The range of measures used to reduce greenhouse gases (GHG) needs to be widened, with more focus on how we operate as a society such as eating meat, a study has concluded.

The research, by the European Climate Foundation and Climact, a climate and energy consultancy, stated that to be on a trajectory to net-zero by 2050, GHG emissions in Europe will need to be reduced by between 55 to 65 percent compared to 1990 levels by 2030.

This means a significant increase in ambition from the current EU 2030 target of 40 percent. The next 10 years are therefore critical, it said.

Trickle-down effect

Commercially-available solutions can already take Eurrope about 75 percent of the way to net-zero if deployed at scale, it said. The remaining 25 percent can be achieved based on known approaches and techniques for which further scaling up and commercialisation is needed. 

The researchers recommended more focus on how we operate as a society, for example, the introduction of circular economy principles so that products are designed to last longer, which can have major trickle-down effects on the entire value chain.

Meat consumption must be reduced by 25 percent (and at least halved by 2050) by 2030, without increasing consumption of dairy products, it stated.

Julien Pestiaux, partner at Climact, said: “What has really struck us during our research is how attainable the transition to zero emissions is: most of the tools we need are already available across all sectors, and using them will redirect the huge financial flows spent on fossil fuels back in to the European economy.”

The benefits of the transition “massively outweigh” the additional investments needed, particularly given that consumers are starting to understand circular economy principles, for example in relation to plastics, he added.

As reported by The Ecologist this week, the Labour party has committed to the target for UK emissions to be slashed to “net zero” by the middle of the century, boosting ambition from the current 80 percent set in the Climate Change Act, if they come to power.

This Author

Catherine Early is a freelance environmental journalist and chief reporter for the Ecologist. She was formerly the deputy editor of the Environmentalist. She can be found tweeting at @Cat_Early76.

For twelve hours thirty Greenpeace volunteers occupied a palm oil refinery belonging to Wilmar International, the world’s largest palm oil trader.

Wilmar supplies major brands including Colgate, Mondelez, Nestlé and Unilever. 

The refinery, which is on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, was processing palm oil from major producers that are destroying rainforests in Kalimantan and Papua, Indonesia. 

False promises

Kiki Taufik, head of Greenpeace’s global Indonesia forests campaign said: “Wilmar has been promising to clean up its supply chain since 2013. Yet it is still buying palm oil from forest destroyers.

“It is not Greenpeace’s responsibility to police their supply chain. Wilmar should only buy palm oil from producers it can prove are clean. That is what Wilmar CEO Kuok Khoon Hong promised almost five years ago.” 

The Greenpeace team includes volunteers and climbers from Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, the UK, France and Australia.

One group of  activists climbed the anchor chain of a tanker ship transporting palm oil and are preventing it from moving. Another group scaled the refinery and painted “DIRTY” in five-metre high letters on the storage tanks. 

Severe deforestation

In 2013, Wilmar became the first palm oil trader to adopt a ‘no deforestation, no peat, no exploitation’ policy.

But last week, a Greenpeace International investigation revealed that 25 palm oil producers had cleared 130,000ha of rainforest since 2015. Wilmar was buying from 18 of those palm oil groups; three supplied the refinery where the protest is taking place.

Only a fraction of the palm oil that Wilmar trades comes from its own plantations; more than 80 percent comes from other palm oil producers.  

Dal Payne, a climber from the UK taking part in the action said: “This refinery is loaded with Wilmar’s dirty palm oil and if we weren’t here it would be on its way to supermarkets all over the world. Hundreds of thousands of consumers have had enough of forest destruction.

“The message to brands like Unilever, Nestlé and Mondelez is simple: cut Wilmar off until it breaks all links with forest destroyers.”

Forest destroyers

Greenpeace is calling on Wilmar to prove that it no longer sources palm oil from forest destroyers. The first step is to requiring all producer groups in its supply chain to publish mill location data and concession maps for their entire operations and to cut off any that refuse.  

Wilmar International and other palm oil groups are regularly accused of exploiting workers, children and local communities. 

The plantation sector – palm oil and pulp – is the single largest driver of deforestation in Indonesia. Around 24 million hectares of rainforest was destroyed in Indonesia between 1990 and 2015, according to official figures released by the Indonesian government. 

Deforestation and peatland destruction are major sources of greenhouse gas emissions which contribute to climate change. This has pushed Indonesia into the top tier of global emitters, alongside the United States of America and China.

Plantation development is a root cause of Indonesia’s forest and peatland fires. In July 2015, devastating blazes spread in Sumatra, Kalimantan and Papua. These fires produced a haze that affected millions of people across Southeast Asia.

Researchers at Harvard and Columbia Universities estimate that the smoke from 2015 Indonesian fires may have caused 100,000 premature deaths. The World Bank calculated the cost of the disaster at 16 billion US dollars.

This Author 

Marianne Brooker is a contributing editor for The Ecologist. This story is based on a press release from Greenpeace.

Chemical analyses of some of the oldest pieces of Earth ever discovered suggest our planet was habitable as early as 4.1 billion years ago – 700 million years before the date of the earliest confirmed fossil.

It was thought that life on Earth must have evolved after 3.9 billion years ago, as during this time our planet was undergoing a period of intense meteorite impacts, known as the ‘Late Heavy Bombardment’, which was believed to have destroyed all potential for life.

However, earlier this year a study used a genetics-based ‘molecular clock’ to suggest that all life on Earth evolved from a common ancestor that arose before the time of the Late Heavy Bombardment.

‘Goldilocks’ zone

Following that, this new research presents, for the first time, evidence that the environments necessary to support life were present on Earth’s surface during this period.

Dr Paul Savage, of the School of Earth and Environmental Studies at the University of St Andrews, said: “Understanding how, when and where life first arose on Earth is fundamental to understanding how life might evolve on other planets in the Universe, but also to understanding what our earliest ancestors were.”

The latest study, involving researchers at the University of St Andrews with colleagues at the University of Rochester, UCLA and the University of Oregon, was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

The research team found evidence for the existence of chemical sediments, such as cherts (silica-rich rock) and Banded Iron Formations on Earth before four billion years ago, implying that the niche for life on Earth existed much earlier than first fossil evidence currently suggests.

This implies Earth became habitable relatively early on in its history – providing evidence to suggest that other (exo)planets that exist in the ‘goldilocks’ zone could also support life very early in their existences – planets such as Mars.

Ideal niche

The Earth is continuously destroying old rocks (and along with them any fossil evidence of life), and forming new ones, in the process of plate tectonics.

This means even though the Earth is about 4.5 billion years old, few bona fide terrestrial rocks still exist that are older than 2.5 billion years and, so far, no rocks that date from the first 500 million years of Earth’s history have been found.

The crust or its chemically weathered derivatives likely served as a niche for the origin of life. In particular, hydrothermal settings such as we find today at mid-ocean ridges, and/or chemical sediments such as chert are common candidates, as these should provide the energy and suitable environmental conditions for life.

Nevertheless, some evidence for Earth’s earliest inhabitants does exist, in the rare ancient rocks and minerals that we do have in our collection.

Because of the lack of any bona fide terrestrial rocks from before four billion years, there is no direct evidence of what Earth’s crust and surface environments looked like from before this time – hence there has, up to now, been no confirmation that the ideal niche(s) for life to thrive existed on the earliest Earth.

Studies have thus turned to (geo)chemical signatures within detrital zircons from this time. Zircons are extremely hardy minerals that can survive multiple periods of weathering untouched, and can be dated using the radiogenic isotopes of uranium.

Analysing the chemistry of these minerals can provide clues to the composition of the melts from which these zircons first formed, and hence the sort of crustal material that was being consumed to form such melts.

This Article

This article was based on a press release from the University of St Andrews.

Searching tweets for text or hashtags allowed researchers to gather information on popular ecological phenomena observed in the UK, such as the emergence of flying ants and starling murmurations.

To test how reliable and accurate Twitter is as a data source for scientific research, ecologists from the University of Gloucestershire compared their results directly to three previously published studies on winged ant emergence, autumnal house spider sightings, and starling murmurations.

These studies were based on primary data collected by citizen scientists during the same period. Their findings have been published in the journal Methods in Ecology and Evolution.

Citizen science

They found that the “Twitter-mined” data was able to replicate most temporal findings, such as date and time of ant mating flights or house spider sightings.

The researchers could also reproduce the sex ratio of house spiders by analysing the photos tweeters uploaded and, in some cases, received an indication of where in the house the spider was seen.

Professor Adam Hart from the University of Gloucestershire, who led the study, said: “The retrospective analysis of social media has been used widely to detect earthquakes or political sentiment, but not so much in ecological research.

Our study shows that passive citizen science, where we gain information and access to photos indirectly through Twitter or other social media channels such as Facebook and Flickr, can indeed generate robust and interesting data.”

All tweets have an automatic date and time stamp and people generally post on the same day of the actual sighting.  

Charismatic events

Hart added: “It is perhaps the immediacy of Twitter, the “urgency” of the phenomena and the desire to connect with other users that have produced so many usable tweets. The emergence of winged ants is also popular in the media and hashtags like #flyingantday often trend on Twitter”. 

Determining the exact location of a sighting proved more difficult as people rarely indicate it in their posts and it is not necessarily the same as the home location listed in their Twitter bio.

Twitter has recently launched the option of having latitude and longitude automatically added to tweets via “share precise location”, which could fill some of these gaps in the future. 

As for the observed starling murmurations, nine of ten tweets mentioned the geographical location, identifying places such as Blackpool, Aberystwyth, Brighton, the Somerset Levels and East Anglia. These aerial displays often become a hotspot for people wanting to watch them, and thus location is relevant to both tweeter and followers.

Hart concluded: “Twitter can provide a valuable tool for phenological studies of charismatic events and species. Dog owners noting ticks on their animals, or the timing of frog spawning or foxes mating are just some of the questions that could be explored.”

Robust methods

To encourage members of the public to participate in ecological studies, the researchers suggest promoting specific hashtags that make the search through Twitter archives easier.

There could also be a system that allows people to automatically record data by tweeting about it.

They stress that Twitter-derived data needs to be interpreted with care though as it can be difficult to validate. Thus, it should be compared directly with data gathered through other more robust methods.  

This Author

Marianne Brooker is a contributing editor for The Ecologist. This story is based on a press release from the British Ecological Society. The full paper is available here.

The environment movement in 1997 appeared to be at its most confident – and confrontational. 

In Britain, Greenpeace launched an audacious and effective international media campaign against Shell after the oil company was given permission by the British Government to sink a huge North Sea storage bouy into the depths of the Atlantic Ocean off the west coast of Scotland.

Green activists sailed out and occupied the buoy for more than three weeks, creating a live media story that captured the hearts of the nation’s viewers.

Sea change

While the environmentalists overestimated the amount of oil pollution that would have been caused, the campaign was nonetheless successful. Shell decided to reuse much of the steel in constructing a new facility at Stavanger in Norway.

“There was a sea change in Shell in 1997 after Brent Spar,” a senior Shell executive me. “It was, ‘oh God, we’re just making a complete mess of the way we managed external issues’.”

He added: “The group hadn’t thought it necessary to consult or to discuss, you know, see what people thought about it, that sort of whole process of engagement was missing.”

The oil company had come to realise that it could no longer ignore the concerns of the public, even where the company genuinely felt it was doing the right thing.

Shareholder pressure

This revolution in thinking inside one of the six major global oil companies coincided with a concerted campaign by British environmental groups, including Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, to exert pressure on Shell and BP shareholders so they would, in turn, force the oil companies to abandon the Global Climate Coalition.

The Coalition was a corporate lobby group set up to oppose immediate action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. It was formed in response to the creation of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 1989.

Sir Martin Jacomb was chairman of the Prudential—an international financial services group—in March 1997 when the insurer held 3.8 percent of Shell’s shares. This made it Shell’s largest single investor.

Environmentalists turned up at the Prudential shareholders’ meeting, demanding the company support a resolution to the Shell annual general meeting.

This resolution would force the oil executives to produce a fully audited environmental report, and also conduct a detailed investigation into the company’s suspected involvement with the murders and human rights abuses that had taken place around the Ogoni oil fields in Nigeria.

Fuels

Sir Martin, a British American Tobacco banker, told the campaigners he was well aware of the dangers of climate change. “We are absolutely committed to sustainable development. There is no difficulty about that,” Sir Martin said.

“But the idea that one can stop global warming by stopping consumption of fossil fuels, when mankind depends on it, is unrealistic,” he continued. “We have got to find economic and sustainable ways of using such fuels.”

Contemporary news reports suggest that Prudential managers have met senior Shell executives “several times since controversy erupted over the Brent Spar oil platform and the Nigerian Ogoni oil fields”.

Sir Martin refused to bow to the pressure from the campaigners. “We will not be voting for the resolution. It implies interference with the board in the management of the company. We think it is very, very important not to dilute the responsibility of the board for conducting business seriously.”

But a remarkable victory was about to be delivered by the environmentalists’ offensive, which was designed to tear apart the powerful union of international oil monopolies within the Global Climate Coalition. And two decades later, Sir Martin would reappear in our story as a founding trustee of Lawson’s Global Warming Policy Foundation.

This Author

Brendan Montague is editor of The Ecologist, founder of Request Initiative and co-author of Impact of Market Forces on Addictive Substances and Behaviours: The web of influence of addictive industries (Oxford University Press). He tweets at @EcoMontague. This article first appeared at Desmog.uk.

Scientists are warning that 2019 could see the first major test of Indonesia’s new anti-fire measures, which have been criticised by some environmental groups for not going far enough.

Three years ago dramatic forest fires in Indonesia released huge amounts of carbon into the atmosphere, causing more than $16bn of damage to Indonesia’s economy and leaving much of south-east Asia coated in a thick, toxic, yellow haze.  

Since then the government led by President Joko ‘Jokowi’ Widodo, has made a great show of introducing measures to prevent fires, which are overwhelmingly caused by human activity, like land clearing for agriculture and palm oil plantations.

Causing drought

In 2016, President Jokowi announced a moratorium on developing on peatland and a raft of moves to protect rainforests. The Washington Post reported at the time that the developments “could be a major boon for both public health and the global climate”. Jokowi signed a three-year moratorium on new palm oil licenses last week.

Fires have been less dramatic in recent years, but this may be in part down to natural changes in weather patterns. There are concerns about whether the measures taken by authorities are being properly implemented.

This matters because researchers have told Unearthed that next year could see similar climate conditions to 2015, with an El Niño highly likely in the coming months, increasing the risk of fires in next year’s dry season.

El Niño refers to a period of high ocean surface temperatures in the Pacific ocean, creating warmer temperatures in the surrounding region and affecting weather in countries from South America to south-east Asia.   

As this Nasa blog post sets out, in El Niño years, “rain that is normally centred over Indonesia and the far western Pacific shifts eastward into the central Pacific”, causing drought and increasing the risk of fires in the country.

Dry season

This is exactly what happened in 2015, when an unusually strong El Niño helped spark unprecedented fires in Indonesia.

Use this map to see NASA satellite images of “hotspots” across the world from the last 24 hours.

Katia Fernandes, associate research scientist at the International Research Institute for Climate and Society at Columbia University tells Unearthed at the moment there is a high probability of an El Niño this winter. However, both because of its strength, or lack thereof, and the fact that it is due to peak in the middle of the country’s rainy season, from November to February, the impact of the coming El Niño is unlikely to be as dramatic as 2015.  

“We believe there will be an El Niño, but it will be a weak one,” she says. “It could create a drier fire season, though not on the scale of 2015, when a really strong El Niño led to intense drought.”

Fires typically occur in the dry season, which peaks around September and October.

Long, hot summer

This summer, some parts of the country have seen significant blazes, with Indonesia experiencing a similarly dry summer to Europe. 

This August, daily wildfire CO2 emissions from Indonesia were at the highest level since 2015, according to researchers at Copernicus CAMS Global Fire Assimilation System. In West Kalimantan, a southern province on the island of Borneo, forest fires have caused air pollution and forced an airport in the city of Pontianak to close. It was reported in local media last month that four people died in fires in the region.

Susan Minnemeyer head of GIS at Global Forest Watch, describes the situation in West Kalimantan as a return to “business as usual”, after two unusually wet summers.

“Without an El Niño, it’s an average dry season,” she says. “About a third of fires happening in Indonesia in the last month have been happening in West Kalimantan.”

Robert Field, an associate research scientist at Columbia University, spends a lot of time studying the climate in Indonesia. “There has been some fire in 2018, but nothing like 2015,” he tells me.

Palm oil industry

“By this time in 2015, you had widespread fires right across Kalimantan. Fire was getting into the peat underground and haze was spreading to neighbouring countries.”

As Field sets out, “peat is the distinguishing factor with fires in Indonesia”.

Much of the country is covered with the carbon-rich soil and agricultural development in recent years has had the effect of drying out this soil, making it more vulnerable to fires. This has huge consequences for the global climate. By October 2015, carbon emissions from fires that summer in Indonesia were on a par with Brazil’s annual emissions.

“In 2015, the main problem was caused by fires getting into the peat underground. Once the fires are underground they have [an] inexhaustible supply of fuel,” says Field. “They just don’t stop until monsoon season. My sense is that this hasn’t happened so far this summer.”

Field says the fires in 2015 appear to have galvanised authorities into taking significant steps to address future fires, from investing in local fire services to establishing new agencies. Previously, volunteer forces and NGOs had done much of the firefighting, a practise that continues today.

But for all the investment, Indonesia still faces the challenge of protecting the environment while maintaining a rapid expansion of industrial agriculture, led by the palm oil industry. Some argue that the government is not prepared for a repeat of the conditions seen three years ago.

Court case

A recent article published by the environment site Mongabay about this summer’s wildfires argued that despite the authorities embarking on a major peatland restoration project, “the fires this year have sprung up in regions that have been prioritised for peat restoration, suggesting the government’s policies have had little impact”.

At the same time, Indonesia’s top court is reviewing a lawsuit filed in 2016 by environmental activists calling on the government to pass regulations to prevent forest fires. 

This Article

This article first appeared at Unearthed, from Greenpeace.

China’s carbon emissions have risen this year by an amount that experts say is “globally significant”.

An analysis of official data by Unearthed shows that emissions from the world’s biggest carbon polluter increased three percent in the first half of 2018, compared to the same period last year.

The additional emissions, driven by surging energy demand from industrial growth, are equivalent to those emitted by Spain’s entire energy system. It follows a two percent rise in 2017, after several years of decline

Urgent action

The news follows a summer heatwave across the northern hemisphere, with China’s June temperatures the second highest on record.

New research also suggests that China’s northern plain – its most important region for food production and one of the most populous areas in the world – could be hit by the world’s most deadliest heatwaves by the end of the century if emissions are not drastically curbed.

It is widely acknowledged that China is on track – or even ahead of its current schedule – to meet its current 2030 emissions reduction target.

But as China is both the world’s biggest emitter and seen as a leader in efforts to combat global climate change, international experts are concerned. However, they are not yet sure if the rise constitutes a long-term trend or is a temporary blip in progress.

Bill Hare, director of German think-tank Climate Analytics, told Unearthed: “The rise is globally significant, and whilst not a trend yet, is a clear warning sign and timely reminder that the deep and urgent action will require sustained efforts and policy attention.

Long-lasting trend

“To meet the Paris agreement long-term temperature goal we should now be in a period where CO2 emissions from coal  should be going down globally, and in countries like China stabilising before a increasingly rapid decline in the next decade.  Consequently a rise like this is of concern.”

The rising emissions could be reversed, especially if the issue of coal consumption is addressed he added.

Neither Hare nor Dr Helena Wright from think-tank E3G thought that the data is yet a sign of China’s role as a global leader on climate change diminishing.

“China is showing political leadership in an absence of leadership from the US. In fact, part of the China rise could be due to temporary stimulus spending to offset the impact of US tariff,” she told Unearthed.

“As the world’s largest emitter, the efforts taken by China on climate change are critical – we should take note of this issue if it becomes a long-lasting trend rather than a temporary rise.”

What’s driving this?

Energy demand is accelerating at its fastest pace since 2011, driven by industrial growth across the economy that follows a record credit boost by China’s banks last year.

The largest increase in industrial power demand came from the iron and steel industries, with China’s steel mills producing record output in recent months. Steel in China is used almost exclusively for construction and for industrial machinery, making up 70-85% of total demand.

Although renewable energy is still growing, it has been unable to keep up with demand, with coal consumption rising by 3% in the first six months of 2018, after a historic fall that started in 2013.

The weather didn’t help with either, with conditions – lack of rain in some places and far too much in others – meaning that hydropower plants have been producing below capacity, which make up China’s biggest source of renewable power.

The rate of deployment of clean electricity generation would need to double to keep up with growing demand without increasing emissions.

The key drivers of the increase in coal demand are rapid growth in coal-fired power generation and steel output, according to data from WIND Information, the Chinese financial data provider.

The number of new coal power plants that began construction in the second quarter was the highest since the government started clamping down on coal power overcapacity two years ago.

It was also enabled by the loosening of regulations from last year that curbed coal capacity, with  a recent analysis of satellite imagery by CoalSwarm identified 46.7GW of previously suspended coal plants that have started or re-entered construction in the last few months.

What next?

Dr Yang Fuqiang, senior energy and climate adviser for the Natural Resources Defense Council China programme predicted that rising energy consumption would slow down in the latter half of the year, but that China would still see an overall emissions rise of 2.6% in 2018.

“We anticipate that the rise of energy consumption, in particular the coal use, will slow down from July to December. There are a mixture of reasons. The China-US trade war could potentially hit the industrial production; the energy intensive industries will be contained during the winter heating season; and the hydro-power installation is set to go up.”

China’s increasing energy and coal demand follows a similar rising trend in lending. Data from the People’s Bank of China shows that total new credit grew by 16% in 2016 and 9% in 2017, unleashing a wave of construction that is now driving emissions up.

But new lending slowed by 19% year-on year in the first half of 2018, so if this trend continues, it should trigger a significant slowdown in coal consumption and CO2 emissions growth.

However, the government may be about to loosen its monetary and fiscal policy again, so this is by no means certain.

This Article

This article first appeared at Unearthed, from Greenpeace.

The headlines are true. We are already facing, and will continue to face, some severe changes to our environment, including our oceans, as a result of climate change. But if we act now with proactive and adaptive good management, there may be a chance to see better outcomes. 

I was the co-author of a study recently published in Science Advances showing that climate change-induced warming of our oceans will alter the productivity and movement of global fish stocks. As ocean temperatures rise, fish populations will travel outside of their normal ranges, largely shifting towards the poles.

In Europe, the impacts of climate change on commercially vital fish species are already visible, with recent research indicating that 16 out of 21 of the most valuable fish species in the North-East Atlantic inhabit waters outside of where they have traditionally been found. Of these 16, nine are considered ‘big movers’ – with those nine species representing more than 50 percent of the landed value of the North-East Atlantic catch.

Unless we prepare for these types of changes, they will wreak havoc on a global fishing system that is already under stress from overfishing, and unprepared for the impacts of shifting fish populations.  

Ocean productivity                                                      

Importantly, our latest research outlines an opportunity to improve on the picture of ocean health and marine food production that we see today.

If more nations begin to manage fishing sustainably, work together on shifting stocks, and establish policies that limit warming to no more than 2 degrees Celsius, we can increase the number of fish in the sea by nearly a third, while providing an additional 25 billion servings of seafood and increasing profits for fishing communities by twelve billion euros.

If we don’t act, we could lose a vital source of protein and nutrients that help support billions of people around the globe. Even before accounting for the impact of climate change, more than a third of the world’s assessed fisheries are at risk of collapse due to overfishing and a lack of policies that strike a balance between the ocean’s economic potential and its need to replenish itself. Experts warn that 80 percent of the world’s fisheries will be at asimilar risk by the end of the next decade if we don’t change how they are managed. 

Climate change adds to this challenge. Nearly all fish species are expected to experience changes in productivity, and half of them will shift across existing national boundaries in search of cooler water, testing international shared fishing agreements and sparking new conflicts over fishing grounds and profits. 

The good news is that overfishing – and the web of problems associated with it – is an environmental challenge that we have the experience to deal with. 

Decades of research and real-world examples have shown that our oceans can be incredibly resilient with good fisheries management. Smart decisions that ease pressure on fish stocks and give them time to replenish can yield results very quickly. In a number of countries, including the United States, Mexico, Namibia, Belize and the Philippines, sustainable management has eased fishing pressure, stabilised prices and sustained local fishing economies. 

Call to action

But only a few fishing nations are developing solutions that take into account the shifting stocks that this new research predicts. 

For example, Chile and Peru already recognise the conflicts these shifts might create. Both nations benefit from fishing grounds that are fed by the Humboldt Current, one of the most productive ocean ecosystems on earth that accounts for 15 percent of the world’s fish catch. Warming waters are creating radical shifts in the cycles of the sardine and anchovy fisheries, as well as movement of species like giant squid and smaller, but locally important, artisanal fisheries. 

In response, the two countries are beginning to share information on shifting stocks, discussing plans for observation and monitoring across the Humboldt Current region, and considering the types of joint management responses that may be necessary to deal with the effects of climate change on their fisheries. They deserve recognition for their foresight and cooperation, and more countries should follow their lead.

It’s tempting to view this research as more bad news for our oceans. On the contrary, I see it as an optimistic call to action – our decisions now can make a difference. Despite the impacts of climate change, there is a path forward that is not only good for our oceans, but good for the people and economies that depend on them as well.

Now, policy makers in fishing nations around the world must answer the call. The ocean waters are warming, and time is running short. 

This Author

Kristin Kleisner is a senior scientist with the Environment Defence Fund’s fisheries solutions centre. She researches the science around combining spatial and rights-based management to achieve sustainable fisheries around the world.

Natural Resources Wales has agreed to end pheasant shooting on Welsh public land in a landmark move which has been welcomed by leading wildlife-protection organisations. 

The announcement from Natural Resources Wales (NRW) comes off the back of a three-year-long campaign by Animal Aid and the League Against Cruel Sports, which included over 12,500 people signing a petition to the government agency.

The pheasant shooting leases have been strongly opposed by the Welsh Government.

Extremely controversial

Welsh Environment Minister Hannah Blythyn AM wrote to NRW over the summer to spell out how the administration does not support rearing, releasing and shooting game birds for sport on public land.

This position has strong public support: over 75 percent of the Welsh public disagreed with shooting birds for sport in a recent opinion poll.

Leasing public land for pheasant shooting has become extremely controversial in recent years because of the considerable negative impact on wildlife and the environment.

Large numbers of factory-farmed pheasants have been released into government woodland to be gunned down by shooting parties for sport. Many birds are not killed instantly and hit the ground suffering from painful wounds and injuries, only to be killed by having their necks broken or being hit over the head with a beater’s stick.

Native predators – including foxes, stoats, weasels, crows and magpies – are also killed to preserve large numbers of ‘game’ birds for the guns. These practices, which form a standard part of managing woodland for pheasant shooting, result in an overall decrease in biodiversity. This includes through displacing threatened wild birds, upsetting the delicate ecology and threatening rare butterfly species.

Offering thanks

Bethan Collins, Senior Public Affairs Officer (Wales) at League Against Cruel Sports, said:“Natural Resources Wales is to be commended in the strongest terms for ensuring pheasant shooting in the Welsh national forest is being brought to an end. This outcome reflects strong opposition to the practice from the Welsh Government.

“We thank those who have relentlessly pursued an end to pheasant shooting in the Welsh national forest, including Environment Minister Hannah Blythyn AM and the public who have backed us. This is as much a victory for them as it is for the wildlife which has now been spared the gun.”

Fiona Pereira, Campaigns Manager at Animal Aid, said: “We are delighted that NRW has banned the cruel shooting of pheasants on public land. The campaign has shown that the vast majority of people strongly oppose the killing of animals for ‘sport’ and want to see an end to it.

“NRW can now use that land for positive activities that are kind to animals and to the environment, and, importantly, set an example for other public bodies that also want to bring about an end to the shooting of birds.

“We’d like to thank all the animal lovers who helped the campaign – and secured a victory for game birds.”

This Author

Marianne Brooker is a contributing editor for The Ecologist. This story was based on a press release from the League Against Cruel Sports.

The climate deniers were ready to attack the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) following its second report, released in 1995. They well understood the political dangers that confronted them.

Frederick Seitz, then chairman of the faux think tank, the Science and Environmental Policy Project (SEPP) – which argues against the existence of climate change – demanded that IPCC chairman Bert Bolin draft a statement immediately saying that the IPCC had “not been able to quantify the magnitude of the greenhouse gas”. 

He even took the extra step of drafting the proposed letter, ready for Bolin to sign. “I was indeed amazed about Dr Seitz’s way of proceeding,” Bolin would recall.

‘Disturbing corruption’

Seitz would later use the pages of the Wall Street Journal to issue unsubstantiated claims against the IPCC, rather ironically under the headline “A Major Deception on Global Warming”.

He stated that “this report is not what it appears to be – it is not the version that was approved by the contributing scientists listed on the title page.”

“In my more than 60 years as a member of the American scientific community, including service as president of both the National Academy of Sciences and the American Physical Society, I have never witnessed a more disturbing corruption of the peer-review process than the events that led to this IPCC report.”

The newspaper, however, did not inform the reader of Seitz’s oil or tobacco funding, which meant the author was not what he appeared to be.

Seitz was joined by Patrick Michaels, then a visiting scientist at the Exxon-funded George C. Marshall Institute, in the attack against the IPCC.

State of the climate

Michaels used his position as editor of the publication the State of the Climate Report to accuse scientists of hiding any weaknesses from policymakers and members of the public in the most recent climate models, despite the fact that this issue had been directly addressed in the IPCC documents.

Michaels also demanded that the Met Office in Devon, England, provide the original data supporting some of the science, and complained bitterly when it refused.

The State of the Climate Report was delivered to every member of the US Congress on Earth Day in April 1996.

Bolin was absolutely furious and unusually blunt about his feelings. “The way Michaels dealt with the climate change issue in the first issue of the State of the Climate Report disqualified him from taking part as a serious fellow scientist in the climate change debate. His statements were simply not trustworthy.”

The Union of Concerned Scientists responded by issuing a press release attacking the maverick scientist for his sources of funding. They claimed: “The forthcoming climate change report sponsored by the Western Fuels Association is like a lung cancer study funded by the tobacco industry.”

Cooler heads

Michaels was then invited to speak at the launch of the latest sceptic vehicle, the Cooler Heads Coalition. The coalition presented itself as a subgroup of the National Consumer Coalition and wished merely “to dispel the myths of global warming by exposing flawed economic, scientific and risk analysis.”

Myron Ebell, the chairman of this new outfit, around the same time joined the newly formed Exxon-funded free market think tank, the Frontiers of Freedom. The economist currently works with Fred Smith at the Koch-funded Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI).

Meanwhile, Roger Bate, founder of the European Science and Environment Forum (ESEF), was working equally hard in the UKto attack the IPCC and climate science.

Politicisation of science

An internal memo set out the tasks for the tobacco- and oil-funded front: “RB to write a short book on the politicisation of science, showing the motivations of the various players influencing the outcomes. May concentrate on one topic so one can analyse the players properly. Climate change is the obvious choice. Two publishers interested.”

The ESEF also planned to place articles implying that the “source is now more important than the science,” defending British American Tobacco while Bate and an environmental journalist named Richard D. North wrote an article titled Anatomy of Health Scares, dubbing the salmonella outbreak “Chickengate”.

Bate also penned a comment article asking, “Why Regulate Nicotine When Caffeine is More Addictive?” and continued to promote his latest climate change book, Global Warming, A Report of the European Science and Environment Forum.

Subjective view

Promotional material sent to tobacco companies stated: “There has been much focus on the IPCC and the only opposition to the idea that there is a consensus has come from individual scientists who, with a few notable exceptions, have been dismissed as misguided by those within the process, and indeed most commentators.”

It goes on: “We are identifying mainstream journalists, specialist science journalists, selected MPs and MEPs and other policy advisors and academics. We want the media to come to ESEF for a different subjective view.”

The book was advertised as including contributions from the major climate change deniers: Singer, Michaels, geography professor Robert Balling, and the increasingly eccentric climatologist Piers Corbyn.

This Author

Brendan Montague is editor of The Ecologist, founder of Request Initiative and co-author of Impact of Market Forces on Addictive Substances and Behaviours: The web of influence of addictive industries (Oxford University Press). He tweets at @EcoMontague. This article first appeared at Desmog.uk.