Just nine percent of the 92.8 billion tonnes of minerals, fossil fuels, metals and biomass that enter the economy are re-used annually, according to the latest Circularity Gap Report.

As much as 62 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions – excluding those from land use and forestry – is released during the extraction, processing and manufacturing of goods.

Despite the fact that we already live on a planet that is 1°C warmer than pre-industrial levels, global use of materials is still accelerating.

Unprecedented changes

We live in a linear, Take-Make-Waste economy. Materials extraction has more than tripled since 1970 and could double again by 2050 without action, according to the UN International Resource Panel.

This is a bad place to be – but the remedies are easy to grasp. We can see the climate risk in ‘business-as-usual’. The ingrained habits of unchecked consumption are not sustainable.

Cutting waste is part of the answer to tackling climate change. The circular economy is potentially the missing piece of the jigsaw.

If we are to bridge the Emissions Gap and get back on track towards a target limit of 1.5°C, then closing the Circularity Gap is not merely desirable. A 1.5° world can only be a circular world.

That transition to a circular economy is the paradigm shift that can help us achieve “rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society”, as called for in the Paris Climate Agreement.

Resources for governments

For a low-carbon future, we need a circular economy; there is no other way. Our world must become more than 9 percent circular. 

To date, most governments have focused their green agenda on renewable energy, energy efficiency and avoiding deforestation.

Policy-makers have overlooked the vast potential of the circular economy to achieve the Paris goals. Re-use, re-manufacturing and recycling, greater resource efficiency and circular business models offer huge scope not only reduce emissions, but also to boost growth through efficiency gains.

The Report calls on governments to take action to move from a linear economy to a circular model that maximises the use of existing assets, while reducing dependence on new raw materials and minimising waste.

Innovation to extend the lifespan of existing resources will not only curb emissions but also reduce social inequality and foster low-carbon growth.

Practical examples 

The Netherlands has set itself a target of becoming 50 percent circular by 2030, and 100 percent by 2050.

Governments control the levers to drive change through direct fiscal tax-and-spend measures. They should start by abolishing incentives which encourage overuse of scarce natural resources, such as subsidies for fossil fuels.

It makes sense to raise taxes on emissions, extraction and waste;at the same time, lower taxes on labour, knowledge and innovation would help cleaner industry and investment.

In our report, we highlight three key circular strategies and give practical examples. First, we must optimise the utility of products by maximising their use and extending their lifetime. Ridesharing and carsharing already make it less important to own a car.

Autonomous driving will accelerate this trend, potentially increasing the usage of each vehicle by a factor of eight. At the same time electric powertrains, intelligent maintenance programmes and software integration can extend lifetimes of cars.

Secondly, we must enhance recycling by using waste as a resource. By 2050 there will be an estimated 78 million tonnes of decommissioned solar panels.

Modular design would enable products to be disassembled, components to be re-used and valuable materials to be recovered to extend their economic value and reduce waste.

Finally, we could reduce material consumption, use lower-carbon alternatives and incorporate circular design methods. Bamboo, wood and other natural materials have the potential to reduce dependence on carbon-intensive alternatives such as cement and metals in construction.

Instead of emitting carbon, these materials store it and will last for decades. They can be burnt to generate energy at the end of their life.

New metrics

The Report introduces new metrics and data analysis to identify the best prospects for impactful change. We found that circular strategies to reduce waste are particularly important in the built environment, which accounts for a fifth of all global emissions. 

Our calculations show that nearly half of all new materials going into the world economy – 42.4 billion tonnes a year – are for the construction and maintenance of houses, offices, roads and infrastructure.

Another example is Capital Equipment. This broad spectrum of products, from cars to medical scanners and solar panels, consumes half of all metals. Advances in digital technologies and innovations in smart design, however, are already creating new circular business models.

The opportunities for investment in these new markets is real. The opportunity is greater, where shared understanding of circularity metrics brings more transparency to decision-making.

Global development

Moving society away from the Take-Make-Waste pattern of consumption, ingrained in our linear economy, requires a paradigm shift. The circular model serves to separate things we do want from our economic system, from those we do not want.

For example, we want fairer distribution of prosperity and a bright future for the next generations. We do not want to squander scarce natural resources, nor to suffer adverse effects on our environment and society.

Ultimately, a circular economy is a practical strategy to decouple economic growth from unsustainable resource extraction and emissions. It aims to bring prosperity, whilst intelligently managing resources within the boundaries of our planet.

Circular thinking is compatible – in fact, dependent – on policies that foster social equity and mitigate climate breakdown.  A 1.5-degree world can only be circular: the time to close the Circularity Gap is now.

This Author 

Harald Friedl is chief executive of Circle Economy. Before joining Circle Economy in 2017, Harald spent five years in Myanmar, during which he co-founded Impact Hub Myanmar; led national market development of electro-mechanical hydropower projects in the country; and co-founded Myanmar’s first pre-incubation programme for social enterprises. 

You are offered a position to work in a forest oversight authority – let’s call it OSINFOR. Your job involves going to the field to document whether logging operations are being conducted according to the law.

You discover extensive cases of illegal logging and take to meticulously documenting them. You publish your findings. Within hours, you get an angry call. The next day, you get your first threat. Soon after, you’re fired.

Why? Because the truth is, if you work for OSINFOR, doing a good job can land you in serious trouble.

Fierce backlash

Over the last decade, OSINFOR has taken the lead in inspecting timber harvest areas in the Amazon. Some of the inspections they’ve made are truly heroic and have shed much-needed light on the way loggers get away with logging illegally.

At Global Witness, we wanted to get a better sense of just how effective OSINFOR’s work has been. So we made official requests for huge amounts of data that they have been producing over the last decade.

We recently published our findings. They turn out to be pretty sobering: between 2008 and 2018, of all the harvest areas OSINFOR inspected in the three main timber producing regions in Peru, over 60 percent came from areas where widespread illegalities had been reported, including the laundering of a massive 2.5 million cubic meters of timber. 

But far from being praised for uncovering such illegalities, OSINFOR has faced a fierce backlash from the private sector and some government officials – our short video gives a good sense of this.

OSINFOR has been subject to protests and attacks on its offices in major Amazon cities. Some inspectors have been barred from entering harvest areas.

In 2016, the then director was sacked and forced to flee Peru in fear for his life. He had played a key role in exposing the biggest timber export scandal in Peruvian history, which has also been the subject of a Global Witness investigation.

Ministerial control 

Just last month, OSINFOR’s independence was seriously weakened by being placed under the Ministry of the Environment, where it is more vulnerable to political meddling and conflicts of interest. This caused its director to hand in his notice, in protest at the move.

Rather than clipping the wings of such an effective institution by weakening its independence, the government of Peru should ensure that OSINFOR can continue to operate independently and give it appropriate resources to do so.

The US government has also expressed concern about the recent weakening, as it has signed a Trade Promotion Agreement with Peru that requires OSINFOR to be “independent and separate”.  

The United States Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer said about the situation: “Since its creation in 2008, OSINFOR has played a critical role in Peru detecting and combatting illegal logging, and we are gravely concerned that its independence is threatened. I urge Peru to abide by its obligations and restore OSINFOR’s separateness and independence, as called for in the PTPA.”

Prior to the agreement, OSINFOR had been under ministerial control, and was ineffective and starved of resources. It had no control over its own budget and was responsible for only one type of harvest area. Inspections were rarely undertaken, if at all, staff was poorly trained and corruption was said to be rife.

Illegal timber 

Only after OSINFOR’s reincarnation as an independent agency free of control by any one ministry did its oversight operations dramatically improve. Placing OSINFOR under ministerial control once again risks taking the Peruvian logging sector back to the past.

There is a strong case to be made for OSINFOR’s mandate to be expanded: our analysis also reveals how some of Peru’s biggest sawmills consistently process high quantities of illegal timber without asking any questions as to the origin of the timber. Yet sawmills are areas where OSINFOR cannot make inspections.

Plantations and land cleared for agriculture are also beyond OSINFOR’s remit, so it is perhaps not a coincidence that these areas have recently begun to be used as laundering vehicles to make illegal timber appear as legal.

No one should be reprimanded, threatened or fired for doing a good job. And, in Peru, no one has played a more important role than OSINFOR in exposing what really goes on in Peru’s timber sector.

Given the scale of the plunder revealed in our investigation, Peru should make sure that it does not in any way undermine its forests’ eyes and ears. 

This Author 

Laura Furones, head of the Peru campaign at Global Witness.

Weeks after the Indian government unveiled the country’s first ever air pollution reduction targets, new data has revealed the number of cities violating the country’s air quality standards is more than twice as high as previously thought.

The National Clean Air Programme, published earlier this month after months of waiting and years of campaigning by Indian civil society, set a target of reducing levels of toxic particle pollution by 20 to 30% by 2024, from 2017 levels.

The plan includes a list of 102 cities violating the country’s air quality standards that are required to prepare city-level action plans and expected to achieve the reduction targets.

Quality standards

But a new map of regional air pollution levels, produced and analysed by Greenpeace India, shows that the number of cities where air quality standards are being violated is more than twice as high as the cities that are required to take action as a part of the national plan.

Out of the 313 cities for which there is data, 241 had PM10 levels exceeding the standards, with data for nearly 400 other cities still missing.

In recent years India’s air quality has deteriorated to the point where it has become the most consistently smoggy country in the world, with pollution levels even exceeding those in neighbouring China.

Not only do the new numbers show the need for urgency in reducing particle pollution levels across the country, they also highlight that even a 30% reduction would just be the beginning.

Even if a 30% reduction was achieved across the country, more than 150 cities would still violate India’s national air quality standards, and these standards themselves are four times as lenient for PM2.5 as those recommended by the World Health Organization (40 micrograms per cubic meter in India vs. WHO guideline of 10).

Rising trend

Not a single city among the 313 cities with data met the WHO guideline.

India’s clean air programme includes a long list of recommended measures, but leaves implementation largely in the hands of each of the 102 cities that are supposed to come up with their own action plans.

The programme, however, currently lacks a legal status, specific city-level targets and an implementation budget commensurate to the challenge, which leaves a lot of work to be done before the recommendations and targets are made into reality.

The government has come a long way from first promising a national-level action plan a year ago to setting at least tentative, measurable targets for which it can be held accountable.

China’s National Air Pollution Prevention Action plan, released in 2013, turned around a rising trend and achieved record reductions over the four-year period to 2017.

India’s air pollution levels continued to climb over the period, with the average Indian being exposed to more particle pollution than the average resident of China, for the first time on record, in 2015.

Greenpeace India compiled the data from government websites and through numerous right-to-information requests to state and city Pollution Control Boards which monitor air pollution levels but have been sluggish in publishing the data.

This Article

This article first appeared at Unearthed, from Greenpeace.

Martin Kaiser from Greenpeace was a member of a 24-person commission convened by the German government which advised last week that the country abandon coal entirely by 2038.

He spoked to Unearthed, the environment charity’s investigative journalism platform, about the commission’s proposal – and whether it will help avert catastrophic climate change.

So what has Germany’s coal commission decided?

First of all, the commission can’t decide anything. It was set up to work out a proposal for how Germany can quit coal in a socially responsible way whilst also making sure the country can meet its 2030 climate target and close the gap to its 2020 goal as quickly as possible.

That said, after the enormous efforts of the commission over the past seven months to find an agreement between parties as diverse as unions, industry reps, energy utilities, mining regions and environmentalists, it’s hard to imagine that the government won’t adopt its recommendations.

The most important part of the proposal – and the commission’s very existence – is that Germany, home of the Energiewende, but also world-champion in lignite burning, has finally decided to get off coal for good.

The deadline for that phase-out is 2038, with several opportunities to review the plan and see if it can be accelerated.

The phase out will start immediately: Over the next three years (until 2022) coal capacity of more than 12GW (5 of lignite, 7.7 of hard coal) will be removed from the grid. That’s about a third of Germany’s entire fleet.

Now obviously – since the commission needed everyone on board – there are some pretty significant problems with the proposal’s goals.

The 2038 phase-out date fails to meet the Paris Agreement’s 1.5C target and was voted against by the environmental groups on the commission (including Greenpeace).

And the speed of the phase out between 2022 and 2030 is far too slow, which again the three NGOs within the commission voted against.

Finally, although Hambacher forest can finally be spared from RWE’s mining plans due to the planned lignite reductions, there was a glaring absence of any statement about how all threatened villages must be saved.

How is Germany planning to close these plants?

The proposal does not speak about individual plants, it only mentions capacity reductions.

It’s now up to the government to figure out which plants will deliver the needed GW-reductions. There will be compensations for the utilities, but again the details will be determined by the government.

Why is this announcement significant?

Germany hasn’t been making any progress in reducing its carbon emissions for close to a decade, but with the coal phase-out in place this is almost certain to change. It will add the much-needed second leg to the energy transition.

The country’s stalling emissions showed that it’s not enough to boost renewables if you leave an aging brown coal fleet untouched. These plants are cheap, old(some are more than 50 yrs old) and hard to compete with economically, but also very dirty (a brown coal plant emits about three times more CO2 compared to a modern gas power plant.) Now the renewables boom can start to become a success for the climate.

Germany, the world’s fourth-largest economy, is moving into a decarbonized future without relying on nukes and that’s obviously a big deal.

With the coal phase out in place the path is cleared to eventually focus on other key areas of decarbonisation such as transport.

But the commission’s proposal is not in line with the Paris Agreement…

The commission’s proposal ensures that the energy sector reaches its 2030 target which was modeled on a 2° trajectory. So it is not in line with 1.5 and that is a big problem.

Ending coal only in 2038 is unacceptable and sets a bad example to other countries – which is why environmental NGOs voted against it.

Is there anything people can do to try to accelerate the phase out?

As much as this proposal leaves to be desired, the important progress it does make could only have been achieved with the tens of thousands of demonstrators marching for Hambacher Forest, asking for more climate action, and the pupils and students who have gone on strike on Fridays. Similarly I believe that a loud voice of civil society is crucial to accelerating the phaseout.

This voice should first be heard during the legislative process ahead when the proposal will be put into law by the government. Here, the climate movement needs to ensure that there must not be any weakening of the proposal and contrary to emphasise the urgency to move ahead faster.

The proposal includes a number of assessments (in 2023, 2026, 2029 and 2032) to look at things like electricity prices and the necessary structural changes in the mining regions as well as progress in climate protections and I’m certain that the Paris Agreement goals and the need for a faster decline in emissions can and must be taken into account here.

This Article

This article first appeared at Unearthed, from Greenpeace.

A UK wide student strike has been called on Friday 15 February 2019 to protest against climate inaction, with a global strike following on Friday 15 March.

There have been escalating young people’s school strikes across the globe, with tens of thousands coming onto the streets to demand action to stop global warming and environmental destruction.

All have been inspired by Greta Thunberg, who began a solo climate protest by striking from school in Sweden in August 2018. Since then, thousands of school students around the world have joined her.

Climate action

The school strikes have spread to at least 270 towns and cities in countries across the world, including Australia, the United Kingdom, Belgium, Switzerland, Germany, the US, Canada and Japan.

The picture above shows young people in Belgium taking part in a strike organised by an independent youth movement, not affiliated to any parties or organisations. 

In November 2018, thousands of Australian children struck school in defiance of the prime minister to protest for greater action on climate change.

Organisers estimated around 15,000 left their classrooms in 30 locations across the country, including Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth, carrying signs reading “procrastinating is our job not yours” and “I’ve seen smarter Cabinets at Ikea”. There were similar protests in Canberra and Hobart also.

Youth

On 10 January, 3000 young people took to the streets of Brussels, calling for climate action outside the the European Parliament.

A week later on 17 January, 12,500 came out (part of the crowd shown in pictures below). On 24 January, over 32,000 took part, with another 5000 coming out in other Belgian cities.

The following day, there were climate strikes in Switzerland, where more than 20,000 students from schools and colleges in 15 cities took part, and in Germany, where similar numbers joined events in at least 56 towns and cities.

For the February 15th youth strike in the UK, events have so far been set up in cities including London, Manchester, Glasgow, Bristol and Brighton.

New phase

We are now in a new phase of climate action in the UK. More and more of us are deciding to make our voices heard over climate change.

Young people are not waiting for adults to do something for them – instead, they are leading the way in taking action for themselves. 

The UK Students’ Climate Network said on their Facebook page: “Exciting stuff is happening here!! Let’s keep 2019 going the way it has started: full of determination to do everything we can to make our voices heard and save the planet from mass extinction before it is too late.”

This Article 

This article was first published on the Campaign Against Climate Change blog. 

The global wave of student strikes for climate action has come to the UK. We should unequivocally support these young people to have their voices heard, especially as the clock ticks in the 12-year countdown to implement measures to avoid runaway climate breakdown.

Holly Gillibrand, 13, has already instigated protests in Scotland and there are plans for a nationwide day of action on 15 February 2019. These actions come as tens of thousands of students have held similar strikes in countries across the world.

Students from Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, the Netherlands, Germany, Finland, Denmark, Japan, Switzerland, the UK and the United States have taken part, having been inspired by sixteen-year-old Greta Thunberg’s protests outside the Swedish Parliament.

Strong words

Thunberg’s protests coincided with the World Economic Forum 2019 in Davos, where elites gather to discuss how to keep markets ‘free’. Days before, 35,000 teenagers marched in Brussels, while students in Basel and Berlin planned sit-ins. 

The narrative of the student-led protests has straddled two compelling lines. Naturally, they convey a strong sense of intergenerational injustice. The protests also lay blame for climate injustice primarily at the feet of the rich and powerful.

At the demo after thousands of Australian students brought Melbourne traffic to a standstill, 11-year-old Lucie Atkin-Bolton told crowds, “When kids make a mess, adults tell us to clean it up and that’s fair. But when our leaders make a mess, they’re leaving it to us to clean up.”

Greta Thunberg challenged UN leaders telling them, “you say you love your children above all else, and yet you are stealing their future in front of their very eyes.” These are strong words that leaders need to hear. They decisively expose the hypocrisy between their moral intuitions and the consequences of their political choices.

From Davos, Thunberg told the BBC: “My message was that most emissions are caused by a few people, the very rich people, who are here in Davos.” She goes on to assign them “huge responsibility” for safeguarding future living conditions.

Holly Gillibrand of the Scotland protests recently said: “I am striking because we are running out of time. Thousands of children around the world should not be having to miss classes because of our leaders’ inability to treat the climate crisis as a crisis.”

Holly’s right. It’s indicative of the scale of climate breakdown’s injustices that children are forced to become activists. It shows how severely they’ve been let down by our current decision makers and those that have come before.

Intergenerational activism 

These messages show how successfully the analysis of climate change as injustice has become entrenched. It is most starkly understood by disenfranchised children that we are already enduring the impacts of climate breakdown distributed disproportionately along the lines of race and class, experienced by those who contributed least to the crisis.

When climate justice narratives focus on intergenerational injustice, we distract from some of the contemporary realities of the crisis.

When winters get colder and fuel remains expensive, its older people who die. Landgrabs driven by capital’s desire for more coal mines or the displacement of people by flooding, drought and food insecurity are all harms afflicting people disproportionately in the global South today.

As well as her more radical messaging, Thunberg says, “We need to hold the older generations accountable for the mess they have created, and expect us to live with. It is not fair that we have to pay for what they have caused.”

But “older generations” have not acted – or have failed to act – as a homogenous bloc. It is a generation of the wealthy and powerful that have inflicted climate harms on the poor and colonised of their own generation as well as the next.

The younger generation too is not homogenously righteous. Those of it who inherit capital and end up running our society are equally likely to continue the bad work of those who precede them.

We should embrace the energy brought by students taking radical action and use it to catalyse taking our wider organising to the next level. We also mustn’t lose sight of the primary antagonism in the climate crisis.

The rich are waging a class war on the poor and climate change is the symptom. It is not the older versus the young. Intergenerational solidarity is the way forward.   

This Author

Chris Saltmarsh is co-director of Climate Change Campaigns at student activist network People & Planet. He tweets at @chris_saltmarsh. 

The government is on course to ditch a landmark EU legal commitment to end overfishing by 2020 – despite the prime minister’s promise not to reduce UK environmental standards after Brexit.

The move represents a dilution of ambitions outlined in the government’s own fisheries white paper, according to MPs and conservationists. It comes after some in the fishing industry called on ministers not to adopt the 2020 target into post-Brexit law.

Under the common fisheries policy, EU ministers will be legally bound – from next year on – to set fishing quotas within a “maximum sustainable yield” (MSY). This is the greatest amount of fish that scientists say can be caught without depleting the stock long-term.

Watering down

The deadline was agreed by EU member states, including the UK, in a bid to finally end the annual spectacle of fisheries ministers caving to industry pressure to set allowable catches at levels their scientific advisors say are unsustainable.

Prime minister Theresa May has promised to incorporate all EU environmental regulations into domestic law, and to ensure “Brexit will not mean a lowering of environmental standards”.

But the government bill intended to replace the EU’s common fisheries policy includes no legal duty to limit catches in line with the scientific advice – and ministers have so far rebuffed attempts to introduce one.

Instead, the fisheries bill – which will return to the House of Commons soon – includes only an “objective” to ensure fishing within MSY. Environmentalists warn this will leave ministers vulnerable to continued industry pressure to overfish.

“It would really be a step backwards and a watering down of existing commitments,” said Sam Stone, head of fisheries and aquaculture at the Marine Conservation Society.

Set catches

“The government has said several times that there should be a green Brexit, and said they want to improve environmental standards. Removing this commitment would certainly not achieve that.”

Liberal Democrat MP Alastair Carmichael, whose Shetland and Orkney constituency plays a major role in UK fishing, told Unearthed that the costs of getting the fisheries bill wrong “would be huge”.

“Fishing unsustainably is in no one’s interests, especially not the interests of the fishing industry and the communities that depend on it,” he said.  

“Maximum Sustainable Yield is a piece of jargon that really means common sense. Fishing is an industry that goes down generations and fishermen themselves want an industry to pass on to their children.”

Mr Carmichael sat on the committee of MPs that examined the bill, and tabled an amendment – blocked by Conservative MPs – that would have introduced a duty to set catches in line with scientific advice. “The absence of MSY from the bill is disappointing,” he said.

Scientific advice

“The white paper that came ahead of the bill was much stronger. The bill looks to me like a botched job coming from a government department that, seized by the challenges of Brexit, has lost sight of what is important.”

But he added: “This Government does not have a majority in the Commons and is in an even weaker position in the Lords. I believe we shall see a lot more changes to the bill and am determined to keep fighting on this issue.”

Fisheries minister George Eustice has offered various arguments for not including a binding MSY duty in the bill.

He has argued it would rob the UK of “flexibility” needed to manage fish stocks shared with countries like Norway, which does not always use scientific advice based on MSY; that it is impossible to set all catch limits at MSY in “mixed fisheries”, where more than one species is caught in the same area; and that “it makes no sense” to include a 2020 deadline in a bill that probably will not take effect before 2021.

He has also said the fisheries bill will require the UK’s four nations to produce a joint statement explaining how they will meet the bill’s objectives. He argues this statement would be the right place to make a commitment to set catches in line with scientific advice.

Safety net

A Department for Food Agriculture and Rural Affairs spokesman told Unearthed: “The UK’s four Fisheries Administrations will set out in a statutory joint statement how they will work together to achieve the Bill’s sustainability objectives, including maximum sustainable yield (MSY).

“The UK Government remains committed to continuing to work under the principle of MSY and restore stocks to healthy conditions as quickly as possible.”

However, Mr Carmichael says there is “no guarantee” that MSY will be “enshrined” in the joint fisheries statement. He told the bill committee: “The fisheries statement will be subject to a negotiation between four administrations.

“There might be any number of reasons why maximum sustainable yield might fall from that particular safety net.”

The MCS’s Sam Stone told Unearthed that in most cases it would be the secretary of state determining “fishing opportunities” – the amount of fish that can be caught – and there was “no requirement anywhere” in the bill for the secretary of state to “ensure that catches are only set up  to the maximum sustainable yield”.

Unachievable

Conservationists say uncertainty about when the bill will take effect does not prevent the inclusion of a legal duty to set catch limits according to scientific advice. They argue this duty could be combined with an allowance for flexibility in negotiations with “third countries” like Norway.

The July 2018 white paper in which ministers set out their principles for post-Brexit fishing regulation boasts about the UK’s role in securing a legally binding commitment to MSY in the most recent reforms of the EU’s fishing policy.

It promises that after Brexit the government “will continue to work with our European partners to regulate fishing and to set harvest rates that restore and maintain fish stocks at least to levels that can produce MSY”.

It adds: “This will mean agreeing catch rates that are based on the best available science. In mixed fisheries, that will include taking account of the interactions between harvested species and with the wider ecosystem.”

Defra consulted on this paper last summer. According to the department’s summary of the results, most respondents backed the objective to fish at or below levels that support MSY. “However,” it added, “some respondents from the fishing industry expressed concern that the [EU] CFP target to achieve MSY for all stocks by 2020 was unachievable.

Fishing mortality

“Industry responses in particular suggested that a more general commitment to work towards achieving MSY in line with the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) would be preferable.”

Unearthed asked Defra if the decision not to include a binding MSY duty had been taken in response to fishing industry concerns but it did not directly respond.

A legal duty to set quotas within MSY is backed by NGOs including the Marine Conservation Society, the Pew Trusts, Greener UK, Greenpeace – which funds Unearthed, and the Angling Trust.

Helen McLachlan, of the World Wildlife Fund and Greener UK, told MPs the 2014 common fisheries policy reforms that set a binding deadline for MSY had marked a turning point. “Prior to that, we consistently set limits over and above that recommended by scientists. Since that binding commitment was brought in, we have started to see those trends going the right way: biomass increasing, fishing mortality decreasing…”

According to the Pew Trusts, in 2018 about 44 percent of EU fishing limits were set higher than the scientific advice, but for stocks with an MSY recommendation around 75 percent were set in line with that advice.

Sustainable fisheries

Giving evidence on the bill, Angling Trust campaigns coordinator Martin Salter – a former Labour MP – told Mr Eustice that if “I were in your shoes, I would want a binding duty.

“I would want to make it crystal clear that we are going to end the discredited system that has operated under the common fisheries policy and replace it with a legally backed duty to fish at sustainable levels, just as we have legally backed targets for climate change and emissions.”

He added: “[It] is easy to claim that we are going to be an independent coastal state, but that does not deliver sustainable fisheries.

“Senegal is an independent coastal state, and its fisheries have been wiped out by super-trawlers, which are mainly European and have used their economic power to destroy the livelihoods of artisanal fishermen in independent coastal states.

“You will deliver sustainable fisheries management by having world-leading sustainable fisheries policy.”

This Article

This article first appeared at Unearthed, from Greenpeace.

Can we feed 10 billion people a healthy diet within planetary boundaries? The recent EAT Lancet report attempts to answer that question – proposing a ‘healthy reference diet’ that, the report suggests, works with and not against the planet.

It has understandably attracted some mixed responses – this is a complex question and one report can’t possibly have all the answers. But EAT-Lancet has made an important contribution to the conversation.

Now that the dust has settled, and people have shared their initial reactions, it’s time to take a closer look at the detail. Here are five things you need to know about the report and about the ‘healthy reference diet’.

1. ‘Sustainable intensification’

The EAT-Lancet report calls for “strategies to refocus agriculture from producing high volumes of crops to producing varied nutrient-rich crops” and makes strong recommendations for agro-ecological farming systems like organic.

It suggests that ‘sustainable intensification’ based on “nutrient cycling” on the farm can contribute towards “large increases in carbon sequestration in agricultural soils and above ground.”

This is hugely welcome, for in reframing ‘sustainable intensification’ in such terms, the report provides an important correction to those who advocate a ‘business as usual’ brand to feed the world.

A ‘business as usual’ brand of ‘sustainable intensification’ fails to meet the needs of healthier diets, and would perpetuate intensively farmed monocultures which are dependent on high levels of chemical input.

It is therefore incompatible with eliminating the use of fossil fuels, restoring soils and biodiversity, and dramatically reducing nitrogen pollution, as this report demands.

2. Less meat

The recommendations on meat consumption have caused a stir, though the proposed ‘healthy reference diet’ does allow for limited quantities of meat, dairy and eggs.

The Soil Association supports a move to “less but better” meat, based on animals reared extensively on grass and ‘leftovers’ where possible.

The Commission recognises that such a ‘livestock on leftovers’ approach could have environmental benefits. It dedicates its appendix to showing how this would produce a similar total volume of milk/meat. However,  the commission gives greater priority to poultry over beef and lamb, for health reasons.

Serious questions need to be asked as to whether poultry should be prioritised over red meat here in the UK, where livestock can play an integral role in sustainable farming systems, and whether the evidence on red meat and health is as strong as the report suggests.

However, the direction of travel – ‘less but better’ meat – is the right one.

3. Sustainable diets

Many of the priorities identified in the report are things the Soil Association has been advocating for years.

This includes a shift from the focus on producing high quantities of food to producing healthy food; halving food losses and waste; governments helping people eat a healthier diet by creating healthier food environments and; making sure systems are in place for wise management of land and seas

The question now is how to go about normalising more sustainable diets here in the UK. Public procurement has an important role to play.

The Soil Association’s Food for Life programme – which has made menus more sustainable in over 10,000 schools – will be engaging with public health nutritionists as well as with school leaders, parents and caterers to understand to what extent a version of this ‘healthy reference diet’ can or should be normalised in schools.

If nut consumption needs to double, should we be finding ways to bring nuts back into schools, or are the risks to allergy sufferers too great to overcome?

Should the government be setting more ambitious targets for ‘less and better’ meat in public settings, including a mandatory meat free day in schools each week?

4. Nitrogen 

Other recommendations in the report are less welcome, including the conclusion that using less synthetic fertiliser in developed countries to reduce pollution will allow for significantly increased use in developing countries to help increase yields there.

This is despite acknowledging that artificial nitrogen fertiliser is linked to significant greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and helps explain the assertion that food production might contribute half of all GHG emissions in 2050.

A more realistic pathway to improving yields in developing counties would be using approaches that build soil fertility and use legumes to fix nitrogen naturally – which would also help reduce GHG.

5. Global recommendations need to be tailored to local realities

There are many more questions that need to be answered. We would like to see more research looking at the most effective way to produce meat from low input forage and how to minimise methane emissions while maximising the important contribution grasslands make to carbon storage.

Could agroforestry in grassland provide opportunities to produce more nuts and fruit in conjunction with dairy? How do we lower the global nitrogen inputs to benefit local air and water while adopting other ways to build fertility?

What is the role for grazing in maintaining Europe’s precious permanent grasslands, and what are the trade-offs for health and greenhouse gases? If we are to adopt some of the dietary recommendations in the report, how are we going to produce the nuts and pulses sustainably?

There is an inherent problem in looking at the planetary environmental limits for healthy food production without balancing this with a field and farm level look at the best available options.

What we now need is a more dynamic global model that would enable different dietary scenarios to be tested for their impacts on farming, health and the environment, and for different farming options to be tested for their health and environmental impacts.

In conclusion…

The EAT-Lancet report has made an important contribution to the conversation.

But for farmers, who need to plan long ahead, there are many uncertainties and it is not surprising that this radical report has generated some apprehensive responses.

The priority now must be moving from global recommendations to local realities – we must define what healthy and sustainable farming and diets mean here in the UK, and press ahead with the urgent task of making such farming and diets the norm.

Dietary habits are already changing, and farmers and citizens will need all the help available to respond to these huge challenges. 

This author 

Joanna Lewis is policy and strategy director at the Soil Association and chair of the Food Ethics Council. She can be found tweeting at @JoLewisSA.

An investigation conducted by The Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature (GARN) has exposed repeated violations of the Rights of Nature in Bolivia, particularly in the case of the Isiboro Sécure Indigenous Territory and National Park (TIPNIS). 

These violations include the transgression of rights that were established in the landmark Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth, signed in Bolivia itself nearly a decade ago. 

An international GARN Commission, formed by Alberto Acosta (Ecuador), Shannon Biggs (USA) and Enrique Viale (Argentina,) visited Bolivia in August 2018 to verify the difficulties experienced by the indigenous peoples and others that are defending the Rights of Nature, in particular in the TIPNIS case. 

Indigenous resistance

A new 44-page report produced by the investigative team reveals the Bolivian Government’s disregard for the rights of indigenous peoples and the rights of defenders of nature in the country in general. It focussed on the government’s plans for road construction across TIPNIS and Bolivia’s southern Amazon,

Isiboro Sécure Indigenous Territory and National Park, known as TIPNIS (Territorio Indígena Parque Nacional Isiboro Sécure) is considered the most biodiverse region in Bolivia.

It is a transition zone between the Andes and the Amazon with remarkable ecosystem and species diversity. From the sub-Andean foothills to the floodplains, it forms one of the largest pristine forest complexes in the country, essential for national and regional freshwater supplies. It is also an area of high ecological fragility.   

In 1965 TIPNIS was declared a National Park under the following considerations: “That in the provinces of Chapare and Moxos of the Departments of Cochabamba and Beni respectively, the State has areas that due to their particular beauty, location, topography, richness in flora and fauna, deserve to be maintained as virgin reserves.”  

Controversial highway

In 1990, the historic March for Dignity and Life, made by indigenous peoples from the Amazon to the highland city of La Paz, led to the park’s recognition as an Indigenous Territory of Mojeños, Yuracaré and Tsimane, conferring double protection on the region.

The Gaia Foundation, a member of GARN Executive Committee, was one of the early international allies for indigenous peoples in this region.

Liz Hosken, Gaia’s director, said: “At the time the March for Dignity and Life it felt like a huge victory and the protections it gained a safeguard that we hoped would protect TIPNIS in perpetuity. 

“But the ‘untouchable’ status of TIPNIS was shattered when President Evo Morales approved construction of a controversial highway – it cuts through the heart and construction is already underway despite strong local resistance.” 

Environmental impact

Bolivian President Evo Morales gave the go-ahead for the construction of the 190-mile Villa Tunari – San Ignacio de Moxos highway in August 2017, after backing down on plans to build the road after protests in 2011. He said that the new project would favour indigenous peoples and their development.

On 7 and 8 November 2017, at GARN’s International Tribunal for the Rights of Nature held during the UN Climate Change Conference in Bonn, indigenous leaders from Isiboro Securé told a different story.

Speakers including Marquesa Teco, president of the Women’s Association, denounced the highway, saying that the road would cause permanent and structural damage to their communities, forests and rivers, causing the displacement and extinction of animals. 

They warned about the economic interests that underlie the construction of a highway, which has not been subject to environmental impact studies despite the great ecological fragility of a region the size of Jamaica.

They also shared how the highway would open the park and indigenous territories up to the expansion of the agricultural frontier and facilitate oil and gas extraction, since the Bolivian government approved Supreme Decree 2366 allowing the exploration of hydrocarbons in national parks. 

The testimonies offered at the tribunal spurred GARN to organise the fact finding mission to Bolivia last year.

Universal declaration

In what now appears an ironic gesture, president Evo Morales said in his inaugural speech at the historic World Peoples’ Conference held in Tiquipaya, Cochabamba, in 2010, that “To guarantee Human Rights, it is necessary to recognise and effectively apply the Rights of Mother Earth.”  

According to the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth, defence of the Rights of Mother Earth is a duty, and the State has the task of promoting that defence. But can defenders of Human Rights and the Rights of Nature speak freely in Bolivia? 

Data, information and testimonies obtained during this fact-finding mission to TIPNIS suggest this is not the case, and that those opposing nature’s destruction face criminalisation and violence. 

The new TIPNIS report from GARN calls for the government of Bolivia to take action in accordance with its supposed stance on the Rights of Mother Earth.

It demands the definitive halt of the road construction; the cancellation of oil expansion plans; the adoption of measures to stop the advance of colonisation towards the core zone of TIPNIS, and the identification and punishment of those responsible for human rights violations against local peoples. 

The report argues: “For the thousands of Indigenous peoples who have called this place home for millennia, and long before the State designated it a national park, this land is sacred. In caring for this land, they are also protecting a vital part of the Amazonian ecosystem vital to the survival of all of Earth’s inhabitants.” 

The Bolivian State has breached its obligation of respect, protection and conservation of Mother Earth, as established in the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth and the country’s national legal framework. 

This Author 

Fiona Wilton is based in Uruguay and works with the Gaia Foundation (UK) and global partners for indigenous self-determination, biocultural diversity revival, the protection of sacred natural sites and Earth Jurisprudence.

Find out more about TIPNIS and this violation of Bolivia’s commitment to the Rights of Mother Earth, view the public presentation and/or download a copy of the full report (Report of the Commission of the International Rights of Nature Tribunal on the case of the Isiboro Sécure Indigenous Territory and National Park).

A close advisor to Donald Trump who wants to slash environmental regulation and regards Brazil President Jair Bolsonaro as a “like-minded partner” is acting as the go-between the White House and hard-Brexiters at the top of the UK government.

John Bolton, President Trump’s national security advisor and a pro-guns, pro-war advocate, has been cheerleading for the UK to leave the EU, cut red-tape and strike a free trade deal with the US.

The former US ambassador to the UN, who has has long held anti-EU views, has been revealed to regularly speak on the phone with International Trade Secretary Liam Fox and Transport Secretary Chris Grayling — two hard-Brexiters inside Theresa May’s cabinet.

Campaign operative

In the US, Bolton is connected to some of President Trump’s biggest financiers. His activities have received millions from billionaire businessman Robert Mercer, the man who bankrolled the Trump campaign, and worked with data firm Cambridge Analytica.

He also held a senior fellowship at the American Enterprise Institute, which is funded by fossil fuel magnates the Koch brothers, notorious for backing climate science denial worldwide.

Described by Financial Times columnist Simon Kuper as “possibly Washington’s most aggressive hawk”, Bolton sits at the heart of a transAtlantic network pushing for deregulation post-Brexit to advance US right-wing libertarian interests.

Bolton has made no secret of his contempt for the EU and has been publicly calling for a clean cut Brexit which would allow the UK to strike its own free trade deal with the US.

He was pictured with Daniel Hannan, one of Vote Leave’s founders and a senior campaign operative, at the Vote Leave headquarters on the night of the results.

Pesticides

Speaking on Fox News after the referendum result, Bolton said: “Britain can now rid itself of the sclerotic over-regulation of the Brussels bureaucrats. It can reduce its taxes, reduce regulation, be a much more attractive place for foreign investments.”

A month after the EU referendum, Bolton met with the unofficial Leave.EU campaign at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio, including Nigel Farage and Andy Wigmore, a businessman and prominent associate of Farage and Arron Banks, the campaign’s main funder.

The group’s most prominent supporters including Jacob Rees-Mogg, former Brexit secretary David Davis, Steve Baker and Boris Johnson all backed the launch of an alternative Brexit plan, which called for the UK to realign its regulatory framework, particularly by cutting environmental protection, to strike free trade deals with the US, China and India.

If these hard-Brexiteers have their way, US products which currently do not meet the EU’s regulatory food and environmental standards — such as hormone-fed beef and chlorine-washed chickens — could enter the UK market.

American agri-businesses recently responded en masse to a consultation by US government’s trade agency demanding food standards be lowered post-Brexit. Some of the responses included dropping safety threshold for pesticides, abandoning existing risk process regarding biotech, getting rid of traceability and and colour warning labelling and removing safety restrictions on beef, pork and poultry.

Marxist plot

Bolton’s endorsement of Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who appointed a foreign minister who believes climate change is a “Marxist plot” to stifle western economies and wants to open up the Amazon to miners, farmers and construction companies, highlights the thin line between deregulation and the rejection of the scientific consensus on climate change.

Until he took his post as a Trump advisor, Bolton was a senior fellow of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), one of the most influential right-wing think tanks in the US that has consistently opposed environmental regulation and spread disinformation about climate change.

The AEI has been largely funded by oil giant Exxon Mobil and Koch-related foundations, which aim to advance the world view of fossil fuel magnates Charles and David Koch.

Bolton has also been a long-time critic of international efforts to reduce emissions and tackle climate change, accusing the UN climate talks of using global warming as an excuse to establish supranational structures of governance.

Speaking to Fox News, Bolton hailed President Trump’s intention to withdraw the US form the Paris Agreement “an excellent decision”.

Election

“The [Paris Agreement] overall objective is more international governance and less national sovereignty,” he said, adding: “We could be dealing with global cooling here […] and these people would be asking for the same [international] structures”.

“We are not going to engage in more blue smoke and mirrors in order to get to more international control,” he said.

Besides his ideological push for a populist low-tax and low-regulation society, Bolton has used data harvesting and micro-targeting to achieve his political ends. This has led him to work closely with Robert Mercer and Cambridge Analytica.

In 2015-16 — in the final stages of the US election campaign — John Bolton’s Super PAC (political action committee) received $3 milllion from Mercer through his hedge fund Renaissance Technologies, according to OpenSecrets data. Between October and December 2017 alone, Mercer gave an additional $1million to Bolton’s Super PAC.

Bolton’s Super PAC was set up to support right-wing Republicans running for election.  

Criminal investigation

Documents provided by whistleblower Christopher Wylie and released by the House of Commons’ Digital, Culture, Media and Sport select committee also reveal how both SCL Group, Cambridge Analytica’s parent company, and Aggregate IQ, the Canadian digital marketing outfit used by the Vote Leave campaign, worked for Bolton during the US 2014 mid-term election.

In one email exchange between the SCL Group, Bolton is described as “a very important client”.

The Super PAC suspended all its political activities when Bolton became a Trump advisor.

In the UK, there remains a host of investigations to establish Aggregate IQ and Cambridge Analytica’s exact role in Vote Leave and Leave.EU’s campaigns.

Cambridge Analytica and Leave.EU insit the discussions were preliminary and the company did not carry out work for the Leave campaign. The Met Police is yet to decide whether to launch criminal investigations months after the campaign groups were referred by the Electoral Commission.

This Article

This article first appeared at Desmog.uk.