Officials have been urged to step up efforts to regulate chemicals which could pose a risk to human health and the environment.

EU governments have not taken action on dozens of substances found to be unsafe, according to a new report by the European Environmental Bureau (EEB).

The group, which represents around 150 environmental organisations, has also called for regulation to be sped up and more checks to be carried out.

No plan

Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemicals (REACH) – an EU regulatory process – was set up to protect health and the environment by identifying the properties of chemical substances.

National authorities, including the UK, began substance evaluations in March 2012.

A group of 352 suspected of being potentially harmful were prioritised for evaluation by the end of December 2018.

By this point, safety checks had been completed on 94 substances, 46 of which were declared to pose a possible risk to human health or the environment, according to the EEB report.

In 34 out of the 46 cases highlighted, the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA) received no plan to manage the risk from the EU member state.

Dangerous

Proposed action could include implementing a ban or improving labelling.

Jeremy Wates, secretary general of the EEB, described the numbers as “stark” and urged officials to “raise their game”.

“The analysis documented here reveals that progress is far slower than expected or hoped and a startling proportion of problem substances remain uncontrolled,” he said.

Tatiana Santos, EEB chemicals policy manager, called for officials to make chemical safety a “much higher priority”.

“Millions of tonnes of dangerous substances are being used unsafely in consumer and other products and getting into the environment,” she said.

Human health

“It can take over a decade for officials to protect us, largely because companies fail to provide sufficient safety information.

“Is it really too much to expect good data from an industry worth £500 billion a year in Europe? It claims safety is a priority. The facts suggest it is not.”

Professor Sir Colin Berry, emeritus Professor of Pathology at Queen Mary University of London, warned chemical testing is a “long and complex process”.

“Looking at the sorts of things that are now being tested, I’m not concerned that they are a real problem in terms of human health,” he added.

“I think there are problems environmentally, from the disposal of chemicals, but that’s a different set of problems which I think has to be managed in a quite different way.”

Data generation

The ECHA said an action plan aimed at increasing the number of checks and accelerating its work was due later this year.

“We agree on the need to speed up and encourage member states to find enough resources to do the work and follow-up on substance evaluation findings through risk management measures,” it said in a statement.

“Our strategic plan for 2019-2023 focuses on ensuring efficient and effective use of the EU chemicals legislation.

“The core of our work for the coming years is data generation and regulating substances of concern to improve the safe use of chemicals.”

This Author

Sally Wardle is the health and science correspondent for Press Association. 

More than two million Londoners are living in areas with illegal levels of air pollution, figures published by the city’s mayor Sadiq Khan show.

Updates from the London Atmospheric Emissions Inventory which analyses air quality in the capital, show that more than 400,000 children among those living in parts of the city which exceed the legal limits for pollution.

Mr Khan said the analysis showed there were no significant improvements in pollution between 2013 and 2016, when his predecessor Boris Johnson was in office.

Legal limit

In 2016, more than 400 schools were still in areas with toxic air.

While the number of primary schools in parts of the city where pollutant nitrogen dioxide exceeded legal limits was down slightly in 2016 compared to 2013, the number of secondary schools in polluted areas was up.

But there have since been significant improvements in measured pollution levels, he said.

Air pollution is down, with a 57 percent reduction in the number of hours recorded in which the city bust the legal limit for nitrogen dioxide so far this year compared to the same period last year.

In the first three months of 2016, 43 monitoring sites in London recorded hours exceeding their legal limit of nitrogen dioxide – with 13 going over the annual maximum of 18 hours above the cut-off.

Taxi fleet

But so far in 2019, just 10 monitoring sites have recorded breaches of the hourly limit, and none have hit the annual maximum threshold.

The figures come ahead of the introduction of the ultra low emission zone (ULEZ) which will charge the most polluting cars, motorcycles and vans £12.50 a day to drive in the city centre, and £100 for lorries, buses and coaches.

Officials said hourly breaches of nitrogen dioxide limits were almost exclusively due to traffic, and the improvements are likely to be down to cleaning up Transport for London buses and drivers already complying with the ULEZ.

Mr Khan said: “From the very outset I have been crystal clear that I would do everything in my power to tackle London’s toxic air crisis.

Motorists

“So far in my mayoralty, this includes cleaning up our bus and taxi fleet and establishing the largest air quality monitoring network of any major city.

“The introduction of the world’s first 24-hour seven-day-a-week ultra low emission zone next week marks a watershed moment in our fight to clean up our filthy air.”

He added: “The data I’ve published today gives an even clearer picture of the urgent need to take action.”

Polling by YouGov ahead of the introduction of the ULEZ suggests 80% of Londoners and 90 percent of drivers know something about the scheme – although only one in five motorists are expected to drive into the central zone.

Dr Penny Woods, Chief Executive of the British Lung Foundation, said: “If more than two million Londoners were drinking toxic water the outcry would be huge. While pollution in the air might be hard to spot – the damage it’s doing isn’t.

Children’s lungs

“Toxic air is stunting the growth of our children’s lungs – something that puts them at risk of infections and breathing problems for the rest of their lives.

“London’s Ultra-Low Emissions Zone is a good first step to cleaning up the capital’s air but nationally we need stronger action if we want to protect the whole country’s lungs.

“This is why we’re calling on the government to enshrine the World Health Organisation’s limit for fine particulate matter into the upcoming Environment Bill.

“Legally binding limits are necessary to ensure no one breathes dangerous levels of pollution, and the Bill is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to guarantee we will all be able to breathe clean air.”

These Authors

Emily Beament is the Press Association environment correspondent. Brendan Montague is editor of The Ecologist.

In the apparently peaceful Somerset village of Wedmore, something is stirring. Actually, more accurately, something has been stirring since 2006 – a vibrant community action on climate change. 

You might expect to find a hardworking community of people across a number of typical, or maybe atypical, trades and occupations, given Wedmore’s location on the edge of the Someset Levels. 

Yet, something else, something actually quite urgent and important, is driving this community now – climate breakdown.

Climate breakdown

We’ve already had some pretty strong warnings here in the UK about climate breakdown. The heatwave of 2003 killed more than 2,000 people in the UK alone from heat exhaustion. Brogdale, a hamlet beside the M2 motorway in Kent, experienced an all-time record high temperature of 38.5 degrees C (101.3 degrees F).

We’ve also had horrendous floods right across the country, including on the Levels. Seabirds around our coasts have been adversely affected by rising sea-surface temperatures – increasing by around 0.2-0.9 degrees C per decade since the 1980s – impacting food supplies and habitats, resulting in reduced breeding among kittiwakes for example. 

Food supplies for the UK’s human population have been hit too, as crops suffer after last year’s extreme weather.

It is now becoming very clear that people all around the world need to act right now to stop climate change. In 2006, a group of people in Wedmore decided to start doing just that.

Multiple successes

Steve Mewes, who works for Somerset Wildlife Trust, said: “We had a street fair here in Wedmore. Soon after I moved back to the village, I set up a stall, chatted to people about green issues and ran a questionnaire around the village to gather people’s thoughts and the core group came out of that really.

“We had a public meeting of about, I suppose, 40 people. We got the key people who wanted to get involved and take action. We took it from there.

“So, that’s where we started really, and we’ve always had an ethos of just getting things done, not talking about it but actually getting on doing things, and that has kept us going for the last 13 years”.

Steve has kept an old list of things that Green Wedmore has done over the years since it first formed. These activities include freecycle days where people gather together to give stuff away that they don’t need anymore. The group has also run five produce markets; created a local cookbook; held repair cafe’s; launched a plastic bag-free project way before the issue of plastic pollution became so widely known; held a green fair and movie nights at which it has provided environmental support and advice; took part in an open eco-homes scheme; ran a scheme where the group bought about 300 fruit trees to sell to the public; held an energy cafe; held twenty-two litter pick-up days; written forty articles for the local magazine; organised a pass-it-on book sharing scheme; held talks for local groups and installed an electric car charging point in the village. 

Green Wedmore also set and manage two community woodlands and a community orchard. It has supported a solar power project on the first school academy and recently has been trying to initiate a ‘Warmer Wedmore’ scheme in which the group has been trying to find a local way of organising a fuel poverty project – a local way of replicating the Green New Deal basically.

There have been various solar PV schemes along the way, with solar on the village hall linked to a Tesla battery. Add all that up, and Wedmore’s breathtaking achievement in the realm of environmental activities would probably be fairly hard to match in communities of a similar size.

Well organised

The group is well organised. It has a quick thirty minute business meeting every month, usually held on Monday evenings in the local pub, following which there are speakers or a longer discussion about particular issues.

It doesn’t set itself particular targets, mainly because it has usually found it fairly difficult to apply reliable measurement systems. However, this will change with the Zero Carbon Wedmore project that the group has just recently embarked on, led by local resident Sonya Bedford whose day job is Head of Energy at Stephens-Scown LLP in Exeter, and who is thus very experienced in this particular area. 

One of the really amazing things about Wedmore is that it now has a solar farm helping to provide clean renewable energy to the village. The solar farm was developed by Wedmore Community Power Cooperative. Although it isn’t linked legally to Green Wedmore, Steve says that the people on its board are often the same people in Green Wedmore (Steve himself is currently the chair!). 

Green Wedmore secures funding in a number of ways. Although the community solar farm has been really useful, helping to fund a a benchmarking report on Zero Carbon Wedmore for example, most of its money has come from general fundraising, such as selling of recipe books at fairs, or local things have been made or just applying for odd bits of funding here, there and everywhere. It also helps that the group actively tries to keep everything as low-cost as it can.

Sonya said: “In some ways it is a slightly different model to a lot of other community groups in that we raise money as cheaply as possible to do projects, and then generally don’t take any returns back. Particularly going forward when there’s no feed-in tariff, we will just raise the money to achieve a project and then gift that to whoever is benefitting from that project, because it all contributes to our Zero Carbon target anyway.

Grant funding

Sonya continued: “For the village hall solar, there was a variety of funding. Some was grant funded, some of it was donations, some of it was corporate donation such as from Next Energy.

“Going forward, it is going to be even more important to get the grant funding because there won’t be any subsidies.

“Even though there’s little return for investors at the moment, we have been successful in getting some grant funding from the community power coop to take the Zero Carbon project on its next step to feasibility study done, which will hopefully unlock some further grant funding to build more stuff.

“Once we’ve got the facts and figures at our fingertips about how we reach our targets and what we can do to get there quickly, we can then apply for more grant funding or government funding to get there.”

Political influence 

The biggest challenge for the village was the solar farm. Steve said: “We were very lucky in that there was about 70-80 percent local support at the planning application, which is almost unheard of in the renewable energy business. There was some local opposition but they are mostly talking to us by now.”

Any community that gets involved in climate-related activities faces the risk of, sooner or later, running into local or national politics. Green Wedmore has adopted a somewhat flexible position on this.

Steve continued: “The only thing we’re really strict about is focus on the community of Wedmore. We have a close relationship with our local MP, James Heappey, we make a point of meeting him regularly. He came to our group soon after he was nominated as a candidate in 2013, when he was fresh out of the army and perhaps a little new to climate change. 

Sonya thinks Heappey’s language has definitely changed over the years that Green Wedmore has been meeting with him. To his credit, Heappey continues to meet the group even though it is unlikely to attract any votes from this quarter.

However, the real political influence from the group has emanated from Zero Carbon Wedmore which Zero Carbon Britain has been citing as an example of what zero carbon projects can achieve.

None of the other projects supported by Zero Carbon Britain has achieved as much as Wedmore has and Sonya believes that’s where the group’s influence has been really evident on a national basis.

Zero Carbon

Sonya explained: “I joined the group two years ago, as an interested person living locally. I’d been following the progress of Green Wedmore for a long time, out of interest in what was going on.

“I’ve been studying up at the Centre for Alternative Technology, Green Wedmore kindly paid for me to go on the Zero Carbon Training and I came back and we launched 2045 zero carbon target for Wedmore.

“We decided that we would deliver five teams of zero carbon, which are transport, energy, health, food and wellbeing.

“Wellbeing is quite an unusual one, because it encompasses all those and its not part of the tenet of Zero Carbon Britain but its really important because we live in a really nice place, and we want to keep it nice and keep everyone healthy and happy.

“We started mapping out what we’re going to do under those teams and everything we’ve done or want to do in the future, all contributes to one of those things getting us towards the target”.

Next steps

From that, the group began new projects, including a retail scheme, more traditional work around more renewable energy and looking at additional woodland.

Steve has been helping to run an extremely successful food trail project which is going to be bigger and better this year, focusing on local food and local producers to try and increase the amount of activity there. 

Sonya said: “The next step will be to properly map and do a feasibility study around how we get to the target, whatever target that is – probably 2030 or if we can get there quicker, and then map out what needs to be done, compared to our carbon use and emissions use within the village. 

The thing that really comes across from Green Wedmore is how amazingly positive it all is. Sonya says that’s why the wellbeing side is really important, as people really enjoy being engaged with a group that’s doing something positive and the group actively tries to make it as easy as possible to get involved.

So keep your eyes on this particular community, as it sets out to demonstrate what can really be done when people get together.

This Author

Robin Whitlock is a full-time freelance journalist specialising in climate change and renewable energy. He is a correspondent for Renewable Energy Magazine and regularly writes for other magazines on similar subjects.

The people of Durdih village, in the state of Bihar, India, have a simple existence close to nature, but the encroachment of paved roads and merchants peddling plastic-wrapped snacks has led to some unwelcome changes. 

The village has a long history of indigenous farming practices in which the cow is the centre of all agriculture.  A significant amount of this knowledge is being lost as life in the village changes and adapts to new ways of farming. 

Walking through a rural village such as this, you might not expect to see children with smart phones eating packaged candies and oily snack foods. But this is what you’ll witness walking through the unpaved village roads of Durdih today.  With a less than optimal waste management system you will find the small drainage canals of Durdih littered with used wrappers.  

Reviving knowledge

One man is trying to change all this.  Kumar Neeraj is a fourth-generation farmer of the fields of Bihar, and he sees a new future for the lands that his great grandfather wrestled back from the hands of exploitative higher caste farmers almost 100 years ago.  

These farmers were forcing the lower caste villagers into slave labor and stealing their farm land.  Neeraj’s great grandfather, Bodhan Yadav, would not let this happen. 

As the story goes, Bodhan, a well-known local wrestler, won a fist-fight and reclaimed the lands.  Neeraj said: “My village would not be here today if it wasn’t for my great grandfather giving these lands back to the people.”   

Neeraj is one of the many farmers reviving the use of the ancient natural fertilizer called Jiwamrita (jeev-amrita), which has been used for thousands of years in India. 

The only ingredients in this miracle fertilizer are cow dung, cow urine, evaporated cane juice or raw sugar and water.  Neeraj says this is all you need in order to cultivate healthy soil.

Natural fertiliser  

Neeraj treats his seeds with it before they are planted, treats the soil with it during planting and waters the plants with it as they are growing – and it works. 

He has been cultivating his single-acre plot of land with this method for the past three months and his plants are thriving, while many of the surrounding plots of land have sick plants. 

He says this is due to too many chemical fertilizers being used in the soil: “The main reason why this method of farming is so amazing is because you don’t need anything.  Almost all farmers in India have a cow, and if they don’t they know someone who does.”

This method is part of a series of ancient techniques that have been forgotten in India and are now being revived by people like Neeraj.  The practice is so old that it is even mentioned in one the oldest books in existence, the Vedas. 

The Vedas says that producing healthy, nutritional food is easier than we think.  Nature has its own method of cultivation that is even better than anything that man has invented.  Nature has been creating bountiful amounts of food for far longer than humanity has walked the earth. 

All we need to do is nurture this already existing system. 

Khetee project

Neeraj’s project is called Khetee – which means ‘farming’ in Sanskrit – and is part of a group of many farms doing very similar things throughout India. 

Neeraj maintains that he has not invented anything new, he is simply helping to revive a very old practice that he believes will stop global warming, help clean the streams and oceans of the earth and provide poison free food, water and soil to everyone on earth.  

Neeraj is openly accepting volunteers and learners on his farm. He wants to spread this knowledge to whoever wishes to receive it. 

I have much gratitude in my heart for the generosity Neeraj and his family showed me during my stay at Khetee farms and I can’t wait to come back in the future to see how the landscape of the fields or Durdih have changed.    

This Author

Campbell Waldron is a freelance writer and traveling journalist interested in indigenous ecology and agroforestry.  Campbell studied soil biology and botany at Mahirishi University of Management.

The Sustainable Soils Alliance recently hosted a groundbreaking event that brought government ministers into the same room as campaigners, and found that they shared an understanding of the importance of soil. But we need to be mindful of the distinction between rhetoric and action.

So much was clear as the Real Farming Conference celebrated its first decade. The conference was initially set up in direct opposition to the Oxford Farming Conference, its “mainstream”, National Farmers’ Union-backed sister. They run on the same days, in the same city.

Looking back at the tweets emerging from the two this year, it was sometimes difficult to know which was which.  New terms like “agroecology” were emerging from the older sister, as well as expressions of the need to protect and restore soil health and to slash the use of pesticides and fertilisers. We’re hearing similar things from the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organisation, and even from the mouth of Conservative Secretary of State Michael Gove.

Standards and definitions 

We’re beginning to understand that agriculture must slash its climate change emissions and that it cannot keep coshing nature with pesticides that have done enormous damage to our ecosystems. Soils can be fertile without artificial fertilisers if the health of immensely complex natural systems is to be maintained.

So there’s a lot of talk about agroecology and the soil health it produces – and a lot of apparent agreement. Many agree that agroecology is “an ecosystems approach to agriculture”. But beyond that, what it actually is, and which systems and methods can be included within it, is open to a very wide range of definitions.

Saying that we need to adopt agroecology to prevent climate change, ensure food security and end the trashing of our collapsing ecosystems is a statement with which many will agree, then, but that alone doesn’t get us far.

Many experts in the field might visit a farm and broadly agree on whether or not it fits the classification, but “it feels right” is no basis for a system of certification. We need a more robust means for consumers, retailers and regulators to classify farms as meeting the standard of being agroecological.

But we don’t have time to develop the necessary framework. The IPCC has told us we have just 12 years to turn this planet around and slash our carbon emissions. Insect studies are demonstrating that our ecosystems are on the very edge of disaster. The state of our soils is an enormous threat to future food security.

Traditional systems

Governments, communities, and consumers need to act not to demand that our lands be farmed agroecologically.

So what to do? There are several traditional systems that produce agroecological outcomes. Permaculture and biodynamics are two, but the first has defied attempts to classify it and is uncomfortable with the embrace of regulation; the second has a basis in beliefs that don’t fit comfortably with most.

There is only one alternative available: organics. There is a well-established legal and classificatory framework and registration systems for organically produced food. 

In the UK, just 517,000 hectares of land is farmed organically, 2.9 percent of the total farmed area. That’s not much.

But the story is very different in other parts of the EU. Across the entire Union, 7 percent of land is farmed organically, but it is 24 percent in Austria, 19 percent in Sweden and 15 percent in Italy. These countries have led the way, shown what is possible when organic agriculture is promoted by governments and demanded by consumers.

There’s a lot of evidence that there’s a great and unmet demand for organic produce across the world. And there’s the practical reality of a world in which we’re already at, or have exceeded, our planetary limits.

We need to make organic the basic standard, the way we expect farming to be conducted.

One of the current problems with that is that certification is expensive – a cost that can be hard for farmers to meet – and the continuing cost of inspection and checking also has significant costs.

One questioner of Michael Gove in his first visit to the Real Farming Conference in 2018 had a suggestion to deal with this. Instead of having to be specially certified as organic, why should any farmer not using organic methods have to face the costs of registration, of checking of their methods and approach, and of labelling appropriately their methods so consumers can know what they are buying?

We need to make organic farming our standard farming system. Any deviation from that should occur only when it’s absolutely necessary – and should be documented, controlled and labelled accordingly. The costs of this deviation should be borne by the producer of non-organic food.

If we are going to look after our soils, and our fragile, much-abused planet, that’s the only alternative.

This Author 

Natalie Bennett recently completed a review of recent literature on soil carbon for Green MEP Molly Scott-Cato. Rich Earth covers the views outlined here in more detail.

Image: George M. Groutas, Flickr. 

Climate change is shifting spring forward in the UK, with insects on the wing and birds nesting earlier than they used to, a 50-year study has confirmed.

The research finds aphids, moths and butterflies are now flying and birds are laying eggs much earlier than in the mid-20th century, but how much of a shift there has been depends on where in the UK and which habitat they are in.

The researchers warned variations in how different groups of animals were shifting their behaviour means wildlife could get “out of sync” with the life cycles of other species they rely on for food.

Complex

It also suggests wildlife will not be protected in habitats such as woodlands, which it had been thought might provide more stable conditions that could be a “buffer” to rising temperatures.

The shift towards an earlier spring is also happening in shady forests as well as more open areas, the study into the seasonal habits of more than 250 UK species found.

Lead author Dr James Bell, who heads up the Rothamsted Insect Survey, said: “There was already good evidence that spring is coming earlier each year, but what we didn’t expect to find was that it was advancing as much in forests as it is in open areas such as grassland.

“Equally, in areas where we’d expect to see much greater acceleration, such as urban parkland, the rates of advance appear to be the same.

“This all points to a complex picture emerging under climate change, which makes ecosystem responses hard to predict, and even harder for conservationists to prepare for.”

Butterflies

He added: “The work is important because is shows us that we cannot rely on habitat to slow down climate change impacts, even in woodlands and forests where the conditions are more stable, and which were expected to buffer against adverse changes.”

The detailed picture built up by the study, which used data that stretches back to 1960, reveals that the responses by species to climate change are not straightforward.

Moths which turn from caterpillars to adults on the wing earlier in the year seem to be more responsive to climate change that those which change later, with moths that start flying before June now doing so much earlier.

In the north of the UK, changes in the climate may have different impacts on species, as butterflies become active earlier in the warmer wetter west than the colder drier east, but the opposite is true for birds laying eggs.

And birds and butterflies that live on farmland – as well as birds that live in coastal areas – are seeing later activity, suggesting that other factors such as a decline in available food are also in play.

The research – which also involved scientists from the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, the British Trust for Ornithology, Butterfly Conservation, and Science and Advice for Scottish Agriculture – was published in the journal Global Change Biology.

This Author

Emily Beament is environment correspondent for the Press Association. 

Firms are being urged to do more to tackle the impact of asbestos after a study found that 5,000 deaths a year are linked to past exposure to the cancer-causing material.

The Institution of Occupational Safety and Health (IOSH) said people were still being exposed to asbestos, 20 years after it was banned in Britain.

More than 130 companies or individuals have been ordered to stop work activities over the past year because of non-compliance with asbestos regulations, said an IOSH report. Asbestos is present in at least 500,000 buildings built before 1999, said the report.

Mesothelioma

Bev Messinger, the chief executive of IOSH, who will address an International Asbestos Awareness Conference in Washington DC on April 6, said: “It is unacceptable that 20 years on from asbestos being banned in Britain, organisations are still potentially putting at risk the lives of employees, their families and other members of the public.

“Courts fine some of the worst offenders, which causes significant commercial and reputational damage, but the human costs far outweigh the financial cost.

“Thousands die in Britain every year from cancers like mesothelioma, while many more are diagnosed with it. All this is preventable through good occupational safety and health. It is time for organisations to wake up and realise how dangerous asbestos is. There are no excuses.”

Vigilant

Dr Nick Hopkinson, medical director at the British Lung Foundation, said: “Breathing in asbestos dust can cause mesothelioma. Mesothelioma takes a long time to develop and people often get symptoms 30 to 40 years after exposure to asbestos.

“Currently the only treatments available are aimed at slowing the progression of the disease and improving quality of life.

“This devastating disease is preventable, and the dangers of asbestos are well known. This means it’s vital companies are vigilant and take the proper precautions to protect people from the life-threatening dangers of asbestos, and take urgent action if asbestos has been found.”

This Article

This article is based on a story from the Press Association. 

International plans to restore forests to combat global warming are flawed and will fall far short of meeting 1.5C climate targets, according to new research by UCL and University of Edinburgh scientists.

The study, published in Nature, reveals that almost half (45 percent) of the vast areas that countries have pledged are set to become plantations of commercial trees, a move which will seriously reduce expected carbon uptake and prevent agreements to curb climate change being met.

Simon Lewis, professor of Global Change Science at UCL Geography and lead author, said: “There is a scandal here. To most people forest restoration means bringing back natural forests, but policy makers are calling vast monocultures ‘forest restoration’. And worse, the advertised climate benefits are absent.

Forest restoration

“Plantations are much poorer at storing carbon than natural forests. To combat climate change, natural forest restoration is clearly the most effective approach. Well-managed forests can also help to alleviate poverty in low-income regions, as well as conserve biodiversity and support the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.”

To meet 1.5C requires rapid emissions cuts andremoving carbon from the atmosphere. The international community is striving to restore 350 million hectares of forest, an area slightly larger than the size of India, by 2030, to do just this.

New calculations based on 43 countries’ restoration pledges show that only by allowing natural forests to return would sufficient carbon be captured for new forests to play their part in meeting global climate goals.

The 43 tropical and sub-tropical countries – where trees grow fast – have signed up to restoration commitments, many as part of the Bonn Challenge that aims to restore 350 million hectares of forest. Together, those countries, which include Brazil, India and China, have already committed to restore 292 million hectares of forest.

The study, which is the first in the world to compile and analyse country-level commitments for forest restoration, shows that land put aside for natural forests holds 40 times more carbon than plantations and six times more than agriculture that mixes trees and crops, known as agroforestry.

Emissions pathways

Using long-term carbon sequestration rates for natural forest, plantations and agroforestry, the researchers show that restoring natural forests over 350 million hectares of land removes 42 billion tonnes of carbon by 2100, whereas using current pledges for plantations (45 percent), natural forests (34 percent) and agroforestry (21 percent) applied to the whole area reduce this to 16 billion tonnes of carbon by 2100, assuming that all new natural forests are protected.

And if commercial monocultures were planted across 100 percent of the area just 1 billion tonnes of carbon is sequestered.

Countries differ vastly in their commitments. Vietnam represents the world’s largest commitment of new natural forests, at 14.6 million hectares; Brazil has pledged 19 million hectares of new plantations; Nigeria has the most agroforestry, 15.7 million hectares.

Dr Charlotte Wheeler, from the University of Edinburgh, and a co-author, said: “The reason plantations are so poor at storing carbon is that they are harvested every decade or so, meaning all the carbon stored in the trees goes back into the atmosphere, as the plantation waste and the wood products – mostly paper and chipboards – decompose.

Natural regeneration

“Instead, restoring all 350 million hectares back to natural forests can meet the role forests need to play under Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change emissions pathways that keep global warming to 1.5C.

“Of course, new natural forests alone are not sufficient to meet our climate goals. Emissions from fossil fuels and deforestation must also stop. Other ways to remove carbon from the atmosphere are also needed. But, no scenario has been produced that keeps climate change below dangerous levels without the large-scale restoration of natural forests.”

The scientists recommend that the definition of ‘forest restoration’ excludes monoculture plantations, and propose four ways to increase carbon capture from today’s forest restoration schemes.

Firstly, increase the proportion of land being regenerated to natural forest; second, prioritise restoration in Amazonia, Borneo and the Congo Basin, which support very high biomass forest compared to drier regions; third, build on existing carbon stocks by targeting degraded forests for natural regeneration; and fourth, once natural forest is restored, protect it.

This Article

This article is based on a press release from University College London.

An estimated 15,000 young people took to the streets to demand action on climate change last month. 

But the sustainability and environmental issues that so clearly motivated these young protesters are not sufficiently reflected in the curriculum they are taught at school, according to one headteacher. 

Richard Dunne, headteacher of Ashley C of E Primary School in Walton on Thames, has responded by writing a Teachers’ Guide, which he hopes will help schools develop curricula inspired by Nature. This, he says, will better equip students to take on the environmental challenges threatening their future wellbeing – and the wellbeing of all life on Earth.

Environmental challenges

Dunne said: “If there’s one thing the Youth Strike 4 Climate protesters have taught us, it’s that there is a growing and vocal group of young people who care deeply about the future of our planet. 

“It’s time for educators and policy makers to hear the clear message from these young people and to develop for them an education that prepares them to engage with – and take the lead on – the sustainability and environmental challenges we all face.”

Published by The Harmony Project, Harmony: A New Way of Looking at and Learning About Our World (A Teachers’ Guide) sets out in detail what a curriculum inspired by Nature could look like.

It is a curriculum that Richard Dunne has developed and rolled- out, alongside staff at the Surrey school, over the last five years. Now others are following suit. 

The publication of the book comes at a critical point for school leaders. In September 2019, Ofsted’s new framework for inspection, which places greater emphasis on the design and delivery of the curriculum taught in schools, comes into force.

Richard Dunne added: “The new focus on intent, implementation and impact in the draft framework requires schools to consider in more detail not just what they teach, but how and why they teach it.

“Schools have a fantastic opportunity to create purposeful, contextualised and environmentally-aware curricula that are adapted to their students and to their geographical settings.” 

This Article 

This article is based on a press release from The Harmony Project.

Image: Cade Martin, Pixnio. 

Extinction Rebellion (XR) seemed to have fallen into relative quiet since it burst into existence at the end of 2018 the environmental action group.

But plans have been hatching during these months of relative silence. On 15 April XR will renew its booming demands for government action on climate change with an International Rebellion. 

Groups from across the country will descend on the capital to engage in acts of nonviolent civil disobedience in hopes of averting ecological catastrophe. Thousands will begin their journey on the morning of the 15th, and there are also those who are taking a little more time to make their way there.

International rebellion

Individuals from various corners of England and Wales will spend the weeks leading up the International Rebellion walking together to London, in what have been dubbed Earth Marches.

A group beginning in Land’s End set off more than a month early, with at least 50 people starting their epic walk on 11 March. This is just one of the 16 counties who have organised walks, with over 1000 members nationally. 

Ness Woodcock-Dennis has been organising the walk beginning in Colchester on 9 April. The team living the ancient capital will be joined by fellow walkers along the way as well as cyclists from Norwich.

Ness, 45, a public health nurse and educator at the University of Essex, sees the march and subsequent protests as an opportunity to raise public awareness of climate change. She hopes it will urge the government and media – increasingly dominated and distracted by Brexit – into acting and telling the truth on the dire situation the planet faces.

Ness said: “Climate change and the effect this has on our health and the health of our children is an emergency and should be treated as such by our government, who have chosen to ignore robust research. Our government, along with governments around the world need to act now to legislate if we are to avoid ecological disaster.”

Social support

Other walkers from Colchester include a community volunteer working with vulnerable people and children’s play therapist. All have taken time off from their jobs to take part in the walk which will cover an average of 10 miles a day.

As well as raising awareness the walkers will be litter-picking as they make their way to London. They will document the amount of rubbish they collect along the roadsides and footpaths to highlight the human impact on ecosystems.

Despite some negative responses to the walkers already set off from Cornwall, the majority of the interest in the Earth Marchers has been extremely positive.

Ness said: “We have had overwhelming support from people in our communities who are offering us food, drink and rest along our way.” The social cohesion created between the walkers and the communities they come in contact with is an important part of Regenerative Culture, a cornerstone of XR’s approach to direct action.

The Earth March demonstrates the strong social supports it is possible for groups to create as well as emphasising an alternative, more pensive approach to modern life, but this does not mean that they intend to go about their demands quietly.

Join in 

Ness explained: “On arrival in Westminster, we want to make our concerns heard. We are the people government are employed to serve.”

To be part of the Earth March for any distance, join the Facebook group and find out if there are already walks planned near your area.

This Author 

Liz Lee Reynolds is a freelance writer focussing on place and the environment. She tweets @LizzieeLR.