Eighty three Birmingham City Councillors voted unanimously to declare a climate emergency earlier this month. 

They called on the government to provide the ‘powers and resources’ to help Birmingham become zero-carbon by 2030. I was in the viewers’ gallery, swept up in the frenzy of excited applause, and finding it hard to suppress a glow of pride.

Only four short months before, the chances of Birmingham – the birthplace of the industrial revolution – declaring a climate emergency or even taking small steps towards defending the living planet seemed practically nonexistent.

Landslide action 

I thought back to the evening before the first youth strike, writing the words “I’m 14 years old and I want a future” on a piece of cardboard. I had no idea of the landslide of political action that was awaiting me.

It began sometime in January. My father showed me a video of a girl named Greta speaking in Davos about the climate. It was an amazing speech, but at the time I only expressed a mild interest.  

After following her Instagram account I researched the climate crisis and soon found out that youth strikes were taking place in Sweden, Belgium and Australia. My father had evidently done the same, as one evening he said: “If you ever wanted to do something like that, I’d totally support you.”

From then on I kept mulling over what I could do, and I finally found the answer when, over a plate of vegan pasta, my grandfather casually asked whether I’d seen that there was going to be a global youth strike for climate, and that people would be on the streets in London.

But climate solutions need to happen everywhere, so instead of looking into tickets to Euston, I texted some friends to see if they would join me striking in Brum.

Making friends

It can be frustrating growing up in a world so beset with problems. I’ve always wanted to make a positive change, but never known how.

I was keen to be like Greta and sit outside the Council House with a sign, but how does action outside lead to changes inside? I decided to write to some people who might know…

I started with my local Councillor Kerry Jenkins, who got straight back saying she would love to meet and put me in touch with a couple of others Councillors eager to help our cause.

Then I contacted Friends of the Earth, asking for advice about how to protest. They agreed to meet me and my friend before the strike… and so my activism began!

A few days later I climbed the steps to Birmingham’s Victoria Square, nervous and unsure of what to expect, but this trepidation soon melted into excitement as I saw there were others already there, a needed reassurance. I put my shyness aside and began to make friends.

Climate emergency 

Kerry Jenkins and another Labour councillor Olly Armstrong, who had come along with his two sons in tow, soon appeared outside the Council House and invited not just myself, but all thirty strikers inside, keen to hear our thoughts and demands.

We introduced ourselves, and then were asked the surprisingly difficult question, “What do you want from the council?” I raised my hand, stood up, and answered: “The very first thing that we need Birmingham to do is declare a climate emergency.”

Between that day and the unanimous declaration, there was a lot of work and a lot of support from a lot of people. At each new strike, we achieved more and more.

We met Councillors (including the Leader of Birmingham), working specifically with Lisa Trickett and Green councillor Julien Pritchard, MPs like Jess Phillips, Richard Burden and Liam Byrne, the Conservative Mayor Andy Street and other representatives of the West Midlands Combined Authority, people from Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and Extinction Rebellion.

We spoke on the local news, to newspapers, teachers unions amongst other Trade Unions, and at local area forums. Everywhere we went we were clear: political parties need to work together, they need to declare a climate emergency and the target needs to be 2030!

Carbon-free revolution

A few months later, all four political parties stood side-by-side proposing a motion to deliver on one of the strongest climate change targets in the world, stating: “Birmingham started the industrial revolution, it can lead the carbon-free revolution.”

Contrary to what many think, however, this does not mean our job is done. Birmingham Youth Strike 4 Climate is only just beginning and we will not stop until the council talk turns into action.

We have taken the crucial first step, but the next one may even be harder – if my Twitter feed is anything to go by, some Brummies may not take kindly to being at the forefront of climate action!

The Council will have to make it clear that this is positive for our city, it means faster journeys, cleaner air, less litter, stronger communities.

And anyway, we have no choice but to reduce our carbon emissions, it needs to be a priority, both socially and financially. There’s nothing more important than ecological breakdown – not even Brexit!

This Author 

Olivia Wainwright is a member of the Birmingham Youth Strike 4 Climate (@bhamys4c), she blogs about the climate and has been regularly striking since February 15 2019.

During the first episode of the BBC’s long-awaited series War on Plastic, television chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and presenter Anita Rania shed new light on how vast our plastic problem has become.

In one of the starker moments of the show Fearnley-Whittingstall found discarded packaging from some of the UK’s best-known brands as he explored a major landfill site in Malaysia.

He said: “When we put [these items] in our recycling back in the UK, we think we’re doing the right thing. I really want to know who’s responsible for this horrendous mess. Is it our local councils? Is it our Government? Is it our supermarkets? Is it the manufacturers of these goods? They’re all in it together.”

Waste

Viewers were left with a prevailing sense that despite increasing efforts at recycling, there is still no guarantee that their waste will actually end up being recycled.

The UK is unable to recycle the vast amount of packaging it produces and much of it is sent abroad with the intent that it will be recycled and made into a new product. As the episode exposed – in reality – much of this waste ends up in dump sites around the world.

Measures are needed to ensure that waste material that does end up in the natural world are either recovered or recycled.

The 3R Initiative – which stands for Reduce, Recover and Recycle – brings together business giants Nestlé, Danone, Tetra Pak and Veolia, in a bid to both standardise and hasten efforts in tackling waste, plastic or otherwise.

These corporations recognise that once their product is sold, their disposal is at the hands of consumers. And even with increasing numbers of the public engaged with recycling, the bulk of recyclable waste still ends up in landfills or worse – the environment.

Time for action

With this in mind, the Initiative developed the 3R Project and Crediting Mechanism which provides a crucial financial incentive for the recovery of plastic and other types of waste.

Recycling projects who recover plastic waste, avoiding its release into the environment, will receive credits that can then be sold to businesses mindful of their residual plastic footprint.

Activities that go one step further – and ensure that the waste recovered actually ends up being recycled – will receive a different type of credit, reflecting their contribution to plastic circularity.

The Initiative will also give businesses who participate access to a new standard – the 3R Corporate Standard – which will quantify their efforts to tackle the problem of waste in a standardised and credible way, and independently verified.

The Initiative is being led by Verra, an international standard-setter and BVRio, an environmental market developer, who will develop and manage the standards and program infrastructure.

Financial incentive

NGOs Conservation International and project developer South Pole will provide expert advice and give support to the various projects and workstreams that make up the initiative.

The Initiative aims at having a wide membership, with participants from different sectors and inputs.

Giving those on the ground the financial incentive to recover and recycle waste, whilst ensuring that corporations are kept to a consistent standard when measuring their efforts, can support efforts in reducing the amount of waste that ends up in the environment. 

This Article

Pedro Moura Costa is director of BVRio and co-founder of the 3R Initiative.

Climate breakdown, mass extinctions, and extreme inequality threaten the earth’s rich tapestry of life and leave our own fate increasingly uncertain.

At a time of such social, political and ecological upheaval, it’s natural to dream of a utopian world in which these problems are no more – in fact, people have been doing it for centuries. 

Such visions are often dismissed as nothing more than pointless flights of fancy, yearnings for impossibly perfect societies. But these assumptions are largely incorrect.

Being otherwise

Utopianism is the lifeblood of social change, and has already inspired countless individuals and movements to change the world for the better.

Utopia is not, as its Greek etymological roots suggest, a “no-place”. The name may derive from Thomas More’s classic sixteenth-century fictional work, Utopia, but it is not confined to literature depicting distant or fantastical ideal worlds.

Utopianism is in fact a philosophy that encompasses a variety of ways of thinking about or attempting to create a better society. It begins with the seemingly simple yet powerful declaration that the present is inadequate and that things can be otherwise.

Present in communities, social movements, and political discourse, it critiques society and creatively projects futures free of the strangleholds of the time. Put simply, it embodies a longstanding human impulse towards self-improvement.

Utopianism is manifest in countless historical examples of those that have dared to challenge the status quo and assert that things can – and indeed, must – change. Take Martin Luther-King’s dream of a world free of racial segregation for example, or the strivings of the suffragettes for gender equality.

Ecotopian aspirations 

Now, our relationship with the natural world is humanity’s defining challenge – and utopian ideas have shifted to meet it. “Ecotopian” aspirations are already in full view in community networks attempting to create more conscious ways of living such as the Transition Network, social movements such as Extinction Rebellion, and bold policy proposals such as the USA’s Green New Deal.

What’s more, many of the ideas put forth by these projects were long since imagined in prominent ecotopian literary works.

In the ideal worlds sketched in Ernst Callenbach’s Ecotopia and Kim Stanley Robinson’s Pacific Edge for example, resources are renewably sourced and communally owned.

Healthcare, education, and meaningful employment are available to all. Extreme wealth disparities have been eradicated through income caps and minimum earnings schemes.

These ideas are reflected in many aspects of the Green New Deal, which aims to transition the USA towards communal ownership of energy systems and a 100 percent renewable energy system by 2030, as well as enshrine into law rights to single-payer healthcare, guaranteed work at a living wage, affordable housing, and free university education.

Climate breakdown 

It’s not clear whether Alexandro Ocasio-Cortez, the leading figurehead for the grand policy package, was directly inspired by these works. But judging from the way she has been promoting the Green New Deal, she certainly sees the value in painting visions of utopia.

For example, her viral video, titled “A Message from the Future”, creatively imagines a more socially and ecologically resilient society just a few decades on from now – and, crucially, helps us to believe that it is possible. 

As a decentralised global movement that gives its members autonomy and demands politics in which citizens lead, Extinction Rebellion also echoes ideals from ecotopian novels.

In Ecotopia and many other similar works, most aspects of life are decentralised, from small-scale agriculture to neighborhood-specific healthcare. In Pacific Edge, the direct brand of politics Extinction Rebellion advocates is central to social and ecological wellbeing.

Extinction Rebellion urges efforts of wartime proportion to decarbonise by 2025 – a utopian target that has been met with scepticism in some quarters. But whether or not it is achievable, such a demand has been crucial in highlighting that what is presently deemed politically possible is not sufficient to stop catastrophic climate breakdown. 

Intentional communities 

Their radical visions have shifted the climate and ecological crises to the forefront of the political agenda. And, crucially, they have switched millions on to the idea that fundamental transformations in the way we organise and power our societies are possible.

To some, the serious political proposals outlined by Extinction Rebellion and in the Green New Deal might seem as unrealistic as the literary works that imagine their realisation. But living examples of ecotopian imagination can already be found in the world we live in.

Thousands of intentional communities across the globe are already creating spaces with social and ecological justice at their heart. Many of these eco-communities have been directly inspired by the communities imagined in ecotopian novels. For example, hundreds of eco-villages in the Baltic region were set up according to the concept laid out in Vladimir Megre’s The Ringing Cedars of Russia.

Some movements, such as the Transition Network – whose co-founder describes himself as a “vision harvester” – are even working to transform existing settlements across the world, with great success.

As just one example among initiatives in nearly 1,000 towns and cities, Transition Marlborough’s Bee Roadzz project in south-west England has drawn together local residents, businesses and organisations to link habitats and combat the rapid decline of bees and other pollinators. 

Better future

In shattering the perceived rigidity of the present, utopianism paves the way for change. Perfect worlds may not be realisable or even desirable, but that doesn’t mean we should shy away from imagining and striving for a better future.

Societies without extreme inequality and environmental degradation are surely within the bounds of possibility.

Whether in the form of a creative novel, a social movement, or a political proposal, dreaming can help us get there.

This Author 

Heather Alberro is an associate lecturer and PhD Candidate in political ecology at Nottingham Trent University. This article was first published on The Conversation. 

Image: A Latvian ecovillage based on The Ringing Cedars of Russia. Santa Zembaha/Wikimedia Commons. 

Campaigners have have maintained a nearly constant presence since early January at the West Newton Rathlin Energy drilling site in East Riding.

This week has seen another large increase in movements and traffic leaving the site with a number of oversized loads, causing disturbance and disruption in local villages such as New Ellerby. 

The increase in activity follows the announcement by Rathlin Energy that they are removing the current equipment used for drilling the exploratory well. This indicates that Rathlin Energy are preparing the site for the next stage – flow testing the well. This has been recognised as one of the most dangerous stages of exploration. 

Public footpaths

Last weekend a group of walkers, and campaigners from surrounding areas joined forces to challenge the recent closure of local and regularly used footpaths and the lane leading to the West Newton site.

The group said: “We wanted to show Rathlin Energy and ERYC that residents in Withernwick and Ellerby – or anywhere else for that matter – ought to be able to continue to walk the public footpaths that have been closed for no good reason.

“We walked peacefully on these years-old paths without the need of interruption from the police or anyone else. The paths were closed for alleged road works, but even the police don’t know where the roadworks are.

“We want to empower other villagers to walk on the paths too. It is our right to do so. It is Rathlin that is industrialising our local area – why should we residents allow them to walk all over us? The path was closed without any of the statutory notice to those affected, like us.”

Possible contaminants 

The group were approached whilst walking on a public footpath and right of way by a small number of police officers who questioned their motives and intent, and stated that the presence of thirteen people consisting of teachers, managers, mothers, fathers, grandparents and a number of dogs had made the Rathlin private security nervous.

The group were then told that the area was subject to a Section 14, which contradicts previous interactions and notices associated with the recent emergency road closures leading to the site.

The group were asked for details, which they politely declined to give. They were allowed to continue their walk, with the remaining police seemingly as puzzled by the closures and necessity of their presence.   

While large amounts of infrastructure used during the drilling process continued to leave the site throughout Saturday and into Sunday, campaigners joined the local community of New Ellerby.

They did this to take the protest to the village and highlight the dangers of increased movements of heavy good vehicles, but also the possible contaminants that will also be leaving during this phase, and how this could become the norm for traffic movements in the future if Rathlin Energy succeed in their plans to develop a network of infrastructure across East Riding.

Planned industrialisation

The campaign group highlighted the dangers and the continued planned industrialisation of this area.

Around mid-morning on Sunday the campaign group engaged a vehicle travelling through the village carrying a very large and heavy load.

The campaigners safely engaged and slowed the vehicle, but according to them the driver allegedly used his vehicle to attempt to intimidate protestors. The vehicle drove towards campaigners, say witnesses, and lightly made contact with an individual.

Due to this the campaign group and monitors directed the vehicle into a safe lay-by and requested the police deal with the incident.

During the process of slow-walking the vehicle to the layby a number of potential defects were noticed by the group, and once the vehicle was safely stopped a further inspection revealed a number of serious and potentially dangerous defects that were recorded and reported to the police, according to the campaigners.

At the request of the campaign group the Humberisde police force brought a specialist traffic officer to the scene, who then confirmed he was not happy with this vehicle completing its journey.

The vehicle was then taken away under police escort to a secure compound where it will remain until VOSA have completed a full inspection and it is deemed safe to travel. 

Community monitoring 

Campaigners and local residents involved in the incident highlighted that these alleged dangerous defects might never have been spotted without their continued protests and slow-walking. 

There is an urgent need for monitoring by the community, as neither company, police or council are taking appropriate precautions. 

This week, a number of pieces of infrastructure and the main body of the rig will be leaving the site. There was at least one arrest on Monday morning, and around 40 police officers on the scene observing a handful of protestors. 

The campaigners have set up a website here. 

This Author 

Marianne Brooker is The Ecologist’s content editor. This article is based on a press release from West Newton Gateway to the Gas Fields. 

Bolivian president Evo Morales was inaugurated in 2006 as the first indigenous person to be sworn in as a president of a sovereign nation. Since then, he has shown extraordinary resolution in strengthening the legal and economic situation of indigenous people in Bolivia.

Giving constitutional protection to Mother Earth (Madre Tierra in Spanish or Pachamama in Quechua) has earned him accolades from environmentalists all over the globe. But the reality is far from it.

Bolivia has opened the country in general and indigenous and protected territories in particular to the onslaught of international oil and gas corporations. The president’s dream is to make Bolivia the energy hub of Southern America.

Protected areas

The easy targets for oil and gas are already running thin in Bolivia. Drilling has to go deeper and deeper. A much cheaper option is then to start drilling in the protected areas, where gas-bearing strata are believed to be much shallower.

The president’s Supreme Decree No. 2366 from 2015 authorised oil and gas production from most protected areas and specifically exempted exploration wells from the usual Environmental Impact Assessment procedures.

All in all, now eleven of the nation’s protected areas have been opened – rather arbitrarily – for oil and gas exploration, by the stroke of a pen. 

The Bolivian people do not let this happen easily. The residents of the Tariquía National Reserve for Flora and Fauna in the southern Bolivian federal state of Tarija have had enough. For more than two months, they have now blocked the only access road to a new exploration frontier.

They have fought running battles with police trying to smash through the barricades. They are trying to protect one of the last remaining extensive stands of sub-Andean mountain forests.

Local resistance

The forest is an important headwater for major rivers in Bolivia and Argentina. Humidity rising from the forested mountain slopes drive the climate engine that is feeding rain to the lucrative agriculture in their state.

All this has brought local activists powerful friends and vicious enemies alike. Can they succeed?

On a remote bridge over the muddy waters of the small river Los Lapachos in Chiquiacá Norte, local farmer families gathered under a rugged blue tarpaulin donated by a friendly trucker. This make-shift resistance camp blocks the only access to the strategic part of the 260,000 hectares nature reserve.

Earlier in the year, the police broke through another blockade further down the road. In a show of force, they accompanied company officials from the Brazilian PETROBRAS to enter the reserve.

After a tense stand-off, the villagers signed a deal with the authorities: consultation first, exploration later. This principle is in fact enshrined in the Bolivian Constitution and spelled out in detail in the environmental laws of the country.

But contracts with the exploration company had already been signed even before the Environmental Impact Assessment study was drafted. Some selected local farmers were asked to sign papers for a donation of free stoves and gas bottles, only to find out later that they indeed had signed off their ancestral lands to gas exploration.

Spectacular failure

The Bolivian state under president Morales is automatically majority shareholder in each and every oil and gas venture in Bolivia. The national Department of Oil and Gas is effectively controlling and at the same time shareholder of the industry.

The minister in charge, Luis Albert Sánchez, is celebrating victory after victory, promising a new Abu Dhabi in the mountains.

But despite enthusiastic support from government, production rates are declining, as the existing fields in the east of the country are quickly running dry. Exploration has become excessively expensive.

The last exploration borehole Boyuy X-2 reached 7,963 m, the deepest borehole on the South American continent, before it had to be abandoned, dry and cold. This came as a shock after President Morales had publicly announced it would drill into “a sea of gas”.

After such spectacular failure, the industry is looking west, into the foothills of the Andean mountain range, where due to extensive folding, the gas-bearing strata are believed to be much closer to surface.

Ecological restoration 

Twenty to thirty years ago these mountain ranges were mostly declared nature reserves, due to their eminent ecological importance.

Nature reserves like the Reserva Nacional de Flora y Fauna Tariquía, the Parque Nacional de la Serranía del Aguaragüe, the Isiboro Sécure National Park and Indigenous Territory and several others further north are all in the potential extension zone of the industry.

Many of these parks therefore already had a resident agricultural population when they were proclaimed. There are serious human impacts with cattle ranching and slash-and-burn farming (“chaqueo”) the most damaging interventions, besides local and selective logging for local furniture making and building purposes.

Thus, these sensitive and essential areas were earmarked for ecological restoration and conservation.

The previous minister in the Presidency, Juan Ramón Quintana, called fracking an attack on the environment, but the Government has since U-turned in allowing fracking.

Complex interests

The industry itself is more careful. It has learnt its lesson and avoided the world fracking at all cost. These industries maintain that until now, hydraulic fracturing has not been employed, but many of the new exploration targets like the Los Monos Formation are in fact shale-dominated formations, whereas all earlier gas fields came from conventional sandstone deposits.

Only one Canadian company (Cancambria Energy Corp) has openly admitted to prepare for shale-gas targets. 

Matters in Bolivia are generally complex. Local government authorities and some residents are furious that the income of oil and gas production is not evenly distributed between producing and non-producing areas.

The impact of this resource curse can be felt everywhere. Decades of hard lobbying by some industries and some states have left a legacy of uneven distribution of the spoil.

In particular, new production areas get the lion’s share of environmental impacts but less or no benefits at all from the income. Thus, the lobbying gets harder every time.

Fever pitch

In spring 2019, the two gas producing provinces of O’Connor and Arce twice called for general strikes. All life came to a halt, government closed, business stayed closed, schools didn’t open, crippling its own economy.

The discussion has reached such fever pitch that some local residents of the Reserve of Tariquía offered to drop their resistance against gas exploration, if they only would get their fair share of the proceeds.

This has divided the resistance, and local government is trying to do its best to deepen the differences in the camp.

But Bolivians have lived through decades of political lobbying. Many ordinary peasants and their leaders have such sharp political acumen, a tradition of tolerant political debate and organizational discipline that can weather half-hearted attacks on their integrity.

Solidarity is not an empty phrase. For them, the struggle for the Reserve is also one for their dignity (they were never consulted), their survival (they have seen the impacts just next door) and unity (they refuse to let them be divided).

Dedicated resistance 

Local activists are supported by a growing network of environmentalists, churches, student organizations and climate activists under the slogan “Don’t touch Tariquía” (Tariquía No Se Toca!”).

Their dedicated, disciplined and creative resistance took both the industry and the Government by surprise.

In the long years of “Evo rule”, government has stifled civic activism to the minimum. Repression of critical NGOs is vicious.

This was once a new wave of brave environmentalism that ties in with the struggle for genuine indigenous empowerment and the climate change movement gaining momentum also in Bolivia, where the impact is already felt sharply.

During the last months, resisters and their supporters have scored important gains. The police and the corporate officials have withdrawn. The ruling party “Movement for Socialism” (MAS) is afraid of more public unrest ahead of the forthcoming elections in October 2019.

Environmental impact

This time, the government’s lead is marginal and has long left the comfort zone of earlier elections.

In the state of Tarija, opposition parties govern. They put every spanner they can find into the workings of central Government which then retaliates by withholding support or funding only white elephants. 

But oil and gas exploration and environmental impact assessment licenses are a national task. Thus, the Morales Presidency has given the green light for gas exploration in the Reserve.

It took local lawmakers several months to finally even get a copy of the Environmental License, a public document under Bolivian law. What they found was a glossy and voluminous document of 1746 pages, describing the environmental impact on the drill site and the access road.

It only records a few water samples, presents nice, colorful maps and copy-and-paste data from other sites. Such a “study” does not do justice to the impact of invasive exploration and even less of gas production facilities of gas would the exploration be successful.

Dearth of data

The value of this ecologically important nature reserve has not been duly appreciated. There is a dearth of hard data on the ecosystem of the Reserve. Biodiversity profiles are outdated, forest resources are not mapped, land use patterns have not been studied, there is no climate research, no micro-seismic studies, nor is there a geological map of any detail available.

In the absence of all this, the state-run National Service for Protected Areas (Servicio Nacional de Áreas Protegidas, SERNAP) simply changed the Management Plan in 2014 to allow the gas exploration in areas that were suddenly of less importance to the conservation goals.

Since then, SERNAP has been effectively dismantled of its political clout to protect the areas under its auspices.

The new Management Plan has never been published, the Management Board has not convened, and key positions have remained vacant for years.

Today, this large area avails of less than 20 rangers, ill-equipped and poorly funded, to control an area larger than the island of Mauritius.

New research

In this complex situation, the state Universidad Autonoma Jose Misael Saracho (UAJMS) in Tarija has offered to bring some sanity into the heated debate.

It started from the observation that the environmental impact studies presented by the exploration applicant are deficient and cannot be taken for granted, as hardly any base-line data exists to allow for a reliable modelling of the impacts on a largely unknown ecosystem.

Under such conditions it is not prudent to continue with invasive exploration activities, until their impacts can be effectively modelled and assessed.

The university has therefore requested the help of the German Senior Expert Service (SES) to draft an interdisciplinary and intercultural research proposal to fill some of the most glaring gaps: a study on water quality, on micro-climates, on forest resources and fauna biodiversity, in order to allow the approximate value of environmental services rendered by nature reserve to the local and regional economy.

This is an exceptional window of opportunity as the exploration activities are suspended due to the brave resistance of the local residents and the political maneuvers of the Bolivian Government.

Community dialogue 

The government has agreed to hold new community consultation, probably only in 2020. Such a real community dialogue must be based on facts and figures and their appropriate interpretation.

The local resistance of a few farmers and their families has so far withheld permanent damage from the Reserve.

Let us hope that they can maintain their militant stand even through the harsh Bolivian winter approaching and against all attempts to split the movement. They need international support.

You can offer Bolivian farmers solidarity through their Facebook groups Unidos por Tariquia (United for Tariquia), Chiquiaca Resiste (Chiquiaca Resists) and Tariquia Hoy (Tariquia Today).

The farmers also need practical and material support, which can be channeled through David Porcel at WhatsApp: +591 70226231, or through the farmer’s organization Subcentral campesino de Tariquia, c/o Yenny Mesa Valdez at WhatsApp: +591 72969755.

This Author

Dr Stefan Cramer is a retired environmental geologist, currently working with the voluntary German Senior Expert Service (SES) as a consultant to the University of Tarija.

Two thirds of festival-goers say reducing their impact on theenvironment is their number one priority this summer, new research suggests.

Revellers are gearing up for Glastonbury with many expected to abandon their tents at the end of the five-day event at Worthy Farm in Somerset.

And earlier this year the long-running festival announced it was banning single-use plastic drinks bottles from the site.

Festival

According to a study of UK revellers, 62 percent said they wanted to see festival waste reduced as well as better recycling facilities. Despite this more than a third of fans (38 percent) admitted to having abandoned a tent at a festival.

But almost the same number (36 percent) said they did so assuming it would be recycled, despite the majority of tents being taken directly to the landfill.

The State of Play: Festivals report, produced by Ticketmaster and insights company Kantar, asked roughly 4,000 festival-goers about the UK festival landscape.

Its results also indicate strong interest in diversity on line-ups. Some 41 percent said they wanted more representation while nearly a third (29 percent) said they considered the male to female ratio of line-ups before buying a ticket.

Moreover, men appeared to be more concerned about representation than women. Some 32 percent of male revellers said they wanted representation while only 28 percent of their female counterparts said the same.

Line-up

Radio DJ and broadcaster Jo Whiley said recent years have seen organisers rethink how they run their events.

She said: “It is well known that the UK loves a music festival more than anywhere else in the world – which can be attributed to the incredible music, the atmosphere and the lifelong memories made.

“I’ve been going to festivals for a long time and in recent years there has been a radical and long overdue rethink in the way they are run.

“The good news from Ticketmaster’s report is that while we still see festivals as a place where you can let your hair down and enjoy quality time with friends or family, we’re finally thinking harder about (or – we’ve woken up to) the impact festivals have socially and environmentally.

“It’s so encouraging to see that issues like diversity in line-ups and sustainability are part of the equation when people decide which festival they want to go to, and even more encouraging that organisers are already responding to this.”

Sustainability

Andrew Parsons, managing director at Ticketmaster, said: “British summer wouldn’t be what it is without festivals and these findings give us an insight into what festival fans really want.

“While it’s mostly all about the music and having a great time, I’m not surprised and encouraged to see fans wanting more action on sustainability issues and line-up equality.

“Festivals have always been a microcosm of wider society and with the continued rise of social consciousness we expect fans will only become more demanding of festivals to get it right.”

This Author

Alex Green is a reporter with a Press Association.

Households across the country have seen a combined £1.2 billion added to energy bills thanks to 42 price rises in the six months since the government’s flagship price cap was supposed to end rip-off bills, new research has found.

During the same period last year there were just 15 price rises and, despite wholesale gas and electricity prices falling, the average increase is higher than 2018, according to auto-switching business Look After My Bills.

So far in 2019 the average price rise is £110 compared with £75 last year, with many suppliers trying to make up the shortfall since the price cap was introduced in January, new data suggests.

Switched

Lily Green, head of research at Look After My Bills, said: “The sheer number and scale of price rises this year raises serious questions about the unintended consequences of the price cap.

“It’s too early to tell but it’s possible that – in a perverse twist of fate – the price cap may have opened the door to price rises.

“Too many suppliers are seeing the cap as a target and taking the opportunity to push prices up. What is particularly baffling is that wholesale energy costs are in fact going down. You would expect energy bills to do the same.”

The news comes as Energy UK – the energy industry trade body – said 487,231 households switched suppliers in May, down 1.4 percent compared with the same month a year ago.

However, more than 2.5 million customers have moved to a new supplier so far in 2019, 14 percent up on the same time last year when a record 5.8 million – or one in five – customers switched supplier.

Prices

The record switching came as energy suppliers pushed through more price rises than at any other time since deregulation of the energy markets. However, 2019 could overtake it, Look After My Bills added.

The Big Six suppliers – British Gas, Eon, Scottish Power, SSE, EDF and Npower – all increased prices but the worst offenders were smaller providers Ebico and Tonik, with average rises to bills of £162 and £144 respectively.

In January, the government’s price cap was introduced which meant suppliers could only charge up to £1,137 for average usage in a typical home for customers on a standard variable tariff (SVT).

The cap was raised in April to £1,254 following increases in wholesale prices. The Big Six announced they would raise their SVTs accordingly to the highest possible limit.

This Author

Simon Neville is the Press Association city editor.

Everything we buy has to end up somewhere, right? We all know waste is a problem. And yet single-use consumerism has taken hold of society, rabid for the latest styles and trends.

Not just with clothing, but accessories, decor, electronics, vehicles and more. This demand has caused manufacturers to ramp up their production, mainly through unsustainable methods consuming limited resources.

When it comes to the decline of the environment, who is the ultimate culprit? The truth is it’s a combination of factors.

Reuse

The clothing and textile industry is no innocent bystander — after oil, it’s the second largest polluter in the world, responsible for the use of contaminants like pesticides in cotton farming and toxic dyes in manufacturing. Waste like water and damaged material is also a daily by-product.

The good news is this wasteful cycle can be broken. Responsible consumers can implore others to consider all the options and choose businesses with responsible practices.

And companies can use their resources to be leaders in their industries and take steps toward real progress. Read the stories below to learn how you and others can revolutionise the practice of sustainability in the clothing and textile industry.

The textile industry requires large quantities of water, about 100 to 200 liters per kilogram of textile product. And many countries have laws and regulations with how wastewater must be treated to meet standards.

The ultimate goal for sustainability is a reduction in the amount of water used and a water treatment plan that allows for reuse.

Consumerism

One way eco-conscious companies are treating water is through a biological treatment process called MBBR (Moving Bed Bioreactor). This method requires less time and effort than other dye removal processes.

This includes traditional methods like activated sludge, coagulation and absorption. With MBRR, efficiency is the ultimate goal, with engineers continually working to cut energy consumption while reducing the need for maintenance.

Another example of water conversation in the textile industry is Gap, who partnered with BSR’s Sustainable Water Group to make sure the water that leaves their factory is free of chemicals and dyes.

Clothing labels now include a message relaying the company’s goal, claiming the water used to wash and dye jeans is treated to ensure it’s safe and clean upon leaving the factory.

While Gap was the first company to publicly communicate their implementation of sustainable conversation practices, other practicing members of BSR’s Sustainable Water Group include Levi Strauss, Nike and Coldwater Creek. Through careful research and innovation, the companies hope to promote social responsibility in consumerism.

Repair

Total implementation isn’t an overnight event. While Gap had 71 laundries who complied with the jean cleaning program by the end of 2008, that still left 19 laundries who had failed the initiative.

Corrective action plans were put in place to resolve problems that arose and develop more efficient processes. Experts agree that total implementation will take a significant amount of training, communication and investment.

One of the most common ways businesses practice sustainability is through the preservation and reuse of old materials.

Patagonia’s Worn Wear Campaign is a leading example, encouraging buyers to send in old clothing to be repaired or replaced as needed. While consumers may have been skeptical at first — who wouldn’t be? — the company held up their end of the bargain.

The Worn Wear repair factory is located in Reno, Nevada, the biggest garment repair factory in the United States. Each week, 45-full time technicians work diligently to repair the clothing Patagonia customers send in. Just two months into 2017, one team of Worn Wear seamstresses were on track to hit their 50,000th item of the year.

Shorts

The mountain-wear brand isn’t the only one focused on reuse. Looptworks, a clothing and accessory shop based in Portland, takes old clothing and materials bound for the landfill and turns it into something entirely new.

Not only can consumers purchase an item that’s one-of-a-kind, but an upcycled product translates to less waste clogging landfills.

The average American throws out 70 pounds of clothing and other textiles each year, which takes up an estimated five percent of all landfill space.

Other waste can come from the disposal of damaged, excess or unwanted clothing from manufacturers, which ends up being tossed in landfills or incinerated, releasing harmful toxins into the air. Looptworks takes this unwanted material and uses it to create a product consumers will love.

Revolutionised

Upcycling clothing doesn’t mean taking a plain white tee and adding some embellishments. Or taking a pair of pants and chopping them into shorts.

Looptworks gets creative with the process, turning unwanted leather wallets into a stylish motorcycle jacket. Discarded wetsuits can be scrapped for fabric and turned into laptop sleeves. Or belts can be cut and sewn to create stylish, unique clutches.

The evidence is clear — it’s more important than ever for businesses and consumers to spur innovative change.

Many companies have already joined the movement to reduce waste and incorporate sustainable practices. But more can be done to increase progress and create a revolutionised industry.

This Author

Emily Folk is a conservation and sustainability writer and the editor of Conservation Folks.

The summit of all 28 national EU leaders taking place in Brussels was the last chance for the bloc to increase its ambition before a United Nations climate summit in New York in September.

The proposal by the European Commission to set a net-zero emissions target by 2050 was backed by 24 of the EU’s member states, but was vetoed by Poland, along with Hungary, Estonia and the Czech Republic.

“Today we have defended the right of our citizens,” claimed Polish prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki, who is facing Polsih national elections later in the year. “There is a need to further analyse the financial impacts to member states of the [long term EU climate] strategy.”

Lives

Raised targets with 2030 and 2050 timelines would make economic sense and would save more than one million European lives, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).

When putting a price tag on climate action, the health benefits alone outweigh the costs of mitigation two to one, according to a cost-benefit analysis by the United Nations’ health agency

Climate breakdown damages people’s health through heatwaves, storms, floods and droughts, increased spread of infectious disease and the destruction of health facilities, as well as through air pollution.

The same fossil fuel combustion that drives the climate crisis is also the main source of air pollution. Within the EU, air pollution kills over 400.000 people every year, according to WHO.

Worldwide, it causes seven million yearly deaths and costs an estimated €4.5 trillion in welfare losses. For the largest emitters, such as Germany and the UK, the health impacts of air pollution are estimated to cost more than four percent of the country’s GDP. Phasing out fossil fuels can reverse these losses.

Heart disease

If the EU were to reach its current climate target under the Paris Agreement of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 40 percent by the year 2030, the World Health Organization has estimated this would avoid at least 45,000 premature deaths every year, in large part due to reduced levels of air pollution.

Additionally, the 40 percent reduction target would save the block up to €160 million a year in direct health costs, from 2030 onwards.

Raising its 2030 climate goal to 55 percent – as has been proposed by UN Secretary General Antonio Gutierrez – would save the EU 55,000 lives every year by 2030 (an extra 10.000 extra lives a year compared to the block’s current target).

By 2050, this would have added up to one million lives saved and €3.7 billion in health savings, from air pollution reductions alone.

Setting an end-date to carbon-intensive energy production by mid-century, which is now supported by the majority of EU states, has the potential to prevent the current 400,000 lives lost in the EU due to air pollution related diseases, such as heart disease, stroke, and lung cancer.

Accountable

Every additional year it takes the bloc to reach that goal, 400,000 more people will die preventable deaths. Looking beyond air pollution, raised climate goals will also have positive health effects for the EU’s global neighbors.

Looking at just four causes of death strongly influenced by climate, WHO estimated a quarter million additional people a year will die by 2030 from heat stress, diarrhea, malaria and malnutrition if the level of climate ambition is not raised.

The increase in extreme weather events, such as the heatwave that hit the Northern Hemisphere in 2018 and killed thousands of people, is also tightly linked to the burning of fossil fuels.

Although it is often difficult to attribute a specific extreme weather event to human-induced climate breakdown, an increasing body of scientific research is able to attribute a human fingerprint to extreme weather.

Raising the bar on the EU’s climate ambition directly translates into tens of thousands of lives saved. Conversely, failing to raise that bar makes the EU an accomplice in the premature deaths of thousands of its constituents and global neighbours. Its citizens can, and will, hold EU leaders accountable.

This Author

Arthur Wyns is a climate scientist at the World Health Organization. He writes in a personal capacity, his views do not necessarily represent WHO or any of its member states.

Danielle Rowley MP, the newly appointed Shadow Minister for Climate Justice and Green Jobs, has called on the government to ban fracking, allow onshore wind and create free bus travel for under 25s.

Under the new role Danielle Rowley will liaise with popular movements on climate change, including the climate school strikers, to hear their concerns and discuss Labour policies.

Danielle is spending her first day in her new role on Friday at the University of Edinburgh’s Roslin Institute in Midlothian discussing solar energy, and with the climate school strikers at Holyrood.

Renewable

She will also focus on ensuring that the decarbonisation of our energy system and investment in green infrastructure leads to the creation of high-skilled, unionised and UK-based green jobs.

As a first priority, she will demand the government step up its action to lower carbon emissions commensurate with its newly adopted 2050 net zero target.

According to the Committee on Climate Change (CCC), the UK is still off track to meet its near term targets in the 2020s and 2030s, despite parliament declaring a climate emergency in May.

Conservatives have continued to back new fracking sites despite evidence that fracking will lock the UK into an energy infrastructure based on fossil fuels long after 2030 when the CCC says gas in the UK must sharply decline.

Since 2015, the Conservatives have introduced huge barriers in the planning system to onshore wind development in England, and blocked onshore wind from competing for subsidies, effectively banning a renewable energy source from replacing existing reliance on fossil fuels.

Revolution

Providing free bus travel will reduce carbon emissions and generate lifelong use of public transport for young people.

Ms Rowley said: “As a campaigner I’m really excited that I’ll be working more closely with the climate movement, including the inspiring youth climate strikers, to urgently move the issue forward.

“Since Parliament declared a climate emergency and adopted the 2050 net zero target the government has not introduced a single practical measure that will help the UK to lower its emissions.

“As a priority, I will be using my position to push them to immediately ban fracking, stop blocking onshore wind and extend free bus travel to under 25s.

“We need to kickstart a Green Industrial Revolution in the UK informed by diverse voices both within and outside of the climate movement.”

This Article

This article is based on a press release from the Labour party.