Watching sheep graze in lush meadows is a lovely way to pass a sunny afternoon. In stark contrast to that benign pastoral image is the ugly truth that the wool industry is wreaking havoc on the living planet.

More and more people are taking notice of this issue, especially since the Boohoo group’s U-Turn on banning the sale of wool garments. 

The groundbreaking “Pulse of the Fashion Industry” report ranked the production of sheep’s wool as more polluting – for cradle-to-gate environmental impact per kilogram of material – than that of acrylic, polyester, spandex, and rayon fibres. 

Greenhouse gasses

As with other forms of animal agriculture, raising sheep for wool gobbles up precious resources. Land is cleared and trees are cut down to make room for grazing, leading to increased soil salinity and erosion and a decrease in biodiversity.

Sheep, like cows, release enormous amounts of methane gas into the atmosphere and have been referred to as the “Humvees” of the animal kingdom. 

Manure generated by farmed animals – including in countries like Australia and New Zealand, where vast flocks of sheep have been expanded to meet the world’s demand for wool –has significantly contributed to the increase in atmospheric greenhouse gases over the last 250 years.

On top of the horrendous environmental impact of wool, sheep suffer terribly in the industry. PETA has released video exposés recorded at nearly 100 facilities on four continents revealing that sheep are mutilated, abused, and skinned alive – even for “responsibly sourced” wool on disingenuously named “sustainable” farms. 

Sheep are sensitive prey animals who are prone to panic when held down. This means that for millions of sheep worldwide, shearing is a terrifying, painful ordeal. Shearers are usually paid by volume, not by the hour, which exacerbates the problem, as they work at breakneck speed in order to maximise their earnings.

Eyewitnesses saw gentle sheep being kicked, punched in the face, and stamped on in a crude attempt to restrain them. 

Animal cruelty

This violence has been documented in Argentina, Australia, Chile, and the US – and recently, in the UK, where workers were recorded slamming sheep’s heads into the floor. 

Shearers left large, bloody wounds on sheep’s bodies from fast, rough shearing, and they stitched up gaping wounds with a needle and thread and no pain relief. One farmer was seen dragging two sick, lame sheep into a shed and leaving them there to die.

Several sheep died during shearing, possibly from the shock of the violent handling – or what onefarmer called a “heart attack”.

Industry initiatives like the “Responsible Wool Standard” haven’t reduced or stopped the egregious suffering of sheep the world over – they’ve simply createda veil to hide behind while the cruel business continues as usual.

Consumers who are worried about the carbon footprint and sustainability of synthetic materials have a wide variety of eco-friendly options to choose from.

Vegan fabrics

Colombian university students who invented the revolutionary Woocoa, a wool-like material made from coconut and hemp, won an award at last year’s Biodesign Challenge for their pioneering work.

Then there’s Nullarbor, a vegan wool made from coconut by-products. Other environmentally sound wool replacements include Tencel, organic cotton, bamboo, hemp, soyabean fabric, linen, and recycled fibres.

It pays to remember that, according to the researchers behind the “Pulse of the Fashion Industry” report, even when consumers purchase clothing made from synthetic materials, the impact on our planet is stilllower than that of buying wool items. 

Just as we’ve seen with the shift away from fur, angora, and mohair,consumers are increasingly looking to purchase products that live up to their own ethics and their concern for animals, humans, and nature.

With so many fabulous vegan fabrics available, there’s no need for anyone to buy or wear anything made of wool or any other animal-derived material.

This Author

Elisa Allen is the director of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA).

It was a crisp, bright day in February 2017 when politicians, academics and business figures came together to discuss the problems of the Scottish fossil fuel sector. A year before, world leaders had thrown their weight behind a clean energy transition with 195 countries signing the landmark Paris Climate Agreement. Six months after that, the UK had voluntarily ramped up its own emissions reduction target.

But this meeting was different. It was convened to explore how the UK could keep the North Sea’s oil and gas industry going, not wind it down. The Scottish energy tycoon Sir Ian Wood summed up the mood when he declared the industry was “nowhere near the end of its life”.

Can Scotland really have it both ways? Is Aberdeen preparing for the low carbon future the UK and the world is promising, or is it still investing in a future where oil and gas remain the spine of its economy?

Fossil-fuelled future

A DeSmog investigation has revealed a region that continues to put the industry at the heart of its economic planning. In the energy, education, and transport sectors, Aberdeen and its surrounds continue to build on the basis that oil and gas is the future, making the gamble that climate policies won’t make the industry a relic of the past.

Since the oil price crash of 2014, in separate silos of conversation to that of UN climate talks and national emissions targets, the oil and gas sector in the Scottish north east has been working hard to buoy their once profit-churning industry. Both the UK and Scottish governments have been keen to help too, ostensibly to protect jobs and tax revenues, offering no shortage of tax breaks.

And the government-industry duo has largely succeeded, with a flurry of business in the past 18 months that some have even referred to as a ‘North Sea renaissance’.

Notably, this has often been achieved through what the industry nebulously refers to as ‘cutting costs’ and ‘increasing production efficiency’; explanations which, on the ground, have frequently amounted to suppression of worker’s wages, with ensuing acrimony and even strikes in tow.

The 2017 meeting in Aberdeen, the city at the heart of the UK’s fossil fuel wealth, was for the opening of the Oil and Gas Technology Centre (OGTC), an £180 million innovation venture tasked with supporting oil and gas companies. Money came from both the UK and Scottish governments as just one part of a network of measures designed in the past few years to extend extraction in the nearby North Sea.

Some have suggested that the work of the OGTC could unlock 3.5 billion barrels of new oil – equivalent to around six years’ worth of what the industry is currently pumping out.

Policy contradictions

Far from looking at how to make a just transition to a low carbon economy, state-led industry protection like this was called for following a 2014 paper by Sir Ian Wood which laid out a vision for how the North Sea could continue to prosper well into the future.

The paper set a new tone of conversation for the sector and, in the face of fluctuating oil prices and increased international competition, coined what’s now a mantra for both government and industry – maximising recovery from the North Sea.

Elsewhere, on the same day as the OGTC’s opening, the Department of Transport released a research paper on how to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from road freight. More widely, the government was under pressure to make a legally binding commitment to ‘net zero emissions by 2050’, meaning it wouldn’t be able to emit more carbon than it offset elsewhere.

How can these policy contradictions sit so comfortably next to each other?

Last year researchers at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research carried out a report for Friends of the Earth Scotland which showed that 70-80 percent of Scotland’s existing fossil fuel reserves must be left in the ground for Scotland to fulfil its obligations under the Paris Agreement. How do industry oil and gas handouts fit the science?

Asher Minns, head of Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research said: “One of the many climate and sustainability policy challenges is lining-up the policies so that they are complementing rather than pulling at each other.”

Roads to nowhere

Policy contradictions are nothing new, and are not unique to climate and energy policy. But the kind of regressive expediency fed by the UK’s oil wealth could be seen clearly when Kirsty Blackman MP for North Aberdeen told the House of Commons in 2015: “From a small airport through to traffic congestion and limited housing stock, Aberdeen has struggled to keep up with the demands of the oil and gas sector.”

To the casual observer, it would seem that Scotland’s climate policy commitments and the reality of its infrastructure decisions are an example of a country’s right hand not knowing what the left is doing — or being wilfully indifferent to it.

Sam Gardner from WWFScotland said: “Our response to the climate change emergency must be comprehensive and consistent. And yet we’re still seeing decisions being taken leading to ‘high’ and ‘low’ carbon infrastructure, or a ‘green’ and ‘black’ economy.”

One example of this well-known to inhabitants of Aberdeenshire is the decades-long saga of the Aberdeen Western Peripheral Route (AWPR), a 26 mile stretch of bypass road around the city.

Aimed at reducing congestion, the AWPR was first mooted in the late nineties and given the go ahead in 2003. A string of court challenges caused significant delays to the £745 million project, of which the final stretch opened in February 2019.

Financial justification

As with many infrastructure issues in the north east of Scotland, the oil and gas sector was at the forefront of the decision. A 2012 Scottish government document said that the road would bring an estimated cost reduction of two percent to the oil and gas sector just five years after completion.

The document says: “One of the key benefits of AWPR is the improvement of accessibility into and around Aberdeen and the north east of Scotland. Market conditions for key industries in the area such as oil and gas exploration, paper, fish, retail and tourism will be enhanced.”

Separately, the Scottish Government claimed the road would help indirectly attract an additional £6 billion to Scotland’s north east economy and create 14,000 jobs over the next 30 years.

But these figures came under fire recently as their calculations were based on figures from before the 2008 financial crash, when Aberdeen had a growing fossil fuel sector fuelling its local economy.

North East conservative MSP Tom Mason lambasted the lack of an update to this modelling as “naive economics”, suggesting that the road’s financial justification relies on outdated projections of a burgeoning oil and gas sector.

“It seems they have taken a gamble and it’s my sincere wish these sums won’t look foolish in another 30 years,” he added.

Increasing risk 

But beyond being built on the promise of an industry that – in theory at least – the government is meant to be rapidly shutting down, the road also has a more basic symbolic problem: building a big road encourages more cars, which emit more carbon dioxide.

That’s why, broadly, the project has been opposed by environmental groups and some local politicians, as the £745 million project has deflected vital funds from long-term sustainable transport.

Gardner said the government still thinks high-carbon decisions can be justified by mitigation elsewhere. “But we must commit to only investing in and supporting net zero solutions,” he said. “Anything else is simply an exercise in increasing risk and placing costs on the next generation who will be faced with the burden of stranded assets or the costs of retrofit.”

Martin Ford, a Scottish Green Party councillor for the of Aberdeenshire Council, has been a vocal opponent of the AWPR for years. “It is an opportunity cost,” he said. “In that we could have invested in sustainable public transport which would have been good for us right on into the future, as opposed to a 1950s transport solution of building a new and bigger road.”

One of the central problems is that the government makes estimates of how many more people there will be on the roads in the future, and then makes its investment decisions based on these figures. This goes against the rationale of a sustainable transport transition, campaigners like Transform Scotland argue, where policy makers should be steering people away from car journeys and toward more public transport and active travel.

The costs for the new AWPR have escalated dramatically over the years. In 2005 the Scottish Government forecast this to be around £295‑395 million before raising it to £703 million in 2012. The final sum sits at £745 million.

Joined-up thinking

Research by Transform Scotland has shown that, since 2011, road spending has seen a 34 percent increase in spending while aviation has seen an increase of 70 percent. Meanwhile in the year to the Scottish government’s 2017-18 transport budget, funding for bus travel fell by three percent. The overall result of these trends is a tiny two percent fall in transport emissions since 1990, and annual increases in recent years. The Committee on Climate Change has said that overall UKtransport emissions must fall by 44 percent between 2016 and 2030.

Under the environment section of the public page for the AWPR, the government even states that the new road “will provide a fast, direct link to Aberdeen Airport” that will “increase the airport’s catchment area and potentially lead to inward investment, including new airlines and routes coming to the city.”

Increased flight traffic – one of the major obstacles to a low carbon future – has rarely been used as an environmental justification for an infrastructure project.

Ford said: “Essentially, this doesn’t deliver on the stated transport policy of modal shift to public transport, cutting carbon emissions and all the rest of it. If you test it against those propositions, it’s probably overall perverse and it certainly doesn’t take you further forward. So why not do something else which does deliver on what you say is your transport policy?”

Campaign groups like WWF agree, and have tried working with the government to provide basic joined-up thinking across the range of its infrastructure decisions, but often without success.

Public or private

Gardner said part of the problem is that government checks on infrastructure projects like the AWPR often only look at the carbon embodied in construction, not the carbon that will likely be generated as a consequence of its existence.

Gardner continued: “It’s when you step back and look at the totality of an infrastructure pipeline – that’s when the contradiction becomes quite stark.”

Beyond the roads and research centres, campaigners and researchers have argued that pursuing endless economic growth based on infinite use of resources is at fundamental odds with the changes needed to avert climate breakdown.

But Ford said this reality is hard felt in areas where access to housing and basic services are at a squeeze, and smart use of public money is needed to improve people’s lives.

He pointed out that in the Scottish north east, the high wages of the oil and gas sector have sent house prices rocketing over the past 20 years while people working outside those wealthy sectors have struggled.

“We have issues of housing affordability, we find it very difficult to recruit teachers and health professionals from other parts of the UK – all because housing prices are very high,” he said. “Therefore, what looks like a very good salary in many places doesn’t look very good in the north east when you take into account housing costs.”

To help with these issues, City Region Deals were launched by the UK government in 2011 to partner central and local administrations in working together on regional development. In Scotland, they exist between the Scottish Government, UKGovernment and local government, and are “designed to bring about long-term strategic approaches to improving regional economies” and, ultimately, “transformative change”.

18 have been launched across the UK so far, but in the north east of Scotland, corporations rather than people and the environment are at the centre of these large investment channels.

Economic leadership 

The 10-year Aberdeen City Region Deal was announced in November 2016, worth £250 million of direct Scottish and UKgovernment funding, and a total of £826 million once private sector investment is included.

But what’s unique about the Aberdeen deal is the presence of a fourth partner alongside the three levels of government in the form of Opportunity North East (ONE), an industry-led and privately funded economic development body.

At the head of ONE’s economic leadership board sits Sir Ian Wood – the oil magnate. What’s been the flagship investment of the Aberdeen deal so far? £180 million toward innovation in the oil and gas sector in the form of the OGTC. Or, as a recent House of Commons Library briefing paper recently explained, “support for the oil and gas industry to exploit remaining North Sea reserves.”

Aberdeen has a history of putting industry-led bodies at the heart of its public planning, as ONE replaced another body in 2015, the Aberdeen City and Shire Economic Future (ACSEF). ACSEF was a partnership of private and public sector representatives which stated that part of its strategic aim was to “anchor” the oil and gas sector to the north east.

Coincidentally or not, this is the same language used by transport body Nestrans when it supported the AWPR, which it said will offer easier transport of goods for energy firms and will help “anchor” them to the north-east.

Not only do these top-table seats help corporations decide where public money goes, but they also give access to facilitating the deals themselves. Investigations by the Guardian and The Ferret have shown how Scottish financiers sought to make major gains through their involvement in these lucrative public contracts.

Oil and gas hasn’t been the only benefactor of the Aberdeen City Region Deal’s millions – there are also high speed broadband projects and innovation funding for other industrial sectors, including the life sciences. So, unsurprisingly, business leaders have heaped praise on the deal’s direction.

But with its flagship aim of benefitting Aberdeenshire as a proxy to giving direct support to the oil and gas industry, Ford said it was controversial in its beginnings.

“Aberdeenshire Council expressed strong views that the City Region Deal should be about the future – diversifying away from oil and towards renewables,” he said.

Significant investments

Ford and other members had argued that propping up a North Sea oil with ailing profits was not only bad for the climate, but short-sighted with regard to Aberdeenshire’s long term future.

“There were earlier iterations of possible inclusions of significant investments in public transport, significant investments in affordable housing, and – though in the end there was money to pay for transport studies, which is a plus – essentially the deal became very much oriented away from reducing emissions or diversifying the economy, and toward prolonging the status quo in terms of energy, oil and gas specifically,” he said.

Ultimately the council’s views seemingly fell below the priority of those business leaders choosing where the public money should go. But was this a case of a wealthy region like Aberdeenshire’s economic demands taking precedence over the pressing needs of national climate policy?

“From my perspective as a member of Aberdeenshire Council, you can turn that upside down,” Ford said. “The council wanted a much more enlightened deal than the government wanted. So it was national policy imposing old thinking on a region that knew it needed to break out of that.”

Renaissance

Thanks to this continued influx of both public and private investment to support the North Sea oil and gas sector, the industry is now doing well after the oil price downturn of 2014.

The Chinese state-owned oil giant CNOOC (China National Offshore Oil Corporation), Total and Euroil recently announced the discovery of a new gas field of nearly 250 million barrels of oil equivalent, one of the largest in decades.

If the enormous size is confirmed, it would match a 2008 discovery by Maersk Oil which is expected to start producing gas this year and could provide up to five percent of the UK’s energy – together both these fields may produce nearly 10 percent.

Maersk said that its operations had been helped considerably by tax breaks which the former chancellor, George Osborne, declared as “a clear signal that the North Sea is open for business”.

But the Maersk project has been criticised not only from a climate perspective by environmental groups, but by centrists and conservatives for the recipient of its profits.

Despite the government reiterating the importance of the North Sea for the UK’s prosperity, only half of the £3 billion development investment will be spent here after large parts of the infrastructure were ordered from Singapore and other countries.

Economic nationalists see such arrangements as bizarre at best, naive at worst.

Terrible news

Friends of the Earth Scotland said that the discovery is “terrible news” for the climate. “It’s high time our governments stopped supporting fossil fuel development, and get serious about planning a just transition away from this industry,” it said in a statement.

But at the same time as the Scottish parliament assesses the government’s new Climate Change Bill, the handouts keep coming. Earlier this month a parliamentary report from Westminster recommended that the government offer a new sector deal to the oil and gas industry, including a fresh £176 million for technology innovation.

This is important, the report said, to simultaneously “maximise the recovery of the 10–20 billion barrels of oil and gas” and help “the industry reduce its carbon footprint”.

What’s clear is that arguments for rescuing the North Sea fail by their own logic: what’s seen as protection of the UK’s prosperity via fossil fuel tax revenues has actually resulted in zealous tax breaks, largely benefiting big business in Aberdeen and the other nation’s economies. It’s a fallacy.

But those representatives that stand to gain from the financial success of that fallacy were those meeting together in Aberdeen in February 2017, and are still making decisions alongside politicians now.

In such a situation, that the UK is struggling to meet its climate targets doesn’t really matter.

This Article

Simon Roach is a freelance journalist covering politics, the environment and other bits between. This article first appeared at Desmog.uk.

At least 22 UN staff died in an Ethiopian Airlines plane crash on Sunday, along with many delegates travelling to a major environment summit, according to officials.

The acting head of UN Environment Joyce Msuya confirmed the loss of colleagues, although full passenger lists of the flight from Addis Ababa to Nairobi are yet to be publicly released.

She participated in the opening ceremony of the UN Environment Assembly in the Kenyan capital on Monday, and said: “The environmental community is in mourning today.”

“Many of those that lost their lives were en route to provide support and participate in the UN Environment Assembly. We lost UN staff, youth delegates travelling to the assembly, seasoned scientists, members of academia and other partners.” 

Grounded fleet

All 149 passengers and 8 cabin staff died in the accident, the airline said. The cause of the crash has yet to be determined. The airline has grounded its fleet of Boeing 737 8 Max aircraft – the same model involved in a recent disaster in Indonesia. Ethiopian Airlines said that it had contacted the families of the dead.

At the opening of the assembly, head of UN Habitat Maimunah Mohd Sharif said 22 UN personnel were known to have died. UN offices lowered the organisation’s flag to half mast on Monday.

The Associated Press reported that 32 Kenyans were killed in the accident, nine Ethiopians, eighteen Canadians as well as multiple citizens from China, the US, Italy, France, the UK, Egypt, the Netherlands, India and Slovakia.

Msuya said: “The entire UN Environment Assembly will honour them in our efforts this week.” 

The assembly aims to generate a sharper political focus on biodiversity, climate change and the natural systems that support human civilisation.

This Author

Karl Mathiesen is Climate Home News’ editor. He has written for national newspapers, newswires and magazines in Australia and the UK. Before joining Climate Home News in 2016, he worked mostly with the Guardian’s environment desk. This article first appeared on Climate Home.    

Scientists have unearthed and pieced together evidence on more than 1,000 ancient wetland sites from across the globe that are presently covered by fields, forests and lakes.

Cliffs, quarries, road construction, and scientific sampling have revealed carbon-rich wetland deposits buried under other kinds of soils and sediments. Many wetlands are characterized by thick deposits of undecomposed plant material (or peat), which is often preserved, resulting in a record of wetland presence.

The buried wetlands frequently included coastal marshes that had been flooded by sea level rise, and wetlands that had been buried by glaciers, flooding, or wind-deposited sediments.

Global data

The researchers compiled the information about these buried wetland deposits, including where they were found, when they formed, and why they were buried.

The study was led by Dr Treat at the University of Eastern Finland and by Dr Thomas Kleinen at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Germany.

Dr Claire Treat, from the University of Eastern Finland, said: “We were really surprised when we started to combine our data from different sites around the world. What we thought would be only a few sites turned out to be just the tip of the iceberg.

“When we started to look for more examples from previous studies, we identified more than 1,000 buried wetland sites across the globe.”

Buried wetland sites were found from high Arctic islands of Canada and Siberia to tropical Africa and Indonesia, to Southern South America and New Zealand. Some formed less than 1,000 years ago, while others formed during the warm climate period between the two latest glaciations more than 100,000 years ago.

New findings

Using these records of wetland presence since the beginning of the last interglacial, 130,000 years ago, the researchers found that wetlands in northern latitudes responded to changes in climate.

Wetlands formed when the climate was warmer, and many wetlands were buried during periods of glacial advance and cooling temperatures. When it was cold, few new wetlands formed until the climate warmed again.

Some of these buried peat sediments remain until today. These new findings of widespread buried peats suggest that, on the whole, peat burial can result in the slow transfer of carbon from the atmosphere to land, ultimately offsetting a small part of climate warming in the past.

Dr Treat continued: “The fact that these peats are buried and stay on land is  basically like a leak in what we usually consider a closed system of how carbon moves around the earth, from the atmosphere to the land and oceans.

“This new finding isn’t represented in our models of the global carbon cycle, and may help to explain some behaviour that differs between models and observations.” 

The results also suggest that present-day wetlands may continue to offset rising atmospheric CO2 concentrations as the climate warms if they remain undisturbed by drainage and wildfires.

This Article

This article is based on a press release from the University of Eastern Finland. 

People are being encouraged to “put in a pond” for this year’s Wild About Gardens challenge, from The Wildlife Trusts and the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS). Even mini container ponds can make the biggest difference to wildlife.

Wild About Gardens sees the two charities join forces to raise awareness of the importance of gardens in supporting wildlife and offer tips and advice on how to make them more wildlife-friendly.

The UK has lost ponds, rivers and streams at a rapid rate and only a small amount of our natural ponds and wetlands remain. Many of these are in poor condition and 13 percent of freshwater and wetland species are threatened with extinction from Great Britain.

Damselflies

The loss of these important places – to development, drainage and intensive farming – is linked to a huge decline in wildlife, including frogs and toads, water voles and insects.

Adding a pond – by digging one in your back garden or simply by filling a waterproof container outside your front door – is one of the best ways you can help wildlife and enjoy the benefits of seeing water plants, birds and bees close to home.

Digging a pond is great for hedgehogs to have somewhere to drink and for frogs, newts and other amphibians to feed and breed. All ponds – large, small, dug or container – are good news for bats, damselflies, dragonflies, other insects.

Ellie Brodie, senior policy manager at The Wildlife Trusts said: “It’s such fun to help wildlife with a pocket pond – it needn’t be big. All you need to do is fill an old sink or washing-up bowl with rainwater, plant it up and make sure that wildlife can get in and out – it’s easy!

“I love watching bright blue damselflies landing on the irises in my pond – they’re so beautiful and it’s great knowing I’m helping local wildlife.”

Attractive

Helen Bostock, senior horticultural Aadvisor at the RHS, said: “Ponds and other water features are an attractive focal point in any garden and are a real haven for wildlife.

“Even cheap container ponds made from upcycled materials will quickly be colonised by a whole host of creatures and help form a living chain of aquatic habitats across the neighbourhood.”

The Wild About Gardens team are providing pond-tastic inspiration to get gardeners started:

Enjoy our fabulous Big or Small, Ponds for All booklet – a step-by-step guide to creating the perfect pond, large or small! Download the booklet here, available on the Wild About Gardens website from 12 March 2019.

Follow us from 7am on our Ponds for All launch day, Tuesday 12th March! We’ll be cheering on Walthamstow Village in Bloom as they create a series of ponds at the heart of their local community. Follow their progress here or search for #WildAboutPonds.

Every pond counts! We want to know about every new pond! Each pond contributes towards the network of wild places that nature needs to survive. Please put your pond on the map here!

Watch wildlife expert Jules Howard create a pond here.

Wonderful wildlife

Join in a Thursday pond social! This will run from the 17th April to the 27th of June at 6pm each and every Thursday on social media helping people identify things in their pond and creating conversation. Visit twitter.com/WildlifeTrusts or www.facebook.com/groups/WildAboutGardens/ to join in the conversation.

Download Jules Howard’s pond podcast! Jules will be interviewing ecologists and talking ponds for 8 weeks from April 18th. Download the podcast from www.juleshoward.co.uk.

Download your free pond toolkit and find more inspiration for making your garden a wildlife haven at www.wildaboutgardens.org.uk. See our events page for wetland or wildlife gardening events. Subscribe to the Wild About Gardens e-newsletter for updates and wonderful wildlife gardening ideas!

This Article

This article is based on a press release from The Wildlife Trusts. Image: Mark Hamblin (c) The Wildlife Trusts. 

The University of Sheffield has failed to make good on its promise to divest all fossil fuels, research by student activist network People & Planet has revealed.

This was reported by student newspaper Forge Press, exposing the university’s continued investments in oil & gas companies Shell. As of June 2018, those investments were worth over £610,000 in total.

Speaking to Forge Press, I accused the University of betraying the thousands of staff and students who supported for divestment as part of People & Planet Sheffield’s campaign between 2013 and 2015.

Clear betrayal

The University has responded, claiming that their Ethical Investment Advisory Group’s guidelines include cutting ties only with companies with more than “10 percent of their turnover from the extraction of thermal coal and oil from tar sands,” instead of all fossil fuel companies.

I coordinated People & Planet Sheffield’s divestment campaign from Spring 2015 through to the University’s commitment in November 2015. Their narrowing of the pledge to thermal coal and tar sands is a gross re-writing of history.

It is true that both the vice-chancellor and chief financial officer have changed personnel since the divestment commitment in 2015. This is just a message lost in translation over time. But I find that hard to believe.

The university was proud of its commitment when it made it and has played it up as an example of its commitment to climate action ever since. This appears to be a more cynical attempt to dine out on the reputational benefits of divestment without paying the bill.

As experienced student campaigners, we understand that this country’s higher education institutions are hardly democratic.

Political space

However, this is an era where the likes of University of Sheffield are cultivating brands of social responsibility and sustainability. In this context, Sheffield’s failure to follow through on their divestment commitment leaves a particularly sour taste.

During the campaign, student campaigners’ relationship with university management felt healthy and productive. We kept up the pressure while collaborating to build consensus around our call for divestment across all constituencies of staff and students on campus.

This culminated in a public debate and vote where 91 percent of attendees supported divestment. Sheffield’s continued investment in oil and gas companies is certainly betrayal.

The UK’s Fossil Free campaign for universities to divest was launched six years ago in 2013. In that time 72 UK universities, four Oxbridge colleges and two Irish universities have made some kind of divestment commitment – representing over £12 billion of investments. These constitute over seven percent of all divestments by institutions globally.

Higher education in the UK and Ireland has led the global Fossil Free movement. They have created the political space for much larger divestments like the country of Ireland. But they fall behind in implementing their own.

Divestment movement

Like Sheffield, many UK universities continue to invest in fossil fuel companies despite promises to divest. One such is University of Glasgow which became the first university to divest in Europe in October 2014.

These universities are taking advantage of the transience of student politics: a group who started and won a campaign in 2013-14 are unlikely to be on campus to hold management to account for their decision five years later.

That’s why national organisations like People & Planet which stick around and hold institutional memory are so important for our movement.

Why does this failure to follow through on divestment matter though? The primary purpose of divestment is to revoke the fossil fuel industry’s social license to operate through prominent acts of disassociation by reputable public institutions. The aim was never to bankrupt fossil capital through divestment.

This is true, but we should certainly still push for institutions to make good on their divestment pledges. As the climate movement strengthens its political ambitions and escalates its tactics, its essential that a strong divestment movement continues to wage an ideological war against the fossil fuel industry.

Betray students

We need divestments to keep rolling to maintain the pressure on the fossil fuel industry’s historically low popularity.

If we let nominally divested institutions off the hook then others may be discouraged to make the commitment at all. If we slip into complacency then the vast wealth of fossil capital will inevitably be deployed to rehabilitate the perceived legitimacy of this faltering industry.

This Spring People & Planet will release in full its research exposing universities which have betrayed their divestment commitments.

When this information is public, staff and students must challenge the management of their institutions to follow through. This will begin in Sheffield in the coming weeks. Universities thought they could betray students and get away with it. They were sorely wrong.

This Author

Chris Saltmarsh manages People & Planet’s university divestment campaigns as co-director: climate change. He tweets at @chris_saltmarsh.

Right of Reply 

Professor Koen Lamberts, President and Vice-Chancellor at the University of Sheffield, said: “I know that there has been confusion and uncertainty around the our position on ethical investments. Let me be clear straight away and tell you that the University of Sheffield has already been divesting from fossil fuel companies and is committed to completing this.

We now only hold one investment in a company related to fossil fuels, Royal Dutch Shell. This company has stated a commitment to developing cleaner energy sources, but we are still continuing work to remove this investment from our portfolio. The work to do this is underway, and our Students’ Union officers are working closely with our Finance Committee to move it forward. I will be keeping students updated about the progress of this work.  

It is also important for me to say that, since I joined the University of Sheffield in November, I have seen a lot of positive work around ethical investments and sustainability more generally.  We now have an endowment investment policy that has responded to a number of student concerns around areas such as human rights, animal testing, arms, tobacco and environmental damage. The University is also developing an ambitious strategy around sustainability, which is due to be launched in the Autumn. Our new Sustainability Strategy will cover areas such as climate action, quality education, clean and affordable energy and responsible consumption and production. This strategy will be the result of long standing contributions from our active student and staff groups, who are also key to making it work.

The University of Sheffield is full of passionate people, both students and staff, who are dedicated to making evidence based change – on and off campus. I am pleased that we have such an active student and alumni group that, and I look forward to working for and with them as we take this work forward.”​​​​​​​

The University of Sheffield has failed to make good on its promise to divest all fossil fuels, research by student activist network People & Planet has revealed.

This was reported by student newspaper Forge Press, exposing the university’s continued investments in oil & gas companies Shell. As of June 2018, those investments were worth over £610,000 in total.

Speaking to Forge Press, I accused the University of betraying the thousands of staff and students who supported for divestment as part of People & Planet Sheffield’s campaign between 2013 and 2015.

Clear betrayal

The University has responded, claiming that their Ethical Investment Advisory Group’s guidelines include cutting ties only with companies with more than “10 percent of their turnover from the extraction of thermal coal and oil from tar sands,” instead of all fossil fuel companies.

I coordinated People & Planet Sheffield’s divestment campaign from Spring 2015 through to the University’s commitment in November 2015. Their narrowing of the pledge to thermal coal and tar sands is a gross re-writing of history.

It is true that both the vice-chancellor and chief financial officer have changed personnel since the divestment commitment in 2015. This is just a message lost in translation over time. But I find that hard to believe.

The university was proud of its commitment when it made it and has played it up as an example of its commitment to climate action ever since. This appears to be a more cynical attempt to dine out on the reputational benefits of divestment without paying the bill.

As experienced student campaigners, we understand that this country’s higher education institutions are hardly democratic.

Political space

However, this is an era where the likes of University of Sheffield are cultivating brands of social responsibility and sustainability. In this context, Sheffield’s failure to follow through on their divestment commitment leaves a particularly sour taste.

During the campaign, student campaigners’ relationship with university management felt healthy and productive. We kept up the pressure while collaborating to build consensus around our call for divestment across all constituencies of staff and students on campus.

This culminated in a public debate and vote where 91 percent of attendees supported divestment. Sheffield’s continued investment in oil and gas companies is certainly betrayal.

The UK’s Fossil Free campaign for universities to divest was launched six years ago in 2013. In that time 72 UK universities, four Oxbridge colleges and two Irish universities have made some kind of divestment commitment – representing over £12 billion of investments. These constitute over seven percent of all divestments by institutions globally.

Higher education in the UK and Ireland has led the global Fossil Free movement. They have created the political space for much larger divestments like the country of Ireland. But they fall behind in implementing their own.

Divestment movement

Like Sheffield, many UK universities continue to invest in fossil fuel companies despite promises to divest. One such is University of Glasgow which became the first university to divest in Europe in October 2014.

These universities are taking advantage of the transience of student politics: a group who started and won a campaign in 2013-14 are unlikely to be on campus to hold management to account for their decision five years later.

That’s why national organisations like People & Planet which stick around and hold institutional memory are so important for our movement.

Why does this failure to follow through on divestment matter though? The primary purpose of divestment is to revoke the fossil fuel industry’s social license to operate through prominent acts of disassociation by reputable public institutions. The aim was never to bankrupt fossil capital through divestment.

This is true, but we should certainly still push for institutions to make good on their divestment pledges. As the climate movement strengthens its political ambitions and escalates its tactics, its essential that a strong divestment movement continues to wage an ideological war against the fossil fuel industry.

Betray students

We need divestments to keep rolling to maintain the pressure on the fossil fuel industry’s historically low popularity.

If we let nominally divested institutions off the hook then others may be discouraged to make the commitment at all. If we slip into complacency then the vast wealth of fossil capital will inevitably be deployed to rehabilitate the perceived legitimacy of this faltering industry.

This Spring People & Planet will release in full its research exposing universities which have betrayed their divestment commitments.

When this information is public, staff and students must challenge the management of their institutions to follow through. This will begin in Sheffield in the coming weeks. Universities thought they could betray students and get away with it. They were sorely wrong.

This Author

Chris Saltmarsh manages People & Planet’s university divestment campaigns as co-director: climate change. He tweets at @chris_saltmarsh.

Right of Reply 

Professor Koen Lamberts, President and Vice-Chancellor at the University of Sheffield, said: “I know that there has been confusion and uncertainty around the our position on ethical investments. Let me be clear straight away and tell you that the University of Sheffield has already been divesting from fossil fuel companies and is committed to completing this.

We now only hold one investment in a company related to fossil fuels, Royal Dutch Shell. This company has stated a commitment to developing cleaner energy sources, but we are still continuing work to remove this investment from our portfolio. The work to do this is underway, and our Students’ Union officers are working closely with our Finance Committee to move it forward. I will be keeping students updated about the progress of this work.  

It is also important for me to say that, since I joined the University of Sheffield in November, I have seen a lot of positive work around ethical investments and sustainability more generally.  We now have an endowment investment policy that has responded to a number of student concerns around areas such as human rights, animal testing, arms, tobacco and environmental damage. The University is also developing an ambitious strategy around sustainability, which is due to be launched in the Autumn. Our new Sustainability Strategy will cover areas such as climate action, quality education, clean and affordable energy and responsible consumption and production. This strategy will be the result of long standing contributions from our active student and staff groups, who are also key to making it work.

The University of Sheffield is full of passionate people, both students and staff, who are dedicated to making evidence based change – on and off campus. I am pleased that we have such an active student and alumni group that, and I look forward to working for and with them as we take this work forward.”​​​​​​​

The University of Sheffield has failed to make good on its promise to divest all fossil fuels, research by student activist network People & Planet has revealed.

This was reported by student newspaper Forge Press, exposing the university’s continued investments in oil & gas companies Shell. As of June 2018, those investments were worth over £610,000 in total.

Speaking to Forge Press, I accused the University of betraying the thousands of staff and students who supported for divestment as part of People & Planet Sheffield’s campaign between 2013 and 2015.

Clear betrayal

The University has responded, claiming that their Ethical Investment Advisory Group’s guidelines include cutting ties only with companies with more than “10 percent of their turnover from the extraction of thermal coal and oil from tar sands,” instead of all fossil fuel companies.

I coordinated People & Planet Sheffield’s divestment campaign from Spring 2015 through to the University’s commitment in November 2015. Their narrowing of the pledge to thermal coal and tar sands is a gross re-writing of history.

It is true that both the vice-chancellor and chief financial officer have changed personnel since the divestment commitment in 2015. This is just a message lost in translation over time. But I find that hard to believe.

The university was proud of its commitment when it made it and has played it up as an example of its commitment to climate action ever since. This appears to be a more cynical attempt to dine out on the reputational benefits of divestment without paying the bill.

As experienced student campaigners, we understand that this country’s higher education institutions are hardly democratic.

Political space

However, this is an era where the likes of University of Sheffield are cultivating brands of social responsibility and sustainability. In this context, Sheffield’s failure to follow through on their divestment commitment leaves a particularly sour taste.

During the campaign, student campaigners’ relationship with university management felt healthy and productive. We kept up the pressure while collaborating to build consensus around our call for divestment across all constituencies of staff and students on campus.

This culminated in a public debate and vote where 91 percent of attendees supported divestment. Sheffield’s continued investment in oil and gas companies is certainly betrayal.

The UK’s Fossil Free campaign for universities to divest was launched six years ago in 2013. In that time 72 UK universities, four Oxbridge colleges and two Irish universities have made some kind of divestment commitment – representing over £12 billion of investments. These constitute over seven percent of all divestments by institutions globally.

Higher education in the UK and Ireland has led the global Fossil Free movement. They have created the political space for much larger divestments like the country of Ireland. But they fall behind in implementing their own.

Divestment movement

Like Sheffield, many UK universities continue to invest in fossil fuel companies despite promises to divest. One such is University of Glasgow which became the first university to divest in Europe in October 2014.

These universities are taking advantage of the transience of student politics: a group who started and won a campaign in 2013-14 are unlikely to be on campus to hold management to account for their decision five years later.

That’s why national organisations like People & Planet which stick around and hold institutional memory are so important for our movement.

Why does this failure to follow through on divestment matter though? The primary purpose of divestment is to revoke the fossil fuel industry’s social license to operate through prominent acts of disassociation by reputable public institutions. The aim was never to bankrupt fossil capital through divestment.

This is true, but we should certainly still push for institutions to make good on their divestment pledges. As the climate movement strengthens its political ambitions and escalates its tactics, its essential that a strong divestment movement continues to wage an ideological war against the fossil fuel industry.

Betray students

We need divestments to keep rolling to maintain the pressure on the fossil fuel industry’s historically low popularity.

If we let nominally divested institutions off the hook then others may be discouraged to make the commitment at all. If we slip into complacency then the vast wealth of fossil capital will inevitably be deployed to rehabilitate the perceived legitimacy of this faltering industry.

This Spring People & Planet will release in full its research exposing universities which have betrayed their divestment commitments.

When this information is public, staff and students must challenge the management of their institutions to follow through. This will begin in Sheffield in the coming weeks. Universities thought they could betray students and get away with it. They were sorely wrong.

This Author

Chris Saltmarsh manages People & Planet’s university divestment campaigns as co-director: climate change. He tweets at @chris_saltmarsh.

Right of Reply 

Professor Koen Lamberts, President and Vice-Chancellor at the University of Sheffield, said: “I know that there has been confusion and uncertainty around the our position on ethical investments. Let me be clear straight away and tell you that the University of Sheffield has already been divesting from fossil fuel companies and is committed to completing this.

We now only hold one investment in a company related to fossil fuels, Royal Dutch Shell. This company has stated a commitment to developing cleaner energy sources, but we are still continuing work to remove this investment from our portfolio. The work to do this is underway, and our Students’ Union officers are working closely with our Finance Committee to move it forward. I will be keeping students updated about the progress of this work.  

It is also important for me to say that, since I joined the University of Sheffield in November, I have seen a lot of positive work around ethical investments and sustainability more generally.  We now have an endowment investment policy that has responded to a number of student concerns around areas such as human rights, animal testing, arms, tobacco and environmental damage. The University is also developing an ambitious strategy around sustainability, which is due to be launched in the Autumn. Our new Sustainability Strategy will cover areas such as climate action, quality education, clean and affordable energy and responsible consumption and production. This strategy will be the result of long standing contributions from our active student and staff groups, who are also key to making it work.

The University of Sheffield is full of passionate people, both students and staff, who are dedicated to making evidence based change – on and off campus. I am pleased that we have such an active student and alumni group that, and I look forward to working for and with them as we take this work forward.”​​​​​​​

The UK’s failure to comply with its international legal obligations in allowing the public to bring legal cases to protect the environment has been criticised in a damning United Nations report.

ClientEarth lawyers are calling on the UK to take its international legal obligations seriously after the UN’s committee that enforces the Aarhus Convention delivered a harsh reprimand to the UK government.

The UK has been in breach of the Aarhus Convention, an international agreement that gives the public certain rights with regard to the environment, since it came into force eight years ago.

Dirty air

This has made it harder for people to bring cases over pollution and endangered biodiversity – with prohibitive costs being a major factor.

The committee’s latest progress report stated that the government was failing to engage with the process, noting that much of the UK’s response had been copied “often word for word” from previous reports, and contains incorrect or one-line answers.

All of this “significantly hampers” the committee’s ability to assess the UK’s progress.

Karla Hill, ClientEarth global programmes counsel,  said: “It’s deeply concerning that the UK continues to fail in its international responsibilities by allowing prohibitive costs to deter people from bringing environmental cases over issues like dirty air, polluting factories or endangered wildlife.

Marked shortcomings

“The environment cannot protect itself and those that choose to take legal action should not have to worry about risking their financial security for standing up for the common good.

“This stinging rebuke from the United Nations shows that the UK must take seriously its international legal obligations to enable people to rely on the legal system to protect our shared environment.”

Lawyers noted the committee abandoned its usually diplomatic language, expressing its “disappointment” and “surprise” with the government’s “marked shortcomings”.

This Article

This article is based on a press release from ClientEarth.

One November Monday, I was listlessly scrolling through Twitter on my lunch break when a photo caught my eye. It showed a group of activists blocking a bridge in central London.

They carried a banner reading “Tell the Truth. We’re F*****d.” and placards with more slogans: “climate breakdown kills” and “rebel for life”. A line of cars was waiting impatiently to pass and some police were visible, but the activists looked cheerful and determined.

I stopped eating my disappointing sandwich and looked closer at the picture. This was a very different group of environmental activists than those clichés I was used to seeing on the news.

Deeply concerned

For a start, there were children on the street too, and having fun by the look of it. And the adults themselves were such a mixed group – as well as some who looked every inch the activist, there were others who looked just like my mum and dad.

After some digging, I discovered who this group were. These ‘Extinction Rebellion’ people were responsible for a wave of peaceful civil disobedience across the country.

This had culminated, a few days previously, with 6,000 people blocking major bridges in the centre of London and dozens willingly putting themselves forward to be arrested for their peaceful resistance.

They were demanding that the government and media tell the truth about the climate emergency and ecological collapse.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been deeply concerned about climate change, climate crisis, climate catastrophe – every year a new and more horrifying noun is attached to the phrase!

End-of-the-world

As a teenager, I’d read obsessively about the looming threats of biodiversity loss and mass extinction, keeping myself up at night worrying. As an ostensibly “wiser” adult, I’d learnt to push these things to the back of my mind and get on with my life.

Now it all came rushing back. That one picture – the devastating truthfulness of the messages, the willingness of these people to go to such lengths to get those messages across – brought it home to me once again: climate breakdown is not something for future generations to worry about. This is an emergency right now.

In recent years, there has been a significant shift in the tone and content of scientific reports on these issues.

When I was at school we were told that it was important to move towards green energy, that people had to drive less, take fewer flights, have their homes insulated properly – but what would happen if we failed to make these adjustments was always a little vague.

Sure, you had some scientists making end-of-the-world predictions, and yes, some polar bears might lose their habitats, but overall we were given the impression that the truly dire consequences were due “by the end of the century” and that we still had time to avert them.

Democratic contract

But following my chance encounter with that powerful photograph, I browsed through newspaper pieces and the odd accessible journal article with increasing horror.

Clearly, the situation – or our understanding of it – had changed quite a lot since I’d last properly looked into the science. This isn’t a distant threat – we are already in the first stages of total ecological collapse. It’s not only the polar bears we should be concerned about, but a global mass extinction event that could spell the end of our civilisation.

For a few weeks, I was overcome by depression and, if I’m honest, a healthy dose of apathy. All the most powerful companies and governments in the world are invested in the status quo, so what can possibly be done to change our path?

But slowly this apathy evolved into a feeling of injustice, and then rage. Ecological collapse is threatening the extinction of our species and our elected politicians have failed us completely.

They have broken the democratic contract to protect us and fight for our interests, instead looking after themselves and the interests of a tiny, wealthy fraction of our species. Now I truly understood what motivated those protesters on the bridge.

Civil disobedience

My first Extinction Rebellion meeting was held in a room packed with new members like me. It was comforting and exciting just to be with so many other people who felt the same as I did and who were willing to do something to fight back.

As I looked around the faces gathered there, I was struck by the same thing I had noticed in the photo: these were people of all ages, from all walks of life, all cultures. Now, we were all activists.

Each of us found a role that suited. I mainly help with the XR podcast and talking to journalists about what we are doing; others have launched themselves into planning nonviolent direct actions, or helping with fundraising, or making Extinction Rebellion artworks – all sorts.

But the big thing we are building up to at the moment is an event called the Spring Uprising: a two-day festival with music industry supporters like Boomtown and Ninja Tune records.

It will be happening on the weekend of March 15-16 in Bristol in a huge space called Motion. Lots of top artists who support what we do will be playing, alongside a programme of talks and mass training in civil disobedience.

Spring Uprising

This is the first time Extinction Rebellion has organised a major event that doesn’t involve any civil disobedience – it’s all totally legal.

But with further investigation, I found that the Spring Uprising is part of our Regenerative Culture, which aims to build a progressive and sustainable movement involving training, community building, idea-sharing and celebration.

There’s only so far you can go through the continuous push for action. You burn out. This Spring Uprising festival is about embodying the future we all need to adapt to.

It’s a post-capitalist, co-creative gathering that prepares us to engage with the crisis, as well as discover all the things we gain when we look to the world we know is possible… oh, and have a damn good time doing it.

This is all in preparation for the International Rebellion beginning April 15, when we will directly challenge the government’s criminal inaction on the swiftly changing climate, ecological breakdown and species extinction by taking to the streets, and staying there.

This Author

David Anderson works in the media industry and works with the press team of Extinction Rebellion. Image: Ruth Davey.