The most surprising discovery of our eight-country investigation into Common Agricultural Policy subsidies is that they have had the perverse effect of encouraging investment in intensive farms whose size and production falls just under environmental reporting requirements.

Read Part I of the investigation here. 

Increasingly, agri-businesses are designing their operations around the blind spots in regulations. They are buying or creating smaller farming enterprises that pollute up to the maximum allowed by the regulations, while centralising and optimising the subsidies of those farms.

The pollution stays at the farm level, divided into discrete units that require no authorisation from environmental authorities, and once step up, the parent firms collect the CAP subsidies and any profits. Taxpayers contribute through CAP subsidies to the enrichment of shareholders in big companies, and pay again to clean up the pollution that these firms create.

Veterinary inspections

Because different authorities at regional, state or national levels regulate pollution differently, the big companies can shop for jurisdictions where they will be least subject to oversight. This is called ‘regulatory arbitrage’, and it is common in multinational enterprises. It is perfectly legal for various industries in numerous European jurisdictions. We are witnessing the migration of those practices into the farming sphere, supported by the CAP. 

The process is particularly visible in Poland – a highly significant case – for several reasons. The country has a thriving livestock sector, driven by competitive labour prices that help to keep costs low for producers and prices low for buyers.

It is also one of the new member states of Europe that has made the strongest efforts to meet environmental standards. To profit from opportunities in the Polish market, agrobusiness firms must therefore operate in a way that stays below the threshold of environmental rules and sanctions.

A welter of conflicting authorities and regulatory requirements makes it easier. One national institution collects the names and addresses of farms whose animal populations, from which emissions are calculated, exceed European reporting levels.

These are the so-called IED (for the “industrial emissions directive” of 2010) farms. Another institution collects data on reported emissions above the European thresholds. A third, in charge of veterinary inspections, is responsible for collecting data on the actual numbers of animals at each farm.

Tons of ammonia

The data is full of holes: all of it depends on declarations of farmers, and in some cases, it is not in their interest to declare their intentions – for example, to build a larger installation than is described on a declaration – or the true number of animals, or even to fill out the forms in the first place. 

Thus one person, or one firm, may own a number of farms, each of which collects CAP subsidies, and each of which reports – or does not report – its emissions separately. Various exemptions allow the owner of a farm, or several farms, to remain anonymous in the official databases. The different members of one family can create a large livestock business in concert, but as individuals in official terms. A corporation can register separate farms as subsidiaries. 

The data from Poland tell us that by splitting big holdings into smaller units, firms can engage in intensive farming practices that would lead to emissions reports if the farms were considered a single unit. According to the national Ministry of the Environment, between 2007 and 2016, at least 113 Polish farms that met emissions reporting requirements were split into at least 245 smaller entities.

As in other industries after the Soviet empire disintegrated, foreign corporations have invested deeply in the Polish pig farm sector. The Danish pig-breeding company Poldanor owns 10 pig farms and five sow farms in Poland. In 2015, nine Polish farms owned by Poldanor reported joint emissions of over 143 tons of ammonia.

The following year, seven Poldanor farms emitted 112 tons of ammonia. Meanwhile, Poldanor’s Polish operations took in 2,632,965 euros of CAP subsidies in 2015. In 2016 its subsidies in Poland dropped by 61 percent, but it remained the second-ranking livestock firm in terms of subsidies. 

Mixed cultivation

The core of CAP subsidies is a ‘basic payment’ for every hectare of land that is or could be under cultivation. The level of the subsidy varies across the EU member states, but it is converging toward a minimum of 196 euros per hectare by 2019. 

It requires only 2000 square meters – one fifth of a single hectare of land – to erect a building that is home to 40,000 chickens, at the rate of 20 chickens per square meter. That is why even experts on the CAP told us that the program doesn’t subsidise intensive farming – because the CAP subsidises land first and most. Without land, one cannot obtain CAP subsidies, at least in principle.

But a single farm can have more than one revenue stream – a practice that is favored by CAP environmental subsidies, which encourage multi-cropping. A farmer, or a corporate owner, can erect a building on a small parcel of land and fill it with chickens or pigs. The rest of the land keeps on generating CAP subsidies. 

The investment in intensive livestock breeding leverages those subsidies. Part of the remaining fields are used to produce feed for the animals. The animal waste is spread onto the fields, so far as is possible. Some countries, like Poland, require that up to 70 percent of manure produced on a farm must be put on the fields, so a livestock farmer must either own sufficient land, or rent a neighbouring field. 

In principle, this is sound ecological practice. It is highly visible in databases of CAP subsidies, where farms are categorised by their main activities, and where “mixed cultivation and livestock” is often seen. But another effect is that CAP subsidies for land may enable a farmer or corporate owner to invest in intensive livestock facilities, because they represent sizeable potential revenues.

Grown in cages

Since 2015, across the EU, 30 percent of CAP subsidies must – as a matter of regulation – be paid out for practices that “green” the environment. Simultaneously, payments based on simply owning land have diminished by a comparable amount. The “greening” practices may include rotating crops to grow animal feed, or maintaining fields for grazing. In principle, these subsidies are not meant to support intensive livestock farming. 

But they do – indirectly, and legally, but certainly. In Poland, 86 percent of Poldanor’s CAP subsidies in 2016 came from the “greening” scheme. Poldanor claimed to use more than 13,000 hectares of land to grow plants for biogas and animal fodder. Part of that land was leased to the company by Polish authorities, which caused massive protests of small farmers who alleged land grabbing.

In France, we ranked farms according to the geometric mean of their ammonia emissions and their CAP subsidies, to find the farms that received the highest subsidies relative to the amount of ammonia emissions they generate. There as well, we found polluters receiving green subsidies.

The seventh farm on our list was du Perrat – a GAEC, which is a type of farm company – which scored fourth for ammonia emissions, and 214th for subsidies in the years 2014-16. When we looked it up in company registers, we saw it had disappeared.

The firm’s principal activity was intensive chicken farming, which had caused it to be targeted by the activist animal rights group L214. An undercover operation produced a film that showed the conditions inside the building where chickens were grown in cages.

Raising pigs

A national scandal erupted, the government intervened, and the farm closed down. Before that happened, the owners begged anyone and everyone to come to the farm and take some chickens home, because otherwise they would be slaughtered.  

The disaster was shared by the company’s farm workers, who are also supposed to benefit from the CAP’s goal of promoting rural development. According to Fabrice Canet, the CGT official who represented the workers, four of them found new jobs, three went on parental leave, and 16 remain unemployed. He notes: “France has chosen to end the practice of raising chickens in cages by 2025.” 

What will take the place of current practices? An intensive pig farmer told us that he knows the problems, but not the solution: “Ammonia is the biggest pollutant in a pig farm, and it’s bad for the animals and for our employees. So we try to control it. If you want me to say that we should only raise pigs outside, it’s not doable on farms like ours.”  

The CAP subsidies for GAEC du Perrat totalled 48,212 euros in 2014-2016. In the last year, 5020 euros was given to the firm for “practices respecting the environment.” In effect, part of the company’s payments for land disappeared, and the payments came back as environmental subsidies.  

The third firm on our list was La Fennetrerie, which raises pigs, and which scored tenth for ammonia emissions and eighth in subsidies, at 356,477 euros in 2014-2016. A main business of this enterprise is raising pigs. In 2014-15, nearly all of its subsidies consisted of payments for land. In 2015-16, following a reform of the CAP structure, 54,526 euros for greening were given to the farm, while it lost a slightly larger amount in land payments.  

Economic parameters

You see how it works. The EU no longer subsidises land to the same degree. Instead it pays the owners of the land for being green, whether or not their principal activities include intensive livestock farming, which pollutes.

Livestock are indirectly subsidised by environmental practices that may or may not compensate for the pollution created by animals. This much is certain: the greening subsidies do not make all the pollution disappear. Otherwise, our air, rivers and lands would be healthier than they are now.

This is not what the CAP was originally meant to achieve. At the outset in the 1960s, the system was designed to enable Europe to feed itself, and to raise the living standards of millions of farmers whose physical comfort more closely resembled the 19th than the 20th century – barely enough production to feed the farmers’ families while leaving a tiny cash surplus for what they couldn’t grow or make at home.

Those homes featured outdoor toilets, were heated by wood, and often had neither running water nor electricity. One of our team lives in such a house in a French town that lives from raising veal for fattening in Italy. The house was abandoned in 1962, and rebuilt in 2001, when the hamlet finally got electricity. During that period, the town’s population fell from about 600 to 170. It was hoped that CAP subsidies would help to stop the decline and keep farmers on the land.

Did they succeed? Yes and no. To this day, for many farmers the CAP makes the difference between a revenue that (barely) suffices to live, and no revenue at all. Researcher Alessandra Kirsch discovered in a recent doctoral thesis comparing economic parameters of intensive and ecological farms that CAP subsidies account for up to 94 percent of the cash income of French cattle farmers. Without those subsidies, they would disappear – or more exactly, disappear even faster. 

Share of subsidies

The CAP is failing in its declared goal of supporting rural development, if rural development means sustaining a population and jobs for them. In the past ten years alone, over one-fourth of France’s farmers and farm workers left the land, leaving just under one million still active – 20 years ago, there were more than twice as many, according to the Ministry of Agriculture. 

Behind that trend, across Europe, is a movement toward fewer and bigger farms, and more intensive livestock operations. 

Our best analysis of the movement toward fewer, bigger farms comes from Denmark, where our colleague Nils Mulvad, co-founder of the Global Investigative Journalism Network and principal of the data investigations firm Kaas og Mulvad, has studied the distribution of CAP subsidies since 2006.

He found that the total subsidies paid out to Danish farmers declined by nearly one-fifth through 2017, to 948 million euros annually. During that same period, the number of firms that received subsidies declined more than twice as fast, by 43 percent. In absolute terms, the farms Europe subsidised in Denmark fell from about 69,000 to 39,000. 

But this movement was even more startling among the 20 percent of Danish farms that claimed 75 percent of the subsidies. There were nearly 14,000 of them in 2006; by 2017, their numbers dropped to 7,879. In that same period, the average subsidy claimed by members of this elite group rose from nearly 55,000 euros annually in 2006 to over 85,000 euros in 2017. The subsidies for the biggest farmers leaped an average of 55 percent over this time, because fewer farm were dividing the same share of subsidies.

Big concentrations

What about the ordinary folks? In 2006, the 37 percent of farmers who got less than 2500 euros annually amounted to 2.1 percent of total CAP payments. There were over 25,000 of them in 2006, but over the next five years their numbers dropped by nearly half. By 2017, there were just over 12,000 of them, and their share of total subsidies had fallen to 1.9 percent.

There is reason to think that big, intensive farmers who negatively impact the environment are disproportionately rewarded for it by the CAP. Alessandra Kirsch, comparing farms in France, the UK and Germany, writes that “the farms classed lower [by their environmental practices] receive on average more direct subsidies per hectare than better-ranked farms.”

In Austria, CAP payments have driven a similar movement toward bigger farms, including for livestock. Farms are growing, and pig farms are growing faster than the average. Today the average pig farm in Austria has 110 pigs; twenty years ago, it had 35, a near-tripling in two decades. We can safely guess that what tripled the average was intensive farms.

That certainly happened in Italy. Between 2003 and 2013, 78 percent of pig raising companies disappeared from the market (with the absolute numbers falling from 124,000 farms to 26,000), while the number of pigs raised each year remained stable (from 8,58m in 2003 to 8,60m in 2013). In other words, the average surviving farm produced five times as many hogs.

The vast majority of the Italian farms that are responsible for big concentrations of ammonia pollution receive substantial EU subsidies. In 2016, 67 percent of Italian farms that reported ammonia emissions over EU thresholds obtained a total of over 25.6 million euros in CAP payments. In general terms, the largest farms – raising more than 100,000 pigs a year – are among the biggest polluters and get the highest subsidies. 

Big farms

The biggest agricultural company in Italy, Genagricola, which is controlled by one of the biggest insurance companies, Generali, operates by acquiring local medium-sized farms. One of them – a pig raising farm – appears in both the E-PRTR and in CAP subsidy lists.

Genagricola is a major recipient of CAP subsidies, with over 2,5 million euros in 2016. Individual operators are following the same logic. Luigi Cascone controls three different large companies, which between them got over 340,000 euros in CAP subsidies in 2016.

The companies operate farms in the Mantova and Verona provinces. Five of the farms report ammonia levels big enough to appear in the EU database, and one of the companies was recently classified by local authorities as “harmful” because its emissions were found to damage the health of local citizens.

Clearly, this is a sturdy business, because Cascone has applied to build three more intensive pig farms over the last couple of years. Only fierce opposition by local residents is halting his plans temporarily. 

Farming pyramid

The concentration of farming impacts pollution in an indirect but powerful way. Of course, the same number of animals, whether they are on big farms or small farms, produce the same amount of excrement and emissions. But it is harder to manage industrial amounts of pollution than artisanal quantities.

Land must be found where manure can be spread, or trucks must be hired to take the excrement from a landless site to a processing plant or a field elsewhere in Europe.

If a waste storage tank explodes or leaks – French authorities have catalogued an average of two such incidents yearly over two decades – on a small farm, the farmer may have time to put up barriers to stop the runoff from reaching the nearest stream and may be able to handle the mess with a tractor.

If an industrial-scale accident occurs, the mess is far harder to control. The French farm union official was witness to one such incident, when an excrement collection site that served several livestock farms was flooded by heavy rains.      

Faced with such difficulties, some farm managers cheat. “A truck arrives at a farm to take away the stuff,” explains the union official. “A paper is signed saying the truck was filled, in principle to be taken away to another site in the EU. But the truck drives away empty. This happens on a massive scale.”  

Most ironic of all, the agriculture that is being shaped to the needs of the top of the farming pyramid is an export industry, continually building its output to satisfy the demand for meat in Asia, Africa and the Middle East.

Wrong direction

Europe’s farms currently produce about 115 percent of the meat that Europeans can buy, every year, and the excess capacity is growing. The meat goes abroad, while the excrement stays in Europe. That is not the only or entire result of the CAP, but it is certainly a growing result, and it is just as certainly a difficult achievement to defend.            

We can say without hesitation that regulatory arbitrage, coupled with incomplete and fragmented reporting of emissions, have concealed the environmental effects of intensive livestock farming from effective citizen oversight.

We are equally certain that the taxpayers of Europe are paying to clean up the mess created by livestock farming whose raison d’être, more and more, is to serve markets outside Europe. We affirm that current CAP policy and administrative practice favour big polluters over small farmers and the citizens who live with the pollution. 

The next reform of the CAP is currently underway. We conclude that if it does not at a minimum address these issues, the CAP will be “reformed” in the wrong direction.

These Authors

This investigation was conducted by the following authors: Mark Lee Hunter (France), Stefan Wehrmeyer (Germany), Nils Mulvad (Denmark), Delphine Reuter (Belgium), Matteo Civillini (Italy), Benedikt Narodoslawsky (Austria) and Patryk Szczepaniak and Julia Dauksza (Poland). They also thank colleagues Luuk Sengers and De Groene Amsterdamer for sharing information from their parallel investigation in the Netherlands.

A council which gave planning permission for a controversial scheme to bring fracking to North Yorkshire had pensions investments in one of the companies set to benefit – the US oil giant, Halliburton – at the time of the decision.

The Conservative-led North Yorkshire County Council (NYCC) gave the green light for exploratory drilling by Third Energy UK Gas Ltd at Kirby Misperton in May 2016. In turn, Third Energy UK Gas Ltd signed a contract with Halliburton “to support its onshore development activities”.

That same year the council – through its pension fund (NYCCPF) – had £572,000 invested in Halliburton. North Yorkshire County Council (NYCC) has since jettisoned its stake. However, it still invests in fracking concerns.

Conflict and injustice

Elaine Williams, a spokesperson for NYCC, told The Ecologist: “We appoint fund managers for North Yorkshire County Council’s pension fund and they determine which investments to buy and sell – decisions which are outside of the council’s day to day control.

 “The pension fund committee is completely separate to the county council’s planning committee. The pension fund committee is charged with delivering value to members of the pension fund, independent of council business.”

The Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust (JRCT), which is a stakeholder in the NYCCPF, has called for the council to review its investment policies. The trust is an admitted member of the scheme – it has taken on some council responsibilities where transferred staff still have pensions managed by the council.

Susannah Swinton, operations manager at JRCT, said: “The trust has raised the issue of ethical and responsible investment with NYCCPF. We are currently an admitted member of the North Yorkshire Pension Fund, which is part of the Local Government Pension scheme. Decisions on the fund’s investment policy and strategy are the responsibility of NYCCPF and are not under the control of JRCT.”

In 2014, JRCT – the philanthropic Quaker group funding people who address the root causes of conflict and injustice – was one of 17 of the world’s largest funds to say they would divest from fossil fuels and reinvest their money in clean energy.

Chemicals conglomerate

Third Energy’s accounts state under the Under a Contingent Liabilities section: “The Group [Third Energy] has entered into a contract with Halliburton Manufacturing and Services Ltd for the provision of services to support its onshore development activities. 

“As a result of this arrangement Halliburton may receive additional payments at a future date if these activities are successful. Due to the nature of the agreement management are unable to quantify these additional payments at the balance sheet date.”

Halliburton has a questionable environmental record. It was BP’s “cement contractor” for the Deepwater Horizon well and drilling rig that exploded in 2010 in the Mexican Gulf, killing 11 workers and leading to the largest ever marine oil spill.

The company also played a part in the creation of the infamous ‘Halliburton Loophole’, which describes laws that left the Environmental Protection Agency powerless to regulate fracking in the USA. More recently in June 2014, it was responsible for a devastating spill of fracking chemicals in Monroe County, Ohio, which polluted the nearby river and killed over 70,000 fish.

Third Energy is among the companies leading the charge to be the first to frack since the lifting of a government moratorium in December 2012 following minor earthquakes near Blackpool the previous Spring. It is up against Cuadrilla Resource Ltd and the multinational chemicals conglomerate, INEOS. 

Private equity

Cuadrilla was the first company to use high volume hydraulic fracturing for shale gas in the UK.  It was these fracking activities at Preese Hall in Birmingham which caused the tremors.

Third Energy UK Gas Ltd is one of a group of companies – including Third Energy Offshore Ltd, Third Energy EBT, Third Energy Trading Ltd and Third Energy Services Ltd – owned by parent company Third Energy Holdings Ltd, based in the Cayman Islands, where no details are available on company personnel or accounts.

According to Third Energy Offshore Ltd’s 2016 accounts (filed four months late in February and recording losses of over £1.1m): “In the opinion of the Directors, the ultimate parent company of Third Energy Holdings Limited is Barclays PLC. There is no ultimate controlling party.”

Barclays had announced at its AGM in May 2017 that it planned to sell its 97 percent stake in Third Energy Holdings which it owns through its private equity arm, Global Natural Resource Investments, but this has yet to materialise.

Requests under the Freedom of Information Act revealed that out of a total fund of £3.3bn North Yorkshire County Council in 2017 had investments of £4.1m in “named investments”. 

Granted permission

North Yorkshire County Council’s named holdings are: £1.3m in oil and gas company Total – half the amount from the previous year; £1.2m in investment house Macquarie Group Ltd; and £1.6m in chemicals company BASF.

The rest of the money is invested in “unnamed investments” – those managed through pooled funds. Unnamed investments held by UK Local Government Pension Funds can average between 40 to 60 percent of total holdings.

The North Yorkshire County Council Pension Fund has divested from Centrica plc – in which it held a £2.2m stake in 2016.  Centrica holds fracking licenses in partnership with Cuadrilla for operations in Blackpool. It appears to have also sold a £2.1m stake in investors HSBC holdings plc.

The Yorkshire Dales National Park (YDNP) is another public sector organisation which is a stakeholder in the North Yorkshire fund. Its employees have pensions invested in the fund. Andrew Fagg, a spokesperson for YDNP, said: “The pension fund is an independent body. As such YDNPA is not a ‘member’ and we don’t control its investment strategy.” The University of Hull is another a stakeholder.

Third Energy is currently being investigated for ‘financial resilience’. If it is granted permission to drill following this, fracking could commence in the Autumn.

This Author

Jan Goodey is a regular contributor to The Ecologist.

The American kestrel – the country’s smallest raptor – could prove to be a significant economy booster, according to new research published in the Journal of Applied Ecology.

The birds dine on – among other things – fruit-eating birds. Introducing more kestrels to the country’s fruit fields would mean fewer birds and less damage done to crops in farming states such as Michigan.

In the first study to measure regional job creation aided by the activity of native predators, researchers concluded the tiny hawks’ mere presence can produce measurable improvements as more kestrels mean fewer pests.

Macro benefit

Betsy Von Holle, a program director for the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Dynamics of Coupled Natural and Human Systems program, which funded the research, said: “This research demonstrates that farmers can use science to design agricultural fields that benefit people and wildlife.”

Catherine Lindell, a Michigan State University (MSU) integrative biologist and her team, calculated the benefit-to-cost ratios of installing kestrel nest boxes around orchards. The results showed that for every dollar spent, $84 to $357 of sweet cherries are saved from fruit-eating birds.

To scale up the projections, the team used regional economic modelling. The models predicted that increased sweet cherry production from reduced bird damage would generate 46 to 50 jobs, which translates to a major contribution to Michigan’s economy.

“Having more American kestrels around orchards reduces the number of fruit-eating birds significantly,” Lindell said. “It’s not just a microeconomic boost that simply benefits the fruit grower – it has a macroeconomic effect that benefits the state’s economy.”

Feathered enforcers

Von Holle added: “Fruit-eating birds avoid orchards with American kestrels, so those with kestrel nest boxes end up producing more cherries. If kestrel nest boxes were used more widely, these researchers estimate, Michigan would benefit by adding new jobs and more than $2 million in increased revenue over a five-year period.”

The strategy isn’t limited solely to Michigan cherry producers. It’s a potential boon for fruit producers throughout the kestrels’ range, and is a cost-effective ecosystem service, the scientists said.

Megan Shave, an MSU integrative biologist and first author of the journal paper, said:  “Though building nest boxes doesn’t always guarantee a booming kestrel population, installation and maintenance costs of boxes are small, and even if box occupancy rates are low, they can direct kestrel activity to particular places in agricultural landscapes where kestrels can deter birds that are fruit pests.”

Although birds make up only 2 percent of kestrels’ diets, just having the feathered enforcers in the area keeps many fruit-eating avian species out of orchards. These improvements give fruit growers another, more sustainable option to conventional pesticide-based crop protection, Lindell said.

This Author

Catherine Harte is a contributing editor of The Ecologist. This story is based on a news release from the National Science Foundation. Read the full report here

The contribution of the tourism industry to climate change has been hugely underestimated, and based on this flawed impact assessment many countries have chosen development based on large scale tourist projects.

Tourism’s carbon footprint makes up eight percent of all global carbon emissions – four times more than previously estimated – according to a group of scientists from the Australian University in Sydney and University of Queensland and National Cheng Kung University from Taiwan.

Development strategies based on tourism should therefore be reassessed according to the research paper published in the scientific magazine Nature Climate Change.

Addiction to transport

The new research has resulted in a significantly higher number because the scientists undertook the demanding task of assessing the whole supply chain in tourism for the first time. 

They included transportation, accommodation, food, drinks, souvenirs, clothes, cosmetics and other commodities used or produced for the tourist industry. They identified carbon flows between 160 countries between 2009 and 2013. 

Arunima Malik from the University of Sydney, one of the authors of the report, said: “Previous studies only looked at certain commodities and supply chains, however we used multi-regional input-output analysis to trace over a billion supply chains for a range of commodities.”

The results show that increased demand for energy intensive travel far surpasses attempts so far to decarbonise the industry. Wealthy people travel more and so influence the rise of emissions much more than technological improvements, like energy efficiency, can reduce it. 

Our wish to go to ‘exotic’ places, an increased addiction to air transport and to luxury goods has a much bigger influence on the planet than most travellers believe. 

Higher footprints

Malik said: “We find that, between 2009 and 2013, tourism’s global carbon footprint increased from 3.9 to 4.5 GtCO2e. Continuing a business-as-usual scenario would increase carbon emissions from global tourism to about 6.5 Gt by 2025. The most important reason for the expected increase are rising incomes – affluence in other words. There is a strong relationship between affluence and footprint.”

At the same time, at least 15 percent of global emissions from tourism have still not been included in any binding reduction targets as emissions of international aviation and ship bunkering are excluded from the Paris Agreement, the research states. “I think both travellers and tourist destinations need to work together to address emissions from tourism,” Malik added.

Tourists from USA in other countries are the biggest source of emissions, but also tourists from other countries coming to USA generate the most pollution. They are followed by China, Germany and India.

But, as Malik states, when we look at the emissions per capita, the worst score goes to small island states. For an example, in the case of the Maldives 95 percent of tourism connected emissions come from international tourists, and this country is already one of the worst impacted by climate change as rising sea levels are already creating climate refugees. 

On a per capita basis, Canadians, Swiss, Dutch, Danish and Norwegians produce a much higher carbon footprint elsewhere than others in their own country, while islanders and residents of popular tourist destinations such as Croatia, Greece and Thailand shoulder much higher footprints from their visitors than they exert elsewhere, the research stressed.

Future deliberations

“Responsible tourists could help by being aware of their emissions from the activities they engage in, or the goods they buy, and then implementing measures, where possible, to reduce emissions,” Malik advised.

“Ultimately real change will come from implementing regulations and incentives together to encourage low-carbon operations. One of the measures could possibly be eco-labelling of operations to promote sustainable low-carbon initiatives.”

The popular – but inaccurate – assumption that tourism is a low-impact development option has its consequences as many countries have chosen to seek development through the rapid growth of the tourism industry, sometimes even doubling the number of visitors over a short time period. 

“We have shown that such a pursuit of economic growth comes with a significant carbon burden, as tourism is significantly more carbon-intensive than other potential areas of economic development. Developing tourism has not therefore been—at least on average— instrumental in reducing national greenhouse inventories,” the authors warn.

“This finding should be considered in future deliberations on national development strategies and policies.”

Climate change also brings rising sea levels, possible flooding of parts of historical and tourist-oriented cities like Venice or Dubrovnik, extreme weather events, desertification of some parts of popular regions like the Mediterranean, which could all threaten the tourism industry itself.

If not human existence on the planet, the threat to industry itself should be an incentive for the sector to work and change these prospects.

“Our work could serve to inform the work of the World Tourism Organization UNWTO which advocates further tourism growth, even in already highly developed tourism economies and the World Travel and Tourism Council (WTTC) in creating awareness of the carbon burden faced by tourism-stressed areas,” the authors of the research emphasised.

This Author

Marina Kelava, is an environmental journalist based in Zagreb, Croatia.

The air is brisk up at 2,900 metres, at Dhorpattan Tibetan Refugee Camp. There’s a thin layer of ice to shake off my tent in the morning—and this is in April, in the spring. 

The remote camp is situated in northwestern Nepal, in a broad valley surrounded by peaks dusted in snow. Locals get around using pack-horses. 

The camp was established in 1961 by the Swiss Red Cross for Tibetan refugees fleeing Chinese persecution. Today, it is inhabited by 40 families, who make a meagre living by breeding horses and raising livestock – and growing buckwheat and potatoes. And those crops are seeing reduced yields due to climate change factors. 

Pioneering source of income

Enter an innovative social enterprise called Mountain Resiliency Project, which is pioneering a new source of much-needed income: bees. 

“We use apis cerena cerena bees, which are hardy and native to this region. There is a rich tradition of indigenous beekeeping in Nepal: we use traditional log hives,” says Tsechu Dolma, a young Tibetan-American who founded the venture in 2014 to deal with poverty and food insecurity prevalent in remote high-altitude communities. 

After the devastating May 2015 megaquake in Nepal, Mountain Resiliency shifted into top gear with rebuilding efforts. To bolster food security in vulnerable communities, Mountain Resiliency has built over 50 greenhouses across Nepal to grow diverse vegetables in these harsh environments, and has started up mushroom farming for a low-caste community. 

Tsechu Dolma herself grew up in a Tibetan refugee settlement in Kathmandu, before moving to New York and graduating from Columbia University. She has garnered a number of prestigious awards and fellowships for her innovative projects. In fact, our group trekking into Dhorpattan comprises members of Wild Gift, an Idaho-based nonprofit dedicated to empowering social entrepreneurs working to solve the world’s most pressing environmental challenges. Tsechu is a Wild Gift Fellow.

Win-win solution

Attached to the eaves of the humble houses at Dhorpattan are log hives, where busy bees come and go, heading out to flowers around the valley. Tsechu jokes about labelling this product ‘Tibetan refugee honey.’ The bee project kicked off with help from American donors, who supported the initial outlay of buying 25 hives at US$100 apiece. Boston-based social business Follow the Honey agreed to provide a market by purchasing honey.

It’s a win-win scenario. Economic win, ecological win. As Himalayan bee species are disappearing due to receding biodiversity, this plan to propagate more bees to accrue extra income will have wider impact. 

Bees are important pollinators of high-altitude flowering species such as rhododendrons, juniper and magnolia. Other pollinators include flies, butterflies and moths, but the bees – both domesticated and wild – do the greatest share of the work, especially at high altitude. 

They visit some 500 flowers a day, collecting pollen and nectar. The resulting honey flavours vary, depending on what the bees have been foraging on: mustard, buckwheat, rhododendron flowers, apple blossom, butternut squash, or lemon trees.

These are the highest-altitude bees in the world. But the survival issue is not so much the altitude – though that does impair winged flight – it’s surviving the freezing winters. These bees disappear for three or four months during that time – nobody knows where. But they return to their hives in the spring.

Honey hunters

On a day-hike in Dhorpattan, we meet an elderly couple, Tsekang and Tsering, at an outlying village. Tsekang takes care of her log hives, sited in trees nearby. Tsering is a honey hunter: he goes out several times a year in the fall to collect honey from wild bees.

This species, Apis laboriosa, is the world’s largest honey-bee—and is only found in high Himalayan regions.  This bee builds huge hives that weigh some 50 kilograms – hanging off precarious cliff faces. 

Collectors like Tsering smoke them out and steal the whole hive – a dangerous endeavour. Wild bee honey is known to have medicinal properties – even psychotropic effects, which result from toxins in the flowers of massive rhododendron trees. 

Decoding the behaviour of bees presents many mysteries. Around the world, the phenomenon of bee colony collapse is prevalent – thought to be connected with the spraying of herbicides for GM crops. Nepal is not immune from this ‘insectageddon’, though it is much less impacted. 

No bees, no pollinated plants

Back in Kathmandu, I quiz bee ‘guru’ Professor Madhusudan Man Singh about the fate of bees in Nepal. He is co-ordinator of the EU-funded Smart Bees project. ‘If bees disappear from the surface of the earth, humans will not survive – not more than four years,’ is the professor’s stark opener, repeating a quote attributed to Albert Einstein. 

“No bees, no pollination – and the plant kingdom will slowly disappear. And there will be no more plants to get food from,” he adds. But he is optimistic that bee species will continue to thrive in Nepal, although they face new threats. 

There are half a dozen wild bee species across Nepal, says Professor Madhusan, living in jungle and mountain environments. Bees must fight off predators such as bears and pine martens (after the honey) and bee-eaters and hornets (after the bees themselves). 

“Interestingly, both wild and domesticated bees use shimmering behaviour to repel hornet attacks – they shimmer simultaneously to make themselves appear to be a much larger insect.” 

Imported bee species do not fare so well. “Attempts by NGOs to introduce Apis mellifera bees from Europe have largely failed,” he says, “because they are not hardy like local species – and because they are susceptible to disease, which can spread quickly in traditional log hives.”

Plan Bee in action

Much later, I get news from Tsechu Dolma. The hives at Dhorpattan have been harvested. She has photos of the first jars of honey. Each precious jar represents the work of thousands of bees, visiting millions of flowers–travelling thousands of airborne kilometres, and leaving no carbon footprint. 

Plan Bee is working. Each hive can be harvested twice a year, producing between 30 and 40 kilograms of honey. This can generate over US$5,000 a year in income for the refugee camp – a major windfall in these parts. Most of the beekeepers are women: the money will go towards their children’s education, as well as buying more diverse seeds for farming. 

Mountain Resiliency aims to implement Plan Bee in other camps in Nepal as well as introducing other income streams such as mushroom growing. Tsechu plans to set up a Mountain Resiliency Institute where young locals can learn agribusiness skills. 

She already has set up a fellowship project for young women to start their own businesses.

This Author

Michael Buckley is an adventure travel writer, environmental investigator, author of Meltdown in Tibet: China’s Reckless Destruction of Ecosystems from the Highlands of Tibet to the Deltas of Asia, and has made three short documentaries about environmental issues in Tibet. Find out more at: www.mountainresiliency.org

The earth’s atmosphere is changing, and not in a good way. Scientists have begun analysing the climate from multiple different perspectives to get the best grasp on why these drastic changes are happening. As time goes on, it’s become increasingly obvious that what humans create and how we live are hurting the planet the most, so the natural next question to ask is how we can reverse the damage – or stop it entirely.

Reducing the waste we produce is a big step in helping the earth, but the issue goes beyond that. What we really need is to make our society fully sustainable. If people fail to act, the planet is only going to continue to suffer. People can do little things like use their cars less to save CO2 from being emitted into the atmosphere, but what might matter more is getting major industries to get on board with going green and focusing on sustainability.

Many large industries could do a lot of good with seemingly small actions – and one of those is the coffee industry. It’s a booming international business that won’t be going away anytime soon because coffee is a beloved beverage for many people around the world. Read up on where the coffee industry is now in terms of their practices and how they can become more sustainable in the future.

Why Sustainability

Although it may seem like a more recent fad, the concept of sustainability has been around for more than 30 years. The first mention of sustainability appeared in the 1987 report Our Common Future, presented to the World Commission on Environment and Development. The report explained how environmental degradation is linked to poverty and inequality. At first, sustainability was about enhancing the development of housing complexes, but it soon became much more than that.

People looking into how else we could go green to help humanity and the earth discovered if we stopped living in the moment and started living for the future, we could make great strides. Farms that were using harmful chemicals to produce larger and healthier crops in shorter time frames were found to be feeding toxic algal blooms in the water sources of Europe, China and the U.S.

Discoveries like this are what led to the definition and promotion of sustainability. It’s vital that people and industries understand why it matters because sustainability is the practice of focusing on having a renewable resource harvest, minimizing pollution and narrowing down non-renewable resources. Everyone can participate in becoming more sustainable, so we do more good for the earth than the harm that’s been continuing for so long.

Changing Standards

Because the coffee industry spans countries and cultures, it’s one of the major ones that must take responsibility and begin to go green. Even from the first step of harvesting the coffee, it’s possible to make changes. Currently, during the coffee harvest, farmers soak the coffee cherry in water, breaking down the fruit mucilage. That may seem harmless, but it actually begins the process of eutrophication. That’s when excessive nutrients cause oxygen depletion in local water sources, killing organisms like algae.

Take that harmful process and put it on a mega scale for coffee companies like Starbucks, and you’ll begin to imagine just how much damage the coffee industry is responsible for. People have begun to take note and hold companies like Starbucks accountable. In return, those companies have responded with promises, but are they really upholding them?

Starbucks has a history of bad business practices. In 2008, an investigation by the newspaper The Sun found a private policy kept their production process running tap water nonstop, wasting a total of 23.4 million liters of water every day. After the article made headlines across the country, Starbucks came forward and admitted they had to own their mistakes.

Since then, they’ve launched practices like selling reusable cups and installing recycling bins in every store, but many question whether that’s enough. No single company is accountable for fixing all the damage to the ecosystem that’s happening around the world, but should customers push Starbucks to do more? Some people question the validity of their claims to be eco-friendly, but other evidence shows they currently lead the industry in their green practices, encouraging other major coffee chains to do the same.

Sustainability Results

Starbucks and other companies have taken steps to promote the use of reusable cups and recycling, which is good initial progress to make. Once daily coffee consumers adopt those practices, they’ll ensure positive change in the long run. Other results of more sustainably focused coffee businesses would be less water use in the farming of coffee or production factories emitting less CO2.

There are many roads ahead for large industries to take to be more environmentally friendly, and each has their own production process and business model to consider. It’s always possible to make little changes at any step — from when coffee gets harvested to when a barista hands the customer their drink in a cup made of recycled materials.

Even though there may be more work to be done in the future, every step forward means helping the planet and future generations that much more. Because the coffee industry is so massive, it’s vital all the companies involved make the effort to do everything they can to become sustainable. Putting new practices into motion that will help restore the health of the earth will only attract more customers and benefit each coffee business because everyone is getting on board with the idea of going green.

This Author

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

You may, like me, have seen the ministerial statement on fracking and sunk low in your chair, or muttered something outrageous about Greg Clark –  secretary of state for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy – under your breath.

And that’s if you’re not in a position to shout at new highs that this government can’t take no for an answer. If you haven’t seen it, the coverage paints pretty well how most of us feel. A quote that perhaps sums it up best is from Rose Dickinson at Friends of the Earth.

“If there was a referendum on fracking, it would be banished to the dustbin of history – and that’s where these proposals belong. Instead, the Conservatives are planning to railroad it through against the wishes of local people and the wider public.”

Continue the fight

The ministerial statement is an outrage, with Clark stating: ‘The UK has world class regulation to ensure that shale exploration can happen safely, respecting local communities and safeguarding the environment….

“The Government remains fully committed to making planning decisions faster and fairer for all those affected by new development”. 

It goes against every grain of democracy this country can still claim to have. But on this very dark day it may be worth outlining some of the reasons why this statement came to be, and why this gives us every reason to continue the fight.

Firstly, these plans to effectively force fracking on communities are only in existence because of the sheer amount of local successes there have been against fracking in recent years.

Particularly in the last few months, we have seen countless rejections of fracking plans at planning committees, resulting in fracking companies largely using what they can to simply bypass the democratic process entirely.

Unconventional methods

The industry is so caught up in opposition they’ve had to resort to draconian measures such as suing the National Trust, Scotland, and ‘persons unknown’ (that’s us).

Fracking has been opposed to at almost every stage of the democratic process, and this is the only reason why the government are now determined to force it through. It is a measure of last resort – the government has been backed into a corner and the only thing they could do was lash out.

Secondly, the statement explicitly refers to some of the things that have ticked the government off about these pesky local people and their council representatives.

The North Yorkshire Joint Minerals and Waste Plan has just undergone review by a government-appointed inspector who found it sound.

Why is it annoying? Because it brings a new definition of fracking to North Yorkshire that prevents unconventional methods differing only in name or volume to the government’s statutory definition of fracking from sneaking in through the back door.

A painful day

The industry weren’t happy about this, and neither were the ministers. The statement says: “We expect Mineral Planning Authorities to recognise the fact that Parliament has set out in statute the relevant definitions of hydrocarbon, natural gas and associated hydraulic fracturing.”

That’s a call out to any naughty people trying to deviate from the government’s framework, which of course is perfect. So, again, this reference they make is alluding to another success this year that the government are very bitter about. Talk about sore losers.

Finally, we’ve already seen great victories this year on the frontline. Third Energy have withdrawn their equipment from Kirby Misperton after their finances came under scrutiny – that’s one less site to worry about for the moment, leaving Preston New Road in Lancashire as the only site in the UK where fracking is even close to happening.

Six years after George Osborne announced a dash for gas, we have yet to see any fracked gas leave a site of production and ready for sale. That’s amazing, and has only been possible because of the sheer range and diversity of people fighting fracking with astonishing spirit and resilience.

Today’s ministerial statement is a painful day for those who thought fracking was dead and buried. But it also serves as a reminder – we’re winning. The only reason a statement with this level of disregard for democracy could come to be published is because the government now have no other way of pushing their plans through.

It’s now time to put all we have into stopping this final assault. Who knows, maybe after we bring a halt to these plans, the nightmare that saw fracking storm up the government agenda may finally be put to bed, and we can crack on with creating that positive future of clean energy for all.

This Author

Mark Robinson is a member of the UK Youth Climate Coalition, which can be found on Facebook or twitter at @ukycc.

You probably have a direct debit or two set up to support your favourite charity, like most other people in the UK. You don’t mind giving away a portion of your hard-earned money to a cause that does good, that supports your values and has a positive impact on society.

But how do you feel about supporting nuclear weapon manufacturing, arms dealing with Israel, tar sand mining and fracking? They probably aren’t at the top of your ‘good causes’ list.

If you have an account with any of the main banks in the UK, then chances you are inadvertently funding these and other unethical activities.

Big Five

We at Ethical Consumer have revealed the hidden investments going on inside the vault and investigates the path to positive banking.

We’ve been investing and surveying the banking sector over 20 years. Our finance reports are our most popular and it’s clear to see why. People genuinely care how their money is being used by their bank and they are not interested in interest at all costs.

Our most recent report on current accounts shows a pretty bleak picture for the UK’s major banks. The report looks in detail at 27 current accounts, ranking them on a whole range of ethical issues from environmental reporting to workers’ rights and political involvement.

The lowest scoring companies include all of the big five banks, which account for 80 percent of current accounts in the UK:

    • HSBC (including M&S Money and First Direct)
    • Lloyds Bank (including Halifax and Bank of Scotland)
    • RBS (including Natwest and Ulster Bank)
    • Barclays
    • Santander

Amongst a whole host of issues, we found that:
    • The big five banks are the biggest investors in the fossil fuel industry, with HSBC growing its investment last year and Barclays investing $3.642 billion in 2017. These investments include arctic mining, tar sands, ultra-deep offshore mining and coal-fired power station construction. HSBC and Barclays take this investment one step further by owning shares in fracking companies.
    • HSBC, Lloyds Bank, RBS and Barclays all lend to companies selling arms to Israel, in turn fuelling a growing humanitarian crisis. Once again, HSBC and Barclays own shares in these companies.
    • Lloyds Bank made $2,986 million available to nuclear weapon producing companies from January 2014 – October 2017.
    • RBS has shareholdings in companies who are involved in palm oil deforestation and have serious workers’ and human rights issues.
    • Santander has over 21 subsidiaries in tax havens pointing to unethical tax avoidance strategies.

Unethical practices

Clearly, if we have accounts with these banks, we can be pretty sure that our money is being used to fund these unethical practices.

But as consumers, we should be able to see where our money is being invested. Our banks should be transparent about their activity. Indeed, the bank with nothing to hide should be open and honest with its customers. But this is simply not the case.

We found that most banks aren’t open about the companies that they lend to and have few scruples lending to unethical and environmentally damaging companies. In fact of the high street banks only one, the Co-operative bank, has any type of ethical investment policy.

Undoubtedly, there’s a strong case here for avoiding the banks that are in conflict with our moral values until they divest from this unethical behaviour. But what are the alternatives?

Banks such as Triodos, which we name as a Best Buy for current accounts, has adopted a strategy of impact investing. Rather than just boycotting unethical lending opportunities, they select investments and lend to companies that provide a positive impact on society, socially or ecologically.

Ethical baggage

Triodos is open and transparent about all its loans, a first amongst banks who offer current accounts. In fact, recent reports show that 24 percent of Triodos’s loans were to renewable energy companies, a fact that flies in the face of the fossil fuel preferences of the ‘big five’.

We also found that Nationwide, Cumberland Building Society, Smile, Yorkshire Bank, Metro Bank and Clydesdale Bank perform well across most ethical categories. In particular, the Co-operative Bank stands out with very clear ethical investment standards.

Claimed to be the latest craze for millennials, app-banking is certainly making its mark in the banking industry. Accessed solely through an app on your smartphone, these banks are already handing more control to the consumer, helping users to track and manage their money in real time.

They are refreshingly open and honest about the way in which their banks work and use customer feedback to actively evolve their systems and the products offered.

As is the case in some of the smaller or newer banks, there seems to be merit in starting a bank from scratch, focused on what the customers really value and without the historical ethical baggage that mires so many of the bigger banks.

Taking action

We conducted a dedicated app-based banks report for the first time this year and awarded our Best Buy label to Monzo. Revolut and Starling also received the same high score and both also offer current accounts.

The problems with the big five are not new. They are showing no concerted efforts to come clean about their investments and they certainly don’t seem to be looking to change their practices any time soon.

But we can make a change. We can take control of our money and ensure that our investments are used for good. Take a look at our guide for yourself and choose a bank that supports your values.

The guide is part of a wider report on ethical personal finance. In it you’ll find reports on all things financial, including loans, pensions, savings accounts and insurance.

This Author

Josie Wexler is co-editor of Ethical Consumer. Ethical Consumer has developed the most sophisticated and simple to use, personal ethical rating system, based on detailed research of over 40,000 companies, brands and products. Ethical Consumer gives consumers the information they need to make ethical purchasing decisions.

There is increasing concern about the health of our children among some parents, and our new book book explores the perfect storm we have created that may be the culprit. 

This storm is formed by a toxic mix of; 1) outdated medical models that struggle with chronic diseases and often overlook food; 2) an embattled scientific community, some of whom have obscured questions about the safety of GM foods and their associated pesticides; and 3) frustrated parents and children who are finding solutions by doing something so simple as changing their diet.  

Of course, the causes of children’s disorders are many. But food plays an enormous role.  Consider the possibility that some of the food we are feeding our children is loaded with chemical ingredients that are impairing our kid’s guts. 

Gut feeling

We’ve always known that guts – the intestines – play a huge role in maintaining health and causing disease.  They allow food to become nutrition and nutrition, we all know, provides the external source of the building blocks for life. More recently, we’ve learned that the collection of microbes that inhabit our gut, called the microbiome, have a lot to do with this process.  The microbiome may just be the evidentiary glue that connects the dots between GM foods and poor health.  

Rather than rehashing old and worn out debates about how GM foods create unknown proteins that may be harmful, or about how GM foods are not ‘natural’, or even about harms to agriculture from weed and insect resistance, this book takes us in a new direction. 

We focus on the fact that GM foods, because they are designed to be resistant to the potent weed killer Roundup or to kill insect pests with Bt, come loaded with ingredients that were once thought to be harmless to humans but now may understood as being harmful to the microbes in our guts. 

Consider the fact that increases in use of one of these ingredients, the active ingredient in Roundup called glyphosate, has escalated over 300-fold from 1974 to 2014.  Keep in mind, there are non-agricultural uses for glyphosate including playgrounds, parks, schools and backyards where Roundup is used profusely.  

How GM foods affect human health

Now we start to get a sense of the crisis we are facing and the central claims of this book.  These are not the only GM foods to worry about, but they are the lion’s share of them, being ubiquitous in corn, canola, soy, sugar beets and other foods as well.  

What has often been missing in the stories about GM foods is how to find a clear pathway through the controversial sciences to answer questions about how these foods affect human health.  Those familiar with the world of GM food debates know that we have never actually tested these foods on humans and that they have slipped through most of the safety regulatory processes, especially in the USA. 

However, we do have a vast number of studies from animals that should raise alarm. Still, it is hard not to be confused. Anyone taking even a short journey to the science library on GM foods will be met with naysaying, with the notion that the scientific consensus has deemed these foods safe. 

Our book offers a balanced and careful introduction to the arguments on both sides, ultimately however weighing in on the side of the nonGMO advocates and nonGMO science.  

Another piece of the puzzle that we are able to bring to the story comes from the clinical world. Using an integrative approach to chronic disorders, and telling us about these by way of vivid patient cases, this book explains what is likely going on inside the body when it is overloaded with agrochemicals. 

A symbiotic approach

They introduce the notion of leaky gut – a state of increased intestinal permeability that can trigger abnormal immune system responses. The result: chronic inflammation often associated with many chronic disorders whether the symptoms show up on the skin, in the lungs, the digestive tract, or in the brain. 

Dysbiosis, the state of having an imbalance of healthy to unhealthy gut bacteria can also contribute to problems of leaky gut. Using scientific publications, this book helps readers make sense of how the agrochemicals used in GM foods may be triggering long-term, sub-acute assaults on the gut, and – as our title says – sick kids.  

In the final chapters, we call for a rethink of our medical and scientific consensus by suggesting a more symbiotic approach to human, plant and animal health. Ecomedicine  is a concept we could use to reorient our medicine toward the connections between healthy soil, healthy food, healthy guts and healthy kids. 

Organic is the way forward even if there remain many hurdles on the path to getting there – like making sure organic foods are actually healthy, making sure people have access to them and labels that distinguish between GM and nonGM foods and, finally, making sure that the scientists who work on producing the evidence base we need for this shift are both heard and supported.  

These Authors

Vincanne Adams and Michelle Perro are the authors of What’s Making Our Children Sick?. You can join Michelle and Vincanne in London at an exclusive event on the evening of Thursday 24th May between 6.30-8.30pm. Tickets are free, but advance booking is essential. Click here for full details and to reserve your place.

My interest in creative ageing began with a midlife crisis which started just before my 50th birthday. I moved out of my 27-year old marriage, leaving the family home and my two daughters. The following year brought depression, a cancer scare, and the loss of my main client for training work.

It took me several years of turmoil to find myself again, but I had some rich adventures on the way, including blind dating, learning to cook, tantra groups, and a lot of solo time at the Hazel Hill Wood retreat centre I have created.

My first book, The Natural Advantage: Renewing Yourself, published in 2000 when I was 52, was one fruit of my mid-life crisis. It took another 10 years, until I was 62, for me to get some perspective on my own mid-life journey, and to start writing what became my second book, Out of the Woods: A Guide to Life for Men Beyond 50. 

Just for men

I wrote my second book specifically for men for three reasons. Firstly, I believed I understood their journey well, not only from my own experience, but from many years of involvement in men’s groups.

Secondly, I could see that men needed help more than women, as shown by the high rates of depression, addiction and other problems at this age. And thirdly, I was afraid that if I wrote a book on creative ageing for men and women, women would bite my head off and tell me I didn’t know what I was talking about.

In fact, my experience of researching and promoting Out of the Woods showed me that women much better understood the issues of creative ageing and why men needed the book – far better than men did. With this discovery, I was emboldened to start running workshops for mixed groups on creative ageing, but with a female co-leader.

By the age of 67, I hit another stage in my own creative ageing process, with turning 70 now on the horizon: this felt seriously old, and feeling daunted, I realised that I was not entirely walking my talk about the upsides of growing older. 

The impetus for writing my latest book Not Fade Away was quite personal: I wanted to unpack and work through my fears of turning 70, and I was guessing that if this landmark was bothering me, it would also be bothering many other Baby Boomers. My research for the book, among women and men, suggests that many of the issues at this life stage are similar for both genders, whereas research for my previous book had shown more differences between them during their fifties. 

The Baby Boomer generation

Not Fade Away aims to cover all the major issues around ageing for the Baby Boomer generation, focused on three major themes:

1.Value what you have

If you’re temperamentally anxious, like me, it’s easy to get preoccupied by worries about ageing. We need to make repeated, conscious choices to put more attention on the blessings of our life, and give thanks for them. Doing this can really raise our morale, and make our experience of the average day much happier. 

2.Be willing to face your fears

This is crucial in mid-life, around 50-60, but a fresh wave of issues is likely to hit us between 65 and 75. At this stage, we may have new challenges around health, money, partnership, elderly or dying parents, and facing the idea of our own mortality. I’ve seen many people at this age discover that it was taking more energy to suppress and deny their problems than to face them. Very often, there is useful wisdom in our fears if we can learn to talk with them.

3.Take a fresh outlook

Over the past few years, I’ve been closely observing people who are in their seventies. There seem to be two main patterns. Some people narrow down their life, deepen into old habits and beliefs, and just accept a steady loss of friends, work contacts and more.

Others find the strength to re-invent themselves, and discover that the seventies can be a period of fresh growth, new friends, and great creativity. Not Fade Away offers a range of new approaches which have helped me and others to do this.

A prime example is ‘Change the Story’: recognise that recurring problems in our lives often arise because we are repeating an old story from a painful childhood experience; if we can name the story, we can also name and consciously choose a more positive narrative to live by.

I’m glad to say that writing Not Fade Away has helped me move through my fears of turning 70. I hope this book will help people of any age, from young adults through to the over seventies. 

This Author

Alan Heeks is a writer and workshop leader who has been exploring wellbeing and resilience for many years. His new book, Not Fade Away: staying happy when you’re over 64, was published on Tuesday 1st May.  All proceeds from the book will be donated to the charity Action for Happiness. See more at www.naturalhappiness.net.