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

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

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

Safe

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

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

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

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

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

Fresh

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

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

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

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

Freezer

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

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

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

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

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

This Author

Emily Beament is the PA environment correspondent.

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

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

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

Real-life science

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

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

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

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

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

Strengthened understanding

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

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

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

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

This Article 

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

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

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

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

Food and farming 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Social justice

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Best Practice

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

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

Recommendations

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

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

This Author

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

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

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

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

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

Godfray review 

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

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

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

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

Measuring infection

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

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

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

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

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

Disease monitoring

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stop button 

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

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

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

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

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

Dead letter

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

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

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

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

Hypothetical benefits 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The sociology clue

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

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

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

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

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

Blindingly obvious?

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

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

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

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

Further distraction?

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

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

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

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

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

Unsafe practices 

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

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

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

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

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

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

This Author

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

The government is facing growing calls to make its fracking ban permanent, as opponents raised concerns the major U-turn could be an election ploy.

Business Secretary Andrea Leadsom on Saturday described the moratorium imposed after a damning report as “disappointing”, and made it clear it will only be in place “until the science changes”.

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn said imposing the moratorium in the run-up to the December 12 poll is an “election stunt”, and reiterated a pledge that his party would “end fracking”.

Greenwash

The suspension is a reversal of years of support from the Tories, including from Boris Johnson who has consistently praised shale gas extraction and hit out at its opponents.

It came after research from the Oil and Gas Authority (OGA) raised concerns over the ability to predict fracking-linked earthquakes.

Speaking to reporters in Swindon, Mr Corbyn said: “I think it sounds like fracking would come back on December 13, if they were elected back into office. We’re quite clear, we will end fracking.

“It seems to me like an election stunt and I think it’s what’s called euphemistically a bit of greenwash.”

The Liberal Democrats raised similar fears, with leader Jo Swinson telling the PA news agency the announcement was “a bit of a distraction”.

Outrage

She added: “A moratorium is half a step in the right direction but at the end of the day this is a Government that has abolished the department of climate change and has been making it harder and preventing on-shore wind farms being built.”

Former Tory energy minister Sam Gyimah, who defected to the Lib Dems, said he does not take the announcement “seriously at all”. 

He told PA: “Boris Johnson’s conversion to environmentalism is skin deep. It’s interesting that just as we approach an election he has decided he is againstfracking.”

Friends of the Earth chief executive Craig Bennett welcomed the suspension as a “tremendous victory for communities and the climate” – but he too called for legislation to make it permanent.

The government announced on Friday it is ending its support for fracking, a process which has provoked particular outrage in counties such as Lancashire and Yorkshire.

Moratorium

On Saturday, Ms Leadsom defended the suspension despite praising the “advantages” offracking, which she hailed as “a huge opportunity”.

She told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “It’s a disappointment but we’ve always been clear that we will follow the science.”

Pressed on why a permanent ban is not being imposed, she replied: “Because this is a huge opportunity for the United Kingdom.

“We will follow the science and it is quite clear that we can’t be certain. The science isn’t accurate enough to be able to assess the fault lines, the geological studies have been shown to be inaccurate, so therefore unless and until we can be absolutely certain, we are imposing a moratorium.”

Jobs

The OGA report found it is not possible to accurately predict the probability or magnitude of earthquakes linked to fracking.

The PM has previously hailed fracking as a potential “answer to the nation’s prayers”, and called its critics’ reactions as “ludicrous” and “mad denunciations”.

But he has now followed Labour’s pledge for a ban and conceded he has “very considerable anxieties” about it, amid growing public opposition.

The climate crisis is one of the issues Mr Corbyn wants to focus on in the winter election campaign, with the party announcing a raft of measures including the creation of thousands of green jobs.

These Authors

Emma Bowden is a reporter with PA. Sam Blewett is the PA political correspondent.

Heathrow Airport’s expansion could be scrapped under Labour plans to tackle the climate crisis by making the nation carbon-neutral by 2030.

Leader Jeremy Corbyn and shadow chancellor John McDonnell both signalled the controversial plans for a third runway may be blocked if the party wins the general election.

On Sunday, Mr McDonnell told the BBC’s The Andrew Marr Show: “We set ourselves criteria, one of which was environmental impact, the other was also economic impact and social impact.

Runway

“On the current criteria, we’ve said very clearly, Heathrow expansion doesn’t qualify.”

Pressed if Labour would cancel the extension, he said: “At the moment it does not qualify based on the criteria we set out.”

Later in the day, Mr Corbyn said: “It has to meet those tests and that is the reason why I opposed it when it last came to Parliament because, in my view, it did not meet those tests.”

Other expansions across the country including in Manchester would also be considered under the criteria.

Parliament gave the go-ahead last year for the expansion of the London airport, which published its “masterplan” in June to build a third runway by 2026.

This Author

Sam Blewett is the PA political correspondent.

Jeremy Corbyn is proposing a move to upgrade almost every home in the UK with energy-saving measures to tackle the climate crisis and bring down household bills.

Labour says work to install loft insulation, double glazing and renewable and low carbon technologies in nearly 27 million homes by 2030 would create 450,000 jobs and cost the government £60 billion.

Promising the largest investment project since the Second World War if Labour wins the December 12 election, the “warm homes for all” pledge is hoped to cut carbon emissions by 10%.

Compensation

Labour expects the project to cost £250 billion in upgrade works – an average of £9,300 per home – but that only £60 billion would come as a cost to central government.

The party says £21 billion would come from loans to regional energy agencies and £169 billion coming out of savings from household energy bills.

The Labour leader said: “If we don’t radically change course we face the threat of a hostile and dying planet. But Labour will turn that threat into an opportunity.

“By investing on a massive scale, we will usher in a green industrial revolution with good, clean jobs that will transform towns, cities and communities that have been held back and neglected for decades.”

Mr Corbyn launched the pledge by visiting a housing association block in Putney, south-west London, where residents have won major repairs and compensation following bad living conditions.

Savings

Mother-of-two Sabiha Aziz, 28, invited the Labour leader into her flat on Sunday, where she told of hazards including water soaking electrics and damp in the building.

Another resident said she was forced to carry her daughter – who has cerebral palsy and is in a wheelchair – up 18 flights of stairs due to the lift breaking down for weeks on end.

During the visit to Clyde House, Mr Corbyn told the group that upgrades in the pledge were about “empowering” residents in rented accommodation.

Labour expects the initiative would also bring down the energy bills of 9.6 million low income households by £417 per year and eradicate the vast majority of fuel poverty by the mid 2020s.

Low income households would get upgrades funded by grants and keep most of the savings on their bills, with part being used to pay off some of the cost of the work.

Carbon

Wealthier homes would be offered interest free loans with no up-front costs, but would see their bills decline more slowly with the regional agencies repaying the loan with the savings.

Shadow business secretary Rebecca Long Bailey said: “Warm homes for all is one of the greatest investment projects since we rebuilt Britain’s housing after the Second World War.

“Labour will offer every household in the UK the chance to bring the future into their homes – upgrading the fabric of their homes with insulation and cutting edge heating systems – tackling both climate change and extortionate bills.”

The pledge is the latest from Labour’s “green industrial revolution”, which would also see all new homes built so no additional carbon is added to the atmosphere.

The Conservatives criticised the Labour announcement.

This Author

Emma Bowden is a reporter with PA. Sam Blewett is the PA political correspondent.

Families in Bristol are having to choose between heating their homes and putting food on the table.

Climate breakdown might not be front of mind for those families, but for Bristol as a city it must be a priority.

So we’re starting afresh. We’re launching a new project that will help to meet those social needs in a way that does not put an unacceptable burden on our planet.

Smart energy

Bristol City Leap will deliver a zero-carbon, smart energy city which will deliver up to one billion pounds of investment and provide significant economic benefits for the people of Bristol and its businesses.

Led by Bristol City Council and Bristol Energy, the city’s energy company, City Leap will establish a joint venture with another organisation, or group of organisations, to support the delivery of the UK’s first carbon neutral city by 2030. 

Bristol is the ideal city to pioneer this bold vision. We were the first major UK city to declare a climate emergency, we developed our own wind and solar farms back in 2005, and we had the honour in 2015 of being the UK’s first European Green Capital. 

The UK’s 63 largest towns and cities are responsible for 50 percent of our carbon output, so have a huge responsibility in tackling climate breakdown.

But we can only achieve so much without government funding, and while Bristol City Council will continue to lobby and campaign the government to provide that investment, we will not sit idly by and wait for action on their part. 

Carbon emissions

That’s why, as part of the City Leap initiative, we are searching for a partner or multiple partners to provide the heavy lifting in terms of investment.

The project will enable us to reduce our carbon emissions across energy, transport and industry and engage with businesses and residents to make a real difference.

City Leap will see Bristol increasingly move away from the national energy network and into more localised systems, with more people generating their own energy and increased investment into new renewable energy in the city.

Much of that investment will go into heat networks, which are hidden from view but can have a huge impact on local people. We recently developed a network for social housing residents in Redcliffe which has significantly reduced household bills and enabled residents to access low-carbon heat for their homes.

We are also hoping to implement a funding scheme which would allow homeowners to access subsidies for rooftop solar panels, and are looking at tightening new building regulations, particularly where insulation is concerned. 

We’ll enable the transition to electric cars by investing in even more charge points and we’ll improve public transport links, which could include the development of a mass transit underground system. 

Social purpose

At its heart, City Leap is a community-driven venture, with the goal of providing infrastructure to serve the people of Bristol into a net-zero 2030 and beyond. 

The aim of Bristol Energy is to deliver energy with a social purpose, and its inclusion in the project will help to ensure we create a smart energy system that weaves a number of technologies together to deliver clean energy and that benefits local people.

We’re fortunate that we already have a number of community energy groups set up across Bristol who we regularly engage with on key issues, and City Leap will enable us to collaborate with them to ensure we can smoothly rollout new infrastructure to deliver a net-zero city that works for everyone. 

That collaborative approach is also reflected within City Hall as we’ve seen all departments and political parties get behind the plan for City Leap. 

These activities will bring new job opportunities to the city so we’re focused on delivering a just transition to deliver economic and environmental success for Bristol. 

Inspiring others

We’re very proud of our record on the environment in Bristol and our ambitions for the future, but the issue of climate breakdown is bigger than one city and one plan. 

We want City Leap to inspire cities around the world to take action, so one of the key pillars of the project is to create something that is replicable.

Mass adoption and support of ventures similar to City Leap will not only improve the quality of life in cities across the world, but they have the potential to galvanise governments into action and help us to work together to tackle the biggest challenge that we face.

This Author

Councillor Kye Dudd is the Cabinet Member with responsibility for Transport, Energy & The Green New Deal at Bristol City Council.

The Permaculture Magazine Prize showcases the very best examples of ecological, social and economical regenerative permaculture projects in the world.

The prize shines a light on good people and good work in a world on the edge of collapse and climate crisis.

The winner and runners up of its main category plus the Youth in Permaculture Prize sponsored by the Abundant Earth Foundation has now been announced.

Nurturing refugees

African Women Rising takes the main £10,000 award for its work in Palabek Refugee Camp, North Uganda, creating innovative, long-term solutions to help solve the food security problems.

The monthly food aid rations from the United Nations World Food Program often run out. African Women Rising have used permaculture design techniques to teach the permagarden method, giving refugees access to diverse and nutritious food, helping to meet the short-term food needs of the refugees, and build their long-term resilience. 

Anthony Rodale, 2019 Permaculture Magazine prize judge, said: “With more displacement and uncertainty in the world than ever before, I feel that African Women Rising demonstrates practical regenerative and permaculture solutions right to the front line between life and death that could benefit millions of refugees.

“It’s an organization of Hope. Most global conflicts begin over loss of land, food shortages, climate change. AWR’s organization and work I believe could be a beacon for the global humanitarian development network at large.

“I’ve worked in international development for years and AWR is actually trying to scale up regenerative programs built on the permaculture design framework and agroecological practices. I believe AWR could help to innovate and elevate the permaculture concept into new areas of our global society. We need BIG ideas, and Big Change, NOW!”

Green desert

Thanks to a generous additional donor, a second prize of £5,000 was made available, with Bayoudha Village in Jordan taking the prize. Since 2011, the project has used permaculture methods to engage the local community in regenerating their landscape, focussing on conserving and restoring damaged watersheds.

A bustling farmers’ market is reviving the economy for local products, making healthy, local and organic produce available to the community and the new ‘Karm’ centre is experimenting and teaching techniques for river remediation, agroforestry and profitable agriculture, to help local farmers make a living while protecting and restoring their ecosystems.

Runners up

The four runners up are equally impressive and each will receive £2,500.

They are:

1. Instituto Mesoamericano de Permacultura (IMAP), Guatemala. Due to disproportionate land control, small-scale farmers only have access to small, inaccessible and poor quality plots. IMAP have trained over 10,000 smallholder farmers to grow in these conditions, using permaculture, the production of native crops and the conservation of resilient native seeds throughout Mesoamerica. This enables resilience to varying climate conditions, and improves food security and local market power. IMAP implements a co-operative model whereby Guatemala’s most marginalized people – Indigenous men and women – are the owners of their own seed production as well as their own livelihoods.

2. Northern Youth Project, New Mexico, has created a safe space for young people to learn and become part of a community. They learn leadership skills, get involved with growing food, create art and understand how to respect and care for the land. Learning resilience through traditional and sustainable farming methods and permaculture, enables food sovereignty, health and builds a strong community.

3. Permakultur Kalimantan Foundation, Borneo, have created an educational permaculture site that showcases multilayered canopy food forests with flourishing ecosystems, are beneficial alternatives to the common monoculture agriculture techniques, which are destroying ‘the lungs of the earth’.

4. The School of Earth, Greece, bring permaculture methods to their Mediterranean climate. They provide free classes to marginalized and minority groups, including refugees, sharing skills for creating food forests, restoring fire damaged land and slowing down desertification.

Young people 

A £5,000 prize, divided amongst three winners, was developed to support youth around the world, 25 years or younger, using innovative farming and education practices to face climate change and social challenges.

The first place winner is Mohamed Qasim Lessani, of Afghanistan. Qasim believes that “education can heal the injured mindset of people who believe nothing can change Afghanistan.”

After completing a Permaculture Design Course with Australian teacher Rosemary Morrow (who brings permaculture to many war-torn countries and refugee camps), Qasim is applying permaculture design to transform schools into models for basic human security, including food, water and energy – even in areas of extreme poverty, violence and war.

Runners up are:

· Maria Seltzer, New Mexico, USA. Maria shares examples of how regenerative farming practices can offer a path out of poverty. By restoring the land on her family farm and working towards a more diverse food system, Maria is showcasing to local farmers that their dry climate and barren soils can be turned into food-producing and revenue generating lands through permaculture practices.

· The Brackenology Yeam, Kenya. Their innovative way of teaching permaculture is bringing nature to children through art. Their alternative education is open-source, making it available to all.

This Article 

This article is based on a press release from the Permaculture Magazine.

Yorkshire-born joinery teacher Donald Watson left a global legacy few could have predicted. Born in 1910, he was a pioneer from a young age. By his mid-teens he had made the unconventional choice to become a vegetarian on ethical grounds, citing the horrors of the animal agriculture industry as his motivation.

But it was his actions some 20 years on which left their global mark. Taking his ethical consumption a step further, Watson is said to have coined a term which has revolutionised the way millions of us eat. In November 1944, Donald Watson proposed the term ‘vegan’.

Watson’s influence is internationally recognised on the 1st November each year on World Vegan Day. This year, as our precious flora and fauna continue to vanish before our eyes, we must recognise that the animal agriculture industry is fuelling the destruction and a vegan diet is the best choice we can make to stop it.

Diverse

In the UK our species have suffered unrelenting net-losses since 1970. Two-thirds of North American birds are at risk of extinction due to climate change. Global marine animal communities are projected to shrink within the next century as temperatures rise. In total, one million animal and plant species could vanish if we do not act. This is destruction on a catastrophic scale. This is the sixth mass extinction.

We know our consumption is exacerbating the crisis. For years we have been told to make changes to our lives in the name of the planet – to cut car and air travel, switch off our lights and take showers instead of baths – but the contribution of our diets has been neglected for too long.

In the space of one year, the agriculture industry was reportedly responsible for some 24 percent of all global greenhouse gas emissions, and livestock farming makes up four-fifths of the industry’s contribution.

This summer the world watched on in horror as more than 40,000 fires devastated the Amazon rainforest, yet it is purged year-round to make way for livestock farming. Some 70 percent of deforestation in the Amazon can be attributed to cattle ranching and most of the rest is cleared to grow fodder for livestock. This is destroying vital habitats once home to a diverse array of unique species.

Horrors

We are running out of time to put a stop to the obliteration of our natural world. But the solution is simple, choose a vegan diet.

Researchers at Oxford University found that moving to a vegan diet could have transformative environmental benefits. Making this change on a mass scale would slash the land required to produce food by some 76 percent and could reduce food emissions by 50-80 percent. This is the let-up global nature needs to flourish.

As the world reels at the devastation caused by our unfettered consumption, it’s time we turn our gaze to what we eat for a solution. On this year’s World Vegan Day, Viva! is asking everyone to #GoVegan24 and try veganism for 24 hours to see just how easy it is the make this essential change.

Following the path Donald Watson courageously forged over half a century ago, we must wake up to the horrors of the animal agriculture industry and choose a vegan diet to protect our precious species for centuries to come.

This Author

Juliet Gellatley is director of Viva! The charity is launching its #GoVegan24 campaign on 1st November for World Vegan Day.