The Liberal Democrats are pledging to invest £15 billion over the next parliament insulating homes to tackle climate change and fuel poverty.

Plans to upgrade the energy efficiency of 26 million homes by 2030 with measures such as insulation, double-glazing and new heating systems would save the average household £550 a year on bills, the Lib Dems claim.

And they plan to prioritise fuel-poor households so all low-income homes are insulated by 2025.

Irreversable

At the weekend, Labour pledged work to install loft insulation, double glazing and renewable and low-carbon technologies in almost every home by 2030, creating 450,000 jobs and costing a Labour government £60 billion.

The Lib Dems said capital spending of £3 billion a year over the next parliament would incentivise households to upgrade their homes, provide fully subsidised insulation to those in fuel poverty, and leverage finance from private sources. 

There are also plans to double solar and wind power by 2030, bringing the amount of electricity generated by renewables up to 80% of the mix.

Wera Hobhouse, Liberal Democrat spokesman for the climate emergency, said: “The climate crisis is doing irreversible damage to our planet.

Energy efficiency

“The Liberal Democrats are committed to climate action now so we can protect our planet for future generations.”

She accused the Tories of banning onshore wind, slashing support for solar power and cancelling the green deal, a largely unsuccessful policy to encourage homeowners to improve the energy efficiency of their homes, saying their moves were “no better than climate change denial”.

“We would raise efficiency standards of every home and more than double the amount of electricity we generate from renewables.”

It is the latest “green” salvo by parties in the early stages of the General Election campaign, in which, despite the dominance of Brexit, climate change is expected to be a key issue for many voters.

Organisations ranging from the National Infrastructure Commission to environmental and anti-poverty campaigners have called on the government to make improving the energy efficiency of homes a national priority.

This Author

Emily Beament is the PA environment correspondent. Image: Liberal Democrats.

Children believe that spending time in nature can give their school work a boost, according to research.

A new study into the impact of outdoor activity on children’s wellbeing suggests that being outside can also make youngsters feel more confident and capable of trying new things.

The Wildlife Trusts, which commissioned the study, said the findings show that children experience “profound and diverse benefits” through having regular contact with nature, and that every child should have the chance to “experience the joy of wildlife in daily life.”

Relationships

Researchers at University College London’s (UCL) Institute of Education studied children taking part in outdoor activities, such as identifying plants and trees and considering the needs of wildlife habitats, with their local Wildlife Trust.

A total of 451, mostly aged eight and nine, children in 12 areas of England were asked to complete surveys before and after they took part in the events. Almost 200 of these children were also observed and interviewed about their experiences.

The findings showed that after spending time in nature, almost eight in 10 (79 percent) said they felt the experience could help their school work.

More than eight in 10 (84 percent) said they felt they are capable of new things when they try, and nine in 10 (90%) felt they learned something new about the natural world.

Some 79 percent said they felt more confident in themselves, while the same proportion felt they had better relationships with their classmates. And 81 percent thought they had better relationships with their teachers.

Nature’s sake

Nigel Doar, the Wildlife Trusts’ director of strategy, said: “This research shows that children experience profound and diverse benefits through regular contact with nature. Contact with the wild improves children’s wellbeing, motivation and confidence.

“The data also highlights how children’s experiences in and around the natural world led to better relationships with their teachers and classmates.

“The Wildlife Trusts believe everyone should have the opportunity to experience the joy of wildlife in daily life and we’re calling on government to recognise the multiple benefits of nature for children – and ensure that at least one hour per school day is spent outdoors learning and playing in wild places.”

Professor Michael Reiss, of UCL’s Institute of Education, said: “Each generation seems to have less contact with the outdoors than the preceding one. We owe it to all young people to reverse this trend – for their sakes, for our sakes and for nature’s sake.”

This Author

Alison Kershaw is the PA education correspondent.

Extinction Rebellion (XR) has achieved an amazing feat. Its multiple and large-scale actions have pushed the climate crisis to the fore and pressured decision makers to take drastic action to work to secure a better future for all species. 

XR has been able to motivate ordinary people to participate in peaceful civil disobedience and to break from business as usual by building on the work of past social and environmental movements, as well as the renewed urgency created by the release of the 1.5 IPCC report approximately one year ago.

The reaction from the Home Office has been to ban protests related to XR. The group must be doing something right to draw the ire of the state. The ban only emboldened XR to continue and new people to join their ranks. We are thankful to all who have made these protests happen, many who have taken action on the streets for the first time in their life. 

Justice 

However, the action to shutdown public transport at rush hour exposed many weaknesses in XR’s strategy and decision-making process. This action was undertaken despite principled objections from the majority of rebels. It demonstrated that XR needs to rethink its decision-making processes and find a way to prioritise accountability within a decentralised movement. 

This action also demonstrated the truth to some early criticisms of the movement and its messaging – that it chose to ignore the role of capitalism and colonialism in creating the climate crisis.

Thankfully there are groups within XR such as the international Global Justice Rebellion that are pushing XR to include a fourth demand: global climate justice. We hope that this will bring deeper strategic thinking to future actions.    

We are heartened that the vast majority of rebels were opposed to this action and that XR values openly challenging itself and the toxic system, as well as reflecting, learning and welcoming everyone.

We ourselves are people of colour (Poc) residing in Europe who have been actively involved in the global climate justice movement for over a decade. Here we offer our analysis of how XR can and must do better. 

The strongest weapon of non-violent movements is people power and it is not strategic – neither is it ethical – to alienate marginalised communities.  

Maximising arrest

As the grandchildren of those who resisted British colonial rule in South Asia, we wholeheartedly support civil disobedience and know that all successful movements include an element of sacrifice.  

But civil disobedience does not necessarily mean arrest. Many civil disobedience movements have managed to achieve change without mass arrests. XR will need to be more agile if it is to keep the authorities, the fossil fuel industry and financiers guessing about what will come next. 

For example in Chile, the miners association called for non-cooperation by driving below the speed limit, not sending children to school, and banging pots and pans every evening at 8pm. Through such actions, it became clear that the opposition to Pinochet was growing without forcing people to land in harsh jails. 

Fetishisation and glorification of arrests individualises collective acts and belittles how those that look different than the majority of rebels are treated by the police. Focussing on individual arrests plays into a neoliberal focus on personal pursuit and exceptional action, rather than building community. 

This strategy has been detrimental to people of colour (PoC) joining and identifying with XR. Getting arrested can be a rather small sacrifice for an upper-middle class white man in his mid-fifties and he is likely to be treated respectfully by the police, whereas the transgendered black British youth with a disability born to Caribbean immigrants will have a very different experience. 

A Facebook post from Roger Hallam exemplifies his lack of understanding about how others experience imprisonment, and assumes that the majority of people can afford a court case and will face no consequences if they do not show up to work for an extended time. 

Advocating for disruption and non-cooperation – in small and big ways, everyday and collectively – would be more inclusive and is likely going to increase the movement’s impact. 

Embedding anti-oppression 

While XR has done a phenomenal job of building a movement with strong principles, one that many people feel they can identify with, the ways in which these principles are put into practice has been uneven. 

Sending flowers and a thank you note to staff at the Brixton police station, where three young black men died in custody in recent years, is disrespectful towards those who have their rights trampled on daily by the police and the state.

Similarly, asking the courts to prosecute knife-crime rather than non-violent protesters shows a lack of understanding about how institutional racism and austerity measures have impacted communities of colour.   

We strongly recommend that rebels participate in a continuous practice of anti-oppression analysis and self reflection, applying this to how they fight for climate justice.

Adapting strategy

Mass action and ‘whirlwind’ moments do not happen in isolation, without outreach or deep community organising – as the Engler brothers point out in their book This is an Uprising. This means that sometimes one has to go slowly at first in order to go fast later.

Additionally, this analysis by Nafeez Ahmed points out that XR has not taken into account the differences between protesting to avert climate crisis and overthrowing authoritarian regimes propped up by the police. 

A deeper understanding of the case studies and empirical evidence should have translated into finding weak spots and sympathetic people within the ranks of those sectors primarily responsible for the climate crisis, such as the fossil fuel industry, bureaucrats, banks and insurance companies.

Migration 

People have always been on the move and will continue to be so.

In today’s world many of the factors contributing to displacement and migration are related to the legacy of colonialism, such as political instability, war or economic inequality, and to climate impacts. 

If we are able to use this crisis as an opportunity to create a more just world, we can expect that a number of drivers of immigration will become less acute. But arguing for immigration controls as a climate response is massively unjust.

While it is good that XR supports climate refugees, what about other types of refugees? Where do climate refugees start and stop? If you are a farmer and face desertification, a slow process linked to climate change, and decide to flee, are you a climate refugee or an economic refugee? This differentiation among types of refugees creates unnecessary divisions. 

XR must actively work to include activists from migrant communities if it is to fully embed global justice in its strategic workings. At the same time, as a decentralised movement it must work to remain accountable at all levels, in order to avoid replicating structures of oppression. 

Industrial complex

Rather than simply maximising disruption in public spaces, XR must focus its aim on the fossil fuel industrial complex – those who have cut subsidies or blocked investment in public transport infrastructure, transport ministries promoting roads over rail, automobile manufacturers, financial and banking companies investing in fossil fuels or infrastructures, and of course the oil, gas and coal companies themselves, such as BP.

These actors are fuelling the crisis and their power has to be removed. At the same time, marginalised communities bearing the brunt of climate impacts and economic inequality must be actively empowered. 

We must learn from the Gilet Jaunes movement in France and the current uprising in Chile. 

While science indicates that we must quickly stop emitting greenhouse gases, it does not indicate how we do this. That is up to us – we must provide a vision of how our lives can improve for everyone in a carbon free society and how we get there in a socially just manner.  We hope that XR can expand its demands to include how greenhouse gas emissions can be stopped in a socially just manner. 

Diversifying 

Social movements are successful when they are able to increase support from those who have previously demonstrated passive opposition, and when they are able to diversify an active base.

Within its own ranks, a number of XR groups including XR Youth, XR Slough, XR Scotland, the XR International Solidarity Network, and Global Justice Rebellion are proactively and constructively addressing oppression within the group. They should be listened to and be a part of the leadership within XR.

There are numerous working class, disabled, immigrant and/or activists of colour across the globe who have been a part of the climate and other social justice movements for many years. They should be consulted in an effort to incorporate demands from the most impacted communities and to build meaningful relationships. These groups must have a place at the table and XR must be willing to modify its structure, culture, messaging and tactics based on their inputs. 

By making these changes, XR will be stronger, more effective and strategic. With diverse widespread support across large swathes of society, the government will have no choice but to stop protecting the fossil fuel industry and financiers, as well as make climate justice a reality for all.

These Authors 

Payal Parekh is an international climate activist and former programme director of 350.org. Asad Rehman is the executive director of War on Want. 

Image credit: Talia Woodin, Extinction Rebellion. 

Campaigners have written to the Romanian government to condemn the killings of two forest rangers, and urged the government to dismantle the country’s network of timber mafia.

Forest ranger Liviu Pop was out investigating illegal logging in Maramures, in the northwestern region of the country, when he was shot dead.

His death came shortly after that of Raducu Gorcioaia, who was murdered in the forest district of Pascani earlier in October.

Criminal network

These deaths were “disturbing” in themselves, the letter states, but the fact that these rangers had to risk their personal safety to defend the country’s old-growth forests and when forest protections are already included in Romanian law was “unforgivable”.

The letter was signed by over 40 environmental groups from around the world and appealed directly to president Klaus Iohannis of Romania and the government for a thorough and unbiased investigation into the killings.

Those who work to protect forests should not only have adequate legal protection, but also it needed to be enforced, the letter said.

The government must also take action against the criminals who are responsible for illegal logging, they said.

366,000 hectares of Romanian forest was illegally logged between 1990 and 2011. In recent years there has been widespread logging even within Natura 4 2000 sites, which should be protected by EU law, the NGOs noted.  

Last month, EuroNatur, Agent Green and ClientEarth filed a complaint against the Romanian government with the European Commission for illegal logging in Natura 2000 sites.

This Author 

Catherine Early is a freelance environmental journalist and chief reporter for the Ecologist. She can be found tweeting at @Cat_Early76.

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

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

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

Humanity

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

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

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

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

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

These are:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Steps

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

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

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

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

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

This Author

Emily Beament is the PA environment correspondent.

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

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

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

Taxis

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

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

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

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

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

Dying

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

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

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

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

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

Plans

Conservative councillor Claire Hiscott also expressed concerns about the hospital.

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

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

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

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

This Author

Gus Carter is a reporter with PA.

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

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

Visit the Undisciplined Environments website. 

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

Militant knowledge

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

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

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

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

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

Collective subversion

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

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

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

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

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

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

Existential choice

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

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

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

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

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

Oppressive disciplinarity

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

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

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

These Authors

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

This article was first published on the Undisciplined Environments website. 

Image: Book Bloc, Travel Between the Pages. 

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

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

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

Integrated management 

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

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

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

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

Local ecosystems

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

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

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

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

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

Important role

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

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

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

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

This Article

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

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

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

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

Harmful impacts

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

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

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

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

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

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

This Article 

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

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

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

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

Air

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

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

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

Winds

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

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

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

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

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Tom Wilkinson is a reporter with PA.