More than 11,000 scientists around the world have declared a climate emergency, warning of “untold suffering” without urgent action.

The declaration is based on analysis of more than 40 years of publicly available data covering a range of measures from energy use to deforestation and carbon emissions.

Scientists from the University of Sydney, Australia, Oregon State University and Tufts University in the US and the University of Cape Town in South Africa are joined in the warning by 11,000 signatories from 153 countries including the UK.

Humanity

In a paper published in the journal Bioscience, the researchers set out indicators showing the impacts of humans on the climate.

The paper describes “profoundly troubling” signs from activities including sustained increases in human populations, the amount of meat consumed per person, the number of air passengers carried and global tree cover loss, as well as carbon emissions and fossil fuel consumption.

The scientists warn that despite 40 years of global climate negotiations, people have largely failed to address the problem of global warming.

Now “the climate crisis has arrived and is accelerating faster than most scientists expected”, they say.

But there is hope, the researchers say, setting out six areas where governments, businesses and the rest of humanity can take action to lessen the worst effects of climate change.

These are:

– Replacing fossil fuels with low-carbon renewables and other cleaner sources of energy, alongside implementing massive energy-saving practices;

– Prompt action to reduce short-lived climate pollutants such as methane, soot and hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs);

– Protect and restore natural systems, such as forests, grasslands, wetlands, peatlands, mangroves and seagrasses which store carbon;

– Eating mostly plant-based foods, and reducing animal products will improve human health, cut emissions such as methane and free up land to restore habitats, while there is also a need to protect soil carbon through agricultural practices, and to cut food waste;

– Over-exploitation of resources driven by economic growth needs to be curtailed, with a shift from targeting GDP to sustaining ecosystems and improving wellbeing by prioritising basic needs and reducing inequality;

– There is a need to stabilise, and “ideally gradually reduce”, the world population, through policies such as making family-planning services available to all people and making primary and secondary education a global norm for all especially girls and young women.

Steps

Dr Thomas Newsome, at the University of Sydney, said: “Scientists have a moral obligation to warn humanity of any great threat.

“From the data we have, it is clear we are facing a climate emergency.”

Dr Newsome said that measuring global surface temperatures as a marker of climate change will remain important.

But a “broader set of indicators should be monitored, including human population growth, meat consumption, tree-cover loss, energy consumption, fossil-fuel subsidies and annual economic losses to extreme weather events”.

They could be used for the public, policymakers and businesses to track progress over time. He added: “While things are bad, all is not hopeless. We can take steps to address the climate emergency.”

This Author

Emily Beament is the PA environment correspondent.

Bristol is set to become the first city in the UK to ban diesel vehicles after the mayor confirmed the council’s “moral, ecological and legal duty” to clean up the city’s air.

Marvin Rees approved a ban on diesel vehicles from entering the city centre at a council cabinet meeting on Tuesday evening.

Plans will see all privately owned diesel vehicles barred from entering the proposed clean air zone every day between 7am and 3pm by March 2021.

Taxis

The proposal, outlined in a thousand-page report, will go to officials at the Department for Transport and Defra before a full consultation of local residents and businesses later next year.

Mr Rees, elected as the city’s Labour mayor in 2016, told the council: “We have a moral, we have an ecological and we have a legal duty to clean up the air we breathe.”

The council has considered imposing a £60 penalty for motorists who break the ban but said the size of the fine is yet to be finalised.

A car scrappage scheme has also been proposed in a bid to encourage road users to switch to less damaging alternatives.

The mayor said the council was planning a wider consultation to help reduce disruption, which will also see restrictions on diesel-powered commercial vehicles like buses, taxis and heavy goods vehicles.

Dying

He said: “A city is like a big Rubik’s Cube – you move one thing, other things come out of kilter. That’s why we take the time to think about it and begin to take action.”

Concerns were raised by Conservative councillor Geoff Gollop, who said access to Bristol Royal Infirmary and other hospitals inside the zone could be affected.

Labour cabinet member for housing Paul Smith expressed dismay at the hospital’s decision to try to open a new 800-space car park.

“I think its absolutely shocking that we have got a hospital trust which is proposing to do something which it knows will damage the health of the people who live in the area,” he said.

The councillor also referred to a recent Bristol-wide study which found that “at least 300 people a year are dying because of air pollution”.

Plans

Conservative councillor Claire Hiscott also expressed concerns about the hospital.

She said: “For people on low incomes, they will not be able to transition to different vehicles and currently if you need to get to the hospital and you have a diesel vehicle you will face a hefty fine if you cross that zone in an emergency.”

The council’s head of paid services Mike Jackson said: “We haven’t decided what the amount of that penalty charge should be but in order to do the modelling we have used a fairly standard assumption of a £60 charge.”

Concluding the discussions, the mayor said: “I approve the recommendations as set out in the report.”

The Government’s Joint Air Quality Unit, made up of officials from the Department for Transport and Defra, is expected to begin reviewing the approved plans on Wednesday.

This Author

Gus Carter is a reporter with PA.

A couple years ago one of us was teaching a graduate course in Political Ecology and gave students papers to comment on. One of the papers was from a feminist scholar and had a very personal approach. The students’ reaction was very interesting: they were totally sympathetic but did not know what to do with that paper, how to report on it, what points to take home from it.

This story suggests that scholars are so used to the academic writing style with all its rules that we have lost our ability to relate to and build upon something that does not obey academia’s disciplinary rules. 

Visit the Undisciplined Environments website. 

It seems that we are not able to learn from something that does not fit into the usual template through which we produce and transmit knowledge.

Militant knowledge

This awareness caused us some sense of trouble. It is a well-known fact that Political Ecology (PE) originated outside academia, as a militant form of knowledge, with the aim to change the world rather than just understand it; an aim that has persisted over the years and can still be found in most PE academic writing.

And yet, we found ourselves uneasy with the contradictions that we experience in practicing PE. Having managed to enter the academic fortress, we can now propose unconventional readings, but there is nonetheless some dissatisfaction in this accomplishment – the feeling that we did not take the Winter Palace of academia, after all, and perhaps it is the Winter Palace that has taken us.

Perhaps, we thought, in the process of entering academia, Political Ecology has tried too much to ‘validate’ itself as a discipline (practicing multi-, inter- and even trans-disciplinarity) rather than discrediting the idea of ‘discipline’ itself.

We began to reflect on discipline and indiscipline in PE, building upon the galvanizing experience we had shared – together with a larger group of like-minded colleagues and friends in the European Network of Political Ecology (ENTITLE) project – in organizing the Undisciplined Environments conference (Stockholm 2016), and by the enthusiastic response that our call had received.

That experience pushed us to take undisciplinarity seriously as a tool for practicing Political Ecology.

Collective subversion

Opening the black box of undisciplinarity, however, we soon found ourselves overwhelmed by a number of questions: what are the risks of such a style, and is it even just that? What to do with data, or evidence of any sort? Is ‘misinterpretation’ or ‘validation’ possible, or even important in an undisciplined approach? Where does the meaning of the personal or emotional life? Does undisciplining feel like ‘liberation’ or does it urge for ‘freedom’? Does it have a programme or purpose, or is it merely a subversive critique? Are we talking about different methodologies, different theories, or different stories? Is undisciplinarity something you are or something you do? How can we not conflate it with creativity/innovation?

We are still on a quest for understanding what an undisciplined article should look like. We feel all the irony and perhaps the inconsistency of disciplining our quest for undisciplinarity.

More than simply writing differently in academia, we are interested in how to escape an academic canon that feels at least boring if not oppressive. Instead of looking for undisciplined ‘models’ – i.e. trying to discipline undiscipline – we stay faithful to May 1968 as a democratic collective subversion of orthodox authorities, ideological, scientific or partisan.

There are various ways to do so. Concepts such as ‘narrative’ or ‘cognitive’ justice would not have emerged if it wasn’t for certain minds to release themselves from certain canons and to think and invent new theories that speak to their new encounters with different realities, often expressed by un-recognized ‘authorities’ in testimonies, biographies and other self-ethnographic exercises.

In our understanding and experience of undisciplinarity, the personal has been crucial. Building upon feminist practice and theory, we believe that there can be no liberation without starting from the self, acknowledging our own positionality, and work to free our minds.

We realize that in the process of becoming ‘academics’, we, as persons, are often lost. This text thus represents a call for scholars to connect their own struggles with broader struggles, to build collectives of care rather than mere departments, to investigate ourselves as researchers.

Existential choice

We offer here a list of thoughts that came to mind while trying to think of what undisciplined might mean in practice.

They are not organized in a theoretical argument of any sort, but simply fleshed out and exposed as ‘food for thought’ in a metaphorical convivial gathering of people who share concerns with the need for undisciplining academia.

Undisciplinarity is not primarily or necessarily a rational choice, it comes from your personal story, from conditions not of your own making.

At the same time, undisciplining ourselves is an existential choice. It means to interrogate what the disciplined self does to our relations to others, to the world, to what we study. And it means undoing it.

1. To be undisciplined requires (self) training because we are trained to be disciplined. It is not a matter of doing something different. It implies to question our identities.
2. The personal is always gendered, could not be otherwise: gender is involved in all we do and are as social beings, even when we naturalize it. It may seem trivial, but this still forms the basis of undisciplining academia.
3. To be undisciplined has something to do with being opened or exposed; one cannot be undisciplined without risking to be off guard. In a way, the primary way to be undisciplined is to be naked, metaphorically, without the usual academic protections.
4. Being undisciplined does not require you to get expelled from academia. Camouflage can also be a form of undiscipline. Navigate the disciplinary canon in order to sabotage it can be as efficient as openly rejecting it.
5. Undiscipline can be an esthetic choice, it can be a divertissement or an academic experimentation. Our proposal is to build a politically committed undiscipline, one which rejects the disciplinary code because incompatible with a revolutionary agenda aiming to produce new socio-ecological relations.
6. Undiscipline is an individual choice but with a strong empathic component. A truly undisciplined scholar supports every colleague who is struggling to free themselves. The short-term aim is to form autonomous undisciplined academic communities, connected with each other. The long-term aim is to free academia from oppressive practices.
7. Undiscipline cannot become a new discipline. The experience of environmental history and political ecology demonstrate that also a potentially undisciplined field can easily establish its own canon.
8. Being undisciplined includes in itself a move towards disobedience. One must transgress somehow in order to be undisciplined.
9. Being undisciplined implies having fun.
10. Being undisciplined is a process of liberation, not a line to include in your CV. One will never be completely undisciplined and will continue to navigate between the canon and the autonomous zone, exchanging also with the disciplined academic system and with the disciplined self.

Oppressive disciplinarity

We feel that being undisciplined in academia could be part of a wider social purpose of radicalizing and transforming our way of thinking politically about the socio-ecological conditions of human and non-human existence.

There can be many forms of undisciplining scholarship, ways of practicing it that challenge the oppressive disciplinarity of neoliberal academia.

Could these different praxes come together as part of a wider Undisciplined Zone of Academia (UZA), like a Zapatista experiment?

These Authors

Marco Armiero is an environmental historian and political ecologist. He is the director of the KTH Environmental Humanities Laboratory at the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm. Stefania Barca is a senior researcher at the Center for Social Studies of the University of Coimbra, where she teaches a graduate course in Political Ecology and coordinates the Oficina de Ecologia e Sociedade. Irina Velicu is a political scientist working on socio-environmental conflicts in post-communist countries at the Center for Social Studies, University of Coimbra, Portugal. 

This article was first published on the Undisciplined Environments website. 

Image: Book Bloc, Travel Between the Pages. 

Social wasps are effective predators that can manage pests on two high-value crops, maize and sugarcane, a new study published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B has found. 

Wasps are found all over the globe and could easily be used on small or large-scale farms to control a range of common pests.

The study’s lead author, Dr Robin Southon, said: “There’s a global need for more sustainable methods to control agricultural pests, to reduce over-reliance on pesticides or imported pest controllers. Wasps are very common, but understudied, so here we’re providing important evidence of their economic value as pest controllers.”

Integrated management 

The study was conducted in collaboration with researchers at São Paulo State University and Universidade de São Paulo in Brazil and is the first controlled experiment in semi-natural conditions on the subject, as it was done on an outdoor research site.

Maize was infested with a common pest, the fall army worm, while sugarcane was infested with sugarcane borer. The researchers introduced the social paper wasp, a hunting wasp common to the area.

The wasps effectively reduced the pest populations, and the plants suffered less damage when wasps were present. Encouragingly, the researchers found that even when the pests had bored inside the plants without being present on the plant surface, the wasps were able to go into the plant and pull out the pests.

The researchers say they hope to continue their work with larger trials in active agricultural fields, but for now they have established that wasps should be considered more seriously as pest controllers, and could be an important part of an integrated pest management scheme.

Local ecosystems

Dr Southon said: “We’re not saying that farmers need to stop what they’re doing and start using wasps instead of their current pest management strategies; rather, we’re adding a new tool to the toolkit, as it can often be most effective to use a multi-faceted approach.

“Social wasps like the ones we studied are generalist hunters, so complementing existing approaches with wasps could reduce the likelihood of a pest evolving resistance to a particular pesticide or biocontrol agent.”

Co-author Professor Fabio Nascimento, who hosted the study at his labs in São Paulo State University, Ribeirão Preto, added: “Using native species that are already a part of the local ecosystem tends to be more sustainable as it preserves local biodiversity.

Our study provides evidence that wasps could be a cheap, accessible form of pest control, particularly helpful to small-scale or subsistence farmers in countries like Brazil, who could attract and encourage wasps to establish themselves.”

The study’s senior author Dr Seirian Sumner (UCL Centre for Biodiversity & Environment Research) said: “By using chemicals to kill pests, we’re often also killing the very insects that can provide us with natural forms of pest control, and that’s what social wasps are doing. It’s about making the most of what you already have around you.”

Important role

Dr Sumner says she hopes their research will highlight the value of wasps. A previous study she led last year found that many people don’t like wasps due to a lack of understanding of their important roles in the ecosystem.

Dr Sumner said: “This isn’t just about agriculture – this is about wasps in general and their role in regulating insect populations.

“Wasps are in decline across the world, similar to the more well-loved bees, and losing the wasps would result in a lot more aphids and flies and other nuisances. Even your backyard garden could benefit from a more wasp-friendly attitude – instead of killing wasps and using pesticides on your plants, treat your local wasps as the helpful pest controllers they are.”

The research was supported by a Researcher Links grant under the Newton-British Council Fund partnership, funded by the UK Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy and Brazil’s FAPESP.

This Article

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

The Trump administration has given written notice to the United Nations Secretary General of its intention to withdraw the United States from the Paris Agreement. 

The Paris Agreement was adopted by nearly 200 countries in 2015 to limit global climate change; under the provisions of the Agreement, the withdrawal will take formal effect on 4 November 2020 – one day after the presidential election.

Alden Meyer is director of strategy and policy at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) and a leading expert on the United Nation’s international climate negotiations process. Meyer argued that “President Trump’s decision to walk away from the Paris Agreement is irresponsible and shortsighted.”

Harmful impacts

Meyer continued: “All too many people are already experiencing the costly and harmful impacts of climate change in the form of rising seas, more intense hurricanes and wildfires, and record-breaking temperatures.

“The Paris Agreement is our best hope to mount an effective global response to the climate crisis, which is why it has resounding support from a majority of Americans.

“President Trump’s anti-science stance on climate change puts the profits of fossil fuel polluters above the health and well-being of current and future generations. It also impedes the ability of American companies and workers to compete with other countries like China and Germany in the rapidly expanding market for climate-friendly technologies.

“Fortunately, no other country is following President Trump out the door on Paris, and here at home, states, cities and businesses representing more than half of the US GDP and population have committed to take action to meet the Paris Agreement’s goals.

“Unlike the president, these leaders understand that reducing emissions creates jobs and protects local communities, while it is inaction on climate that poses the real threat to prosperity.”

The Union of Concerned Scientists puts rigorous, independent science to work to solve the world’s most pressing problems. Joining with people across the country, the union combines technical analysis and effective advocacy to create innovative, practical solutions for a healthy, safe, and sustainable future. 

This Article 

This article is based on a press release from the Union of Concerned Scientists. 

Air pollution levels on Bonfire Night were up to four times the daytime level, scientists have said following a major urban study.

Thousands of sensors across Newcastle and Gateshead constantly take readings of fine particulate matter, and on November 5 last year they showed that measurements tripled between 8pm and midnight as bonfires and fireworks were lit.

Levels rose from around 20 micrograms/m3 during the day to 80 micrograms/m3 just before 11pm.

Air

That figure compares with the annual average across the area of 25 micrograms/m3 and is eight times the World Health Organisation’s recommended safe limit of 10 micrograms/m3.

The data was collected as part of Newcastle University’s Urban Observatory, the UK’s largest urban experiment collecting data about city life, taking in around 60 studies of everything from energy use, noise, rainfall, pollution, traffic and social media use.

Professor Phil James, from Newcastle University’s School of Engineering, said: “The air pollution data we collected over 24 hours last Bonfire Night paints a really striking picture of the impact the fireworks and bonfires are having on air quality.

Winds

“It’s perhaps not surprising – you can often smell the gunpowder and smoke in the air on November 5th – and the low cloud cover that night exacerbated the situation.”

The wider study is aimed at observing how cities interact, and to help policymakers in the future to come up with solutions to urban problems.

The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) said pollution levels were not expected to remain high around Bonfire Night this year, with different weather conditions forecast from those experienced in 2018.

A Defra spokesman said: “Fireworks and bonfire celebrations can sometimes lead to temporarily increased levels of air pollution in localised areas, however we are expecting pollution levels to fall rapidly on Bonfire Night this year as the increased winds should disperse any particles.”

This Author

Tom Wilkinson is a reporter with PA. 

Retailers should sell fresh fruit and vegetables loose and leave “best before” dates off packaging as part of efforts to cut food waste, experts have said.

New advice for packaging and labelling fresh produce has been produced by waste reduction body Wrap, the Food Standards Agency and the Environment Department to tackle one of the biggest areas of food waste.

Around a fifth of food brought into UK homes ends up as waste, including £4 billion worth of binned fruit and vegetables, costing the average household hundreds of pounds a year.

Safe

The new advice encourages retailers to offer fresh produce in a range of pack sizes and loose, where it is suitable to do so – which can cut plastic packaging and give customers the opportunity to buy the amount they need.Leaving off the “best before” date on some packaged items can also help reduce waste, for example with potatoes, by encouraging people to use their judgment more.

It comes as a new retail survey by Wrap, looking at 2,000 products in nearly 60 supermarkets, said it has seen good progress on implementing some of its previous recommendations.

But while supermarkets and brands have implemented best-practice guidance on date labels, product life, pack size and storage and freezing advice, more work needs to be done in a number of areas.

Peter Maddox, director at Wrap, said public concern over plastic packaging had increased since the last survey in 2015, and the guidance had been updated to deal with single-use plastics for fresh produce.

“Removal of packaging must be done carefully to avoid food waste, and we now we have a clear set of principles that will help limit plastic use, and ensure removal is done in a safe and sustainable way.

Fresh

“The other significant development we recommend is removing best before dates from uncut fresh produce where this doesn’t risk increasing food waste, and the guidance helps this decision-making,” he said.

Wrap said better labelling can help customers reduce the two million tonnes of food thrown away because it is not eaten in time, and the 1.2 million tonnes that ends up in the bin because too much has been cooked or served.

In 2017 new best-practice guidance was published on how to apply and use food date labels and other on-pack advice, with the Government saying last year that it expected food businesses would fully adopt the recommendations.

In its latest survey, Wrap said it found good progress in areas such as removing date labelling on pre-packed unprepared fresh produce, and use of the snowflake label to show that items could be frozen.

Freezer

The product life of milk and cheese had increased, and most goods carried the correct home storage advice, with many retailers using the “little blue fridge” logo to show foods that last longer when refrigerated at home.

But more work was needed in areas such as removing “open life” statements – which tell a consumer to eat a product within a certain time after opening – for things such as blocks of cheddar which have an average life of 64 days but 90% of packs advise eating within five or seven days.

Bagged salads have a very conservative open life of just one day and this could be extended, while smaller pack sizes for bread were relatively more expensive.

Wrap also wants to see an end to “freeze on day of purchase” labelling as it can lead to people throwing away good food instead of putting it in the freezer up until the date mark, with three retailers removing such labels and eight more removing the remaining few products with this statement.

Mr Maddox said: “Overall, we’ve seen good progress from all, but we have also been very clear with each company where more work is required, and where they are falling short.”

This Author

Emily Beament is the PA environment correspondent.

School and college students across the UK are being challenged to generate new scientific discoveries that could be used to help protect the country’s struggling bumblebees, though a competition being run by the Bumblebee Conservation Trust, with support from the National Lottery Heritage Fund.

As part of the conservation charity’s Big BeeWalk Data Research Competition – which runs from 5 November 2019 to 7 February 2020 – hundreds of thousands of bumblebee records gathered over the past decade are being made available to students for the first time.

Those taking part will have access to the records of almost 400,000 bumblebees, gathered since 2010 through the Trust’s BeeWalk national recording scheme. This citizen science survey – in which volunteers identify and count bumblebees they see while walking the same route monthly from March to October – builds a national picture of bumblebee health, and provides early warning of declines.

Real-life science

The vast set of BeeWalk data includes information on different bumblebee species and factors such as the weather, location, habitat type, and time of day of sightings – allowing a huge range of new and different research questions to be analysed, from how temperature affects bumblebee behaviour to how availability of specific plants can increase bumblebee numbers.

Andy Benson, education officer at the Bumblebee Conservation Trust, said: “By drawing on our unique BeeWalk data and using fresh thinking to design their own innovative research projects, students will be able to get involved in real-life science and develop skills desirable to universities – while potentially producing findings that could be used to boost practical conservation action to help bumblebees.” 

“It’s important because bumblebee populations have crashed in the UK over recent decades. We want students to think outside of the box and help shed new light on these remarkable insects whose hard work pollinates so many of our fruit and vegetables. The more we understand, the more we can do to reverse the plight of the bumblebee before it’s too late.”

The national curriculum-linked competition is also a chance for schools to apply some of the amazing science they have already been teaching their students in a real-life context. Students aged 11-19 across the UK can take part – working on their own or as part of a team, to analyse the data, create their own research project and then submit their research as a fully fledged academic paper.

There will be four prize categories – most innovative project, most rigorous methodology, best presentation and overall winner. Each school can make more than one entry, as long as each entry is by different students. To enter, visit bumblebeeconservation.org.

Strengthened understanding

Each winner will receive a certificate and a copy of the Bumblebee Conservation Trust’s book ‘Bumblebees – An Introduction’, and their research will be published on the Trust’s website. The overall winner will have their work published in the 2019 BeeWalk annual report, and their school will win £250.

The UK-wide competition has been designed through the Bumblebee Conservation Trust’s Pollinating the Peak project, which is taking action for bumblebees in the Peak District and Derbyshire, as well as supporting the Trust’s national initiatives such as the new competition.

Anne Jenkins, area director for the National Lottery Heritage Fund in the Midlands and East, said: “We hope it will help inspire the next generation of scientists and conservationists, while helping students learn about the importance of bumblebees and how to help these struggling pollinators.”

The BeeWalk surveys have also strengthened understanding of threats facing bumblebees, including land use changes or climate change. With loss of flower-rich habitat the biggest threat to bumblebees’ survival – only three per cent of UK wildflower meadows remain compared to before World War II – the findings have also underlined the importance of making gardens, parks and green spaces bumblebee-friendly.

This Article 

This article is based on a press release from the Bumblebee Conservation Trust. 

A new report, the Green New Deal in the North West, provides an outline of a radical restructuring of the economy that is needed to improve the quality of lives of all species, while increasing biodiversity and enriching the land so that it can provide good, nutritious food and be resilient to extreme weather conditions. Sounds like a fantasy? Not so! 

Many of these objectives are already being delivered, albeit in some cases, small scale. This plan is a positive, ‘can-do’ plan which describes a rapid transition to a smart, zero carbon, nature-friendly economy that will create thousands of rewarding jobs – a true ‘Green Powerhouse’ in the North.

This is why I was delighted to launch this Green Party report in Manchester last week.

Food and farming 

One of the most challenging areas is that of land use. We require a fundamental transformation of our relationship to the land, our food and those who provide it. The UK is one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world. 

Farming subsidies do not support nature, healthy food or small-scale local farmers. Soil depletion is largely due to decades of intensive farming and over-use of harmful pesticides and fertilisers.

Our industrialised food system is not only failing our planet, but also our health and well-being. Our current farming subsidy system promotes an agri-business model focused on global markets and international companies.  

The North West has the lowest forest cover in the UK; our peat bogs are in poor condition and we have experienced unprecedented flooding in recent years. 

Solutions lie in creating smaller, organic farms. These provide more jobs per farm in the UK than conventional agriculture and provide jobs which are more interesting and rewarding.

More support is required for the Northern Forest. This is a partnership between the Woodland Trust and local community forest organisations, who plan to plant 50 million trees across the North, from Liverpool to Hull. It will cost an estimated £500 million over the next 25 years and will require considerably more government investment. 

Social justice

The transition from fossil fuel energy to renewables will be ‘just’. This means that the move from fossil fuels, road and air transport will include re-training (or early retirement) for workers in these traditional industries to enable them to work in green industries or environmental restoration schemes. 

The Green New Deal eschews fossil fuel developments and untested new nuclear in favour of upscaling on and offshore wind, solar and green hydrogen power. All of which have the capacity to create thousands of jobs for decades to come.

Increasing the energy efficiency of our buildings in the North West is the most obvious way of tackling the climate emergency while at the same time, delivering social justice for all. Fuel poverty is higher in the North West than anywhere else in the country.

Well-insulated, warm homes mean healthier and happier residents, less spending on public health and in turn, this would contribute towards a more productive economy. 

Similarly, an overhaul of the North West’s inefficient transport system is essential to tackling the climate emergency and contributing to social exclusion and inequality.

Greater Manchester already has ambitious plans to introduce Clean Air Zones and to improve public transport and cycle and pedestrian routes. Other local authorities are stymied though, as they are not accorded the same level of devolved powers as combined authorities with directly elected mayors.

The report calls for this inequality to be addressed. Without doubt, airport expansion must be curbed and frequent-flyer levies applied.

Best Practice

Under the Green New Deal many low carbon initiatives already underway in the region would be accelerated and expanded. A few examples of these:

• The glass industry along the ‘Glass Corridor’ stretching from Liverpool to Hull, with the support of local government, has come together to support Glass Futures, a not-for-profit R&D project aiming to eliminate carbon from the manufacturing process;
• Crystal Doors, a small manufacturer in Rochdale which has reduced its energy use by 75 percent and where the reduction of carbon footprint underpins every aspect of the business; 
• Carbon Co-op, based in Manchester, a unique citizen-led organisation which provides tools, knowledge and training on whole house retrofits for people and communities;
• Arcola Energy, a leading engineering specialist in hydrogen and fuel cell vehicle technologies. This London-headquartered firm is building a new manufacturing facility in Knowsley to support the development of hydrogen-powered transport in the region;
• FarmStart, an incubator programme provides access to affordable land, shared equipment, training and local customers to build a new generation of organic growers. 

Recommendations

The Green New Deal report has nearly 40 recommendations. They include:

• Establishing a Just Transition Commission which would have a dedicated fund and would protect and enhance jobs in heavy industry; 
• Making energy-saving a national priority;
• Declaring the state of housing a national emergency and launching a multi-billion-pound deep retrofit scheme with associated vocational training schemes;
• Supporting reform of the EU Common Agricultural Policy to put a cap on payments and to ringfence at least 50 percent for eco schemes;
• Passing a new Clean Air Act and enshrine it in law;
• Obligating planning departments to prioritise the climate emergency in project appraisals;
• Bringing public spending on walking and cycling up to at least £10 per capita per year and ensure new housing developments are designed with active travel and public transport in mind;
• Piloting new measures of wellbeing alongside GDP.

This Author

Gina Dowding is the Green MEP for North West England, a county councillor for Lancashire County Council and a city councillor for Lancaster.

Read about the Green New Deal for the North West here.

A recent meeting about badgers and bovine TB (bTB) at the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) was followed closely by the belated publication of what is barely disguised government propaganda. 

The publication models the effects of badger culling on new herd bTB breakdowns following four years of extensive badger culling, including in Gloucestershire and Somerset (Pilot culls 1 & 2).

The ZSL meeting presented details of a small study in Cornwall, including data for one place where badger culling has been carried out and badgers observed. Results showed that, as with other species such as foxes, and as shown in other badger studies, once persecuted surviving individuals dispersed more widely. 

Godfray review 

At the meeting, the Cornish badger populations researcher Rosie Woodroffe is reported to have criticised one aspect of the Godfray Review, the 2018 inquiry into the current bTB policy that the government is apparently about to comment on and implement. The review posed more questions than it answered. 

Concern was expressed that the review’s suggestion for comparison of mass badger vaccination with supplementary culling (continued culling after the first 4 years of culling) in any forward strategy would be biased. Such bias would be due to many of the remaining badgers in cull areas being cage trap-shy.

A better comparison, Woodroffe reported, would be between data from a vaccinated area and an un-culled comparison area. 

This raises two important queries. Firstly, over the government response to the Godfray Review, and secondly over the ability of the government’s 2011 bTB policy to feedback with any accuracy upon its own progress in the fight against bTB, by killing badgers.

Measuring infection

Defra measures infection by monitoring bTB: including project SE3131 conducted by The Animal and Plant Health Agency. It tries to count new herd breakdowns via the SICCT test that is known to be unreliable, and it counts herds that are certificated ‘clear’ of bTB when the unreliable test says so.

Many ‘clear’ herds, however, are still infected (due to low sensitivity of the test) and will go on to spread and perpetuate the disease locally and wherever uncaught infection is transported by lorry. 

All, it may be said, that can be done to try to say at least something about what the badger cull might be doing, is to compare new breakdown figures with what is happening in un-culled areas. Un-culled areas are diminishing in number, as culled areas surround and engulf them.

With modelling (that includes altering figures to try to adjust for the effect of other variables), it is not possible to have surety in the level of accuracy of your findings. However, if policy culling is taken as implementation of the Randomised Badger Culling Trials findings alongside other necessary steps, the face value breakdown numbers in pilot culls should speak for themselves with an average anticipated benefit of 16 percent per year. 

Generally the more factors that you adjust for, the weaker your confidence in them reflecting the real world. A paper in 2017 (Brunton et al.) analysed  just the first two years of culling and was criticised on exactly this point; for adjusting for many potentially confounding variables. Yet despite this, the findings were wrongly presented at the time to the public, more or less as fact, by MPs and Ministers.

Disease monitoring

The ‘elephant in the room’ is a catastrophic lack of basic statistical confidence before informing the public about data. In effect, the public are being wilfully misled.

Defra’s official position, as determined from government disclosures to legal challenge in 2019, is that for their own thoughts on the power of analysis, the policy requires at least six cull areas to be compared after four years before you can start to make tentetive comment.

Therefore, just to get a basic modelled result that might give you an early glimpse of what just may be happening, but not with any certainty, the wait is until some of the ‘new in 2016’ badger culls are four years old, plus an observation and analysis period – effectively in 2022.

By this time over 200,000 badgers may have been sacrificed. All as a result of a hypothesis that has a good chance of being unsound due to bias; lack of blinding and such statistical factors.

But an even bigger elephant was detected relatively recently, thanks to a final act of the retiring Defra Chief Scientific Advisor Ian Boyd, in June 2019. His written advice was that it will never be possible to distinguish the existence or measurement of directbenefit from badger culling from any other individual bTB intervention.  Other interventions include additional and more effective bTB testing, hygiene improvements in cattle sheds and the prevention of infected slurry spreading from causing faecal ingestion of infected slurry.

Boyd indicated that the policy aim is to cull badgers long term, until 2038, and to consider data from the whole of the High Risk Area on a regional basis, but only after such an extended period when badgers have been removed for many years.

Stop button 

A cull with no ‘stop button’ is consistent with fears that the supplementary culling method, devised in 2015, was simply an endorsement of Nigel Gibbens (ex Chief Vet) enthusiasm from the start to copy the culling approach implemented in the Republic of Ireland since 2004. In RoI, past Irish government statements have also tried to link badger culling and herd breakdown reduction.

These statements are very poorly substantiated (if at all), and based on low sample sizes, cause-arguing and presentations that seem heavily biased. In fact, the lower bTB trend in Ireland correlates more closely with cattle measures/testing than with badger culling.

Unlike the UK, the RoI has never relaxed annual herd testing nor did it suspend testing during the foot and mouth disease epidemic. Consequently, Ireland is not suffering the legacy of higher levels of bTB experienced in the UK resulting from Maff/Defra policy decisions of nearly 20 years ago.

The Downs et al. 2019 report was remarkable in that it was accompanied by an extremely comprehensive Defra publicity drive to state that badger culling appeared to be working in Gloucestershire and Somerset. As with Brunton in 2017, the statistical modelling within the paper is tortuous.

In 2017, Brunton showed that assessment of culling impact was sensitive to adding and taking away adjustments, but in Downs, sensitivity analysis is not mentioned, despite multiple adjustments.

Dead letter

What is to be made of the Downs paper? It is an analysis based on data up until 2017, while Gloucestershire herd incidence rose by 130 percent in 2018.

So on one hand the Downs could well be a dead letter. While on the other hand, the government has come clean that it has adopted a policy that says ‘you will never know whether badger culling works in practice or not’, yet at the same time that ‘badger culling is working’ and (but unspoken) there is a need to keep killing until essential approaches (testing, movements and hygiene etc.) are more efficacious.

There has long been suspicion that this was the approach. We now have proof that this is exactly what it is.

In short form; kill the badgers in case it might help, while someone tries to put the essential cattle measures in place. This is the reality.

Hypothetical benefits 

Defra’s exercises to measure the hypothetical benefits of the cull, (using models it admits may be inconclusive) are being passed to politicians pretending it can be said to be working.

So with George Eustice claiming “the cull is starting to show results … No one wants to be culling badgers forever” perhaps he hasn’t been told the facts. That the plan is not to know whether badger culling assists or not and to kill badgers beyond his retirement while still not knowing the return, if any.

Perhaps most worrying of all is to see scientists paid now or in the past by government (& who know or should know the above), writing loaded critiques of Downs’ Report.

While on the one hand they pick out some of the cautionary remarks in the paper that are underneath the headline, on the other hand confirming either in passing or outright, that in theory the pilot culls are likely to be working and reducing bTB herd breakdown. That’s not what was said in 2013.

This was also done by Christl Donnelly and John Krebs on Radio4 Farming Today on 14 October, exactly as Defra and the NFU would have hoped and wished, by relying on the Randomised Badger Culling Trials (1998-2005).  

In doing this, they ignored the fact that on data from two places, nothing can or should be concluded about faint signals until a greater sample size is available. Comparing real differences between two 4-yr cull and control areas (let alone via modelling) is like taking two girls and two boys out of a large school to declare whether girls are taller than boys.

It seems absolutely extraordinary that they chose to do this at such a sensitive time, and that it should be coincide with such a concerted effort to get the popular media, trade (vet and farming) press and Defra-funded outlets to run a PR campaign claiming badger culls to be a significant success. The British Veterinary Association and National Farmers Union rushed out a supporting message. It is hard to think when such a large scale coordinated environmental propaganda exercise was undertaken in England.

The sociology clue

The reason for the government approach may inadvertently have become apparent over the weekend of 12/13 October.

Perhaps coincidentally, a sociologist working for Defra began commenting on social media that preliminary studies suggest that cattle farmers are only willing to undertake essential bTB controls thoroughly, once badgers have been killed and reduced for a number of years. While this was somewhere between known and suspected, it shines a light on two very important things that the English and Irish government might care to consider with some urgency. 

Firstly, the refusal of many farmers to cooperate with voluntary cattle measures until badgers are killed. The agri-folklore myth of certain badger culpability with bTB in cattle was very strongly fostered for 20 years before the RBCT and ingrained in the farming community.

It was no secret that even despite the RBCT conclusion that culling ‘could make no meaningful contribution’, culling was adopted part as a ‘carrot’ to try to garner farmer compliance for disease-control related trade constraints that could be severe. 

This happened irrespective of the now irrefutable evidence of the chronic failure in the use of the SICCT (tuberculin skin) test, where very many farmers have been given bTB-free status incorrectly and allowed to trade infected stock widely.

Blindingly obvious?

Secondly, such ‘carrot’ lead behaviour helps explain one of the more important criticisms of the RBCT and other culling trials in Ireland.  This is that in an un-blinded trial (where treatment or lack of it is known to participants), significant effects are caused by the lack of blinding. 

So fewer breakdowns in badger cull areas may simply relate to other inseparable variables at play, with badger culling becoming the placebo that government hopes will motivate farmers, whether or not it has any value.

Downs touches helpfully on this crucial issue: “There are other mechanisms at play that amplify effects associated with badger controls. Implementing culling may lead to greater focus on cattle controls, TB testing quality and implementation of biosecurity.”

This is exactly where scientific criticisms of the RBCT have pointed out another major fallibility of that early work and of other field trials of limited strength and clarity. To the list could be added unregistered cattle movements. These days, a scientific trial of badger culling without blinding would be highly controversial. 

Further distraction?

With the shortcomings of the RBCT comes the controversy of the badger and bovine TB ‘perturbation effect hypothesis’, where badgers are theorised to carry bTB to infect nearby herds with rapidity after culling, to bring about herd breakdown. 

While this hypothesis was criticised by government scientist; Sir David King, and his team in 2007, due partly to inadequate statistical power in calculations, it has been debated since then both as fact or fantasy by those for and against badger culling. A danger has emerged however in that as with culling, massively expensive mass badger vaccination could be attempted in some effort to apply the hypothesis to the real world. 

Mass vaccination is not to be confused with the worthy local efforts to protect badger populations with vaccination that is practiced by several Badger Groups and Wildlife Trusts. In principle veterinary efforts to remove a virulent non-native disease should be welcome, done carefully as a wild animal intervention. Local schemes rightly defend badgers from imported cattle disease and treat hundreds of badgers a year across several counties. 

But this is quite unlike Defra’s policy requiring a nationwide military scale mobilisation of shooters (or vaccinator’s), and vast sums of public & private money, as well as professional implementation teams.

What is known however, is that vaccination has been trialled in north Pembrokeshire Wales (2013-2017) on a large scale with over 5000 badgers vaccinated. It proved inconclusive in relation to bTB reduction in cattle and shelved as a meaningful large scale action. Even if badgers are protected and pass bTB resistance to offspring, the capacity to assist in the battle against bTB is an unknown. 

Unsafe practices 

Measures needed to identify the ‘hidden’ bTB reservoir in the herd and to prevent cattle movements are known, but under-implemented due to industry resistance. Scarce resources must surely only be pointed at genuine solutions and the limitations of the ability to measure badger interventions fully grasped. Speculative spending around the crisis is pointless. It is the unimplemented cattle measures that need to be got right.

Comparisons of vaccination with culled or un-culled areas would, as with culling, be scientifically unmeasurable and a wrong turn. Not just because of confounding variables and as yet another action with no measure, but because it would be a further huge escalation of unsafe science in unsafe policy.

They would be an excuse for yet more prevarication, distraction and inaction on the scandal of failed testing and further prolonging a failing policy.

Badger culling and mass badger vaccination should come under the heading of ‘Badger Meddling’. That is, the unsafe practices that, in an unscientific way use massive amounts of public funds to interfere with protected species populations in unquantifiable actions that are not safe experiments.

They are based upon hypotheses created around unknown bias as opposed to direct evidence and have no accurate quantitative measure. 

How we have got to this position is astonishing. This is not the time to dig deeper holes. The badger policy and cull needs to stop – it is now literally and officially, completely out of control.

This Author

Tom Langton is an international consulting ecologist to government, business and industry. He provides advocacy support to charities and pressure groups seeking justice where environmental damage is being caused to species and habitats. He has worked for over 40 years in nature conservation including common and protected species management, habitat management & restoration, wildlife disease investigation and invasive non-native species control.