Climate scientists understand potential climate disasters, but can not accurately predict the timescales or details of how they will unfold.

Some are more sceptical than others about the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), but all see it as an essential outlet for their research. When pushed to question some of the IPCC’s ludicrous assumptions on negative emissions technologies, some are readier than others to criticise.

These were my impressions from an all day conference in London, where scientists presented the IPCC’s three recent reports – on limiting warming to 1.5 degrees, on oceans and ice sheets, and on land and agriculture.

Social action

All the scientists who spoke had felt a shot in the arm from the school climate strikes and Extinction Rebellion. Andy Challinor of Leeds university opened the event and said: “People now feel the urgency in a more visceral way”.

Speakers repeatedly urged political and social action, which they are convinced can avert the worst impacts of global warming. But there was no mention of radical social change: the appeals were, rather, for “joined-up government policy”.

The event was organised by the Royal Meteorological Society of the UK. It was free to get in and open to all. There was a deluge of useful information, clearly and thoughtfully explained. (The presentations and other relevant stuff are on its web site here.)

To be honest, I could not understand why it wasn’t over-booked, and was disappointed that there were empty seats. One scientist I talked to in a coffee break saw it differently: he had been at previous “tell-the-public” events that attracted just a handful of non-scientists, and was pleased by the turnout.

Media reports often miss the uncertainties in climate science, because the scientists provide sound-bites designed to combat climate science denial. But the uncertainties were mentioned in the frank, open discussions at yesterday’s event.

Choices

The scientists basically have no clue as to whether, over the twenty first century, it will turn out bad, extremely bad, or catastrophic – for one thing, because that depends to a large extent on human society and how it acts.

Mike Meredith of the British Antarctic Society, introducing the IPCC report on oceans and the cryosphere (that’s ice, to us non-scientists), said: “The level of sea level rise [in coming decades] depends on choices we make. There are strong, policy-relevant issues.”

London, where the event was taking place, will face sea level rise of anything between 29 cm and 115 cm by 2100. “The greatest contribution will coming from melting ice sheets and glaciers. The greatest uncertainty is Antarctica.”

The IPCC report calls for “timely, ambitious and coordinated action”, Meredith added, and should be used to “empower people, communities and governments”. Many of the speakers used similar phrases.

Mat Collins of the Exeter university, asked about the speed with which the Arctic could become ice-free, said: “If we stopped emitting carbon today, we might get some ice back.” That will not happen, so: “The answer is: we do not know.” There are multiple feedbacks, some positive, some negative.

Collins said that the idea of rapid destabilisation of marine ice sheets had been under discussion in the IPCC group that drafted the oceans report. “We feel that the science is uncertain. If it wasn’t in the headline statements, it doesn’t mean we didn’t think about it. It means the science wasn’t clear.”

Predictions

Don’t forget, dear readers, that, despite these difficulties, the IPCC report is frightening enough. The summary for policymakers says: “Between 1979 and 2018, Arctic sea ice has very likely decreased for all months of the year. September sea ice reductions are very likely 12.8 ± 2.3 percent [that is 12.8 percent, plus or minus 2.3 percent] per decade.

“These sea ice changes in September are likely unprecedented for at least 1000 years. Arctic sea ice has thinned, concurrent with a transition to younger ice: between 1979 and 2018, the areal proportion of multi-year ice at least five years old has declined by approximately 90% (very high confidence).

“Feedbacks from the loss of summer sea ice and spring snow cover on land have contributed to amplified warming in the Arctic (high confidence) where surface air temperature likely increased by more than double the global average over the last two decades.

The words in italics indicate the scientists’ consensus view about how sure they are of each prediction.

Over the long term (the next two or three centuries), the sea level rise that scares the scientists most is not from the Arctic, but from the Antarctic ice sheet melting. (I also wrote about this here.)

Denial

Jane Rumble, a scientist who works at the UK Foreign Office, said it is “quite likely” that the western Antarctic ice sheet will collapse: “Once it’s gone, that’s not going to re-grow. It will not come back.”

Asked whether there was any point to international climate agreements, she said: “Well, if it wasn’t on the governments’ agenda, governments wouldn’t insist on studying, for example, the rate of melt of the Thwaites glacier [a key element of the west Antarctic picture.]”

Rumble explained how she had been to an international meeting of government officials and presented research from the Grantham Institute on the effect of warming. The Japanese and Chinese delegates “denied that warming was happening at all”, and the American delegates “could not comment”. “We could not get the research endorsed.”

I am not blind to the fact that the UK government, Rumble’s employer, is anxious to paint itself as leading the fight on climate, although its policies (discussed elsewhere on this blog) show otherwise. But her insights on Antarctica, on oil exploration in the southern ocean, and other issues, were valuable.

Solutions?

From the audience – a pretty well-informed mix of students, campaigners, researchers in related areas and others – the biggest suspicion of the IPCC (which I share) concerned the assumptions in its scenarios about the large-scale future use of negative emissions technologies (NETs).

Many people, including many climate scientists, think these are drastically inflated, to make the scenarios look as though warming can be limited with less rapid action to cut fossil fuel emissions than would otherwise be needed.

Answering a question on this, Philip Williamson of the University of East Anglia, an oceanographer, said that the drafting group for the IPCC oceans report was “instructed not to consider NETs” (which feature in the larger five-yearly IPCC assessment reports). “There are a few paragraphs on ocean fertilisation. It’s quite speculative.”

He added: “Personally I don’t think they are going to work.” In general, large scale geo-engineering solutions do not have “political and public acceptance”.

Supposed climate “solutions” such as planting seaweed – claimed to be effective for soaking up carbon – should not be called solutions, “unless you put double quotation marks around it”, Williamson said. Whereas seaweed rots and the carbon sequestrated ends up back in the atmosphere, mangrove forests have roots in the sediment and retain carbon more effectively.

Fantasy

The NETs question also came up in the session on the IPCC’s land report. The inclusion of gigantic assumptions about the future use of Bio Energy with Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS) in IPCC scenarios was questioned. (I’ve also written about this here and here.)

Pete Smith of Aberdeen university, a soil and ecosystems researcher, said bluntly: “If we use an area the size of India for BECCS, then we no longer have that area for food production.”

If BECCS was ever used on the scale implied by IPCC scenarios, “that would mean we are in big trouble”, he added.

The criticism of the IPCC was implied, not explicit. It was left to an audience member, in another session, to denounce the use of BECCS in the scenarios as “a fantasy”.

Support

Perhaps the ultimate audience question was: “It’s so strange to hear this report. Why is this not reacted to? Why is there not an emergency? Why no Manhattan-style project?”

Corinne Le Quéré of the University of East Anglia, an oceanographer and one of the founders of the Global Carbon Project, said this was a good question. “How many IPCC reports do we need?”

Le Quéré said that over the last twenty years she had battled against climate science deniers – and now witnessed the rise of the Fridays for Future movement and Extinction Rebellion. There is “no voice in the middle”, and what government actions are taken are “not at the necessary scale”.

There had been “incredible support” for climate action, she said, but also opposition to government measures – such as by the French yellow vests and Dutch farmers, who demonstrated against diesel price rises, and demonstrators in Ecuador who opposed the removal of subsidies.

This showed that “transition needs to be fair” and people had to be won over.

Politics

In my view, this went to the heart of the conference’s politics. Most of the speakers saw government, and business, as the prime movers of political change. For Le Quéré, the most pressing measures to forestall climate change are market-based ones, and government’s job is to balance the interests of those penalised by them with those who want action on climate.

This is a false dichotomy. It takes as given neoliberal economic policies, such as those of the French government that triggered the “yellow vests” protests.

There was no suggestion that radical social change that could be combined with measures on climate change, in such a way as to penalise the big corporations that bear the lion’s share of the responsibility for it.

Le Quéré’s view was, I think, representative of the scientists at yesterday’s conference. Many of them complained that government policy was ineffective because it was incoherent, and that different government departments were moving in different directions. But no-one dared breathe the word “regulation”, which is surely a basic minimum for any effective climate policies.

It is not that climate scientists do not talk about these things. Some are politically outspoken: in the UK, most obviously, Kevin Anderson of the Tyndall Centre at Manchester university. In 2013, the centre organised a more explicitly political event than yesterday’s, a “radical emissions reduction conference”. (The word “radical” referred both to swingeing emissions cuts and the policies needed to produce them.)

Campaign organisations and social movements could, and should, have picked that initiative up and run with it, in my view. We might have found ways of widening the space for dialogue between scientists and movements. We didn’t, and that’s our collective failure.

Together is better

My humble suggestion would be that we who are active in social movements try harder to work together with climate scientists.

It has become fashionable among some climate campaigners simply to denounce the IPCC as fundamentally flawed, and quote only those scientists who publish more radical policy proposals. I think that’s a bad mistake – not because such proposals are wrong, or because we should read the IPCC reports uncritically, but because we should engage with the scientists whose work is aggregated there.

Science is not neutral. It is done in a social context; the power and wealth that dominates society also dominates science; and those relations are played out not only through the IPCC but through the whole university system.

But, while constrained by that context, climate scientists are doing work on which all of us depend. The event yesterday was a reminder of the titanic efforts they put in, the incredible complexity of the process – and also of the way that all sorts of pressures, from departmental memos to high-level political pressure on the IPCC, are used to control their work.

Another lever is funding by fossil fuel companies – an issue raised at yesterday’s event by a student campaigner who challenged Emily Shuckburgh about a recent £6 million grant from Shell to some of her colleagues.

The challenges are not (usually) about outright censorship, but about massaging the message, fitting the science in with economic arguments that slot into the neoliberal agenda, and imposing political assumptions that gel with governments’ attempts to avoid acting on the consequences of the science.

This Author 

Gabriel Levy is a writer with People & Nature, where this article first appeared. 

In spring the city of Kyiv refuses to contain its jubilant nature. Chestnut trees extend their candle-like blooms and the air turns sweet with anticipation of longer days and warmer nights.

Coming to the capital of Ukraine for a mid-term break in the spring of 1986, my 20-year-old aunt Tetyana and her four friends did not want to stay indoors. They went to the zoo and botanical garden, strolled along Kyiv’s luxuriantly green boulevards, sunbathed, and marched with the crowds on Labour Day, returning to the dormitory only to sleep. Around 130km to the north, a reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear power station was burning.

This article was first published in Resurgence & Ecologist magazine. 

What does “the world’s worst nuclear disaster” mean to people who marched through it, and to those born in the affected territories afterwards? What does it mean to us in the year when western imagination has been captured by a top-rated mini-series and three major books about Chernobyl? And why now, 33 years after the explosion, can’t we help but look back?

Radioactive waste

What happened in Chernobyl on 26 April 1986 ought to have remained in Chernobyl. With the blazing reactor spitting radiation into the air, the Soviet leaders were set against sharing the news. First to sound the alarm were the Swedes, who detected radioactive clouds brought to Scandinavia from the other side of the Baltic Sea on 28 April.

On 29 April the wind changed direction, pushing the radioactive front south towards Kyiv, the capital of Soviet Ukraine, where the annual Labour Day parade was to be held. Pictures of smiling children and socialist labourers appeared, with the aim of stifling western rumours about the Soviet-made nuclear apocalypse.

The party’s decision to proceed with the parade was more than questionable because of the record-breaking levels of radiation in Kyiv on 1 May, measuring 100 times higher than pre-explosion norms. The radiation concentrated around the capital’s low-lying central street – and so did the festive crowds, Tetyana and her friends among them.

Bullied by Moscow into holding the parade, Ukrainian leaders waved from the podium to their grandchildren marching under the banner Our Future Successors.

When we talked recently about that spring break, Tetyana was still convinced that the Chernobyl fallout had not reached the capital until 3 May. “People started whispering about a radioactive cloud,” she recalled. Coincidentally, that was the day when she and her friends boarded a train home to industrial Zaporizhzhia, polluted in a way that suddenly seemed familiar and tame. Kyivans rushed to the railway station in alarm and escaped the verdant city that would, come autumn, bury fallen leaves as radioactive waste.

Elusive impacts

Within a year, Tetyana had developed food allergies and gastrointestinal problems. Although radiation damage is known to cause digestive illnesses, it has not been possible to determine whether her newly acquired health issues were related to the exposure in May 1986 or to the fact that shortage-driven Soviet agriculture continued to process goods from contaminated areas.

Radiation harm is difficult to isolate, particularly in an ecologically unsavoury place like Zaporizhzhia, which is packed with metallurgical and chemical plants.

The elusive, prolonged, multifaceted impact of radiation exposure is one of the reasons the number of Chernobyl fatalities recorded amounted to fewer than 50 first responders.

To see past this number, we need to trace again the path of the wind from Chernobyl. Before turning south towards Kyiv at the beginning of May, it had been blowing north-east from the plant towards Moscow. To prevent a radioactive thunderstorm deluging the capital of the Soviet Union, Soviet air force pilots were ordered to intercept and seed the clouds over rural Belarus.

On the twentieth anniversary of the Chernobyl accident, major Aleksei Grushin, who led the operation, received an award for bravery from the hands of Vladimir Putin. As a result of that human-made rain, the south of the Belarusian Republic was covertly blanketed with a radioactive soup.

Continuing to work in the fields, unsuspecting farmers received radiation doses exceeding the annual permissible limit in just a few weeks. It took the Belarusian government three years to start a partial evacuation from some of the poisoned territories.

Grand narrative

In her astonishing investigation into the disaster’s long-term health effects, Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future, Kate Brown writes: “Of all categories of Chernobyl-exposed, those living on contaminated ground today have the most health problems and highest mortality rates – more than cleanup workers and more than evacuees.”

The fate of those people has barely entered the grand Chernobyl narrative, which guides us away from the dreadful accident and the sacrifice of firefighters to today’s touristic afterlife of the 30km exclusion zone. As Brown elucidates, many parts of the power station are cleaner than spots in the Belarusian Mogilev province, 400km away, where the radioactive material landed with rain.

Brown’s book is part of the great Chernobyl renaissance we have witnessed in 2019. The sensational television show Chernobyl catapulted the catastrophe back into the limelight. British reporter Adam Higginbotham reconstructed the accident and its immediate aftermath in his book Midnight in Chernobyl. Harvard historian Serhii Plokhy preceded this resurgence of interest with his outstanding book Chernobyl: History of a Tragedy, in which he analysed the disaster’s innate link with the operation and collapse of the Soviet empire.

Rightfully exposing the paranoia, dilapidation and cannibalism of the Soviet system, these accounts tend to portray Chernobyl as a uniquely Soviet event. Let us not be reassured, however, by its chronological and geographical distance.

Radioactive contaminants are global travellers, reluctant to leave our bodies, water and soil. They derive from nuclear accidents in high-tech countries like Japan and the US as much as from the nuclear bomb tests that have been conducted on more than 2,000 occasions between 1945 and 1980 and have collectively released the power of 29,000 Hiroshima bombs. Today the world is on the threshold of a new nuclear arms race.

International solidarity 

While we were marvelling at the unrivalled Soviet lunacy and its atomic climax as presented by the US television network HBO, Russia and the US suspended their obligations under the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty.

For more than three decades, the treaty had been curbing the two countries’ stockpiling of nuclear weapons. One of the sites where Russia is now flexing its military muscles is Ukraine. This former Soviet republic used to have the third-largest nuclear arsenal in the world, but it gave it up under the 1994 Budapest Memorandum in exchange for security assurances from the UK, the US and the Russian Federation.

Twenty years after signing the document, the Russian Federation annexed the Ukrainian Crimean Peninsula and unleashed the war in the east of the country that has so far taken 13,000 lives.

When asked about the Labour Day festivities in the vicinity of the exploded reactor, my aunt shrugged. “What do I care about 1986?” she retorted. “Putin threatens to pave a land corridor to Crimea via Zaporizhzhia one of these days.” However, both threats remain potent and connected through their origins in the imperialist Soviet project, now in its revanchist phase.

Today, extending international solidarity beyond the crumbling economic sanctions against Russia is vital not only for the existence of Ukraine, which hosts five nuclear power stations, but also for any hope of nuclear disarmament and for the future of the whole planet. The wind from Chernobyl pulls us inexorably into the future, and it can no longer be ignored or contained.

This Author 

Dr Sasha Dovzhyk is a London-based cultural researcher. She divides her time between teaching, freelance writing, and campaigning for political prisoners. This article was first published in Resurgence & Ecologist magazine. 

Image: Stijn D’haese, Flickr

The Green Party is setting out plans to invest a £100 billion a year in tackling climate change as it publishes its manifesto for the December 12 General Election.

It will include legislation for a “Green New Deal”, intended to set Britain on track to reduce carbon emissions to net zero by 2030.

The party – which is strongly pro-Remain – is also promising a People’s Vote bill for a fresh referendum on Britain’s relationship with the EU.

Transition

Under the party’s plans, it would raise £91 billion a year for the next decade for capital expenditure on tackling climate change.

A further £9 billion a year in operational spending would be funded through raising taxes, including corporation tax which would rise to 24 percent.

The party argues that borrowing on such a scale is both justified – given the looming “climate crisis” – and prudent as it would kick start economic and social regeneration.

It says public sector investment would act as a catalyst for private sector investment, as private investors seek to share in the financial rewards of a transition to a low carbon future.

Voting

Co-leader Jonathan Bartley said: “We’re proud to put forward a manifesto which puts us on track to remain in the European Union and make the whole country carbon neutral by 2030, while delivering social justice across Britain.

“It’s the most ambitious Green New Deal proposed anywhere in the world. While the other parties are trying to catch up, we’re still racing ahead, reaching new horizons.”

In other measures, the party said it would increase NHS funding by at least £6 billion a year, scrap university tuition fees and introduce a universal basic income with a “phased-in unconditional payment to everyone at a level above their subsistence needs”.

It would also scrap the first-past-the-post system in elections, replacing it with proportional representation, create a fully elected House of Lords and extend voting rights to 16 and 17 year-olds.

This Author

Gavin Cordon is the PA Whitehall editor. Image: Bristol Green Party. 
 

The University of East Anglia’s student-elected Union Council has passed a motion to ban the sale of beef on campus for climate change reasons.

The union says students are becoming more concerned by the climate crisis and already have a Meat Free Monday campaign and have increased their range of vegan products.

Farmers have branded the decision to ban beef on the University of East Anglia campus as “illogical” and urged them to reconsider.

Overwhelming 

UEA is the centre of climate science in the UK. According to research by campaign group, Moving Animals, seven more student unions would also like to work towards banning the sale of beef at their university outlets, with many others working to increase their plant-based food offerings. One union isn’t just stopping at beef – they’re looking into making the entire campus vegetarian and vegan.

Momentum to move away from “environmentally-destructive” foods like meat comes after other universities, including University of Cambridge, Goldsmiths University of London, and Portugal’s oldest university, have already dropped beef.

Kaya Axelsson, Vice President of Charities and Communities at Oxford University, said that the beef ban is “something students are pushing for, and it is part of our broader climate action plan.” She hopes that the beef ban could happen by the end of the year. 

Plant-based

According to Moving Animals co-founder, Paul Healey, the response has been “overwhelming”. He said: “Goldsmiths made headlines worldwide when they banned beef in September – now University of East Anglia join them, and at least seven more student unions would like to follow suit. That’s an overwhelming response in such a short amount of time.”

“Universities continue to have a major role in implementing policies and influencing public thought, as well as providing much of the academic work and research that creates the conversation around the climate catastrophe.

“Higher places of learning also represent a significant number of the UK population, who can – and should – be mobilised to support a wider transition towards a more sustainable plant-based food system.”

Online guide

Moving Animals have now launched an online guide to help institutions make the change. The guide includes case studies from Goldsmiths and Cambridge University, with the latter’s catering services who banned beef (and lamb) back in 2016, saying that the move helped reduce their food-related carbon emissions by a third. 

This Article 

This article is based on a press release from Moving Animals. 

The governments of England, Wales and Scotland spend less than £1 per person per year on trees, new analysis by Friends of the Earth has shown. This drops to just twenty pence per head in England. Scotland has increased its forestry budgets for 2019-20.

Friends of the Earth is campaigning for UK tree cover to be doubled as part of the fight against the climate crisis.

The environmental group estimates that doubling tree cover will require public investment of approximately £500m per year – around ten times current government spending on trees.

Key findings

The analysis shows that funding in England fell by 43 percent to £13.5 million during the year 2017-18, meaning just 20p per head was spent on trees.

UK-wide funding for tree planting, woodlands and forestry has been declining in recent years, following a relative high point in 2013-14 of £73.5 million, to £56.1 million in 2017-18. But Wales and Scotland have seen funding increases, but still lower than respective high points of 2012-13 and 2014-15.

Read the full report from Friends of the Earth here. The report comes after tree planting announcements from the Conservative Party and Liberal Democrats over the weekend.

Emi Murphy, trees campaigner at Friends of the Earth, said: “This National Tree Week we’re calling for the next UK government to properly fund the doubling of tree cover. This is one of the key solutions to solving the climate crisis but has been shockingly underfunded for years.

“Faced with the climate emergency, and the dire impacts it will bring, we simply cannot afford not to fund trees.”

Get involved 

Sanjay Singh, senior programmes advisor at People’s Postcode Lottery, which is supplying thousands of trees for Friends of the Earth planting events, said: “We’re facing a climate and nature crisis and it’s local communities leading the fight to protect woodlands and plant more trees.

“Our players are funding a range of tree-planting initiatives across the country, and I’m pleased that they are also are able to support this crucial part of the fight against climate breakdown.”

Friends of the Earth is supporting community tree planting events in Oxford, Enfield, Manchester and Nottingham during National Tree Week, 23-30 November.

For more information on these see the events section on the Friends of the Earth Facebook page.

This Article 

This article is based on a press release from Friends of the Earth. 

Image: Treesponsibility.

Nearly three quarter of a million trees are winging their way across the UK as part of the Woodland Trust’s Big Climate Fightback.

Almost 4,000 schools and community groups will be taking delivery of the free saplings over the next two weeks, and while each group has its own reasons for planting, every tree will count towards the Trust’s campaign to help tackle climate change.

The Big Climate Fightback aims to get more than a million people to pledge to plant a tree on the run up to a mass day of planting across the UK on 30 November. Everyone that applied for a tree pack will be added to the list of pledges.

Wonderful projects

John Tucker, Director of Woodland Outreach, at the Woodland Trust said: “Tree planting has never been higher on the social and political agenda. From school children to MPs, people are waking up to the message that trees are a big part of the solution to tackling climate change.

“Trees absorb carbon dioxide and produce oxygen, as well as filtering out other harmful pollutants from the air that we all breathe. Quite simply we need more of them.

“The government has committed to act on the Committee on Climate Change recommendations and legislate for net zero emissions by 2050. To do this we need to plant 50 million trees each year.

“The Woodland Trust is pleased to be sending out this huge number of trees to schools and community groups that are eager to get planting and be part of the Big Climate Fightback.

“There are many reasons why schools and community groups choose to plant trees. Some of the wonderful projects this season include creating outdoor classrooms where pupils can spend time in a tranquil, outdoor, environment which will improve their education as well as their mental health and wellbeing. Others are growing natural screens and borders from roads to help to reduce pollution and improve air quality. We’re delighted to be helping them to create greener places to live.”

Since the initiative started in 2010, 9.6 million trees have been sent to schools and community groups keen to improve their local area. 

Every tree has been UK sourced and grown as part of the Trust’s quality assurance scheme to guarantee the provenance of native trees. The scheme guarantees that trees from a number of nurseries marked with the UKSG badge are raised from seeds sourced only from the UK and grown in the UK for their entire lifespan.

All our saplings arrive with protection to give them the best chance of survival, and each pack comes with full instructions on planting and after care. We also direct all applicants to our Defra funded resource Tree Tools for Schools which has everything they need to plan, plant and care for their tree pack.

If you would like to apply for free trees in the coming season get your application in soon, as the scheme is once again proving to be extremely popular. 

The Trust has two deliveries each year – one in March and the other in November – to coincide with tree planting season over the winter months. Applications for the next delivery in March 2020 are now being accepted, via the online application form, which can be found here, along with details about the different packs on offer.

Tree packs are allocated on a first-come-first-served basis and once they’re gone, they’re gone. You can apply for between 15-420 trees depending on the space you have available and your requirements. Packs are: hedge, copse, wild harvest, year round colour, working wood, wildwood, wildlife, and urban.

This Article 

This article is based on a press release from the Woodland Trust. Join the Big Climate Fightback.

Amazon forests with the greatest evolutionary diversity are the most productive, an international team of researchers led by the University of Leeds have revealed.

The team used long term records from 90 plots as part of the Amazon Forest Inventory Network (RAINFOR) and ForestPlots.net to track the lives and productivity of individual trees across the Amazon region.

By combining these records with DNA sequence data – which identified the evolutionary relationships among all the species – the team was able to investigate the links between how fast different forests grow and their diversity.

Biodiverse ecosystems

Their study demonstrated that the plots with the greatest evolutionary diversity were a third more productive compared to areas with the least evolutionary diversity.

The finding suggest that evolutionary diversity should be an important consideration when identifying priority areas for conservation.

Study lead author Fernanda Coelho from the School of Geography at Leeds said: “Understanding how biodiversity affects productivity in tropical forests is important because it allows us to understand how conservation strategies can best be designed to maximise protection of species and the services that these ecosystems provide.

“Our results indicate that we should include evolutionary history in conservation priorities – because ecosystem function may be higher in areas where species come from right across the tree of life.”

This Article

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

Image: Fernanda Coelho, University of Leeds.

Labour will tomorrow announce additional police resources to support plans laid out in the most radical animal welfare plan anywhere in the world.

The plans will double the number of police officers tasked to prosecute wildlife crimes from the current 88 to 170, increasing the capability of rural crime units to prosecute wildlife crime. The new wildlife crime officers will not reduce allocations to frontline policing.

Wildlife offences include hare coursing, which has emerged as a significant problem across farmlands, and acts outlawed by Labour’s 2004 Hunting Act, like fox hunting and stag hunting.

Crimes

Sue Hayman, Labour’s shadow environment secretary, said: “Labour’s animal welfare manifesto is the most radical animal welfare plan anywhere in the world.

“While the Tories continue with their mass slaughter of badgers and flip flop on bringing back fox hunting, Labour is determined to bring animal welfare policy into the 21st Century, based on the latest science and understanding.

“We are calling time on those who have been allowed to get away with illegally hunting, maiming and killing wild animals such as deer, hen harriers, foxes and hares.

“By increasing the number of wildlife and rural police forces across the country we will help protect both wild animals and property in rural communities, and ensure a crackdown on the types of crimes against animals that this Tory government has turned a blind eye to.

Strict

“Labour is the true party of real change when it comes to animal welfare.”

Other wildlife crime offences include badger and raptor baiting. Prosecutions in England and Wales for crimes like baiting, poaching and hunting have plummeted by a third since 2016.

Working in partnership with regional organised crime units, the additional officers will also act as the eyes and ears of other crimes including animal welfare crimes taking place in rural areas, like livestock theft and dog fighting, which are often linked to serious organised crime.

Labour’s commitment to increase wildlife crime policing will enable more effective actions against existing crime and will ensure police forces are ready to enforce planned new offences and stricter rules.

Loopholes

Labour’s animal welfare manifesto includes additional plans to:

·        Close loopholes in the 2004 Hunting Act that allow in practice the continuation of illegal hunting of foxes, deer and hares.

·        Introduce a ‘recklessness’ clause to the Act, to prevent trail hunts being used as cover for the illegal hunting of wild mammals.

·        Remove the exemption for ‘research and observation’ hunting.

·        Remove the exemption for ‘use of dogs below ground to protect birds for shooting’.

·        Review the penalties available under the Hunting Act 2004.

·        Consult on the introduction of custodial sentences for illegal hunting, bringing it in line with the penalties for other wildlife crimes.

This Author

Brendan Montague is editor of The Ecologist. This story is based on a press release from The Labour Party.

Labour has promised to create a climate apprenticeship programme which will train an average of 80,000 people a year.

The party said it will also bring in reforms to the apprenticeship levy in a bid to better meet the needs of workers and employers, as well as tackling the climate emergency.

Under the plans, Labour said they will deliver 320,000 apprenticeships in England during their first term in government, with the programme creating 886,000 by 2030.

Levy

Climate apprenticeships will “upskill” the UK workforce so that UK companies can compete and succeed in the green economy, the party said.

Under the plans, businesses will benefit from an average of 80,000 people per year being trained as apprentice engineers and technicians in renewable energy and transport, civil engineers and skilled tradespeople in sustainable construction, designers, welders and fabricators in low carbon industries, and sustainable agriculture and forestry specialists.

Labour said the programme will be funded by diverting 25% of the funds employers already set aside through the Apprenticeship Levy and topped up by any dividends over the cap paid into Labour’s Inclusive Ownership Funds, which the party said is expected to be £700 million by 2024.

Labour said they will give employers more flexibility in how they spend their levy funds, and among reforms are allowing levy funds to be redeemed for a wider range of accredited training and extending the period of time allowed for employers to spend their levy.

Emergency

The party said it will also increase the amount of money businesses are allowed to transfer to non-levy paying small and medium-sized businesses.

Speaking to business leaders at the Confederation of British Industry annual conference on Monday, Leader Jeremy Corbyn is expected to say: “Labour’s Green Industrial Revolution will be a central motor of the party’s plans to transform our country and economy, using public investment to create good, clean jobs, tackle the climate emergency and rebuild held back towns, cities and communities.

“Climate Apprenticeships will offer training to school leavers and workers looking to change jobs mid-career, creating the engineers, technicians and construction workers we need to transition to a green economy.

“This election is our last chance to tackle the climate emergency. The Tories have failed to invest in our economy, failed to deliver apprenticeships and failed to face up to the climate emergency.”

This Author

Catherine Wylie is a reporter with PA.

American ethologist Richard Despard Estes is a world authority on the wildebeest (gnu) and their epic migration through the Serengeti national park in Tanzania (including the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, the gateway to the Serengeti), an extension of the Masai Mara ecosystem in neighbouring Kenya.

Estes, now age 91, received his doctorate in vertebrate zoology from Cornell University following undergraduate studies at Harvard, and began his pioneering field study of this prolific antelope in October 1962 when he became the first foreigner to live on the floor of Ngorongoro Crater in over a generation.

In his 1958 land rover pickup, often in the company of his Austrian-born wife Runi, whom he met and married in Tanzania and who later assisted his research by translating German literature dealing with animal behaviur, Estes traversed the open plains, montane grasslands and lush forests making discoveries over the course of half a century of not only of the wildebeest but insights into the interconnectedness of other wild species of fauna and flora in the Serengeti ecosystem including in the soil itself.

What first attracted you to the wildebeest given the fact that you have also studied other African antelope’s?

Wildebeest were the most numerous and, I suspected, the most ecologically important of the antelopes. 

What has been your greatest discovery studying the wildebeest and its migration on the Serengeti?

The territorial behaviour of the males, which I first observed in Ngorongoro Crater. Why, I wondered, would these individuals, members of a species whose habit of gathering in dense concentrations proved they were highly sociable, isolate themselves like this? Could they be defending territories?

Oddly enough, the first behavioural observation I made as i gazed into the void of Ngorongoro Crater became the subject of my doctoral dissertation-the territorial behaviour of wildebeest.  

How do wildebeests drive the ecology and evolution of the Serengeti – the largest eoc-system in the world?

The migrating wildebeests create and maintain the Serengeti ecosystem. They churn the soil with their hooves and nourish it with their urine and dung.  

Males bashing bushes with their horns in territorial displays help keep the savanna from growing into forest. Even a component in the wildebeests’ saliva has been found to stimulate grass to grow.  And because the animals move on after grazing, (unlike cattle) the grasses grow back, stronger than ever. 

We already know what the predators and scavengers get out of the serengeti migration-lunch, but what do the hundreds of thousands of zebras, gazelles and other antelopes get out of it?

I counted twenty-eight other species of mammals that can thrive in Serengeti because of the wildebeest migration. But new studies suggest that number may be too low.

Additional species that benefit range from aquatic micro-organisms and fish (nourished by the carcasses of gnus who die crossing rivers) to giraffes (whose babies suffer less from predation when the wildebeest migration sweeps through their territories. wildebeest are even more important to the ecosystem than I could have imagined when i began my work in 1962. 

At age ten, in the midst of the American museum of natural history in MYC, you made up your mind to go to Africa.

I was fascinated with the diversity of animals there and wanted to learn more about them. I did not know then that I could make a career studying african animals. 

What kind of family did you have and were they supportive about your passion for African wildlife and to live there?

My father was a lawyer; my mother a homemaker; I had an older brother. There was no support from my parents because my mother died when i was 11. My father died when i was 14. 

Who were some of your well-known contemporaries at Harvard, where you studied sociology and social anthropology?

George Plimpton and Henry Kissinger were fellow 1950 grads of Harvard. More important to me, en route to my work in Burma, I would meet Nobel Laureates Niko Tinbergen and Konrad Lorenz, who along with Carl von Frisch were the founders of ethology-the study of animal behaviour.

They were not associated with Harvard but I had the opportunity to spend a summer at the Max Planck Institute for Behavioural Physiology in Bavaria and studied with Lorenz, and met other influential biologists including Ernst Mayr and von Frisch.

In 1958, you travelled to Burma [Myanmar] to conduct a wildlife survey. What was that experience like. 

The field experience was very helpful, though the animals were quite different. However, the great diversity of animals there fascinated me.

Do you recall any adventures in Burma?

One day I was sitting at a waterhole and sensed that a tiger was circling me. I still have the teapot from a different person’s neighbouring camp that was upended by a tiger who jumped over a log, picked up a person in its mouth, and ran into the forest with him. 

have you ever gotten caught up in some political chaos or natural disaster during your field studies in Africa or Asia?

Thankfully, no. In 78-81 we ran into food shortages in Tanzania because of the war with Uganda, but the country itself was calm.

Your two African wildlife books: The Behavior Guide to African Mammals and The Safari Companion are classics. Are they still as popular as they once were? 

The two books are currently being used to train safari guides throughout Africa. As of 2018, the Behaviour Guide has sold 30,000+ copies, and the Safari Companion sold 52,200+ copies.

How did the idea of the rare species conservatory foundation come about and what have been some of its accomplishments ?

Paul Reillo founded it. He has been protecting rare species of all sorts, especially birds, I was a founding board member. Our daughter Anna and son Lyndon are associates, too. It’s dedicated to preserving global biodiversity.  

Why was there a decline in Kenya’s bongo population to the point where you had to help repatriate American-bred bongos to Kenya? What time period was this?

The Bongo antelope was another victim of habitat destruction and poaching. The bongo SSP was founded in 1999.

The rare species conservatory is essential for reporting what is happening in the field among all antelopes during a period when many species were facing endangerment and which I chaired and co-chaired for almost three decades, contributed bongo to the Jacksonville zoo-one of the 47 zoos that supplied bongo for repatriation to the Mount Kenya Game Ranch in 2004. 

What are some of the greatest threats to the Serengeti ecosystem and how are humans involved?

Foreign plants are taking hold where native grasses once flourished. Poachers snare 100,000 wildebeest a year in Serengeti alone. Herders’ animals compete with native animals for graze; climate change skews rainfall; tourists’ vehicles compact soil and carve ruts into grasses, and every year, as Africa’s population is projected to double in the next 20 years, more houses, roads, fences, and farms crowd the land the animals need to survive.   

What are some of the environmental and social blowbacks that humans will feel if we lose the wildebeest migration to the rising bushmeat trade, capitalist market forces and socio-economic development?  

As for the human social consequences, when an entire ecosystem collapses, humans – who grew up in this ecosystem – will profoundly feel the loss.

I could also cite the considerable money lost to the Kenyan and Tanzanian tourist industry (extremely important to both countries’ economies) but as Sy Montgomery writes in her recent book: “If we lose (the migration), we deserve no second change. We forfeit forever the spectacle and renewal of the world’s most magnificent migration.”      

This Author

Curtis Abraham is a freelance writer and researcher on African development, science, the environment, biomedical/health and African social/cultural history. He has lived and worked in sub-Saharan Africa for over two decades with his work appearing in numerous publications including New Scientist, BBC Wildlife Magazine, New African and Africa Geographic.