Andrew Sells, Natural England’s outgoing chair, has admitted England’s conservation advisor is no longer independent from government. The frank statement, made under questioning from MPs last week, comes as the government considers proposals for a new post-Brexit environmental regulator.

Theresa May’s government is currently pushing a Brexit deal that includes proposals for a new environmental regulator that could have the power to take the government to court.

Sells revealed that the agency’s financial, press, communications and HR functions are now under the control of Michael Gove’s department for the environment, food and rural affairs (DEFRA).

Monitored

He suggested that as a result Natural England’s ability to fulfill its legal duties is being sidelined under pressure to deliver on DEFRA’s priorities. The agency is responsible for monitoring and conserving protected sites, advising on planning proposals and issuing wildlife licences.

“The difficulty is that all of our money effectively comes from DEFRA,” Sells told MPs.

“There is an inherent contradiction there. They want us to deliver their priorities. We say we have 500 statutory duties and responsibilities. We want to deliver those,” he said.

In September, Unearthed revealed a leaked internal plan from Natural England that warned that the body is too stretched to prevent further extinctions and is no longer working towards a government target to conserve the country’s top wildlife sites.

Around the same time, data emerged in a parliamentary question by Caroline Lucas showing that almost half of these sites of special scientific interest (SSSI) have not been monitored in the last six years.

Repeated cuts

Asked about the lack of monitoring in parliament, Sells told MPs: “You can’t have this level of cuts without having impacts on the ground and these are some of them. I am happy that they are being highlighted and I won’t pretend it’s not the case […] It makes the bill for restoration ultimately bigger.”

DEFRA told Unearthed that Natural England’s independence is “essential” for the work it does on environmental protection.

But Sells told MPs: “Five years ago we could determine very largely what we did with our money and how we made announcements. Now we can’t,” he said.

Asked about the advice he would give his successor, Sells highlighted “never letting go of your independence…..but having said that is not one of my achievements”.

The Wash is England’s biggest site of special scientific interest. Sells said that lack of monitoring on SSSIs is one of the impacts of repeated cuts to Natural England. Photo: Steve Morgan/Greenpeace

Resignations

Sells’ stark interview in parliament comes at a time of rapid re-organisation at Natural England.

He is set to leave his position as chair at the end of the year, a year earlier than planned. It follows the sudden resignation of the CEO James Cross a few weeks ago, which Sells said was “not ideal”.

Meanwhile at least 50 Natural England staff have been moved over to DEFRA to work on Brexit.

Sells added that a further 63 are working on Brexit from within the watchdog and that 20 more may also be affected. He said “of course” this has had an impact on Natural England and that those moved include senior, very experienced people who are “some of the very best”.

“The staff are very hardworking, frankly overworked, underpaid and many of them are stressed and have been through endless re-organisations and uncertainty,” he said. 

None of the people working on Brexit at DEFRA would have the expertise his staff have, but the agency is not reluctant to help, he added.

“Actually the opposite is true. We do this happily because EU exit, deal or no deal, is something approaching a national emergency issue and i think we should support our colleagues in DEFRA on that and secondly, and equally important is that what these people are doing is working on policies for the future.”

Cuts

Even so, Sells said that the “single biggest recurring challenge” under his tenure has been the sharp budget cuts implemented at the body.

Its budget has been almost halved in the last ten years, with the funding for monitoring of SSSI sites down 55% in the last five, he said.

And this year’s budget was cut by £6m – after the financial year had already started.

“It’s very hard to run an organisation with that destablising pressure,” he said.

Sells told MPs that the long-term financial strain at Natural England has the driven the movement of key functions to DEFRA.

“Running Natural England now is a very different thing to running it five years ago,” he said.

“What I think started as cost savings has run over into something which feels more like less freedom, frankly….I think the pendulum quite frankly needs to swing back”.

Sells said that he now has to request financial information from DEFRA, and that “when an inquiry comes into DEFRA, they start to draft a reply and put their interpretation on it”.

He also said that he had been concerned about a conflict of interest in accepting a position on the board of DEFRA but that he had done so because he felt under pressure, after being told that David Cameron wanted him to be.

His concerns about a conflict had not materialised, he said, because the board rarely dealt with Natural England issues.

Employees with concerns now have to go to HR representatives in DEFRA. While he said that he believed DEFRA would deal with concerns appropriately, he added that “in employment law this is not very clever”.

Wildlife crime

Sells also highlighted a couple of areas of work at Natural England that he was unhappy with.

He thought there should be tougher penalties for wildlife crime.

“I think that is an area where we as a society we haven’t been very good. The problem is obtaining the evidence. Once you have obtained the evidence the penalties are very light,” he said.

He thought that magistrates or Natural England should have the power to withhold gun licenses used for vermin control on estates.

But he stressed that this was his personal opinion, as the matter had not been discussed by Natural England’s board.

Hunting convictions are now at a historic low, the Guardian reported two weeks ago.

Sells was also very critical of the government’s Countryside Stewardship Scheme, which provides funding for farmers to do work to protect the environment. It’s set to be replaced after Brexit.

“The Countryside Stewardship scheme is like a really badly designed car, designed by a huge committee of people and various key parts of it have never worked.”

Farmers have faced significant delays in receiving payments.

“Our advisors found it was incredibly inefficient,” he said.

A Defra spokesperson told Unearthed: “The work of Natural England and its staff to protect our invaluable natural spaces, wildlife and environment is vital and its independence as an advisor is essential to this. With the government’s 25 year plan for the environment, Natural England will continue to have a central role in protecting and enhancing our environment for future generations.”

This Article

This article first appeared at Unearthed, from Greenpeace.

Dirty flood waters, impassable roads and submerged slums have become the norm every time it rains in Nairobi, Kenya’s capital city.

In August, the authorities took drastic action, bulldozing around 2,000 buildings in the flood plain, including shopping malls worth millions of dollars. After a lull, they are due to resume demolitions this month, national media reports.

The ongoing October-December rainy season is on track to bring – mercifully – average volumes of water. Yet the city’s flood risk is rising, as climate change brings more extremes of rainfall. Experts tell Climate Home News better waste management, urban planning and warning systems are needed to protect its growing population.

Flooded home

Numerous informal and formal settlements without adequate sewerage and sanitation services edge onto the three Nairobi Rivers: Mathare, Ngong and Nairobi.

At Hazina village, one of 22 villages in south B division along the Ngong, the river chokes with refuse, making the water hardly visible.

“It’s the village’s dumping site,” Anne Keli, a 46-year-old mother of 12 tells Climate Home News. She has lived in the village for two decades and says flooding has been particularly bad in the past two years.

“The water reaches the village at a high force compared to previous years but gets stuck due to the plastics, paper bags and assorted waste in the river, blocking its flow,” Keli says. “Since we are on a lower area, the run-off from higher areas headed to the river has no place to go as the river is full. So, where else does it go? Into our houses.”

During the long rains in April, Keli’s family left their flooded home and camped in the county commissioner’s grounds. She lost around 30,000 Kenyan shillings ($290) worth of goods from the shop she runs less than a kilometre from the river.

Climate models

The provincial administration made some efforts to clean the river during the flooding, but as soon as the rainy season ended it clogged up again, Keli says. “People keep building close to the river, reducing its size by day. People are asked to remove the structures with every flood but after the rains, everything moves back to normal.”

Kenya Meteorological Department (KMD) has installed more than 72 monitoring stations across the country in a bid to provide more timely and precise information.

Brian Chunguli, a county disaster management official, says a UK-funded programme will allow them to monitor live flooding levels from satellites and alert residents as waters rise.

“We hope to respond before flooding happens, and collected data will inform the disaster policy and interventions as we will compare long term data showing at what rainfall levels has certain areas flooded,” explains Chunguli.

Long-term projections of East African rainfall vary, with most climate models predicting heavier inundations as temperatures rise.

Mary Kilavi, the Nairobi County director of meteorological services, is mapping the areas likely to flood in Nairobi given a specific amount of rainfall. South B and South C on the Ngong river are hotspots, along with Mathare by the Nairobi river.

Political interference

“We are using a model that simulates surface water flooding using previous city flooding data corrected over time,” she explains. “We want to find out with a specific amount of rainfall, which areas will flood.”

This will help the authorities to move beyond a reactive approach to systematic preparation, she says. “Since weather is given in probabilistic terms, systems don’t act fast. We will establish the probability of achieving the estimated flood causing rainfall, then with stakeholders, agree at what point to act, the actions to take and funds to be set aside for the actions.”

The solutions range from cleaning up waste to creating green urban spaces and changing land management upriver. Many of these face political, as well as practical, obstacles.

There is a directive against building within 30 metres of the riverside, for example, but it is haphazardly enforced. Many owners of the recently demolished structures insisted they had permits to build there.

“It requires funds and land to relocate and rebuild the structures amid political interference, as area politicians incite the residents not to move,” says Barre Ahmed, assistant county commissioner for Starehe sub county.

Keeps coming

Dr Lawrence Esho, chair of the Kenya Institute of Planners, calls for a drainage master plan to cover the entire metropolitan area.

“We have a flooding crisis but the issue is bigger than the illegal buildings. It is more of the uphill destruction of land which we are doing nothing about, too much concrete pavements aggregating the run off flow, blocked drains and climate change,” says Esho. “Over the last 20 to 25 years the city has also gone through the change from bungalows built over a huge area to high-rise apartment blocks… without a drainage city master plan change.”

Builders should leave gaps between pavements for grass “to allow the water sip under when it rains,” he advises.

In the meantime, Keli can only make sure she has a quick exit strategy ready. She says: “I worry at every drizzle. But this time, I am prepared with a bag packed for any eventuality to rescue my children.

“As for the shop, there is little I can do. Until the river is cleaned, I still believe this village will flood if the rain keeps coming as they did these two years.”

This Article

This Article first appeared on Climate Home News.

Extinction Rebellion coordinated a series of protests this autumn in London, causing widespread disruption.

The group occupied Southwark, Blackfriars, Waterloo, Westminster and Lambeth bridges earlier this month and shut down major roads and junctions with walking protests and sit-ins. Activists chained themselves to the entrance of the department for business, energy and industrial strategy (Beis).

The group, also known as XR, is coordinating what it calls “a non-violent uprising” of civil disobedience against the British government because of its failure to tackle the climate change crisis. It wants the government to change its “inconsistent policies” and introduce a legally binding commitment to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2025.

Political inconsistencies 

The inconsistency in UK policy is clear. The UK has traditionally been strong in clean energy and climate change; it set the world’s first CO2 emissions reduction target in 2008, is the world leader in offshore wind, and has set a date to stop using coal power stations.

But it has also halted onshore wind development, cut support for solar, failed to make energy efficiency a priority, and thrown its support firmly fracking – while still trying to reduce the country’s carbon emissions.

Large-scale protests and civil disobedience have been commonplace among anti-globalisation movements for several decades.

Protests against the IMF, World Bank and the G7 began in Europe in the late 1980s, with anti-globalisation movements growing though the 1990s and swelling protests – the 1999 anti-WTO protests in Seattle attracted 50,000 protestors and had 600 arrests.

Numerous global finance meetings were disrupted by protests in Europe and North America through the 2000s as part of the Occupy movement, culminating in the G20 protests in Toronto in 2010, which was the largest mass arrest in Canadian history with over 1,000 people detained.

Civil disobedience 

Climate change has been present under the umbrella of the broader theme of global justice at anti-globalisation protests, but not the main focal point or prompted the same scale of protests.

In the UK, there have been numerous small-scale, focused actions aimed at airport expansion plans or road widening. But until now there has been a lack of broader, climate change-focused civil disobedience movement.

In the UK an emergent climate movement coalesced in 2013 around fracking. The ‘Reclaim the Power’ camp was set up near fracking firm Cuadrilla’s oil well in Balcombe and attracted around 1,500 people across its the six-days. Over 100 were arrested in protests that followed when work began at Cuadrilla’s site.

Yet in the fracking debate, for many, climate change was not the primary issue. Opposition has often focused on localised and more environmentally-narrow issues such as groundwater pollution and seismic activity – and, for local residents, noise pollution and even house prices.  

The protest camp attracted mainstream groups such as Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, but also non-climate or environment campaigners such as people there on behalf of InfoWars, the alt-right anti-government US website.

General infrastructure 

While the climate change angle has since become more pertinent amid dire warnings about global temperature increase – with Greenpeace now listing it as the primary reason to oppose fracking – anti-fracking protests have mainly remained small and focused on drilling sights or outside companies associated with the industry.

In this context, Extinction Rebellion stands out for three principle reasons. Firstly, the group’s protest action has targeted key transport infrastructure and open spaces London that are not energy-related.

Climate protests in the UK have mainly been context-specific, aimed at fracking sights, fossil fuel power stations, or airports considered for expansion. In targeting more general infrastructure, XR have increased the disruption of their action while also gaining broader public and media exposure to their campaign.

Secondly, climate change is what drives the civil disobedience campaign of XR. Their specific aims of forcing government to address policy failure and setting a net zero target are broadly held positions by environmental groups and NGOs – as well as many politicians – but XR’s sole focus on climate change is what sets them apart.

Thirdly, XR also differs in that it is not from the mainstream of climate-related campaign organisations, such as Friends of the Earth or Greenpeace. In fact, in October XR occupied Greenpeace’s head office in London and asked them to “up their game” on climate change campaigning.

Mainstream politics 

A statement released during the occupation noted that XR activists have been inspired by Greenpeace, have fundraised for them, and have “marvelled at [Greenpeace’s] courage over many years”. But using positivity as a call to action “does not work when faced with ecological and societal collapse … business as usual is no longer an option.”

This could have consequences for the political effectiveness of XR’s campaign. The main UK political parties went through periods of policy ‘greening’ and translating long-standing British ideals on the natural environment into their mainstream politics.

Climate change remained outside of this until more recently, but has since become regarded as an issue that sits above party politics – evidenced by the overwhelming parliamentary support for the 2008 Climate Change Act. But it remains a sensitive issue for some elements of both the Labour and Conservative parties.

Traditional environmental campaign groups have been a key part of building this political consensus, but XR operate in a fundamentally different manner.

Their narrow but deep focus on climate change as a call to action separates them, as does their non-violent civil disobedience, but this technique may yet be problematic for building a positive message on climate change.

Public support

On balance, politicians and the general population might view short-term disruption as a price not worth paying to increase public awareness of climate action and to force government to change its policies.

Ultimately, XR do not believe that the existing process of bringing about change works – and their comparatively extreme measures are justified by the extremity of climate change and the threat it poses.

Whether this is enough to galvanise public support and bring about real change remains to be seen.

This Author

Joseph Dutton is a policy adviser for the global climate change think-tank E3G. All views are his own. He tweets at @JDuttonUK

Chimpanzees use others to get what they want, new research from the University of St Andrews has found.

A team of researchers from the University of St Andrews, the University of Leipzig and the Max Planck Institute for Pyscholinguistics in the Netherlands has discovered that chimps can manipulate other chimps as tools to satisfy their own needs.

The study – published in the Journal of Comparative Psychology – presented a group of semi-wild chimpanzees with an apparatus that would release juice from a distantly-located fountain.

Cognitive skills

Any individual chimpanzee could only either push the buttons or drink from the fountain but never push and drink simultaneously. Thus, to get the desired juice, another individual was needed.

During the testing, one adult male used other individuals more than 100 times to drink juice.

He retrieved another chimp from the spacious enclosure, pushed them towards the apparatus and repositioned them. If they didn’t push the buttons, he then pushed them towards the buttons again or started begging by blowing raspberries and reaching out.

Social tools

Dr Manon Schweinfurth of the School of Psychology and Neuroscience at St Andrews said: “While there is good evidence that social animals show elaborate cognitive skills to deal with others, there are few reports of animals using others like physical tools.”

In contrast to physical tools, a social tool – such as another individual – needs to perform an action that cannot be fully controlled by the social tool user, i.e. releasing the tool in order to drink from the fountain.

Using this strategy, the social tool user increased his juice intake drastically, while social tools did not receive any juice from their action.

This Author

Brendan Montague is editor of The Ecologist. This article is based on a press release from the University of St Andrews. 

Chimpanzees use others to get what they want, new research from the University of St Andrews has found.

A team of researchers from the University of St Andrews, the University of Leipzig and the Max Planck Institute for Pyscholinguistics in the Netherlands has discovered that chimps can manipulate other chimps as tools to satisfy their own needs.

The study – published in the Journal of Comparative Psychology – presented a group of semi-wild chimpanzees with an apparatus that would release juice from a distantly-located fountain.

Cognitive skills

Any individual chimpanzee could only either push the buttons or drink from the fountain but never push and drink simultaneously. Thus, to get the desired juice, another individual was needed.

During the testing, one adult male used other individuals more than 100 times to drink juice.

He retrieved another chimp from the spacious enclosure, pushed them towards the apparatus and repositioned them. If they didn’t push the buttons, he then pushed them towards the buttons again or started begging by blowing raspberries and reaching out.

Social tools

Dr Manon Schweinfurth of the School of Psychology and Neuroscience at St Andrews said: “While there is good evidence that social animals show elaborate cognitive skills to deal with others, there are few reports of animals using others like physical tools.”

In contrast to physical tools, a social tool – such as another individual – needs to perform an action that cannot be fully controlled by the social tool user, i.e. releasing the tool in order to drink from the fountain.

Using this strategy, the social tool user increased his juice intake drastically, while social tools did not receive any juice from their action.

This Author

Brendan Montague is editor of The Ecologist. This article is based on a press release from the University of St Andrews. 

Chimpanzees use others to get what they want, new research from the University of St Andrews has found.

A team of researchers from the University of St Andrews, the University of Leipzig and the Max Planck Institute for Pyscholinguistics in the Netherlands has discovered that chimps can manipulate other chimps as tools to satisfy their own needs.

The study – published in the Journal of Comparative Psychology – presented a group of semi-wild chimpanzees with an apparatus that would release juice from a distantly-located fountain.

Cognitive skills

Any individual chimpanzee could only either push the buttons or drink from the fountain but never push and drink simultaneously. Thus, to get the desired juice, another individual was needed.

During the testing, one adult male used other individuals more than 100 times to drink juice.

He retrieved another chimp from the spacious enclosure, pushed them towards the apparatus and repositioned them. If they didn’t push the buttons, he then pushed them towards the buttons again or started begging by blowing raspberries and reaching out.

Social tools

Dr Manon Schweinfurth of the School of Psychology and Neuroscience at St Andrews said: “While there is good evidence that social animals show elaborate cognitive skills to deal with others, there are few reports of animals using others like physical tools.”

In contrast to physical tools, a social tool – such as another individual – needs to perform an action that cannot be fully controlled by the social tool user, i.e. releasing the tool in order to drink from the fountain.

Using this strategy, the social tool user increased his juice intake drastically, while social tools did not receive any juice from their action.

This Author

Brendan Montague is editor of The Ecologist. This article is based on a press release from the University of St Andrews. 

Chimpanzees use others to get what they want, new research from the University of St Andrews has found.

A team of researchers from the University of St Andrews, the University of Leipzig and the Max Planck Institute for Pyscholinguistics in the Netherlands has discovered that chimps can manipulate other chimps as tools to satisfy their own needs.

The study – published in the Journal of Comparative Psychology – presented a group of semi-wild chimpanzees with an apparatus that would release juice from a distantly-located fountain.

Cognitive skills

Any individual chimpanzee could only either push the buttons or drink from the fountain but never push and drink simultaneously. Thus, to get the desired juice, another individual was needed.

During the testing, one adult male used other individuals more than 100 times to drink juice.

He retrieved another chimp from the spacious enclosure, pushed them towards the apparatus and repositioned them. If they didn’t push the buttons, he then pushed them towards the buttons again or started begging by blowing raspberries and reaching out.

Social tools

Dr Manon Schweinfurth of the School of Psychology and Neuroscience at St Andrews said: “While there is good evidence that social animals show elaborate cognitive skills to deal with others, there are few reports of animals using others like physical tools.”

In contrast to physical tools, a social tool – such as another individual – needs to perform an action that cannot be fully controlled by the social tool user, i.e. releasing the tool in order to drink from the fountain.

Using this strategy, the social tool user increased his juice intake drastically, while social tools did not receive any juice from their action.

This Author

Brendan Montague is editor of The Ecologist. This article is based on a press release from the University of St Andrews. 

Chimpanzees use others to get what they want, new research from the University of St Andrews has found.

A team of researchers from the University of St Andrews, the University of Leipzig and the Max Planck Institute for Pyscholinguistics in the Netherlands has discovered that chimps can manipulate other chimps as tools to satisfy their own needs.

The study – published in the Journal of Comparative Psychology – presented a group of semi-wild chimpanzees with an apparatus that would release juice from a distantly-located fountain.

Cognitive skills

Any individual chimpanzee could only either push the buttons or drink from the fountain but never push and drink simultaneously. Thus, to get the desired juice, another individual was needed.

During the testing, one adult male used other individuals more than 100 times to drink juice.

He retrieved another chimp from the spacious enclosure, pushed them towards the apparatus and repositioned them. If they didn’t push the buttons, he then pushed them towards the buttons again or started begging by blowing raspberries and reaching out.

Social tools

Dr Manon Schweinfurth of the School of Psychology and Neuroscience at St Andrews said: “While there is good evidence that social animals show elaborate cognitive skills to deal with others, there are few reports of animals using others like physical tools.”

In contrast to physical tools, a social tool – such as another individual – needs to perform an action that cannot be fully controlled by the social tool user, i.e. releasing the tool in order to drink from the fountain.

Using this strategy, the social tool user increased his juice intake drastically, while social tools did not receive any juice from their action.

This Author

Brendan Montague is editor of The Ecologist. This article is based on a press release from the University of St Andrews. 

Chimpanzees use others to get what they want, new research from the University of St Andrews has found.

A team of researchers from the University of St Andrews, the University of Leipzig and the Max Planck Institute for Pyscholinguistics in the Netherlands has discovered that chimps can manipulate other chimps as tools to satisfy their own needs.

The study – published in the Journal of Comparative Psychology – presented a group of semi-wild chimpanzees with an apparatus that would release juice from a distantly-located fountain.

Cognitive skills

Any individual chimpanzee could only either push the buttons or drink from the fountain but never push and drink simultaneously. Thus, to get the desired juice, another individual was needed.

During the testing, one adult male used other individuals more than 100 times to drink juice.

He retrieved another chimp from the spacious enclosure, pushed them towards the apparatus and repositioned them. If they didn’t push the buttons, he then pushed them towards the buttons again or started begging by blowing raspberries and reaching out.

Social tools

Dr Manon Schweinfurth of the School of Psychology and Neuroscience at St Andrews said: “While there is good evidence that social animals show elaborate cognitive skills to deal with others, there are few reports of animals using others like physical tools.”

In contrast to physical tools, a social tool – such as another individual – needs to perform an action that cannot be fully controlled by the social tool user, i.e. releasing the tool in order to drink from the fountain.

Using this strategy, the social tool user increased his juice intake drastically, while social tools did not receive any juice from their action.

This Author

Brendan Montague is editor of The Ecologist. This article is based on a press release from the University of St Andrews. 

Chimpanzees use others to get what they want, new research from the University of St Andrews has found.

A team of researchers from the University of St Andrews, the University of Leipzig and the Max Planck Institute for Pyscholinguistics in the Netherlands has discovered that chimps can manipulate other chimps as tools to satisfy their own needs.

The study – published in the Journal of Comparative Psychology – presented a group of semi-wild chimpanzees with an apparatus that would release juice from a distantly-located fountain.

Cognitive skills

Any individual chimpanzee could only either push the buttons or drink from the fountain but never push and drink simultaneously. Thus, to get the desired juice, another individual was needed.

During the testing, one adult male used other individuals more than 100 times to drink juice.

He retrieved another chimp from the spacious enclosure, pushed them towards the apparatus and repositioned them. If they didn’t push the buttons, he then pushed them towards the buttons again or started begging by blowing raspberries and reaching out.

Social tools

Dr Manon Schweinfurth of the School of Psychology and Neuroscience at St Andrews said: “While there is good evidence that social animals show elaborate cognitive skills to deal with others, there are few reports of animals using others like physical tools.”

In contrast to physical tools, a social tool – such as another individual – needs to perform an action that cannot be fully controlled by the social tool user, i.e. releasing the tool in order to drink from the fountain.

Using this strategy, the social tool user increased his juice intake drastically, while social tools did not receive any juice from their action.

This Author

Brendan Montague is editor of The Ecologist. This article is based on a press release from the University of St Andrews.