as wildebeest, zebra, buffalo and impala on which lions subsist.


As if that weren’t enough, a 2017 survey examining the pan-African trade in Lion parts, has highlighted “escalating and worrisome trends” that could increasingly pose a threat to the continent’s dwindling lion populations.

The African lion is the only big cat listed on CITES Appendix II, and the only one for which international commercial trade is legal under CITES.

This has resulted in the widespread trade in African Lion body parts with items and products ranging from sport hunting trophies to curios sold in the tourist trade and lion bones that is increasing in demand in countries of East and Southeast Asia where it is used in Traditional Asian Medicine (African zootherapeutic practitioners and consumers mostly use fat, claws, skin and teeth for their healing rituals).
 
On a more optimist note, conservation efforts in Southern Africa have had much more success. In Botswana, Namibia, South Africa and Zimbabwe, where most lions live in fenced reserves that are heavily managed, lion populations have been growing. Lions in these reserves are provided with extensive vet care and even extra prey.

This Author

Curtis Abraham is a freelance writer and researcher on African development, science, the environment, biomedical/health and African social/cultural history. He has lived and worked in sub-Saharan Africa for over two decades with his work appearing in numerous publications including New Scientist, BBC Wildlife Magazine, New African and Africa Geographic.

The Amazonian Andes is one of the richest habitats on Earth, where the wildlife of the Amazon basin meets the alpine species of the Andes Mountain Range. However, only an estimated 25 percent of the natural habitat in the tropical Andes remains intact.

The remaining patches of natural habitat are increasingly isolated from each other – and often only remain secure in parks or reserves under national protection – as agricultural practices intensify across the South American continent leading to the clearance of rainforests.

Maintaining the connections between these areas is vital for allowing species like the Harpy Eagle and Spectacled Bear to move between forest areas and for connecting populations of less widely ranging species, such as amphibians.

Purchased and designated

These connections are also increasingly important in the face of climate change, as intact natural corridors will allow species to move in response to changing weather patterns and habitats.

The land that lies between the nationally protected areas of the Antisana Ecological Reserve and Sumaco Galeras National Park in the Napo Province of northeast Ecuador, and Narupa Reserve is one of these critical corridors.

The 2,800 acre wildlife reserve under the management of Fundación Jocotoco, the Ecuadorian partner of the World Land Trust. However, the local government have announced plans to build a road into the forest to increase access for agriculture and development – as this land is not currently under protection.

Principal use

Road constructions are typically followed by strong and rapid deforestation, as they provide better access for legal and illegal logging, and open the land up for exploitation by mining and increased hunting, which would have a devastating impact on local wildlife.

Dr Richard Cuthbert, director of conservation at WLT, said: “Fundación Jocotoco has been in close discussion with the local government who have agreed that the road will not be developed if the area can be purchased and designated for wildlife conservation. We have a small window of time to purchase this area and keep this vital wildlife corridor intact.”

Martin Schaefer, executive director at Fundación Jocotoco, added: “The principal use of the road would be to allow access for agriculture, which would result in the destruction of the corridor between Narupa and the national protected areas used by Amazonian and Andean species.

“The reserve would be turned into an island, which at its current size of 1,200 hectares would not be able to sustain healthy populations of a large number of the species which currently live there, such as the Harpy Eagle and Military Macaw.”

This Author

Brendan Montague is editor of The Ecologist. This story is based on a press release from the World Land Trust. You can find more information and donate online to save the Amazonian Andes online, by phone (01986 874422) or text AMAZ18 to 70070 with a donation up to £10.

A huge campaign is needed to reverse the “mass extinction” of nature and instead promote restoration of ecosystems in the UK, according to Tony Juniper, one of the country’s foremost environmentalists.

Juniper, who has held senior positions with several NGOs, and authored books on environmental issues – including the Ladybird Book guide to Climate Change with the Prince of Wales – has recently been appointed by WWF as executive director of advocacy and campaigns.

He said campaign organisations including the WWF, RSPB and Wildlife Trusts were planning to come together – potentially in a similar set up to Greener UK, a coalition of 13 NGOs set up to prevent environmental standards being dropped after Brexit.

Climate Change Act

Juniper, a former trustee of Resurgence Trust which owns and publishes The Ecologist, made the comments at a conference about reversing the decline of nature in the UK. “We’re in need of something like Greener UK. We’ve never before had a focussed political agenda of the type that’s come of out that,” he said.

The Climate Change Act was a good model to follow, Juniper said. As executive director of Friends of the Earth he led the Big Ask campaign that led to the act being signed into legislation in 2008 – the first of its kind in the world. The act provided binding, five-yearly targets for carbon reduction based on latest science, with a long-term goal of an 80 percent cut by 2050.

The act is credited with the rapid decline in power generation from coal in the UK and the rise in renewables, as well as influencing other governments around the world to create similar legislation. “It transformed the situation very quickly,” Juniper said.

The debate around nature has moved on considerably from when Juniper first started working in conservation several decades ago, he noted. 

“The prevailing sense across society, politics and boardrooms was that environmental degradation and destruction was the price of progress, it was what we had to do to create economic growth and jobs. Anyone who got in the way of that was anti-people,” he said.

Mass extinction

Today, there was a realisation that healthy natural systems were an essential way to create health, wealth and security, he said. But despite this, there was a “mass extinction happening all around us”.

An Environment Act is needed to ensure that the whole economy was working towards restoring nature – rather than just slowing down its decline, he said.

“We need to reframe the discussion about nature in this country. For many years, we’ve seen welcome efforts by society and by government to slow down the loss of nature. But it’s been exactly that, slowing down inexorable decline,” he said.

Moving towards restoring nature can only be done with very big ambition, joining together different policy agendas – and bringing in private sector money – which would require legislation to make it happen, he said.

Juniper said that NGOs had already approached ministers about the idea, and were working on a public campaign that would be launched in the “not too distant future”. “We will need a big movement behind us for what we’re trying to achieve,” he said.

New ambition

He was optimistic that the government would support the idea, even when so much time was taken up with issues concerning leaving the EU. “The UK will want to be an influential leading country on the global stage as we leave the EU. One of the ways in which we could do that is to set new ambition on environmental restoration.

“It would go very much with the mood of the country, whether you’re a leaver or remainer,” he said.

Michael Gove, the environment secretary, has promised that a new green watchdog will be set up to ensure that environmental laws are enforced after the UK leaves the EU. However, a consultation on the proposals is yet to be published.

This Author

Catherine Early is a freelance environmental journalist and the former deputy editor of the environmentalist. She can be found tweeting at @Cat_Early76. Tony Juniper is the subject of the Ecologist interview in the May / June issue of Resurgence & Ecologist magazine, on sale from 20 April.

Nick Breeze (NB): The term ‘climate restoration’ seems to be gaining traction in a number of circles. Can you give me your definition of what this entails?

David King (DK): Climate restoration is really saying that we need to restore the global climate system back to the state it was in 50 years ago. This not only means de-fossilising the global economy reaching net zero emissions but also that we need to reach negative emissions. This means pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere more efficiently than we are today.

NB: When we look at greenhouse gas emissions, the numbers are so huge – tens of billions of tonnes – that the task to not just stop but actually reduce atmospheric concentrations to safer levels seems impossible. Are you daunted by these kind of numbers?

DK: I think the first thing is the business of stopping the use of fossil fuels – and finding alternatives to concrete and steel is essential. We need to stop emitting the stuff.

Secondly, we need to pull carbon dioxide out of the air. Well, actually, we have been doing that on the planet for many many years. There is a balance between what green matter does in sunlight – taking carbon dioxide out and converting it into hard trees – and the business of reforesting, to create more forests and pulling the carbon dioxide out. That is one very important part of it.

But the second important part is what is happening in the oceans. We have wonderful deep blue oceans and not much thought is given to the fact that most of the deep oceans are actually almost deserts. There is very little living matter there.

“Can we re-green the deep oceans?” is another very big question, because the amount of carbon that can be stored at the bottom of the deep ocean, several miles down, is simply enormous. That is how, over the past thousands or millions of years, carbon has been stored in the past.

NB: Restoration is a term that implies “intervention” and this word is very often loaded in the direction of geoengineering. How do you think about intervention in the climate system?

DK: It is intervention in the sense that we are already intervening in the climate system by emitting greenhouse gasses. So the intervention we are now talking about is, “can we also reduce the amount of carbon dioxide that we have put up in intervening with the climate system?”

Now the first and most important thing is to return the planet to the sort of equilibrium that it was in before, by increasing natural carbon sinks.

The second thing, and this is where intervention, I think, becomes more of an item for discussion, is can we, for example, refreeze the Arctic? All of us scientists are really worried about what is happening in the Arctic and the Antarctic, because if the Arctic melts, and all the Greenland ice melts, global sea-level goes up by seven metres.

So can we prevent that from happening by intervening and trying to refreeze the arctic? These are measures that all need investigation and discussion and that is certainly part of the climate restoration agenda.

NB: What do you see as the most critical place to start in terms of restoring climate?

DK: I think the most important place to start is, when it comes to mitigation, reducing emissions. I think we are all clear where we stand on that. When it comes to restoration, in terms of pulling carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere back down below where they are now, we must start with investigative experiments, demonstrating whether or not there are going to be, whatever attempt we try, negative consequences.

The first thing is investigation. Setting it all up so that, as the need arises, and we all know it is going to arise, we can start using the techniques which are very unlikely to have a negative impact on the planet.

NB: Much of the research in these areas seems to be fringe compared to the amount of scientists actually working on, for example, modelling the climate system. Is there a way to scale up our engineering / restoration solution response?

DK: Five or six years ago I began to think of this in terms of what do we do about the business of switching to renewable energy right across the world. So that 100 percent of our electricity, for example, and our heat is produced from renewable energy?

Feed in tariffs – very successful in Europe, in subsidising a new market for photovoltaics and wind turbines – for example. Very successful and the whole world has benefitted.

But what about energy storage, smart grids, all of the other technologies, replacements for steel and concrete? What we needed was a big burst of research and development publicly funded around the world. We got that in Paris on the first day of the Paris meeting, when we had 20 heads of government on the platform, under a banner of ‘Mission Innovation’.

They all agreed to double their funding for research and development from public purse money and that meant going from $15 billion a year as it was in 2015 to $30billion by 2020. Now we have got that up and running. I believe we need a similar exercise for the business of learning how we pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere safely and cheaply!

NB: What have you seen that most excites you in this solution space?

DK: I think many different things and one of them, that has been going on for a while, is re-greening the oceans. What we know historically is that green patches in the oceans develop when the wind blows off a desert.

For example, when the Sahara has a wind blowing over the ocean, it carries dust particles from the desert. When these settle on the ocean, what we realise is that these particles contain a high content of iron.

The iron is used to form haemoglobin with other particles of matter on the surface, and in sunlight, this produces an algae bloom. Wherever you get these algae blooms, we also know, there is a massive stock of fish emerging.

The reason is quite simple: the fish lay an enormous amount of eggs into the sea. Most of them when they hatch, die. But if there happens to be a large amount of algae food around, they live, and so you get millions, if not billions of fish, suddenly blooming in the blue ocean.

That’s a model for saying: could we take sand from the desert, grind it so we only pick up small particles, so they will float on the ocean. The wind does that automatically. Then drop it on the ocean so it creates these algae blooms. While it is alive, it is producing oxygen, increasing the oxygen content of both the sea and the air, and taking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.

But when it dies, like we know what happens in small ponds, it takes up the oxygen in the pond. The pond is deoxygenated and the fish go belly up. This has to be avoided.

If you are in the deep oceans, and I say this can only be applied in the deep oceans, once the algae dies, it falls down a hundred metres into the cold sea below, but it may go down for miles. It is no longer going to oxidise, it is simply sinks to the bottom and stays there. It becomes carbon that is carefully sequestrated at the bottom of the ocean.

So this is what we need: a good bunch of demonstrative experiments to show that what I have said actually happens.

I personally would be in favour of a moratorium against any experimenting of this kind in the shallow waters, such as the Baltic ocean, because you may end up reducing the oxygen content even further in those oceans that are not very deep.

NB: Restoration – whether it is referring to soils, forests, oceans, agriculture – all involves management in someway. It is a big step for humanity to move from extracting from the Earth to being custodians of it. Are we up to the task?

DK: This is a very, very big and important question. In 2012 the Chinese government pushed their Communist party, which is binding on the Chinese government, to add a new part to the constitution of the Chinese Communist Party.

That part is headed ‘Scientific Development of the Country’. Under that they developed a phrase, ‘Eco Civilisation’ and they explained this phrase as meaning: we cannot manage human development without also managing our eco-systems on which we all depend.

The Chinese government, I think, is the first to explicitly state, “we fully understand that human development means being fully in-step with nature”. And they talk about the circular economy, which means there is no waste. This means that every manufactured object has to be designed so that it can be recirculated and reused, as nature does.

So getting back into equilibrium with nature is a key part of what the Chinese government set out for itself. Of course that is a very difficult pathway to follow. Particularly after 100s of years of just taking whatever we needed, recking the state of the oceans by throwing plastic into it, recking the state of the atmosphere by causing greenhouse gas emissions.

All of this mining has just been taken as a freebie, that we take these things and improve our economy. It is a very big change for humanity. I happen to think personally that I worry about the future of my children and grandchildren if we don’t manage to make this critical transition.

NB: What would you say to people who spread a narrative that “it’s too late” to save our climate?

DK: Very recently a wonderful scientist working with NASA out of Columbia in the United States, Kate Marvel, has suddenly announced after giving brilliant talks about the need for action, that we all never do it. She has given up all hope that we can manage. And she simply said that, “we need courage, not hope, to face climate change.”

Now, I’ve got to say, after the Paris Agreement we now have 195 nations all signed up to one objective for the first time ever. That objective is to aim for 1.5oC and no more above the preindustrial average temperature level.

This isn’t the time to give up hope at all. We have finally got an agreement. We now have to push each government to take more action. No government is doing enough. Not even the British government. We all need to focus, therefore, heavily on how we raise the profile of managing this critical problem.

Giving up is simply not on. I look at Kate Marvel’s position just to raise the profile of just how important it is not to give up!

This Author

Nick Breeze is organising a high-level panel discussion on climate restoration as part of Green Culture Week in Montenegro on 24th May 2018. For more information or to attend the event visit his Envisionation blog. Follow on Twitter: @NickGBreeze

The official world order is now in an impasse: in one corner, a stale and bankrupt neoliberalism; in the other, a reactionary nationalism which offers no solutions.  

A major theme of this series will be to explore ways out of this impasse. What is salutary is that mainstream economics is coming to be met with increased scepticism, while even establishment organs flirt with leftwing ideas.  But let’s consider what systems theory can contribute.

I would say that Adam Smith, the late-18th century founder of liberalism, was indeed a systems thinker. Prior to him, the only way to organise an economy seemed to be from the centre/top: he understood that a system can organise itself, without being directed.  Hence the doctrine of laissez-faire (‘let it happen’).  

Laissez-faire

But this raises an important question: is there a bad use of systems theory? In principle, I would argue for self-organisation. In my practice as food-grower, I’m inspired by Japanese sage Masanobu Fukuoka, and his notion of ‘do-nothing gardening’, whereby we let the system work for us and don’t intervene too much.  

So the question is: why is laissez-faire okay in gardening and not in economics?! I’d answer this is as follows. The problem with liberalism was what it encourages to ‘happen’. Although capitalism is indeed a true system, it only ‘happens’ (i.e. develops, grows) through an ongoing biophysical and societal depletion.  

From an biophysical angle – as Georgescu-Roegen pointed out – mainstream economics fails to understand the flow of energy/matter.  In nature, although each individual entity is sustained by a flow – whereby energy/matter is absorbed and then excreted in a degraded form (as entropy) – the entropy is always recycled. As in the role of dung beetles.

In contrast, the capitalist economy – as Alf Hornborg says – encourages entropy at a whole-system level: industrial processes – through which high-quality materials are turned into obsolescent products and eventually waste – is falsely rewarded as an increase in quality.

And from a social angle, laissez-faire typifies a dangerous manifestation of the principle of feedback. Wealth is an entitlement to accumulate more wealth, leading ultimately to its concentration in fewer and fewer hands.

Environmental economics

This explains the escalating polarisation and social inequality identified by recent studies of the US – and a tendency to dump the poor as mere garbage, which I would see as a kind of ‘social entropy’.

The reason mainstream economics can treat people as garbage is because it defines ‘demand’ in a way unconnected with need: demand presupposes the wealth to buy things.

Thus, in housing markets – as anti-gentrification activists rightly point out – it’s false to assume that need for housing can be answered by increasing supply (building more). If the demand springs from speculators and oligarchs, prices will never reach equilibrium at affordable levels.  

Economics has nevertheless tried to find a way to deal with the side-effects of laissez-faire (environmental or social), which are dubbed ‘externalities’.  

Though I don’t really like the term (because the evils are intrinsic), the externalities argument did give rise to environmental economics.

Free-market ultras

Here, you could use taxes or subsidies to penalise bad effects and incentivise good ones. Moreover, you could add in the systems of nature, e.g. climate regulation, as Herman Daly attempted, even where conventional ‘externalities’ arguments neglect such systems.

In fact, in a mixed ecological-social definition, benefits could be ‘cascaded’ in a benign chain reaction. This is actually much closer to the way a complex natural system really works, where the ensemble generates emergent properties which exceed the sum of the parts. This sets it apart from the reductionist market-obsessed self-organisation of liberal economics.

Let’s illustrate this with a real case. Subsidised urban housing projects for essential workers can be required to incorporate the most advanced energy-saving features. Accommodation is then cheaper if energy-bills are negligible. So you allow health/education workers an affordable living which is close to the communities they serve – while at the same time cutting emissions!

Undoubtedly, environmental economics remains an essential tool – so long as capitalism is still in place. Nevertheless, the mainstream externalities argument harbours a fatal flaw. Its core metaphor is of a world where environmental damage consists of one proprietor harming another: e.g. a factory-owner who dumps pollutants in a river, harming the fishing rights of a downstream country squire.  

The weakness of this reasoning rendered environmental economics tragically unable to defend itself from the free-market ultras of neoliberalism. 

Self-organisation

The latter – who triumphed as world orthodoxy from about 1980 onwards – simply took the metaphor of factory-owner and squire to its logical, absurd conclusion: if everything is privatised – and therefore subject to property rights – externalities will be resolved.

We would not need regulation, but simply a gentlemen’s agreements between owners. It’s a bit like the argument that you’ll solve mass shootings by having more guns.

The result has been a ruling orthodoxy which encourages the further privatisation of commons – water, for example – resulting in both an increased spoliation of natural resources, and their transfer into the hands of an ever-shrinking elite.

This is, moreover, a global elite. This in turn links with another major theme which we’ll explore in a later article: the globalised international economy, which spread since the 1980s.

By confronting a common enemy in neoliberalism, environment and society are united in a common cause.  The principle of self-organisation must be salvaged from the laissez-faire perversion, and restored in a more authentic form: reversing the erosion of commons, and instead expanding them, in their role as stewards of nature.

This Author

Dr Robert Biel teaches political ecology at University College London and is the author of The New Imperialism and The Entropy of Capitalism. He specialises in international political economy, systems theory, sustainable development and urban agriculture.

Hunts are routinely breaking the law and their packs of hounds are still literally tearing to pieces British wildlife, according to the League Against Cruel Sports. 

The animal welfare charity reports that it has received a total of 550 reports of illegal hunting activity and hunt havoc since the beginning of the hunting season last autumn.

This new set of figures reveals the extent to which hunts are illegally chasing – and in many cases, killing – foxes, hares and deer and causing disruption in the British countryside.

Tip of the iceberg

Chris Luffingham, the director of campaigns at the League Against Cruel Sports, said: “Despite hunting being banned 13 years ago, it seems very little has changed, with hunts targeting and killing animals and deceiving the British public about their activities with excuses like ‘trail’ hunting.

“Sadly these reports are just the tip of the iceberg. We estimate that thousands of animals are still being killed every year, with more than 300 hunts on the British mainland still in existence and actively targeting wildlife.”

A total of 405 reports of illegal hunting activity were received by the league over the course of the hunting season which began at the start of November and is currently drawing to a close.

Hunt havoc

A further 145 reports came in of ‘hunt havoc’ – which consists of incidents such as packs of hounds killing domestic pets, trespassing through people’s gardens and allotments and running onto busy roads and railway lines.

The majority of reports covered the four and a half months between November 2017 and the middle of March 2018. Reports of the hunting of young fox cubs which take place in early autumn were also included.

In total, the League received 550 reports, which came in from concerned members of the British public who contacted the League’s Animal Crimewatch team, league investigators who monitor the activities of the hunts, and independent hunt monitor and saboteur groups.

‘Trail’ hunting

Mr Luffingham said: “A new term entered the English language after the hunting ban of 2004 – ‘trail’ hunting.

“This was touted by the hunts as a new pastime which involved following an animal-based scent rather than live quarry, but which mimicked traditional hunting as much as possible.

“In fact, it so closely mimics hunting; it has become clear it is a deception and cover-up for illegal hunting activity.

He added: “Hunts rarely lay a trail and even when they do it is a sham to mask their illegal hunting. Why are hunts routinely seen crossing railway lines, on busy roads or in people’s gardens if they are laying a trail? Why are they regularly being seen chasing wildlife? Why are there so many reports of animal deaths at the hands of the hunts?

Tougher sentencing

“The public – more than 85 per cent of whom opposes hunting – would be horrified if they knew what was really going on in the British countryside and the cruelty and dreadful death toll the hunts are inflicting on wildlife.

“We are calling on landowners to ban hunts from their land and we need to strengthen the Hunting Act and bring in tougher sentencing to act as a deterrent.”

The League Against Cruel Sports cites the following examples of what they say is illegal hunting activity and so -called hunt havoc.

Illegal hunting activity

On January 9, 2018, the League claims one hunt chased a deer and a fox into the Celia Hammond Greenacres cat sanctuary near Hastings. They claim the hounds rampaged across the 80 acre sanctuary and initially 60 cats fled. Sadly five never returned and are feared dead.

The league also said the figures include 42 cases of cub hunting when the hunts blood their hounds in early autumn by surrounding known fox habitats in small woods. The practice involves driving the hounds through the woods so that they learn to kill.

The League said there have been 12 cases this year alone of a single hunt chasing foxes and causing hunt havoc, including the hunt being witnessed hunting on busy A-roads and next to a motorway, which it says presents a very real risk to the public and the hunt’s hounds, and points towards illegal hunting rather than following a genuine trail.

Animal Crimewatch

And the League says many hunts have been seen with terrier men, who accompany hunts and encourage their dogs to find, fight and flush out foxes that have gone underground, often in badger setts.

The involvement of terrier men with ‘trail’ hunts raises a serious question about their activities. The league claims the answer can only be that the hunts are still targeting and killing animals despite the fox hunting ban of 2004 and that trail hunting is a lie being used to cover their activities.

Mr Luffingham concluded: “The good news is the world is changing – advances in smart phone video cameras, new monitoring groups on Facebook, and the development of our Animal Crimewatch team, mean the public can report the hunts’ activities and we can go about bringing them to task.

“It’s time to get the hunts, not animals, on the run.  The hunts are living on borrowed time.”

This Author

Catherine Harte is a contributing editor to The Ecologist. This story is based on a news release from the League Against Cruel Sports. The League is encouraging members of the public to sign their petition titled ‘stop the killing of animals by hunts in the UK’. Full details can be found here. The league also asks the public to report illegal hunting activity by contacting the League’s Animal Crimewatch Team via its website. Alternatively a confidential phone line is available on 01483 361 108 or they can be contacted via email at crimewatch@league.org.uk. 

A mathematical model has been developed to help understand why certain landscapes are vulnerable to losing their forests and the species that rely on them, while others are more resilient.

Scientists from the Smithsonian Institute say they can determine the risk that a fire will strike again by examining the type of vegetation that grows after a forest fire.

The team developed a quantitative model based on mathematic formulas to help identify which forests are most vulnerable in the hope that these areas can be protected before it is too late.

Carbon storage

Forests sequester carbon by absorbing carbon dioxide during photosynthesis. Some of this carbon dioxide then forms plant stems, branches, roots and leaves. 

As plants and trees burn during a forest fire, a large amount of the stored carbon is released as carbon dioxide. If forests quickly recover, they may rapidly re-accumulate carbon.

However, if burning converts a forest to shrubland — and the shorter, shrub-dominated vegetation is maintained by repeated fires — the total carbon stored across the landscape may be substantially decreased. 

Because carbon dioxide is a heat-trapping gas, this process further aggravates climate change creating what scientists refer to as a positive feedback loop.

Forest loss

Kristina Anderson-Teixeira, from the Smithsonian Conservation Ecology Centre, said that in landscapes where the vegetation that establishes after a fire is highly flammable “small increases in fire activity could result in sudden, dramatic and difficult to reverse losses of forests”.

As the climate warms it may become more challenging for trees to regenerate after fire. Some types of vegetation – including shrubs and grasses – are very fire-prone and increase the chance of permanent forest loss. 

But not all forests are the same. Factors including vegetation type and rainfall impact how forests will burn and recover.

The scientists applied their model to forests across the globe – including those in North America, South America and New Zealand. They found forested landscapes burn and recover in very different ways, and some are more vulnerable to being permanently lost.

Tipping points

Alan Tepley, also from the Smithsonian Conservation Ecology Centre, said: “In certain boreal forest landscapes, the low flammability of species that quickly establish after fire, like aspen, provides a degree of resistance to forest loss as the climate warms and becomes more conducive to fire. 

“However, in many southern beech forests of the southern hemisphere, fire can convert a cool, moist forest to a highly flammable shrubland that is easily perpetuated by repeated fires.”

Beech forests also have a slow rate of recovery after fire, which makes them particularly vulnerable to conversion from moist forest to flammable shrubland in response to relatively small increases in fire frequency. 

This is an example of what Anderson-Teixeira refers to as a “tipping point”, meaning they could more easily convert from forested to non-forested landscapes.

The team hopes its quantitative model will help scientists identify which forests are closest to these tipping points and act accordingly to conserve these vulnerable, unique environments.

This Author

Catherine Harte is a contributing editor to The Ecologist. This story is based on a news release from the Smithsonian Institute. The study is published in the Journal of Ecology.