As an island nation, Britain has vulnerable communities that must be prepared for the impact of the climate emergency. And while much has been said about homes at risk from the sea in coastal regions, or those inland subject to river flooding, the UK Committee on Climate Change’s new progress report for 2019 has laid bare the challenge facing them.

In 2018, Hemsby on the coast of Norfolk in the east of England saw several homes dramatically lost after storm surges caused metres of the sandy cliff edge to collapse. Over the last decade, major storms left substantial areas of England badly flooded for weeks or months, such as in 2007, 2009, 2012, and the winters of 2013-14 and 2015-16.

The Environment Agency has said that the UK faces having to abandon areasrather than continue to defend them with the ever higher and stronger flood defences that would be necessary. 

Risk management

According to the committee’s climate change risk assessment it is almost certain that England will have to adapt to at least one metre of sea level rise.

Modelling studies have shown that flooding increases exponentially with rising sea levels. So for coastal areas subject to flooding it is not sufficient to increase the height of sea walls in line with sea level rise.

The assessment predicts that up to 1.5m properties (including 1.2m residential homes) may be located in areas with an annual flood risk of once in 200 years or more by the 2080s. Around 8,900 properties are located in areas at risk from coastal erosion, this may increase to over 100,000 properties by the 2080s.

While coastal erosion affects fewer properties than flooding, the impact is more drastic due to the inevitable and irrecoverable loss of land to the sea. 

Significant increases in coastal flood risk are projected to occur as early as the 2020s due to increases in storm frequency. According to the committee’s projections the number of residential properties exposed to flooding more frequently than once every 75 years (on average) is predicted to increase 20 percent by the 2020s under the scenario which gives a 4°C rise in global temperatures by the 2080s.

Flood protections

However, the Committee on Climate Change’s latest report on dealing with these issues scores work on alleviating surface water flooding, and work on ensuring new building development is properly designed to manage flooding, both firmly in the “red” of the red-amber-green traffic light system indicating readiness.

Other aspects of flood protection fare only slightly better, with river and coastal development flood protection and alleviation and flood recovery in general marked as “amber”.

Number of properties (residential and non-residential) potentially affected by a future once every 200 years coastal surge.HR Wallingford

In the Netherlands, for centuries vulnerable to floods due to its low-lying land, a number of new approaches to water management have been adopted over the years in an effort to live with water rather than to fight it.

Schemes range from flood-proof homes, including floating homes, to the Room for the River programme which entails strategies for planned evacuations, temporary relocation of farmers and villagers, and strategic flooding of polders (reclaimed areas separated by drainage dykes).

Coastlines

The UK has its own approaches to manage increased flood risk, and is developing new approaches in view of the dire predictions by climate change experts under scenarios of both 2°C and 4°C global temperature rise.

River flooding and coastal flooding (from waterway or coastal inundation), as well as surface water and groundwater flooding (from rain and storms and insufficient drainage), were categorised as the most significant sources of risk in the UK now and in the future. 

The committee’s projection of flood risk has identified the most cost-effective, engineering-based measures to reduce flooding as improving defences, managed realignment of the coast, catchment area management, and urban runoff management through sustainable drainage systems.

In this case, “realignment” of the coast entails not only the natural changes to the physical coastline as a result of climate change, but also the decision to abandon or relocate entire settlements. This can have a significant personal and financial impact on those residents affected.

While the abandonment of properties in places like Happisburgh and Hemsby in Norfolk due to coastal erosion is well known, we can see from the map above that many other coastal areas around the Humber, Mersey, Severn and Thames estuaries are at risk.

Design challenges

Those affected, and also key infrastructure assets, will need to be evaluated to ascertain whether they should be included in this process of coastal realignment. The area around the Thames in southern England is likely to be classed as worth protecting due to the high numbers of people living there, for example.

In addition, a number of low-lying inland plains will also be lost – many of which were selected for housing development only a few decades ago.

While planning and building regulations can reduce flood risk to new-build properties within affected areas, anticipated population growth means that there is increasing pressure to build on floodplains. According to Emma Howard Boyd, Chair of the Environment Agency, the number of properties built on floodplains will double over the next 50 years, creating further flood risk problems.

The UK has a significant number of key industries and infrastructure at the coast – for example power stations, petrochemical plants, steel industries and oil and gas infrastructure.

To tackle the associated design challenges for housing, business and industries appropriate funding and having a well-skilled engineering force will be key. 

Increasing impact

In view of the increasing impact of climate change we need to urgently build our resilience to flooding. Flood resilience includes knowing what the risks are and where.

We need flexible engineering solutions, including natural flood risk management, as well as ways to help society adapt.

We need to make sure we have the right people with the right skills at all levels to address related socio-economic issues, including hard decisions on what to fight to keep, and what can be lost.

These Authors 

Carola Koenig is a senior lecturer in Engineering, Flood and Coastal Engineering Programme Lead, Brunel University London. Philip Collins is a senior lecturer in Geology & Geotechnical Engineering, and Vice Dean (Education) at Brunel University London.

This article was first published in The Conversation. 

Living on the edge of Dartmoor is a joy. I can run along snaking lanes and be on windswept moorland in half an hour, watching the whole of south Devon unfold far below between misty green horizons.

As I grind my way up the flanks of England’s largest granite outcrop, I’m immersed in that network of small fields, pastures and tree-studded hedgerows that is so quintessentially Devon.

This article was first published in Resurgence & Ecologist magazine. 

There is much that is great about our farmed landscape. But this is no Wind in the Willows ideal. The fields are largely devoid of livestock, insects and birds. Their striking emerald green reflects a monoculture of highly competitive grasses, growing hell-for-leather on a super-rich diet of artificial fertiliser.

Agricultural policy

A closer look reveals all too many signs of hedge-lines that once were, wetlands drained and rough moorland converted to closely cropped pasture. And then there are the huge brown expanses of dead vegetation recently sprayed with Roundup. We have sacrificed variety and vibrancy for tidiness, uniformity and productivity.

Since 1970 we have lost half of our wildlife; 1,200 UK species are extinct or under threat of it. Devon has the country’s best network of hedges, but only 38 percent of its 53,000km are in good condition. UK farmland loses 2.2 million tonnes of topsoil annually, and the stripping of slurry and agrochemicals by heavy rain is one of the biggest reasons why fewer than 20 percent of our rivers are in good health.

Something badly needs to change if we want to leave future generations with a natural environment worthy of the name.

It would be wrong to blame farming for all of this, of course, and many farmers are among the best champions for wildlife. But agriculture covers three-quarters of our landscape, and intensive farming, which has the largest environmental impact, grew by 26 percent between 2011 and 2017.

Since the early 1970s, farming has become insep­arable from the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). The CAP is a strange beast, stretched and contorted into a bizarre shape by politics and vested interests battling with fairness and common sense. A small amount has been directed to agri-environment schemes, but nearly 90 percent is simply handed out according to how much land a farmer owns.

Nothing to do with food production, nature or efficiency. CAP has propped up land prices, funded wholly unsustainable practices, and ensured the richest get the lion’s share. We need something a whole lot better.

Environmental commitments

By the time you read this we might have left the European Union and be moving towards a post-CAP era. So let’s imagine this brave new world. In New Zealand, where farm subsidies ended in the 1970s, the landscape is one of extremes: areas of stunning wilderness on the one hand, and miles of intensively farmed prairie on the other.

It’s quite possible to see how this could happen in the UK. Most small and upland farms are kept afloat by subsidies. Without them many would go to the wall, and the market value of their land would plummet. Some areas might revert to nature; others might be bought up by hobby farmers or put to non-agricultural uses.

But in an era where the cost of borrowing money is cheap and land is a safe long-term investment, it’s all too easy to see how the larger operators could quickly buy up cheap land and intensify production, capitalising on economies of scale.

If the direction signalled by the recent Agriculture Bill is anything to go by, such an extreme situation is thankfully unlikely. Much has been said about public money for public goods, with the environment receiving special mention.

But we know nothing about the detail or how much money will be available. Just meeting our existing environmental commitments requires government spending five times what it currently does on agri-environment schemes.

Diversify and innovate

So what might a new and more enlightened farming policy look like? We need minimum standards that all farms must meet. As well as safety and animal welfare, this should include phasing out damaging pesticides, and reducing ploughing and slurry spreading, avoiding it altogether on steep slopes. All farms should move to a net carbon-neutral position.

We need farming to diversify and innovate. Agroforestry can be more profitable, productive and Nature-friendly than traditional farming, but it is seldom seen in the UK, as it’s not well suited to current policy.

And, like it or not, new technology such as hydroponic systems might prove to be a much more sustainable and less land-hungry way of producing our food.

And we need farming to make room for Nature. This means hedges being allowed to grow out, wider field margins, and natural vegetation strips along river corridors.

But we also need spaces for Nature to expand, on steeper slopes and in marginal areas around our uplands. And 3 percent of farmland should be managed for pollinators. In some areas, we should allow farming to withdraw altogether or reduce to much more extensive systems, so that Nature can return.

What next?

So how do we make this happen? First, we need a solid bedrock of firm regulation, banning the use of damaging chemicals for example. This could be a challenge in the current low-regulation culture.

Secondly, we need a green subsidy system that pays for things the market won’t – Nature, flood control, soil protection. It should be simple, flexible, widely available and properly funded. £3 billion a year would help restore the natural systems that sustain us. That’s a big sum, but it’s still only 0.5% of total public expenditure and compares with £37 billion for defence.

Finally, we need to be brave enough to say what type of farming is suitable where, rather than leaving the market to dictate. We need a vision for Nature’s recovery – a Nature recovery network – that farming helps deliver, not a complex set of poorly funded mechanisms that struggle to find room for wildlife around the margins.

Is this possible? I think it is, and I believe farmers would benefit just as much as the rest of us.

This Author

Harry Barton is chief executive of the Devon Wildlife Trust. He lives with his family on the edge of Dartmoor. This article was first published in Resurgence & Ecologist magazine. 

Image: Roger Roberts, Geograph. 

A new interactive online tool is set to encourage tree planting initiatives across the UK. It calculates how much pollution would be removed by planting trees in local areas, as well as the corresponding public health cost savings.

Hundreds of thousands of trees are due to be planted across the country over the next three years in Government-backed schemes. The new tool – Pollution Removal by Vegetation – ­takes national data and makes it locally relevant and accessible for councils, NGOs, developers and other businesses that are considering such initiatives.

Scientists at the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (CEH) teamed up with eftec, a leading environmental economics consultancy, to develop the tool, which shows the existing amount of woodland in each local authority in hectares, how much particulate matter (PM2.5) the trees remove from the air and the resulting predicted public health cost saving within that area over a 100-year period.

Health risks

Based on the number of hectares of woodland someone wishes to plant within a local authority area, it can calculate how many kilogrammes of PM2.5 – considered the most serious form of air pollution – would be removed from the air by the extra vegetation and the resulting public health cost saving within that area over a 100-year period. 

The tool can also estimate the effects of felling existing woodland by calculating the health costs attributable to the PM2.5 that would no longer be removed from the air by those trees.

The new tool builds on previous research that CEH and eftec carried out for the Office of National Statistics, which estimated that plants in the UK remove 1.4 million tonnes of air pollution and save £1 billion in avoided health costs every year.

Professor Laurence Jones of the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology explained: “There is a lot of public concern about the potential health risks that pollution poses in many urban areas of the UK.

“While reducing harmful emissions at source is the best way to improve air quality, the addition of vegetation can play a role in removing pollutants within a local area.”

Urban planning

Ian Dickie of eftec adds: “Trees make urban areas more attractive and improve local air quality, thereby boosting people’s health. As our ongoing research has shown, this in turn can have significant positive economic benefits.

“We regularly hear political commitments to plant more trees in urban areas – our new online tool will inform and support the efforts by local and central government, NGOs, businesses and individuals in adding trees in our towns and cities.

“We were very pleased with the positive feedback we received about the valuation tool from these stakeholders at a recent webinar and hope it will encourage and support their tree planting initiatives in pollution hotspots.”

To access the free online tool, visit the website. You can also download a method note that explains the model and its uses.

The recording of the launch webinar hosted by EKN is now available – it takes you through the tool’s development and uses.

This Article 

This article is based on a press release from the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology. 

Environmental campaigners shut down a busy central London road as they called for an end to prosecutions of protesters and urged the Government to take action on climate change.

Extinction Rebellion, which brought central London to a halt earlier this year with protests calling for environmental action, has launched a “summer uprising” in Bristol, Cardiff, Glasgow, Leeds and London.

More than 200 Extinction Rebellion protesters gathered outside the Royal Courts of Justice in the Strand on Monday, blocking the road to traffic in both directions as part of their five-day “summer uprising” in several cities across the UK.

Future

A large blue boat emblazoned with the words “Act Now” was parked on the street outside the main entrance of the building and used as a makeshift stage for speakers to address the crowd.

The group said the demonstration was to “demand the legal system take responsibility in this crisis, and ensure the safety of future generations by making ecocide law”.

It also called on the Metropolitan Police and the Crown Prosecution Service to drop the prosecutions of more than 1,000 Extinction Rebellion protesters who were arrested during demonstrations at five London sites in April.

Jayne Forbes, 63, of Extinction Rebellion London, said: “I was arrested during the International Rebellion in April because it is so important to stand up and challenge a government who is not even performing its primary function of providing our security for the future.

“I therefore believe we have a duty to engage in civil disobedience to promote the need for action now for climate and ecological justice. And yet the government may want to prosecute me for taking a stand to protect our future.”

Liam Geary Baulch, 26, said: “I’m here today because we are in an ecological and climate emergency and we are seeing people around the world taking action because something needs to be done now.

Ecocide

“Although we see Governments starting to accept the emergency and setting targets, they are not acting now. Our demand is net zero (carbon) by 2025. We are demanding the Government act now.”

A spokeswoman for the Metropolitan Police said the force has a plan in operation outside the Royal Courts of Justice.

There was a strong police presence in the area, including around a dozen vans, and the main entrance to the court complex was closed to court users and the public. The Strand was blocked between Aldwych and Chancery Lane and traffic was redirected.

Deputy Assistant Commissioner Laurence Taylor said in a statement on Friday that the force had been planning its operation ahead of the protests. “We have been engaged with the organisers to understand their plans but we cannot tolerate behaviour that crosses a criminal threshold.”

The boat, which also had the words “we are nature defending itself” painted on the side, was named Polly Higgins after the late environmental lawyer who campaigned for ecocide to be made a crime. A flag with the phrase “make ecocide law” was raised from its mast.

Anthem

Protesters of all ages, including several young children, sat in the road and listened to a number of speakers. Songs, poetry and a water ceremony were also performed from the boat.

At one point, a woman announced that the protesters had “caused a major disruption in London today”, to cheers from the crowd.

Another campaigner speaking from the boat said: “I find it incredible that they are clearing so much space in the courts to prosecute all those people who were arrested, when we know who they should be prosecuting.”

Members of the crowd then shouted out the names of a number of large corporations in response, including BP, Shell and Monsanto.

At the junction of the Strand and Aldwych, a smaller group gathered and sang songs at the passing traffic, including the protest anthem, “We Shall Overcome”.

Act

Environmental protesters are taking action across five UK cities to call on the government to halt wildlife losses and cut greenhouse gases to net zero by 2025.

Protesters in each city are unveiling a large coloured boat, each named after an environmental activist, with the message “Act Now” on it.

The activists say they are staging a series of “creative acts of civil disobedience”, blocking specific locations, bridges and roads as well as holding talks, workshops, people’s assemblies and family-friendly activities.

In Glasgow, activists are using a 25ft purple boat to block Trongate, covering the intersection of Gallowgate and High Street, by the Merchant City clock tower.

The boat carries a message from the group which says “Act Now”, with “The future you fear is already here” on the other side of the vessel.

Dying

Protesters are targeting Leeds’ financial district to draw attention to the links between banking and the climate and ecological emergency.

Members of Extinction Rebellion parked a large green boat outside Cardiff Castle and held banners reading “Act Now” and “Climate Emergency” as commuters were subjected to delays during the morning rush hour.

Tents were also set up on grass in front of Cardiff City Hall, the home of the Welsh capital’s local government, as campaigners looked set to camp there ahead of more disruption in the coming days.

A leaflet handed out by campaigners said they were protesting “to prevent the breakdown of humanity’s life support system, the Earth”, and said they were calling for the the UK Government to create a “national assembly” to implement climate change solutions.

Stephen Lingwood, 37, from Extinction Rebellion Cardiff, said: “People are dying right now of climate chaos in places like India. It’s only going to get worse.

“We’re at the beginning of the sixth mass extinction and a climate genocide and the Government’s inaction is, in my view, criminally irresponsible.”

Protesters parked a large blue boat outside the Royal Courts of Justice in London, ahead of prosecutions of more than 1,000 people arrested during protests in April, with activists calling for all the cases to be dropped.

These Authors

Sian Harrison and Sam Tobin are reporters with PA.

Electricity produced by wind turbines north of the border could power every home in Scotland and reach the North of England, according to new figures.

The wind power output hit a record high during the first six months of 2019, which could also power double the number of homes in Scotland.

Figures from Weather Energy indicate that the turbines provided enough electricity to power the equivalent of 4.47 million homes for the January to June period.

Clean

Robin Parker, WWF Scotland climate and energy policy manager, said: “These are amazing figures; Scotland’s wind energy revolution is clearly continuing to power ahead.

“Up and down the country, we are all benefiting from cleaner energy and so is the climate.

“These figures show harnessing Scotland’s plentiful onshore wind potential can provide clean, green electricity for millions of homes across not only Scotland, but England as well.

Market

“It’s about time the UK government stepped up and gave Scottish onshore wind a route to market.”

The output would power homes from the Isle of Harris to Harrogate in North Yorkshire, according to WWF.

Alex Wilcox Brooke, weather energy project manager at Severn Wye Energy Agency, said: “These figures really highlight the consistency of wind energy in Scotland and why it now plays a major part in the UK energy market.”

This Author

Douglas Barrie is a reporter with PA Scotland.

Kiribati. You may not know where it is. Pronouncing it is tricky (Ker-a-bas). It’s a small republic of 114,000 people spread out over 32 atolls in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, near the international date line and right on the equator. 

Palm trees line the white sandy shores. Turquoise water laps the sand. But is it an ideal island oasis? Hardly.

The battle of Tarawa, a horrific skirmish in the Second World War, took place on Kiribati. And now a climate change battle is crashing on its shores amid a crisis of tuberculosis, leprosy and other damnations. 

Free training 

Most of Kiribati sits about two metres above sea level. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that sea levels will rise at least two metres before the year 2100. This gives Kiribati no more than 80 years. 

Anote Tong, the former president of Kiribati, has said that for “Kiribati it is already too late” and that the international community should consider how people can migrate with dignity. 

In response, Australia and New Zealand offer temporary escape, while Fiji sold 5,500 acres of its land to Kiribati for $8.77 million dollars. If all I-Kiribati, as the nation’s people are known, occupied this land the population density would be about 5,300 people per square kilometre. This violates the UNHCR’s minimum standards for refugee camps. 

But as others work to help the I-Kiribati flee, Cuba encourages them to stay. Havana is training I-Kiribati physicians for free with the condition that they will return to work in their home country. Why? 

First, let’s take a look at what New Zealand and Australia are proposing for Kiribati and other Pacific island nations.

Encouraging migration

Jacinda Ardern, New Zealand’s prime minister, proposed a climate-change refugee visa program for Pacific island states, including Kiribati. But the New Zealand government scrapped the plan in August 2018 in response to concerns from Pacific island leaders about the self-determination of their peoples.

New Zealand’s immigration minister, Iain Lees-Galloway, noted: “Pacific peoples have expressed desire to continue to live in their own countries, and current work is primarily focused on mitigating the impacts of climate change.”

What does that work look like?

New Zealand’s “development co-operation” with Kiribati includes building hospital facilities, increasing family-planning options, bolstering the fishing sector, improving doctor qualifications and facilitating labour mobility schemes to help I-Kiribati find employment offshore. 

Australia’s development assistance initiatives for Kiribati involves moving low or semi-skilled workers to Australian communities on temporary work visas to help with “seasonal labour shortages.”

If Pacific peoples want to stay on their islands, why do Australian and New Zealand aid programs have not-so-hidden agendas of moving people off of the atolls? 

Medical scholarships 

Certainly it’s more than Washington’s USAID, and Ottawa’s Global Affairs Canada are doing for Kiribati. These are the foreign development branches of two countries with enormous carbon footprints. Neither country is offering any assistance to Kiribati. 

Enter Cuba. The country is offering close to 40 medical scholarships to Kiribati, which will nearly double the country’s physician workforce, and all under the idea that they should remain on the atolls.

Beyond the climate tragedy, Kiribati faces compounding health calamities. Almost 700 cases of active tuberculosis were recorded in 2018, along with 155 new cases of leprosy. While these conditions are often treated at the hospital in Tarawa, there is little in place to prevent these maladies from occurring. 

On top of this is a dengue crisis.  Almost one in two children are stunted, and one in four adults have Type 2 diabetes. Both are the result of serious nutritional deficiencies. The lack of sanitation also makes the country’s lagoons toxic, making rainwater the only drinking water.

Improving health

With only 59 physicians in the country, more are needed. Kiribati’s treatment of tuberculosis and leprosy meets basic needs, but almost nothing is in place for physicians to actively work on disease prevention. 

Cuba’s medical education is well known for building community-level routines of health promotion around the world. 

Compare Cuba’s plan — to build better health from within Kiribati itself — to temporary work permits and a refugee settlement on an overcrowded parcel of land.

It’s a bold statement to offer a programme that encourages skilled professionals to remain in the eye of the storm. And yet it reaffirms the “desire to remain,” as Lees-Galloway mentioned.

It also echoes Tong’s claim that by the time that Kiribati disappears, “no one will be immune from the catastrophic consequences of climate change.”

Climate breakdown

Extreme climatic events will alter human existence. And as they do, the question remains: how well will we take care of each other? 

Will donor nations engage in development co-operation to foster health and livelihoods for a nation of future climate change migrants? Or will it come down to a few temporary visas for low-skilled workers who would otherwise be pressed into a refugee camp? Already, New Zealand has offered additional training and support to the I-Kiribiati graduates from Cuba working in the Pacific. Such support is encouraging. 

But Cuba, in particular, offers a compelling example of how we can take care of each other during the climate crisis, regardless of where we are on the planet. 

Kiribati is the first land to run out of time as a consequence of climate change. Where will be next? And how will we take care of each other?

These Authors 

Robert Huish is associate Professor in International Development Studies at Dalhousie University. Sharon McLennan is lecturer in International Development at Massey University. This article was first published on The Conversation. 

Image: KevGuy4101, Flickr. 
 

Robert Macfarlane’s Underland: A Deep Time Journey is as much a book about the legacy of the modern era, known as the Anthropocene, as about the ancient strata, myths and catacombs of the underland.

In prose both breathtakingly lyrical and brutally honest, the author uncovers the layers of meaning beneath our feet and what we are currently laying down for future generations to uncover.

This article was first published in Resurgence & Ecologist magazine. 

In a journey from the Mendips of Somerset, through the mines and forests of the UK, on to the invisible city of Paris and the starless rivers of Italy and thence to the far northern reaches of Norway and Greenland, Robert Macfarlane (often really bravely) descends into the darkness in search of knowledge. As he points out, our common verb ‘to understand’ bears a sense of passing beneath something to fully comprehend it.

Deep time 

Our myths and legends echo with ‘descent’ stories – Dante and Virgil, Persephone and Demeter, Eurydice and Orpheus, Ariadne, Theseus and the Minotaur – and a long cultural history of abhorrence exists regarding underground spaces.

Claustrophobia, that most prevalent of all phobias, is evoked within them – and, it has to be said, when reading this book. When the author describes traversing a particularly narrow passageway in the Parisian catacombs, my whole being was willing him to run, to get out of there and ascend to the light. Macfarlane states, “I have rarely felt as far from the human realm as when only ten yards below it,” and neither has the reader.

Deep time is the chronology of the underland – epochs and aeons – yet modern time like a ‘dark force’ is eroding and exposing the secrets of the earth. Into the underland we have long placed that which we fear and wish to lose, and that which we love and wish to save, because the underland keeps its secrets well.

That is, until the Anthropocene, when things that should have stayed hidden are rising up, unbidden: in the Arctic, ancient methane deposits, anthrax and smallpox are leaking through holes in the permafrost; Alpine and Himalayan glaciers are yielding bodies engulfed by their ice decades before; cold war missile bases and chemical stores are revealed as the ice retreats.

When we see these surfacings, we look away, “seized by the obscenity of the intrusions”, by the short-sightedness of our actions.

Our signature

In his description of stone, Macfarlane encapsulates the passage of deep time perfectly: “We tend to imagine stone as inert matter, obdurate in its fixity. But here in this rift it feels instead like a liquid briefly paused in its flow. Seen in deep time, stone folds as strata, gouts as lava, floats as plates, shifts as shingle. Over aeons, rock absorbs, transforms, levitates from seabed to summit.” Salt, too, flows over time. It creeps around, it sags and distorts.

In the salt and potash mines of Boulby, Yorkshire, the author bounces around in the cab of a Transit van to the mine face, many miles under the North Sea. His driver grins at him and says, “We’re out beyond the shipping lane now. Imagine those captains in charge of their boats, with never a clue we’re careering about below them!” Indeed, we know so little of the underland.

What fascinated me most about Macfarlane’s trip undersea was his description of the giant, lizard-like machine that clawed at the seam of potash with its dragon teeth, depositing rock into waiting hoppers at its rear.

The network of tunnels left behind reminds him of termite mounds. It is too expensive to haul the lizard-machine to the surface once its useful life is over, and so it is left in the tunnels to be slowly compressed and distorted by flowing salt and deep time.

“What a signature our species will leave in the strata!” Macfarlane exclaims, imagining future intelligent beings finding the machine and thinking it animal. With great insight, he writes, “Perhaps above all, the Anthropocene compels us to think forwards in deep time, and to weigh what we will leave behind, as the landscapes we are making now will sink into the strata becoming the underlands.”

Wood-wide-web

This review can only touch the surface of the depth and insights of this compelling book.

Learning about the ‘wood-wide-web’ and the communities of mycorrhizal fungi in forests has changed forever how I see trees, and indeed, how I will garden, and Macfarlane’s descent into the ice-blue of a ‘moulin’, a vertical ice-cave made from glacial meltwater, was almost unread­able, so nervous was I on his behalf. 

But in the end, what Underland bestows upon the reader is an awareness of deep time, so that at best it might “help us to see ourselves as part of a web of gift, inheritance and legacy stretching over millions of years past and millions to come, leaving us to consider what we are leaving behind for the epochs and beings that will follow us.”

This Author 

Lorna Howarth is editorial director of Panacea Books and lives in Hartland, North Devon. This article was first published in Resurgence & Ecologist magazine. 

Image: Aaron Escobar, Flickr. 

Extinction Rebellion activists will cause disruption for five days this week. They are calling on the UK government to Act Now to halt biodiversity loss and cut greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2025

The Bristol occupation, supported by rebels from across the South West, will be part of a national rebellion called the ‘Summer Uprising’, taking place in five UK cities.

The Bristol occupation will be joined by synchronised actions in Cardiff, London, Leeds and Glasgow. Each city will focus on a different aspect of the ecological crisis. 

Flooding

The focus of the Bristol action is rising sea levels. This reflects the city’s maritime history and its risk of floods, which NASA research warns are likely to be a regular occurrence by 2050 if climate breakdown isn’t urgently addressed.

In Bristol, thousands of residential properties will be at risk and flooding is likely to affect power stations, leading to frequent blackouts.

XR rebel, Bristol resident and mechanical engineer Leo Green, said: “I’m sorry for the inconvenience we’re causing here in Bristol, but given that our children’s future and the stability of the entire planet is at stake, we feel this is proportional action.

“We are demanding our government acts now to reduce carbon emissions to net zero by 2025, otherwise floods, wildfires, extreme weather and crop failures are only going to get worse, leading to mass migration and societal breakdown.”

Alongside the disruptive actions, Extinction Rebellion Bristol will use the occupation to hold lawful Solution Zones with talks, workshops and family-friendly events that Bristol residents can take part in with their children.

Summer uprising 

XR rebel, Bristol resident and business owner Lindsay Berresford said: “As a mum of three young children, it has been really hard for me to face up to the full reality of our climate emergency. However it has become impossible to ignore, as very credible people tell us that there is a real threat of complete societal breakdown.

“I want my children to have a future, a beautiful one at that, and I feel compelled to do what is in my power to make that happen.

“I know that there can be additional barriers for parents to get involved – it’s not easy to find the time to devote to activism alongside looking after my kids and running a growing business – but I really hope that lots of families will come and join us at the Summer Uprising.”

In April, Extinction Rebellion drove the climate crisis to the top of the news agenda by occupying five sites in London: Oxford Circus, Waterloo Bridge, Marble Arch, Parliament Square and Piccadilly Circus, with the simple message: this is an emergency. Over 1,100 activists were arrested, including many Bristol residents.

The response to the protests, backed by leaders of the environmental movement such as David Attenborough and Greta Thunberg, was overwhelming and led to Parliament declaring a climate emergency. Bristol City Council had previously made a similar declaration in November 2018. Both the Council and the national government have yet to take the urgent action this crisis demands.

#ActNow

Extinction Rebellion follows the science, shown in last year’s landmark IPCC report, to the conclusion that the only way to avert climate catastrophe is to act now and make an urgent transition to a renewable energy economy.

But from fracking to building a third runway at Heathrow to Britain’s first new deep coal mine in 30 years at Copeland, the government is continuing to back ecologically damaging developments. Human activity is also having a catastrophic effect on plant and animal life, which, in turn, threatens human survival.

Follow the hashtag #ActNow from 15 July to see the Summer Uprising unfold in real time.

This Article 

This article is based on a press release from Extinction Rebellion. 

School pupils, Extinction Rebellion supporters and a long-standing local campaign group have joined forces against the tunnel, which would cross the River Thames in east London, near the Blackwall Tunnel. 

London Mayor Sadiq Khan seems determined to press ahead, although Hackney, Lewisham, Newham and Southwark local councils are against. Contracts are expected to be signed with a construction consortium in August.

The tunnel’s opponents say it would not only add to local air pollution, but also contribute to the further growth of car transport – at a time when the climate change danger means moving towards transport systems with fewer cars.

Downright untruths

The tunnel’s supporters have responded with misinformation and downright untruths. They have made shaky, unprovable claims that it will eliminate traffic congestion, improve air quality and ensure traffic volumes do not rise.

A senior councillor in Greenwich, which supports the project, has argued – against all the evidence – that the new tunnel will reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Denise Scott-McDonald, the council’s cabinet member for sustainability, made the claim at last month’s meeting. In response to climate protests, the borough had declared a “climate emergency”, and green campaigners were insisting that that was incompatible with the Silvertown tunnel.

Here are five reasons why the Silvertown tunnel project cannot be reconciled with policies aimed at addressing the climate emergency. 

Air quality

1. Transport for London claims that, by easing congestion, the Silvertown tunnel would achieve an “improvement in air quality”. But research shows that this is very doubtful. 

Queuing vehicles pour out carbon monoxide, nitrous oxides, particulate matter and other toxins, as anyone who has been in a traffic jam knows. That is intolerable for people living nearby. But building more roads would be far more likely to spread the noxious mix differently than reduce the total quantity.

Transportation researchers at Portland State University in the USA crunched numbers for congestion-easing schemes, pollution levels, traffic levels and types of cars. They found that “congestion mitigation does not inevitably lead to reduced emissions”, but would more likely increase some emissions while reducing others. And getting traffic moving more smoothly increases the total amount of traffic … and can lead to higheremissions.  

City Observatory, an American urban planning think tank, called the link between congestion and carbon emissions an “urban myth”. They pointed out that, while traffic at 30-40 mph produces fewer emissions than traffic queues, cars moving above about 50 mph are less fuel-efficient and the volume of emissions per distance travelled rises.

Vehicle numbers

2. The main cause of rising greenhouse gas emissions from transport is the relentless rise in total vehicle numbers and total distances driven. This is a global problem of which the Silvertown tunnel problem is a small part.

The climate emergency means that any road-building project must be considered in the context of efforts to reduce the total number of vehicles and the total number of kilometres driven.

Transport accounts for about a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions from energy-related sources; cars account for about three-quarters of transport emissions. Most car journeys are in cities, and urban transport systems need to be refashioned to rely mainly on public transport, cycling and walking.

This means reversing long-standing trends. Car-based transport systems were introduced in the USA before the second world war, and have spread across the world since then. In 1950 there were about 55 million cars in the world, mostly in the USA; by about 2010, the number had passed 1 billion. And it’s not just the cars, it’s the highways, the parking spaces, and the way that built environments are arranged around them.

The reversal will have to start in rich countries: for every 100 people, roughly, the USA has more than 80 cars and the UK 58, compared to 17 in China and 2 in India. The spread of fuel-inefficient, gas guzzling cars – a rich-country trend pushed by car manufacturers in the three decades since global warming was discovered – will also have to be halted.

UK politicians, including the London Mayor, have acknowledged that there is a climate emergency. Turning back the expansion of car-based transport systems is one necessary response.

Road-building projects

3. Road infrastructure projects always result in more traffic and more greenhouse gas emissions. The Silvertown Tunnel will too.

Research of UK road-building projects have repeatedly shown that they produce more car journeys – so-called “induced traffic” – over nearly a century. 

A recent study of 80 road schemes, based on evaluations by Highways England, showed that they produced, on average, seven percent more traffic over three to seven years, and 47 percent more traffic over eight to 20 years. It also showed that economic benefits – such as those being claimed for the Silvertown tunnel – rarely materialised.

In the US, economists at the National Bureau of Economic Research concluded that building new roads does not relieve traffic congestion. They named the way that extra roads produce more, longer car journeys a “fundamental law”.

Many more studies have shown that road projects of all kinds help to increase the volume of traffic. That leads to calls for more road projects. 

This is why Greenwich councillor Scott-McDonald’s claim that the Silvertown tunnel would reduce emissions makes no sense. 

Vicious circle 

4. The Mayor and Transport for London have not dealt with the fact that the Silvertown tunnel would be part of this larger vicious circle of more cars and more roads.

TfL’s assessment of the tunnel’s carbon impact acknowledges that more than 150,000 tonnes of carbon would be emitted during construction. But it claims a very low figure for future emissions from vehicles as a result of construction (0.4 percent higher). 

That number has been produced by modelling scenarios. And those are based on a key assumption that overall traffic volumes will be kept down by road tolling. A spokesman for TfL told me that the modelling “demonstrates that overall traffic does not increase as a result of the Silvertown tunnel scheme”, and that “in a high [traffic] growth scenario a higher user charge is applied to manage traffic demand”.

But these claims do not stand up. Road charging might penalise local residents but fail to reduce future traffic flows. A future Mayor might change, or abolish, the charges. 

And, most important of all, decades of research on earlier road projects shows that they are part of a vicious circle. In the end, they always produce more traffic. And that produces more roads. Betting that this one will be different – instead of investing in non-car transport schemes – is playing games with the climate crisis.

Social trends

5. To address climate change effectively, transport policies must focus on reducing the total number of cars, and the total distances driven. This means a sea-change in economic and social trends: dumping road infrastructure projects is just the start.

The point of cancelling the Silvertown Tunnel project is not to leave everything else as it is. It should be scrapped as part of a transport policy for London that reverses for good the inexorable rise of roads and cars.

In place of the piecemeal measures in the Mayor’s Environmental Strategy, an integrated approach is needed that prioritises cheap or free public transport, cycling and walking.

Near-zero-carbon and zero-carbon transport technologies are needed, together with post-fossil-fuel energy systems. The rush hour needs to be made a thing of the past by new ways of working and living. 

Without such a bold approach, the climate emergency is being reduced to empty words.

This Author 

Simon Pirani is author of Burning Up: a global history of fossil fuel consumption, and a Greenwich borough resident.

Image: Ross Lydall, Twitter. 

Environmental campaigners have warned a move to open up new areas of the North Sea for exploration by oil and gas firms is “dangerous”.

While the UK government has recently committed to reaching net zero emissions by 2050, the Oil and Gas Authority (OGA) – which became a government company in 2016 – announced the latest round of licensing applications.

A total of 768 blocks or part blocks are being made available for exploration in different areas of the UK Continental Shelf.

Emergency

While the OGA argues oil and gas will “remain an important part of our energy mix for the foreseeable future”, WWF Scotland director Lang Banks said the move undermines efforts to tackle the climate emergency and is “totally irresponsible”.

He said: “We instead need to see a just transition that enables us to harness the engineering skills currently deployed in the oil and gas industry and apply them to supporting a range of cleaner forms of energy production.

“The science is clear. To reduce the risk of dangerous global climate change, the vast majority of known fossil fuel reserves need to be left in the ground unburned.”

That message was echoed by a spokesman for the Scottish Green Party, who said: “Given the UN have said we have 11 years before climate change becomes irreversible, this decision is unsustainable and dangerous.

“If we are serious about tackling the climate emergency head-on, a just transition needs to start right now, not after we’ve extracted every last bit of oil and gas.

Basin

“There needs to be an acknowledgement from Government and industry that maximum economic extraction of oil and gas cannot happen if we’re going to turn this around. That means investment in the alternatives and securing jobs has to step up immediately.

“We can’t burn all the reserves we already know about, and we should not kid ourselves on that further exploration is a responsible option.”

But Jo Bagguley, principal regional geologist at the OGA, said the “latest release of carefully targeted, value-adding data demonstrates the OGA’s continued commitment to supporting industry in its efforts to revitalise exploration”.

As part of the licensing process, the OGA is making a “significant amount” of data available, with this having involved collaboration with 11 companies, and including details from more than 90,000 geochemical samples from 2,700 wells.

She added: “We’re particularly excited about the geochemical database and the release of the Southern North Sea megasurvey and look forward to seeing these, and the other released data packs, being used to good effect to support both 32nd licensing round applications and ongoing exploration activity in the basin.”

This Author

Katrine Bussey is the PA Scotland political editor.