TV presenters Sandi Toksvig and Clive Anderson are backing a bid to recruit more than a million people for a mass tree planting campaign to tackle climate change.

The Woodland Trust is launching a “Big Climate Fightback” campaign after what it said is repeated failures by the government to reach its tree planting targets.

The conservation charity wants to get more than a million people to pledge to plant a tree in the run-up to a mass day of planting across the UK on November 30.

Plant

In England in the past year just 1,420 hectares (3,500 acres) of woodland was created, against a Government ambition of 5,000 a year (12,000 acres).

And the Government’s advisory Committee on Climate Change has warned there needs to be significant increases in tree planting in order to help cut greenhouse gas emissions.

The committee has called for 30,000 hectares (74,000 acres) of new woodland to be planted a year up to 2050 across the UK, a huge increase on current total planting levels of 13,400 hectares (32,000).

The Woodland Trust says meeting the target would require 50 million young trees going into the ground each year up to 2050.

The Trust said it recognised planting trees was not a “solve all” to climate change, and individuals needed to do more than plant a tree to help tackle the problem.

Fightback

But the Big Climate Fightback gives people a way to take direct action.

Toksvig and Anderson are among the charity’s ambassadors lending their support to getting people on board in pledging and planting the trees.

Toksvig, one of the presenters of Channel 4’s Great British Bake Off, said: “Climate change is a real threat and it affects us all. But there is the simplest of all solutions. It’s green and lovely – the humble tree.

“It eats carbon dioxide for breakfast and makes all our lives better. And what’s more we can all do out bit to take action now and plant one.

“I will be pledging to plant a tree in the Woodland Trust’s Big Climate Fightback and I urge people to get off their sofas (when they’ve watched their recording of Bake Off of course) and plant a tree.”

Difference

Anderson, television and radio presenter and president of the Woodland Trust, said because technology caused the problem of climate change, it was often argued humanity could find “a clever bit of kit” or machine to remove carbon pollution from the atmosphere.

“Maybe, but of course that device already exists. It’s called a tree,” he said.

“Though to make a difference we need an awful lot of them – 1.5 billion trees, according to the Government’s Climate Change Committee, if we want to help the UK reach ‘net zero’ by 2050.

“So, let’s make this year the year we make a real difference.”

Broadleaf

Norman Starks, interim chief executive at the Woodland Trust, said: “The Big Climate Fightback is about inspiring people of all ages and backgrounds and providing the chance to take direct action – they have to simply go to our website and pledge to plant a tree, whether it’s in their back yard, neighbourhood, school or at a nearby planting event.

“It’s an easy way for people to do their individual bit for climate change as part of a mass movement.”

The Woodland Trust will be hosting planting days across the UK on November 30, with a focal event at the Young People’s Forest in Mead, near Heanor in Derbyshire.

All the trees provided by the Woodland Trust for planting will be sourced and grown in the UK and will be native broadleaf varieties such as oak, birch and hawthorn.

This Author

Emily Beament is the PA environment correspondent.

Scientists will be able to use up to £1 billion of the aid budget inventing new technology to tackle the climate crisis in developing countries, Boris Johnson is to announce today.

The Prime Minister will commit the clean energy fund named in honour of British physicist and suffragette Hertha Ayrton in a speech at the United Nations in New York on Monday, 23 September 2019.

Putting an emphasis on technology’s potential to answer the climate emergency, he will also announce a further £220 million from the overseas aid budget to save endangered species from extinction.

Rights

But environmental groups warned changes to economic policies were essential to thwart environmental disaster, rather than relying solely on technology.

The PM will make the commitments at the UN General Assembly where he will hold joint Brexit talks with French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

He will also meet European Council president Donald Tusk as he tries to get a new deal ahead of the current October 31 Brexit deadline. A bilateral meeting is also scheduled with US President Donald Trump.

The Ayrton fund aims to encourage scientists to develop and test cutting-edge technology to help reduce emissions in developing countries and to help them meet their carbon targets.

It is named after the scientist who helped further women’s rights and make major scientific advancements at the turn of the 20th century, including in electricity.

Black rhino

Ahead of the announcement, the PM said: “I have always been deeply optimistic about the potential of technology to make the world a better place.

“If we get this right, future generations will look back on climate change as a problem that we solved by determined global action and the prowess of technology.”

The fund aims to cut emissions by means including providing affordable access to electricity to some of the one billion people who are still off the grid, and designing low-emission vehicles.

The new international biodiversity fund will aim to halt the loss of species, with the world’s animal populations estimated as having declined by nearly two thirds in half a century.

The PM hopes the money will save the black rhino, African elephant, snow leopard and Sumatran tiger from extinction.

Fund

The fund will help invest in projects to cut down on illegally-traded products to reduce the demand for hunting, to train anti-poaching rangers and to help communities find alternative means to make a living other than poaching.

“We cannot just sit back and watch as priceless endangered species are wiped off the face of the earth by our own carelessness and criminality,” the PM said.

WWF UK welcomed the “important acknowledgement” of the scale of the crisis but warned that funding new technologies alone is not enough to solve the “planetary emergency”.

Executive science and conservation director Mike Barrett said: “Investment in technology is welcome but the Government must back this up with trade policies that actively combat climate change and reduce deforestation.”

Mr Johnson will announce the biodiversity fund at a WWF event.

Vital

Greenpeace UK head of politics Rebecca Newsom said the PM was destined for “a flop” in his first big test on environmental leadership, saying new finance must come in addition to the aid budget to “avoid undermining other vital” support.

She said a crackdown on poachers is “not enough to stop rampant deforestation”, and said a greater impact would come from pausing trade talks with Brazil until the Amazon is protected, scrapping a third runway at Heathrow, banning fracking and tripling renewable energy by 2030.

“The collection of pet projects announced here falls desperately short of the radical action and bold vision demanded only last week by millions of kids and grownups in the largest climate protest in history,” she said.

“Scientists have been clear that to tackle the climate and nature emergency we need to rethink many aspects of our society and our economy.”

Friends of the Earth campaigner Paul de Zylva said the spending is “dwarfed” by Government support for fossil fuels and environmentally-harmful practices.

Disaster

Labour tried to paint the spending as an effective cut after the UK leaves the EU, saying the £220 million “is paltry” compared to the £3 billion it said the UK spent on biodiversity as a member of the EU.

“It makes crystal clear that the no-deal Brexiteers are in fact looking for ways to cut spending in all these areas, as soon as the UK leaves,” the MP said.

Meanwhile, International Development Secretary Alok Sharma will announce a further £175 million of aid money to be used on climate initiatives in the developing world.

Of that, £85 million will be spent protecting one billion people from natural disasters such as typhoons and hurricanes with earlier warnings, as well as handling their aftermath.

The rest will be used to help cut the costs of disaster risk insurance.

This Author

Sam Blewett is the PA political correspondent, reporting from New York.

Climate change is accelerating, with carbon dioxide levels increasing, sea levels rising and ice sheets melting faster than ever, experts have warned.

The warning from the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) forms part of a “united in science” review for a UN climate action summit at which countries are being urged to increase their ambition to tackle emissions.

The WMO has published a report showing climate change and its impacts over the past five years between 2015 and 2019, which shows it was the hottest five-year period on record.

Glaciers

The world has warmed by 1.1C since pre-industrial times, and by 0.2C just compared to the previous five year period 2011-2015, the report showed.

And with levels of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases rising more quickly than before, to new highs in the atmosphere, further warming is already locked in, the WMO warned.

Carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere increased at a higher rate between 2015-2019 than in the previous five years, and are on track to reach a record 410 parts per million in 2019, data indicate.

Deadly heatwaves, bearing the hallmark of climate change and causing record high temperatures, devastating hurricanes and cyclones and severe wildfires which release more carbon have all gripped the planet in the past five years.

Sea levels have been rising by an average of 5mm a year in the past five years, compared to 3.2mm a year on average since 1993, with much of the rise coming from glaciers and ice sheets that are melting ever more quickly.

Tropical

The Greenland ice sheet has witnessed a considerable acceleration in ice loss since the turn of the millennium, while the amount of ice being lost annually from Antarctica in the last decade has increased by at least six fold compared the 1980s.

Arctic sea ice has seen record low coverage in winter between 2015 and 2018, the WMO said.

The organisation’s secretary-general Petteri Taalas, who is co-chair of the science advisory group of the UN climate summit, said: “Climate change causes and impacts are increasing rather than slowing down.

“Sea level rise has accelerated and we are concerned that an abrupt decline in the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets, which will exacerbate future rise.

“As we have seen this year with tragic effect in the Bahamas and Mozambique, sea level rise and intense tropical storms led to humanitarian and economic catastrophes.”

Ambition

The challenges “are immense” he said, and warned that there was a growing need to adapt to the changing climate as well as reducing greenhouse gas emissions, particularly from energy production, industry and transport.

The report has been released to inform the climate action summit convened by UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres, and to urge countries to up their climate efforts.

Under the international Paris Agreement, countries committed to curbing temperature rises to “well below” 2C and pursuing efforts to limit increases to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels to avoid the worst impacts.

But current commitments put the world on track for around 3C of warming.

Mr Taalas warned: “To stop a global temperature increase of more than 2C above pre-industrial levels, the level of ambition needs to be tripled, and to limit the increase to 1.5C, it needs to be multiplied by five.”

Maxed out

The report comes after millions of people led by children on strike from school took to the streets around the world calling for urgent climate action, including hundreds of thousands in the UK.

Responding to the report Prof Brian Hoskins, of Imperial College London and University of Reading, said: “Climate change due to us is accelerating and on a very dangerous course.

“We should listen to the loud cry coming from the school children. There is an emergency – one for action in both rapidly reducing our greenhouse gas emissions towards zero and adapting to the inevitable changes in climate.”

And Prof Dave Reay, from the University of Edinburgh, said the report read like a “credit card statement after a five-year-long spending binge”.

He warned the accelerating rise in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was of most concern, with still growing emissions from human activities joined by pollution from wildfires and the oceans and land absorbing less carbon. 

He said the world’s carbon credit was “maxed out” and warned “if emissions don’t start falling there will be hell to pay”.

This Author

Emily Beament is the PA environment correspondent.

The Ace of Trade shrimp trawler motored toward Dean Blanchard’s dock early this summer and winched its nets into storage. Blanchard’s workers, strengthened by a lifetime at sea, worked shirtless in the humid summer air.

It was the beginning of hurricane season, and so far 2019 had been the wettest year in US history. With cigarettes in mouths, they vaulted aboard the shipto shovel knee-high piles of fish off the fiberglass deck and into holding tanks, where they awaited the 12-inch-thick, semi-translucent pipes that’d suck them into the warehouse.

This photo essay was written and photographed by Spike Johnson in partnership with the Pulitzer Center.

Blanchard has been in business for 37 years, and is one of the largest shrimp suppliers in America, distributing off the barrier island of Grand Isle in the Mississippi River Delta. He’s a squat man with a boxer’s nose, a soft talking Cajun with the gravelly voice of a lifetime smoker. He fought hard for his livelihood in the early years, when tensions ran high between American shrimpers and newly arrived Vietnamese refugees.

In the 90s, Blanchard said that American shrimp boats would sometimes pull alongside his dock opening fire with automatic weapons, angry at the market competition Blanchard encouraged through his dealings with Vietnamese shrimp fishermen. He said he would always shoot back.

In 2010, Blanchard graduated to political battles with the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster, a spill that sent 4.9 million barrels of oil into his fishing ground. Blanchard’s business took a hit. He later told reporter Julie Dermansky that he estimated his business was worth 15 percent of what it was before the spill. He testified in Congress and began appearing on national news shows to lobby for his industry. 

But increasingly, Blanchard and other Gulf Coast fishermen find themselves skirting a different type of pollution, a threat to the seafood industry and ocean biodiversity that’s unrelated to oil, and much harder to fix. 

“Sometimes we’ll get thousands of pounds of shrimp a day, then the next day everything’s gone,” Blanchard said. “When the dead zone comes, it just kills everything.”

The Gulf of Mexico dead zone — a large, oxygen-deprived swath of water tha  is a result of nitrogen and phosphorus fertilizers from farms in the Midwest that have concentrated off the coast of Louisiana and Texas. The chemicals encourage the growth of algae, which suck up oxygen choking marine life. Escaping fish are forced to migrate out of natural habitats.

This year, the dead zone measured 6,952 square miles  — about the size of New Hampshire, much larger than the 5-year average of 5,770 square miles —  according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Studies by the journal Science state that the global area of dead zones has quadrupled since 1950, driven by a growing human population, and an increase in factory farming methods.

The Mississippi River basin is the country’s largest drainage basin, and one of the largest in the world. Likea topological funnel between the Rocky and Appalachian Mountains, it directs 41 percent of America’s water, along with its contaminant loadtoward the Delta, and America’s most productive fishing grounds. 

Climate factors compound the growth of the dead zone, with increased rainfall contributing to field erosion and fertilizer movement. Last May, the United States Geographic Society commented that the output of the Mississippi River, and its distributary, the Atchafalaya River, were 67 percent above the long-term average between 1980 and 2018, estimating that this larger-than average river discharge carried 156,000 metric tons of nitrate and 25,300 metric tons of phosphorus into the Gulf of Mexico in one month alone, 18 percent and 49 percent above long-term averages, respectively.
Fishing in the Gulf has become unpredictable. As the dead zone shifts and grows, ocean life are pushed into areas where they wouldn’t normally be found. Commercial and recreational fisheries depend on species that spend time within the shallow waters overlapping the dead zone. Normally they would move from inshore nurseries to offshore spawning grounds, but hypoxia blocks their migration, leading to erosions of natural habitats and declines in mating.

A study by Duke University found that hypoxia in the Gulf drives up shrimp prices generally, impacting consumers, fishermen and seafood markets. Fishermen catch smaller shrimp and fewer large ones, making small shrimp cheaper and large ones more expensive. The total quantity of shrimp caught remains the same, but a drop in popular large shrimp leads to a net economic loss. 

“So far we have 68,000 pounds a day for the month. Normally we average about 90,000 pounds a day,” Blanchard said.

That decreased volume comes even with improved equipment — new evolutions in radar, winches, and net technology that to keep the amount of fish abreast of ecological changes. 

“We get the same amount of shrimp, but we’ve got better equipment — we ought to be catching more,” Blanchard said.

Across the Mississippi River Delta there are conservation initiatives and wetland restoration projects—  last–ditch attempts to catch river wateras it barrels between man-made levees and redirect it into marshland where pollutants can be absorbed beforethey hit the ocean.
Seth Blitch, Coastal and Marine Conservation Director at The Nature Conservancy, sat at his desk in Baton Rouge last June, below a wall-to-wall satellite image of the Delta. Like an upside-down tree its printed lines fan out into the ocean. 

Two stories below, and hidden behind its levee, a life-sized Mississippi River slid past. The river had breached its western bank, drowning shoreside factories and chemical plants beneath brown water full of earth, fertilizer, and vegetation from the north. 

After the Great Mississippi River Flood of 1927 — which submerged 27,000 square miles of land along the Mississippi, killing hundreds of people — the US Army Corps of Engineers began to build high banks along the river under the Flood Control Act of 1928. Today, the Mississippi River levee system is 2,203 miles long, incorporating tributary flood walls and control str, with 1,607 miles of levees along the Mississippi itself. This presented a problem. While mitigating flooding, water flow, pollutants and sediment are funneled straight into the Gulf of Mexico. 

The problem is compounded by the hundreds of miles of navigation channels, pipelines and exploratory canals built by the oil and gas industry in South Louisiana. Dredged soil from much of that construction was piled on the edges of waterways, forming piles called spoil banks, or spoil levees, impeding the natural flow of water into the state’s wetlands. 

“The process of wetland renourishment by fresh water and sediment in Louisiana is severed by levees,” Blitch said.

The Atchafalaya River Basin — an area comprising about a million acres of wetlands between the Atchafalaya River and the Mississippi River — takes a third of the Mississippi’s water and is the largest river swamp in the country. Wetlands like the Atchafalaya Swamp act as filtration systems for water travelling to the ocean. Plant life slows the flow of water and sucks up nitrogen and phosphorus using them as fuel, Blitch said. 
“Rather than just being funneled down the leveed river like a pipe,” Blitch said, “these waters, which carry a high nutrient load, could spread out to the marshes.”

In 2015, The Nature Conservancy bought nearly 5,400 acres of forest in the Atchafalaya River Basin, a preservation restoration project called the Atchafalaya River Basin Initiative.

As part of the initiative — still in the permitting phase — the group plans to lower spoil banks in the land it purchased, allowing water back into the wetlands.    

“The idea is to improve/restore the flow of water and sediment such that it both floods and drains from the property more like it would have before constructed levees and spoiling altered the flow,” Blitch said in an email. “Bear in mind this is just of the section of our property where the project is planned, and not for the entire Basin.  Although we hope that this becomes a means for both the state and private landowners to think about restoration on their own lands within the Basin.”

David Chauvin’s Seafood Companyteeters on the silty marshland between the mouths of the Atchafalaya and the Mississippi Rivers. On a Monday in June, teeming rain attacked the tin roofs that canopy David’s workers as they dodged cascades of water. They readied shrimp storage equipment, racing to unload boats escaping the storm. Air turnedgrey as the deluge bouncedoff concrete slick with greasy puddles, and a Bobcat mini-digger ferriedbucket-loads of ice between the freezer and shrimp storage bins, pushing its way through insulation curtains, orange headlights cutting through mist.
Eight years ago, after his retirement as a commercial fisherman, Chauvin and his wife Kim set up their wholesale shrimp company. In her prefabricated office Kim Chauvin was frantic —one of their four shrimp trawlers was caught on a sand bar on Grand Isle, near Dean Blanchard’s place.

“On the one hand we have tropical depressions, on the other we have this humongous dead zone,” she said, “We’re between a rock and a hard place.” 

Switching from cell phone to cell phone, she tried to compile information and mount a rescue plan for a worst-case scenario.

In the past Kim Chauvin has met with farming groups keen to help clean up the Gulf Coast. Smaller outfits are sympathetic to the plight of shrimpers and recognize their role in the chain of pollution, working on nutrient reduction methods like cover cropping or organic farming. 

“I don’t blame the mom and pops,” she said, “It’s usually big corporations who think they don’t have to change.”
She’d like to see regulation of agriculture enforced federally, with limits on industrial contaminants entering the Mississippi, enforced by fines for non-compliance and reparations for historical damage to Louisiana’s shrimping industry. 

“There’s been little to no taste for regulating agriculture,” said Brad Redlin, of the Minnesota Department of Agriculture. But there’s a level of reassurance that conservation systems do exist out there in the countryside.” 

In 2012, Redlin designed a certification program for farmers in Minnesota in partnership with the USDA and EPA that established standards for agricultural water quality, offering farmers a 10-year contract of environmental compliance, ensuring they’ll be within the tolerances of future water quality laws for the duration of their contract.

They developed a matrix of conditions in line with current environmental law, but also look forward to including future regulations. Using software that highlights bad practice — intensive tilling, subsequent soil erosion, or too much nitrogen fertilizer — they make suggestions on how farms could run cleaner and more efficiently. 

In 2016 his network of 15 certifiers began walking the land, field by field, acre by acre, to begin assessments. The process itself is free and voluntary and appeals to farmers – the opportunity for a soil health and efficiency assessment of their whole farm is not a chance to be missed.

But if the farmer is not up to par, certification may require a financial investment to change their practice – things like planting cover crops, or buffers designed to interrupt the flow of runoff. To date Brad has 731 producers certified, including Tim and his colleagues, over a total area of 489,385 acres.
“It’s often expressed that 70 percent of the problem is coming from 20 percent of the people. That’s not invalid,” Redlin said “But it seems to be a different cliché, like death by a thousand paper cuts. Every farm is a little bit leaky and the cumulative result is a dead zone in the Gulf.”

Mike Naig, Iowa Secretary of Agriculture, said he disagrees with the strict agricultural regulation proposed by shrimpers like Dean Blanchard and Kim Chauvin. Farming is in Mike’s blood, he’s one of a long line in the industry, and still travels back to North Dakota, to his parent’s farm to help work the land on which he was raised. 

Smoothing a navy-blue suit jacket, he sits at a polished wood conference table, as he prepares to co-chair this year’s meeting of the Hypoxia Task Force in Baton Rouge. 

“We all understand that we feed into the Gulf,” he said.“And shame on us if we don’t take advantage of the opportunity to show that we can be effective.”

Naigargues that if conservation were a regulatory obligation versus a personal responsibility, the dynamic between farmers and government would change for the worse, that forced conditions would breed bitterness.

Top-down structures for conservation, enforced federally, would mean flip-flopping back and forth on industrial and environmental goals with the four-year cycles of administration changes, while real change requires decades of steady effort. 
“We want people to use their own innovative approaches,” Naig said, “I think we’ll get to a better place, and we’ll get there faster through unleashing people’s creativity.

For him, more realistic is a change in attitude, mindset, and farming practice, driven from the bottom up.

Naig’srole is one of facilitation and communication. Working as an intermediary between farmers, the USDA, the EPA, and Congress, he finds support for agricultural conservation projects through funding, policy changes, and permitting.

Through helping with collaboration between public and private interests – farmers, fertilizer sellers, environmental scientists, and government bodies, he’s able to offer access to equipment, technical assistance, and financial aid for nutrient reduction projects, so far realizing one million acres of cover crops planted, 88 completed wetlands, with another 30 under development across the state.

But Kim Chauvin said that for the shrimpers, fishermen, and communities who’ve grown businesses in the Delta, progress has been too slow. Their patience has worn thin for innovative conservation, the gradual adoption of cover crops by Midwest farmers, or incremental wetland rehabilitation.

“On a congressional level we need to say enough is enough,” Kim Chauvin said. “We need to list annual goals for change, and stick to the plan.”

She said that shrimpers want face-to-face meetings with commercial farmers and fertilizer companies. They want to explain first-hand the impact of large-scale farming on their lives, the environment, and ecology. They want fines, regulation, and a return to healthier waters. 

“We need them to understand what they’re doing to the fishing industry,” Kim Chauvin said. “The states above us should be paying something to the industry that they’re destroying.” 

This Author 

This photo essay was written and photographed by Spike Johnson in partnership with the Pulitzer Center.

Spike Johnson photographs in the documentary style, exploring themes of social conflict that lie at the edges of the human experience. In the past his projects have received funding from the Fund for Investigative Journalism, the Society of Environmental Journalists, and the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

Strike action will close The Ecologist environmental news website for 24 hours as millions of people around the world take part in protests demanding action to prevent climate breakdown.

Brendan Montague, editor of The Ecologist, and Marianne Brooker, content editor, will both down tools in direct response to Greta Thunberg’s request that adults join the school strikers protesting around the world on Friday, 20 September 2019. 

Solution

The Resurgence Trust, owner of The Ecologist and publisher of the Resurgence & Ecologist magazine, will also be closed following an unanimous decision by staff members to join the strike. 

Marianne said: “Greta was entirely serious when she called on workers around the world to take industrial action to support the school students strike. We have heard her call.”

Angie Burke, manager of the Resurgence Trust, said: “This is the first time in our 50 year history that the staff of Resurgence have taken such action. Climate change represents a unique problem that requires a new kind of solution.”

Justice

Marianne Brown, editor of Resurgence & Ecologist magazine, said: “We are very proud to join strikers from across the world for this historic action. The world must wake up to the reality of the environmental crisis – business as usual is not an option.”

The strikes and protests on Friday are expected to be the largest global action about climate change in history. It follows from the school strikes in May when an estimated 1.4 million young people walked out fo school.

The Ecologist has run a series of stories promoting the school strikes, including a how-to guide to building industrial action in the workplace. 

The Trades Union Congress (TUC) has supported action on the day, while staff at charities including Amnesty International, Islamic Relief and Global Justice Now are planning a walk out.

This Author

Brendan Montague is editor of The Ecologist.

Image: Resurgence Staff members make banners in preparation of their first ever strike. (c) Rachel Marsh. 

At least £3 billion a year is needed to deliver nature-friendly farming across the UK which restores wildlife and tackles climate change, conservationists have said.

The RSPB, National Trust and the Wildlife Trusts warn a long-term financial commitment to land managers is needed for the UK Government and devolved administrations to meet commitments to restore the natural world and cut greenhouse gas emissions.

With Brexit, the current EU-wide subsidy regime, which mainly pays farmers for the amount of land they have, will have to be replaced.

Trees

In England, the government has said it wants to switch to a system which pays farmers for delivering public goods such as wildlife habitats, carbon storage and flood prevention.

The three major conservation charities say the £3.2 billion spent UK-wide on farm support and environmental payments under the EU system must be re-invested in helping farmers produce food in a way that helps nature.

Their call comes after independent analysis for the groups concluded the new proposed “environmental land management” schemes and other measures to support nature-friendly farming would cost at least £2.9 billion across the UK.

The money is needed to pay farmers to help boost farmland wildlife such as lapwings, hares and pollinating insects, and create and enhance habitats including wildflower meadows, peatland and woodlands, they say.

Funding is also needed to help farmers protect soils, important for storing carbon, producing food and ensuring healthy natural systems, and cut emissions by restoring wetlands and planting trees and hedges.

Farm

That means guaranteeing funding for at least 10 years after the switch away from the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) system, they argue.

Patrick Begg, from the the National Trust, said: “If the Government wants farmers to get on board with restoring nature it must provide the certainty and security of long-term funding, backed by first-class and first-hand advisory services.”

He urged ministers to guarantee the money to farmers “not just for the next one or two years, but at least the next decade”.

Ellie Brodie, from The Wildlife Trusts, said: “Nature is in big trouble, with one report after another highlighting steep wildlife declines.

“Farmers and land managers are uniquely placed to help it recover as they farm around three-quarters of our land.

Legislation

“It’s crucial that farmers receive advice on how to help wildlife – as well as incentives to do the work required – but it needs to be paid for.

“Creating bigger, better natural habitats, boosting pollinators, investing in healthy soils, cleaning up polluted rivers, managing land upstream to stop flooding downstream and bringing back wildlife are all things that are good for farmers and good for the wider population too.”

Alice Groom from the RSPB said: “In the face of the climate and nature crises, every sector, including agriculture, must be supported to make the vital changes we urgently need to see.

“This research shows that we can re-invest the public money already spent on farming to deliver public goods through new nature-friendly farming policies.

“Backed by strong legislation, this will provide certainty to our farmers and land managers that they will be rewarded for the positive role they play in restoring and enhancing our natural environment.”

Funding

The organisations want to see a strong Environment Bill which contains ambitious targets to help nature recover and an Agriculture Bill, which did not become law as Parliament was prorogued, to ensure farmers are paid for delivering public goods.

Cambridgeshire arable farmer and chairman of the Nature Friendly Farming Network Martin Lines said: “We can only guarantee long-term food security and respond to the climate emergency by protecting and managing our natural assets.

“The £3 billion outlined in this new research is a good first step, but if we’re serious about turning things around to recover the natural environment we need to move quickly. Regardless of future agricultural policy, a clear investment strategy from Government is urgently needed.”

A spokeswoman for the Environment Department said: “When we have left the EU on October 31, we will create an ambitious new system based on paying public money for public goods. This will help our farmers become more profitable while sustaining our precious environment and tackling the effects of climate change.

“We fully recognise the concerns felt by farmers which is why we have already confirmed that we will maintain the same cash total in funds for farm support until the end of Parliament as well as guaranteeing funding for projects that are approved by the end of 2020 as part of the Common Agricultural Policy.”

This Author

Emily Beament is the PA environment correspondent.

A new letter published in Science argues that banning trophy hunting imperils biodiversity.

The letter’s authors present arguments which, to their collective mind, offer a compelling scientific case for trophy hunting, even if they find it repugnant. 

Persistent caveats

The letter aims to bolster its ostensible scientific strength through a supplementary list of 128 signatories.  The inclusion of these 128 signatories constitutes a fallacious appeal to authority. It is indicative of a strange but prevalent view that simply because a scientist makes a statement, that statement is somehow imbued with scientific rigour.

But a statement in speculation remains a statement in speculation regardless of whether it is made by a scientist.

Moreover, many of the names on the list of 128 belong to people who are not scientists by any stretch of the imagination – some lack credentials and some have a vested interest in the trophy hunting industry. The attempt to use the list as some kind of show of scientific consensus is problematic. 

Added to this, caveats are ever-present in arguments favouring trophy hunting as a conservation tool. This letter is no different. In the space of a few hundred words, the authors recognise that “poorly managed trophy hunting can cause local population declines,” and “with effective governance and management trophy hunting can and does have positive impacts.”

Moreover, “there is considerable room for improvement, including in governance, management and transparency of funding flows and community benefits.” The problem is that these caveats constitute conditions for efficacy that are hardly ever realised in practice. 

Arbitrary quotes

The Achilles heel of the hunting argument is the Selous Game Reserve in Tanzania, which allocates 19 of its 20 concessions to hunting. Despite this, the surrounding communities received hardly any benefits and elephants were decimated over a five-year period between 2009 and 2014. This undermines the argument that wildlife population declines would be worse without hunting.

Pointing to a small sample size of a few well-governed instances does not outweigh the evidence of hunting’s inadequacy as a conservation tool. The reason that good governance is not attained in reality is because hunting is subject to the free-rider problem.

While concession owners may have an interest in wildlife population growth, hunters themselves have every incentive to over-exploit the quotas in each concession. The quotas themselves are often thumb-sucks, as it is extremely difficult to decide that each concession, for instance, gets to shoot 20 elephants a year.

On what grounds, for instance, has the Botswana government decided that 400 is the ecologically correct number of elephants that should be shot per annum?

In an open system, the incentive to lure animals from other concessions is strong, which leaves fewer animals available for photographic tourists to see. There is a serious collective action problem here that suggests that governance reforms are incentive-incompatible with the very nature of trophy hunting. 

Science and ethics

It is peculiar that scientists think they are being true to science by ignoring their repugnance of trophy hunting. This subtly implies that ethics and science are somehow distinguishable and should be treated separately.

At best, there is a crude utilitarianism in play, where these scientists argue that the ends justify the means.

In other words, if a few animals are shot because a few wealthy people can afford to shoot them, and this ensures (speculatively) that the land is not converted to agriculture or other non-wildlife uses, then it is morally acceptable to allow trophy hunting.

But this backdoor appeal to consequentialism assumes that outcomes would be worse in the absence of hunting and ignores the importance of respect for individual animals (and the fact that removing the most impressive individuals has deleterious ecosystem and population-level impacts).  

Biodiversity loss

The letter argues that “more land has been conserved under trophy hunting than under national parks.” This may be true, though the reference is quite dated now. Even so, this does not make it self-evident that the land could not have been conserved in the absence of trophy hunting.

Land can be conserved through paying community members cash in hand for not over-exploiting it. Examples such as Carbon Tanzania demonstrate that such payments (for carbon credits, for example) can be enormously successful for conserving wild spaces. 

The letter goes on to argue that “ending trophy hunting risks land conversion and biodiversity loss.” Not ending trophy hunting carries similar risks. Shooting the elephants with the biggest tusks, for instance, means shooting the most reproductively successful animals who also play a crucial role in maintaining ecosystem functionality and herd sociology.

Shooting the lions with the biggest manes similarly undermines pride functionality. In both instances, the genetic selection effects are pronounced and problematic for biodiversity loss.

Again, the implicit assumption is that the land would not be conserved in the absence of hunting, which is untested as there is no counterfactual. The lack of a counterfactual is not an argument in favour of trophy hunting. 

Corrupt industry 

Perhaps no one will argue with the letter’s claim that “hunting reforms should be prioritized over bans unless better land-use alternatives exist.” But it suggests that hunting reforms can be effective.

The Selous example does not inspire confidence, and the extent of corruption in Botswana’s hunting industry prior to the 2014 moratorium also raises questions.

The argument also suggests that better land-use alternatives are unlikely. This simply shows a lack of development imagination. Why should we continue to depend on the global north – rich, white, wealthy elites displaying an extractive chauvinism – to throw trinkets and a bit of bushmeat to local communities? Deepening existing global inequalities instead of finding home-grown solutions is offensive. 

In addition, while trophy hunting can provide income for marginalised and impoverished people, the question is whether it should provide that income. Evidence, conveniently ignored, suggests that income from trophy hunting is full of leakage away from communities – very little of the revenue actually ends of benefiting communities.

Rural poverty is also a function of complex, interacting factors such as corrupt elites in government. Perhaps most frustrating in this argument is that trophy hunting, the colonial excesses of which created the need for establishing protected areas in the first place, disenfranchises local communities and makes them dependent on their colonial masters once more. 

Viable alternatives

The letter wrongly assumes that land-use options are binary, ignoring all manner of alternative uses. What matters is scale-appropriate planning.

For instance, in Botswana, the most important ecosystem consideration is to identify and protect migratory corridors and seasonal movements. Conservation-friendly agriculture needs to map onto the contours of these corridors.

This needs to be integrated with tourism plans. Tourism is not only photographic – self-drive options, adventure tourism and mobile camps are all alternatives to photographic safaris that have lower ecological footprints and ensure counter-poaching presence.

Areas like CT1 and 2 (aesthetically marginal) or southern Chobe would be well-served by these options, but nobody bid for them in the absence of hunting because the government did not make those options available.

Now we have this argument that the hunting ban didn’t work and therefore we need hunting again. The problem is not the lack of hunting; it’s the lack of even considering appropriate alternatives.

Management plans that consider the best ecological outcomes at the right scale also address the obvious point made in the letter that animals like lions fare worst in the absence of either photographic or hunting activities. 

Major threats

Removing trophy hunting because it is morally repugnant, ecologically destructive (for elephants and lions at least) and exacerbates dependence on wealthy whites, forces us to think about alternatives that simultaneously address the major threats to wildlife.

Major threats to wildlife include habitat destruction and fragmentation, along with the illegal wildlife trade.

Paying community members directly through a carbon credit system, for instance, is far more likely to yield ecological and economic sustainability than trophy hunting. If community members are being paid to keep migratory corridors open and farm in conservation-compatible ways, for instance, threats to wildlife will be significantly reduced.

Moreover, these alternatives avoid the governance problems associated with community trusts that are typically riddled with power politics, gatekeeping and in-fighting over how revenues are to be allocated. 

Chauvinist extraction

Trophy hunting does not provide agency or self-determination. If anything, it deepens dependency on wealthy ‘donors’ (hunters) and crowds out the importance of thinking deeply about more appropriate home-grown alternatives.

Maintaining the status quo out of fear that banning trophy hunting might not work is insulting to local African communities who are being patronised by this letter. The subtle message is that Africans are not capable of finding other ways of protecting their biodiversity and therefore need to remain dependent on chauvinist extraction to survive.

This is deeply insulting. A deeper look at the letter demonstrates a matter of stacking the decks. No argument advanced stands up on its own merits but taken together the unsuspecting reader may be persuaded of the merits of trophy hunting. This should be avoided. 

This Author 

Ross Harvey studied a B.Com in Philosophy, Politics and Economics at the University of Cape Town (UCT), where he also completed an M.Phil in Public Policy. At the end of 2018, he submitted his PhD in Economics, also at UCT. Ross is currently a freelance independent economist who works with The Conservation Action Trust.

There comes a moment in every parent’s life when your kids stop believing you are a superhero and you are brought back to earth with a bump.  

Greta’s trip to ‘the Land of the Free’ has taken that experience to a whole new, global level. She preempted the likely responses to her Sentate appearance by going on the attack against these old white people and their inaction on climate breakdown. 

Greta said: “Please save your praise. We don’t want it. Don’t invite us here to just tell us how inspiring we are without actually doing anything about it because it doesn’t lead to anything.”

Questioning everything

She continued: “If you want advice for what you should do, invite scientists, ask scientists for their expertise. We don’t want to be heard. We want the science to be heard. I know you are trying but just not hard enough. Sorry.” 

As a parent, the killer word in there is “sorry”. Nothing is worse than your children being disappointed in you.

The realisation that your parents are flawed and confused – i.e. human – is all part of growing up. It is also part of parenthood.  It gets you every time it happens and every single adult in that Senate hearing will have felt it – the idea that despite the trappings of power bestowed on them, they had failed in their fundamental duty.

This is what it means to speak truth to power. And when she gets the Nobel prize, I hope they change the inscription from ‘peace’ to ‘bluntness’. 

Greta’s speech made me question everything I have been doing to ‘influence’ and bring about political change to support action on the climate crisis.

For example, as someone who has worked for 10 years to find ways to finance the infrastructure (wind farms, solar parks, tidal etc) we need to power our civilisation without burning the deck we are standing on, the climate strike on Friday would seem counterproductive.

Climate strike

Surely, I should redouble my efforts? Work my lunch hour? Get in early and leave late? Anything but strike? 

But I now see that was missing the point. When Greta is speaking truth to power she isn’t saying how ‘green’ is aligned with their political interests. Greta is pointing out the real reason that power hasn’t listened.

Global power is based on wealth that comes from oil. Just look at the politics of the countries that produce the fossil fuels  (and importantly hold the reserves) which will turn the climate crisis into a clear and present danger for humanity.    

The politics of the climate crisis is coming to a head. It is shifting from the politics of talking to the politics of action. The need for action sets the scene for a struggle across new dividing lines which have left many political parties clutching anachronistic identities and speaking irrelevant language.

By striking for climate, I am taking sides in the struggle. And a crisis requires you to take sides. Net Zero is not an objective delivered by compromise.  

That is not to say that our response to climate crisis should be at any cost. We still need to care about justice for those affected by the transition to Net Zero and frankly, if we don’t, we will create friction and suffering that will undermine our goal.

But the time for praise and inspiration is passed. The time for action has come. And calling out those in power for their inaction is a good start. 

This Author 

Bruce Davis is managing director of Abundance Investment, which advertises with The Ecologist.

The EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) has regulated public water sources in America for 40 years. But due to underfunding and bureaucracy, the agency has failed to enforce water testing and treatment standards.

Municipalities have been forced to police themselves, with nearly 100 million cities across America drinking potentially unsafe water.

Take the Flint, Michigan crisis, for example, which came to light in 2014. To save money, city officials switched the water supply from the Detroit River to the Flint River. Lead levels skyrocketed, but the city assured citizens the water was safe to drink.

Under pressure

How was the city able to get away with serving citizens unsafe drinking water for years? The biggest reason was the use of water testing and treatment practices that violated EPA guidelines. One such method is running tap water for several minutes before gathering a sample, a technique called “pre-flushing.”

Municipalities are under more pressure than ever to improve water quality. It’s imperative to invest in updating lead pipe water systems. Cities must find a purification system that meets their safety and budgetary needs — all while removing contaminants like lead, PFOA (perfluorooctanoic acid) and PFOS (perfluorooctane sulfonate). Plus, it’s imperative to invest in upgrading lead pipe water systems.

It’s up to local governments to engage with businesses and promote sustainable initiatives. Legislation should encourage transparent and efficient water use. It’s also crucial to raise awareness with citizens about their water consumption and footprint.

Governments can ensure the long-term sustainability of freshwater resources by setting maximum sustainable limits for pollution levels. They should establish water footprint goals based on best available research, practices and technology.

Many people are arguing the government must take more responsibility for the safety of the environment, including freshwater sources. When an individual makes a mindful decision to conserve water, they do a little good. However, when a government gets involved and enacts new regulations, it can jumpstart a successful sustainability movement.

A lack of freshwater resources in one city has an impact on the whole country. When a government analyzes water use in only their area, they overlook true sustainability. To see the big picture, local governments must look at both the internal and national water footprint.

Radical action

Some local governments have already stepped up to make radical efforts towards sustainability. In Philadelphia, the water authority has recommended “pre-flushing” for more than 20 years. It’s been revealed the city’s children have unusually high lead levels in their blood, four times the national average.

Three municipalities in the suburbs decided to take matters into their own hands after further contamination from the use of firefighting foam on nearby military bases. Both the cities and citizens believe the military cleanup didn’t ensure the water was safe.

Their water project includes the installation of six water filtration systems that will remove all traces of PFAS, contaminants linked to health problems like cancer. The project is almost complete and will remove pollutants in Horsham, Warrington and Warminster Townships.

In California, the water regulator recently voted to spend $1.3 billion to provide safe drinking water to communities throughout California. Water systems are failing, with an estimated 500,000 residents lacking clean water. The Central Joaquin Valley, for example, is home to 10 percent of the state’s population — and more than half the state’s unsafe public water systems.

The new budget, which uses revenue from California’s cap-and-trade program, guarantees safe drinking water through 2030. The goal is to update water treatment systems while also linking smaller local water systems to larger ones. Consolidation is designed to increase efficiencies while lowering costs. As a result, clean drinking water can reach rural parts of the state.

This Author 

Emily Folk is a conservation and sustainability writer and the editor of Conservation Folks.

The planet is burning. We are already at crisis point to try and make a difference, to try and salvage a decent future.

It is becoming clearer to millions of people that the way we organise our society and our economy is not suitable for sustaining life on Earth. A system based on profiteering and greed and competition to boost profit margins isn’t going to be able to adapt quickly enough to stop run away destructive climate change.

Capitalism is the kind of system where the ice caps melt and the oil companies stake a claim to the newly revealed oil reserves.

Radical change

Greta Thunberg and her Fridays for Future movement has been an inspiration. Now these young people are calling on adults – workers – to take action alongside them.

Lambeth Trades Council has called for a rally in Windrush Square on Friday 20 September from 12:30. We are calling on workers across the borough to take action, walk out of work and join us for the rally.

Trade unionists will then be sending a delegation into central London to join school students on their protest outside Milbank. We are urging people to join us in standing together, alongside workers across the world to demand action now.

This is a real opportunity for working people to stake their claim on the future. We cannot leave it to teenagers to be the brave ones. If we accept that human activity is driving climate change then it is up to us who work in that system to organise and frustrate the machinery of climate death and the point of production and distribution.

Locally we are moving in the right direction. Lambeth Council has declared a climate emergency and has committed to making the council’s operations carbon neutral by 2030. Lambeth is also calling a Citizen’s Assembly. But how can we ensure that these aren’t just tick-box, paper exercises, and that they lead to meaningful and radical change?

Local issues

And the issue isn’t just the Council. They contribute only 1 percent of the carbon emissions in the borough. Even if they did go carbon neutral before 2030, what about the rest of the local economy?

We have the Shell HQ in Lambeth after all. How can we create a culture locally of low emissions and carbon offsetting in the next few years?

Workers at Lambeth Council are in negotiations with the council about how we can make serious progress on environmental issues. This is about embedding new cultures and behaviours among staff and putting new systems in place that clearly outline how we can become carbon neutral.

All this has practical implications: when Home for Lambeth begin to knock down estates to build new housing, how are they going to offset the carbon released into the atmosphere?

An independent climate change advisor alongside a regularly convened assembly of local residents to advise and assess Lambeth council’s progress is so important. But this should be widened out too to the whole borough.

International responsibilities 

We have local issues to tackle, a national role to play in providing best practice examples but also international responsibilities.

Staff are calling on the council to ensure they are welcoming climate refugees while doing anything possible to help measures against the global displacement of peoples from their homes.

We are already beginning to see the impact of climate change on our planet. Now it is a race against time to save what we can and ensure a decent standard of living for future generations.

The politicians are prevaricating and the bosses are making money out of the crisis. It is time for working people – alongside the students – to take a stand. Everything depends on it.

This Author 

Simon Hannah is the joint branch secretary of Lambeth UNISON and a Labour Party activist. He is also the author of A Party with Socialists in it: A History of the Labour Left and the forthcoming book from Pluto, Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay: The fight to stop the Poll tax.