Environmental campaigners are aiming to involve one billion people worldwide in a “visual survey” of plastic pollution as part of the second annual One Plastic Free Day.
Set to coincide with World Environment Day on June 5, campaign group A Plastic Planet is asking people to photograph a plastic item they wish to switch to an environmentally friendly item, and post it on social media using the hashtag #OnePlasticFreeDay.
Following the survey on June 5, the results will form the basis of an interactive world map where global plastic pollution hot-spots can be identified.
Tourists
The campaign comes as the Government announced that plastic straws, stirrers and cotton buds are to be banned from April 2020 in a bid to reduce plastic pollution.
In 2018, a quarter of a billion people joined in on what was the first annual One Plastic Free Day. A Plastic Planet co-founder Sian Sutherland said: “So far there have been too many words and not enough action.
“I’m incredibly excited about the prospect of mobilising one billion people for the brighter plastic-free future we all know is possible.”
To mark the campaign, the One Plastic Free Day logo will be projected at tourist sights including Times Square in New York.
Speaking about the Government’s move to ban plastic straws, stirrers, and cotton buds, Environment Secretary Michael Gove said: “Urgent and decisive action is needed to tackle plastic pollution and protect our environment.
Emergency
“Today I am taking action to turn the tide on plastic pollution, and ensure we leave our environment in a better state for future generations.”
A Plastic Planet’s campaign comes after months of campaigning for action on pollution and plastic waste by environmental activists.
In April 2019, climate group Extinction Rebellion occupied four prominent sites in central London over a period of 11 days in order to provoke government action on climate change.
Since then, the UK Parliament has become the first in the world to recognise a “climate change emergency”.
“We don’t want to be part of the plastic pollution problem any longer. Every time we shop we feel guilty. Why is it taking so long for change to happen?” Ms Sutherland said.
This Author
Emily Chudy is a reporter for the Press Association.
Feeding the birds in the back garden has boosted the populations of an array of species that flock to them, a scientific study suggests.
Providing a growing number of feeders and different types of food has also increased the variety of species visiting gardens over the past 40 years, the research found.
A practice that began with kitchen scraps on home-made table feeders has boomed into an estimated £200 million-£300 million a year industry in Britain, with half of British homeowners putting out the likes of seed and fat balls for birds.
Pigeons
Researchers from the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO) examined bird food adverts to track the growing popularity of feeding wild birds over the past 40 years, with a rising number of products and a wider range of foods.
Specialist foods such as sunflower hearts and fat balls first appeared in the 1990s as companies backed by conservationists deliberately increased the range of products to attract more species.
They also looked at 40 years of data from the Garden Bird Feeding Survey, run by the BTO, and found an increase in the range of birds using garden bird feeders since the 1970s.
While garden bird feeders in the 1970s were dominated by two species, house sparrows and starlings, today a much broader range of species is commonly seen taking advantage of the variety of food on offer.
Populations
For example, less than a fifth of those taking part in the Garden Bird Feeding Survey in 1973 reported seeing goldfinches and wood pigeons, but that figure has jumped to more than 80 percent, the BTO said.
The provision of bird food is estimated to be enough to sustain up to 196 million birds, more than the combined total population of many common garden species.
It helps them survive the winter, put them in better physical condition and helps them breed more successfully.
The study found that populations of birds that used feeders in urban areas increased significantly over four decades, while those that did not remained unchanged on average.
Spatial scales
Lead author Dr Kate Plummer, research ecologist at BTO, said: “We now know that garden bird feeding is one of many important environmental factors affecting British bird numbers.
“Regular visits to garden feeders in urban areas appear to have led to population growth across more than 30 different bird species, while there has been no change in the average population sizes of birds that don’t visit feeders.
“It is fascinating to discover how this seemingly small-scale hobby is in fact restructuring bird communities across large spatial scales.” The research is published in Nature Communications.
The Author
Emily Beament is the Press Association environment correspondent.
The Tabernas Desert is a unique landscape in the south of Spain. It is a dramatic setting, and when not blisteringly hot, it is easy to see how the magic of its rocky twists, raggedy outcrops and dusty nooks attract people from all over the world.
In the 1960s it began to be used as a location for Sergio Leone’s famous Spaghetti Western trilogy – A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More and The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. Some of the film sets are still there, and there is a feeling of pride for the rich history that this area has in popular culture
Unfortunately, this pride does not always extend to the countryside itself. While cleaners polish the handrails of the town of Tabernas, the outskirts have been found to be littered with garbage.
Rubbish
The ramblas, the dry riverbeds that are used as roads and paths around the desert, have been popular places to fly-tip and dump everything from refrigerators to mattresses to building materials.
There are rusted old cans that appear to have been there for decades. There are glass bottles that have been warped by years in the sun.
According to locals, in the olden days it would have been limited to mostly organic matter, small amounts that would have decomposed. But it seems the old ways have not progressed and the area is being treated by many as a landfill.
Julian Phillips moved to Tabernas a few years ago. It wasn’t long before he noticed all the rubbish on his walks around the desert with his dogs.
Alarmed, he called the local authorities. They seemed oblivious to the issue, but initially responded by clearing a small section. But upon successive reports, Julian was met with silence. Tumbleweeds.
Grassroots campaign
Phillips persisted but it soon became clear that he would have to take matters into his own hands. Literally.
He started rifling through piles of trash looking for clues as to who the dumpers were and found allies in town willing to help him with monthly clean-ups. The campaign has evolved to beach clean-ups and an educational presentation is now being taken to schools in the area.
Documentary films are increasingly being used as tools for education and inspiration. A Fistful of Rubbish will highlight the problem of litter and neglect of the desert, and show how communities can band together to take action.
Stylized in part as a classic Spaghetti Western, it will depict a simple story of a grassroots environmental campaign.
The Tabernas Desert is the perfect backdrop to tell a universal tale of good vs bad, the mythology of a hero who comes to a new place and destabilizes the status quo. A fight for the greater good.
Raising awareness
Since filming began Julian and his team of volunteers have cleared about 52 tons of rubbish from the area. He formed an official non-profit organisation (P3 Ambiental) and applied for assistance from the government, but to date has received little support.
For a few of the clean-ups the mayor of Tabernas has assisted by providing containers, printing posters and cleaning resources.
But overall, the problem of litter in the area, is not being taken seriously. The signs are old and rusted. Nobody is getting caught and fined. There is no great sense of urgency in regards to environmental degradation.
This is what needs to change and there is a long way to go. The goal is to raise awareness, to encourage solutions, to shed light on a problem that lies deeper than the bottles and cans, broken televisions and mattresses that lie on the surface.
The goal is for people to care again, to remember and honour what nature provides for all beings on this planet. The problem of waste is evident the world over and bleak environmental stories are rampant.
Local activism
The more people see the power of local activism, the more people can be encouraged to take part in being part of the solution.
Like all the great Westerns, it’s about survival.
To view the teaser of the documentary and for more information about the project and campaign, please click here.
This Author
David Regos is a documentary producer. The last environmental film he produced, Divide in Concord, premiered at Hot Docs in Toronto and won awards at film festivals around the world.
This story begins sometime back in the mid-1990s when April came and went and I didn’t hear the voice of the cuckoo from my office window in the Rising Sun Country Park, in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK.
It was a voice that had been there every year since I had started working in North Tyneside in 1983. A hole appeared in the world where the cuckoo song had once been. A hole that gradually expanded as the voices of other familiar birds – the wood warbler, the yellowhammer, the spotted flycatcher, the turtle dove – also began to fall silent, seemingly largely unnoticed by the wider world.
Then, in the early 2000s I visited a primary school on the estate just near to where the cuckoo used to sing, and I played a recording of a cuckoo’s voice to a group of wide-eyed children sitting cross-legged on the floor.
Cultural memory
I was taken aback when hardly a child recognised the song and many didn’t know what a cuckoo was. Unthinkable in my childhood – I realised then how quickly the once familiar can be lost from our cultural memory.
I decided to create a performance piece about the cuckoo that both celebrated the bird and highlighted its plight. The cuckoo is, after all, a bird that is immediately recognisable in its call and one that has likely been woven into our identity as humans since we first walked the Earth.
Indeed, there cannot be a bird (except perhaps the nightingale) that features in more songs, stories and poems across the northern hemisphere than the cuckoo.
It is an important character in tales from Ireland to Japan, where it has variously brought Jack a gift from Africa, been born from an old man’s pipe, and been caged to keep the summer. It appears in the 13th-century English round ‘Sumer Is Icumen In’ and has been put into verse by Ted Hughes, William Wordsworth, John Clare and many others.
It is an essential part of our folklore: it brings the spring, tells us when to plant our seeds, lets us know how many children we will have, and informs us of how long we have to live.
Ecological stories
Out now!
The cuckoo is embedded in the human imagination, it is a very part of who we are, yet we are watching its disappearance from the English countryside with only the faintest murmurings of concern.
An organisation that has shown concern for the plight of the cuckoo is the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO), which in 2011 developed an inspirational project, tracking the birds on their migration from Britain to sub-Saharan Africa.
The aim was to discover where they go, the routes they take, and where they encounter trouble. People are invited to sponsor these satellite-tagged birds, which can then be followed online as they make their extraordinary journeys.
I sponsored one and found myself identifying with my bird and willing it on as if it were a part of myself, which in a sense of course it was. This cyber-journey became the obvious backbone to my cuckoo story, and it was clear I needed to be involved with one bird from the beginning to the end of its journey.
The BTO were interested in working with artists to communicate ecological stories and had already got together a team of visual artists to represent migrant birds in their sub-Saharan locations, so they were open to the idea of other artistic intervention.
Oral storytelling
Oral storytelling was much more of an unknown, but willing to give it a try they teamed me up with a group of BTO scientists who were satellite-tagging birds on the wild land surrounding Fylingdales Early Warning Station on the North York Moors.
I remember arriving at Fylingdales in the 3 o’clock darkness of a May morning and having to show our passports before being allowed onto the military site.
We were driven out onto the moor surrounding the base, and there under the shadow of a great monolith, with its mighty discs pointing to the heavens receiving messages of possible nuclear attack, we set our nets to catch a cuckoo.
The man who facilitated it all was northerner Mick Carroll, an ex-RAF man and fearless bird conservationist with a huge presence undiminished by the incurable cancer that was gradually sapping the life out of his body.
It was he who released the trapped, satellite-tagged cuckoo, as if he were releasing his own spirit, which in a way he was, for he never lived to see it return. When the bird arrived back on the moor the following April, I imagined it singing over the very place Mick had released it.
Extraordinary sights
I remember thinking that it would not get far on its journey, as it stumbled in the sky after leaving his hands, a long aerial protruding between its wings.
On 24 June, however, I logged in to my laptop and saw a green line traced between Fylingdales and a forest in the South of France, where the bird lingered for a while, fuelling up on caterpillars. He now had a name, Vigilamus, given by Mick.
Vigilamus continued over the Mediterranean to Libya, and then across the Sahara Desert, flying for three days and nights at an altitude of 5km, until he reached Southern Chad. Here he recuperated for a couple of months before flying on to the Congo Basin, arriving at his destination in mid-October.
At each stage of Vigilamus’s journey I found myself vicariously experiencing the extraordinary sights he saw and facing the hazards that I imagined he faced: the drought in the South of France, the mass trapping of migrant birds on the Mediterranean islands, more netting on the coast of North Africa, the rigours of a 2,000-mile journey over an expanding Sahara, deforestation and the search for suitable habitats in Central Africa.
And then finally returning to the farmed deserts of Britain and Northern Europe, where insect populations have crashed. That is leaving aside the hawks and eagles looking for a morsel of cuckoo flesh.
Musical journey
So here was a story that could be told. A story that I decided to tell as ‘I’ cuckoo, to bring us humans, as a close as we are able, to the experience of being bird. A story, also, that in its very essence is full of rhythm and passion, a story that invited music to travel with the words.
And this is where my son, Joshua, came in, creating a musical journey both to accompany the words and to evoke the journey in its own right.
The music gave a sense of the cultures and environments the cuckoo visited that complemented the oral storytelling. It was now a story, not just told, but sung, chanted and ringing with thumb piano, guitar and percussion.
But a cuckoo is much more than its migration. It provokes both outrage and awe, it is loved and judged, and it has given rise to words like cuckold, cucking stool and ‘going cuckoo’.
So, as a counterpoint to the physical journey, we wove in the metaphorical: the myths, the folktales, the folksongs, the lore.
Interdependent futures
Narratives that echo the places and cultures from which they arise and explore what it is to be human in relation to a bird and what it is to be bird in relation to a human.
Tales and songs that evoke our essential beings and connection with one another. For as much as we may see a cuckoo bird as ‘other’, it is also a part of us – a living creature evolved from the same stardust and a vital expression of what it means to be alive on this planet. Through these tales our futures are interlinked and interdependent.
The other part of the journey is the personal story. The story of my participating in the capture of the cuckoo and my moral dilemma over harnessing a wild creature so that we can vicariously live its journey.
But possibly the biggest dilemma in making a story such as this is how to tell a tale that has an underlying theme of loss by human action. And how to do this without avoiding the issue for fear of being preachy or leading people to head for the door with yet another tale of doom.
A billion birds migrate from south of the Sahara to Europe and back each year. There are warblers, flycatchers, pipits, chats, nightingales, nightjars, waders, ducks, hawks, swallows, martins, swifts, and many more. Each one a puff of feathers high in the sky undertaking a journey it has to make.
They bring us the spring, colour, songs and life. They are like the Earth’s breathing, keeping it alive, keeping us alive. If through telling the story in words and music we can enable people to feel a little more a part of this wonder, then this is all we can hope.
This Author
Malcolm Green teaches storytelling at Newcastle University. He is a founder member of A Bit Crack Storytellers and a member of the European Storytelling and Peace Council.
A version of this article has appeared in Biodiversity Journal and Resurgence & Ecologistmagazine. You can see Gone Cuckoo performed at our Summer Camp.
The winners of the Lush Spring Prize 2019 were announced as part of a three-day event taking place at Emerson College in East Sussex and at RichMix in London.
The prizes are awarded across four categories: Intentional, Young, Established and Influence; investing more than £200,000 in regenerative work.
Winning projects come from Southern and Eastern Africa, South America and Europe and work in a diverse range of fields including landscape restoration, food and farming, climate change mitigation and adaptation, protecting indigenous rights, empowering women and other marginalised groups.
Regenerative approaches
Projects may have different focuses, but they all take holistic and regenerative approaches to solving the challenges they face, with many being led by members of the communities they are working in. Information about all of the 2019 winners (and the shortlist) can be found here.
One winner is YICE Uganda, which works with refugees in Bukompe refugee settlement and the neighbouring communities, seeking to provide smallholder farmers with access to regenerative agricultural training and flexible financial services to reduce hunger and poverty.
YICE Uganda has been working in Bukompe refugee settlement to engage the camp’s residents around sustainable farming techniques.
Over 100 women farmers have been trained in Permaculture farming, and 20 Permaculture gardens have been established.
Noah Ssempijja, founder and director of YICE Uganda spoke about why he set up the project: “I was raised by a single mother, also a refugee from Rwanda, and spent the early years of my life in a refugee camp, thus Refugees and women issues are very close to my heart.” YICE Uganda is a winner in the Young category.
Slow water
Another winner, INSO, was founded in 1991 to support communities with regenerative social and ecological initiatives in the diverse state of Oaxaca, Mexico.
Its flagship ‘Slow Water’ project aims to address the Central Valley’s watershed crisis, where the speed with which water flows impacts on both its communities and its ecosystems.
INSO remains deeply connected to grass-roots culture, while its Oaxacan Water Forum has brought community stakeholders together with NGOs, the private sector, and governmental and academic institutions.
It takes an integrated approach by combining traditional wisdom and community organisation with modern knowledge and techniques.
At its heart is a belief that we should view “nature and society as inseparable”. INSO is a winner in the Established category.
Equitable action
Warren Brush, Spring Prize Judge, said: “I am both fortunate and honoured to get to read through all the prize applications from an incredible web of organisations and people who are actively creating a better world that is filled with life-giving purpose, equitability, and right action.
“My only regret was not being able to fund every amazing organisation that applied for these grants from Lush.
“May Lush’s efforts to support resilient social, economical and ecological systems inspire other companies and individuals to generously give to these and other organisation’s efforts around the globe that are positively changing the world through regeneration.”
Each year the Spring Prize team struggles to create a shortlist of fifty and select just eleven projects for funding. It has concluded that it should aim to support every application and move away from being a competitive prize.
To start this process an additional £20,000 was made available in 2019 in the form of a ‘Judges Award’. This was used to support other shortlisted projects financially or through publicity work.
Rural economy
The Spring Prize judges also wrote a letter of celebration to recognise the valuable work of established organisations such as GRAIN, FERN, Survival International and Navdanya.
Precious Phiri, a Spring Prize judge, said: “The different Spring Prize applications keep reinforcing a need for us to celebrate this fact: the change we desire will take many small pockets of intentional groups of people around the world allying with nature to address nature’s complexity and to address the root cause of problems. There’s no one size fits all!”
The first half of 2019’s Spring Prize event took place at Emerson College, which is surrounded by biodynamic and organic farms and demonstrates the regenerative practices embedded in parts of the English rural economy.
The second half was held at RichMix in Shoreditch, an example of how social enterprises can play a role in regenerating social landscapes in urban communities.
The event was designed to give members of winning projects the opportunity to share their stories, expertise and ideas in an inclusive and collaborative environment.
Also attending the event are Spring Prize judges, press and representatives from other organisations – selected for their relevance to the winner’s projects.
Holistic approaches
The Lush Spring Prize was set up to support ‘regenerative’ projects – those which go beyond sustainability by taking holistic approaches to restoring degraded land and communities.
It seeks to support those who are actively involved in restoring all the systems they are part of. By supporting regenerative projects, the Spring Prize hopes to raise the profile of the movement as a whole to inspire more individuals, groups and communities to start the regenerative process.
Now in its third year, the Lush Spring Prize has awarded more than £600,000 to regenerative work and is a joint venture between Lush and Ethical Consumer.
This Author
Brendan Montague is editor of The Ecologist. This article is based on a press release from Lush.
The Belchatow power plant in Poland has seen a rise in CO2 emissions and air pollution for a third year in a row.
The lignite-fired power station in central Poland increased its emissions in 2018, according to data from Poland’s National Centre for Emissions Management (KOBiZE) and obtained by Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza.
The Belchatow power plant saw an increase in emissions from 34,9 Mt CO2 in 2016, to 38,3 Mt in 2018, a rise of 10 percent. The power plant produces four times as much CO2 a year as all Ryanair flights combined.
Premature deaths
Along with rising emissions, air pollution levels from the plant have also risen in the last two years, with a 54 percent rise in particulate matter, 50 percent rise in sulphur (SO2) and 8 percent rise in nitrogen dioxide (NO2) levels, as well as increased heavy metal concentrations such as lead and arsenic released by the plant.
Robert Biedron, founder of a new Polish social-democratic political party called Wiosna, which will run in the upcoming European elections, said: “After decades of investment in infrastructure, we must finally invest in human wellbeing.
“In Belchatow, we have coal left for ten more years. After that a few thousand people will lose their jobs. We have to think about this now.”
Tens of thousands of premature deaths have been attributed to pollution from Europe’s coal plants.
Exposure to fine particulate matter (PM2.5) alone caused the premature death of an estimated 422,000 people across 41 European countries in 2015, while exposure to NO2 caused the premature death of an estimated 79,000 people in the same region.
The health impacts of exposure to air pollution are diverse, ranging from inflammation of the lungs, to cardiovascular diseases, breathing conditions, cancer and strokes. Recent scientific research has shown air pollution may be damaging every organ in the body.
Fossil fuels
The 4,4 MW Belchatow plant currently accounts for 20 percent of the Polish power market, and is operated by Polish state-owned coal utility company PGE.
Coal accounts for 80 percent of the country its electricity generation, and will remain the dominant source of power supply in the foreseeable future, with a projected 60% of generation still fuelled by lignite in 2030.
PGE plans to expand several fossil fuel projects in Poland, including the opening up of two new mines, the Złoczew and Gubin-Brody lignite mines, and the extension of an opencast mine in the town of Turow, despite protests by Greenpeace and other environmental groups.
The new Złoczew mine alone would produce an additional 18 million tonnes of coal a year, leading to the emission of an estimated 25.74 million tonnes of CO2.
Emissions from fossil fuel combustion saw a sharp increase by 3.5 percent in Poland in 2018, despite an average 2.5 percent decrease across the European Union (EU), according to Eurostat data.
This Author
Arthur Wyns is a biologist and science journalist. He is a climate change researcher at the World Health Organization and tweets from @ArthurWyns.
The Belchatow power plant in Poland has seen a rise in CO2 emissions and air pollution for a third year in a row.
The lignite-fired power station in central Poland increased its emissions in 2018, according to data from Poland’s National Centre for Emissions Management (KOBiZE) and obtained by Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza.
The Belchatow power plant saw an increase in emissions from 34,9 Mt CO2 in 2016, to 38,3 Mt in 2018, a rise of 10 percent. The power plant produces four times as much CO2 a year as all Ryanair flights combined.
Premature deaths
Along with rising emissions, air pollution levels from the plant have also risen in the last two years, with a 54 percent rise in particulate matter, 50 percent rise in sulphur (SO2) and 8 percent rise in nitrogen dioxide (NO2) levels, as well as increased heavy metal concentrations such as lead and arsenic released by the plant.
Robert Biedron, founder of a new Polish social-democratic political party called Wiosna, which will run in the upcoming European elections, said: “After decades of investment in infrastructure, we must finally invest in human wellbeing.
“In Belchatow, we have coal left for ten more years. After that a few thousand people will lose their jobs. We have to think about this now.”
Tens of thousands of premature deaths have been attributed to pollution from Europe’s coal plants.
Exposure to fine particulate matter (PM2.5) alone caused the premature death of an estimated 422,000 people across 41 European countries in 2015, while exposure to NO2 caused the premature death of an estimated 79,000 people in the same region.
The health impacts of exposure to air pollution are diverse, ranging from inflammation of the lungs, to cardiovascular diseases, breathing conditions, cancer and strokes. Recent scientific research has shown air pollution may be damaging every organ in the body.
Fossil fuels
The 4,4 MW Belchatow plant currently accounts for 20 percent of the Polish power market, and is operated by Polish state-owned coal utility company PGE.
Coal accounts for 80 percent of the country its electricity generation, and will remain the dominant source of power supply in the foreseeable future, with a projected 60% of generation still fuelled by lignite in 2030.
PGE plans to expand several fossil fuel projects in Poland, including the opening up of two new mines, the Złoczew and Gubin-Brody lignite mines, and the extension of an opencast mine in the town of Turow, despite protests by Greenpeace and other environmental groups.
The new Złoczew mine alone would produce an additional 18 million tonnes of coal a year, leading to the emission of an estimated 25.74 million tonnes of CO2.
Emissions from fossil fuel combustion saw a sharp increase by 3.5 percent in Poland in 2018, despite an average 2.5 percent decrease across the European Union (EU), according to Eurostat data.
This Author
Arthur Wyns is a biologist and science journalist. He is a climate change researcher at the World Health Organization and tweets from @ArthurWyns.
The Belchatow power plant in Poland has seen a rise in CO2 emissions and air pollution for a third year in a row.
The lignite-fired power station in central Poland increased its emissions in 2018, according to data from Poland’s National Centre for Emissions Management (KOBiZE) and obtained by Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza.
The Belchatow power plant saw an increase in emissions from 34,9 Mt CO2 in 2016, to 38,3 Mt in 2018, a rise of 10 percent. The power plant produces four times as much CO2 a year as all Ryanair flights combined.
Premature deaths
Along with rising emissions, air pollution levels from the plant have also risen in the last two years, with a 54 percent rise in particulate matter, 50 percent rise in sulphur (SO2) and 8 percent rise in nitrogen dioxide (NO2) levels, as well as increased heavy metal concentrations such as lead and arsenic released by the plant.
Robert Biedron, founder of a new Polish social-democratic political party called Wiosna, which will run in the upcoming European elections, said: “After decades of investment in infrastructure, we must finally invest in human wellbeing.
“In Belchatow, we have coal left for ten more years. After that a few thousand people will lose their jobs. We have to think about this now.”
Tens of thousands of premature deaths have been attributed to pollution from Europe’s coal plants.
Exposure to fine particulate matter (PM2.5) alone caused the premature death of an estimated 422,000 people across 41 European countries in 2015, while exposure to NO2 caused the premature death of an estimated 79,000 people in the same region.
The health impacts of exposure to air pollution are diverse, ranging from inflammation of the lungs, to cardiovascular diseases, breathing conditions, cancer and strokes. Recent scientific research has shown air pollution may be damaging every organ in the body.
Fossil fuels
The 4,4 MW Belchatow plant currently accounts for 20 percent of the Polish power market, and is operated by Polish state-owned coal utility company PGE.
Coal accounts for 80 percent of the country its electricity generation, and will remain the dominant source of power supply in the foreseeable future, with a projected 60% of generation still fuelled by lignite in 2030.
PGE plans to expand several fossil fuel projects in Poland, including the opening up of two new mines, the Złoczew and Gubin-Brody lignite mines, and the extension of an opencast mine in the town of Turow, despite protests by Greenpeace and other environmental groups.
The new Złoczew mine alone would produce an additional 18 million tonnes of coal a year, leading to the emission of an estimated 25.74 million tonnes of CO2.
Emissions from fossil fuel combustion saw a sharp increase by 3.5 percent in Poland in 2018, despite an average 2.5 percent decrease across the European Union (EU), according to Eurostat data.
This Author
Arthur Wyns is a biologist and science journalist. He is a climate change researcher at the World Health Organization and tweets from @ArthurWyns.
The Belchatow power plant in Poland has seen a rise in CO2 emissions and air pollution for a third year in a row.
The lignite-fired power station in central Poland increased its emissions in 2018, according to data from Poland’s National Centre for Emissions Management (KOBiZE) and obtained by Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza.
The Belchatow power plant saw an increase in emissions from 34,9 Mt CO2 in 2016, to 38,3 Mt in 2018, a rise of 10 percent. The power plant produces four times as much CO2 a year as all Ryanair flights combined.
Premature deaths
Along with rising emissions, air pollution levels from the plant have also risen in the last two years, with a 54 percent rise in particulate matter, 50 percent rise in sulphur (SO2) and 8 percent rise in nitrogen dioxide (NO2) levels, as well as increased heavy metal concentrations such as lead and arsenic released by the plant.
Robert Biedron, founder of a new Polish social-democratic political party called Wiosna, which will run in the upcoming European elections, said: “After decades of investment in infrastructure, we must finally invest in human wellbeing.
“In Belchatow, we have coal left for ten more years. After that a few thousand people will lose their jobs. We have to think about this now.”
Tens of thousands of premature deaths have been attributed to pollution from Europe’s coal plants.
Exposure to fine particulate matter (PM2.5) alone caused the premature death of an estimated 422,000 people across 41 European countries in 2015, while exposure to NO2 caused the premature death of an estimated 79,000 people in the same region.
The health impacts of exposure to air pollution are diverse, ranging from inflammation of the lungs, to cardiovascular diseases, breathing conditions, cancer and strokes. Recent scientific research has shown air pollution may be damaging every organ in the body.
Fossil fuels
The 4,4 MW Belchatow plant currently accounts for 20 percent of the Polish power market, and is operated by Polish state-owned coal utility company PGE.
Coal accounts for 80 percent of the country its electricity generation, and will remain the dominant source of power supply in the foreseeable future, with a projected 60% of generation still fuelled by lignite in 2030.
PGE plans to expand several fossil fuel projects in Poland, including the opening up of two new mines, the Złoczew and Gubin-Brody lignite mines, and the extension of an opencast mine in the town of Turow, despite protests by Greenpeace and other environmental groups.
The new Złoczew mine alone would produce an additional 18 million tonnes of coal a year, leading to the emission of an estimated 25.74 million tonnes of CO2.
Emissions from fossil fuel combustion saw a sharp increase by 3.5 percent in Poland in 2018, despite an average 2.5 percent decrease across the European Union (EU), according to Eurostat data.
This Author
Arthur Wyns is a biologist and science journalist. He is a climate change researcher at the World Health Organization and tweets from @ArthurWyns.
It took Tony Abbott – the architect of a decade of climate agony for Australian progressives – to boil a catastrophic defeat for Labor down to a trademark slogan.
The former prime minister and Liberal MP said on Saturday night: “Where climate change is a moral issue, we do it tough. But where climate change is an economic issue, as the result tonight shows, we do it very, very well.”
Abbott was, in fact, giving a concession speech. He’d just been thrashed by an independent who made his climate denial the defining issue for voters in the affluent Sydney seat he’d held for 25 years.
Coal country
But away from the lilly pilly-lined streets of northern Sydney, Australians were emphatically rejecting the fullest climate offering from a major party in years.
Labor, led by former union boss Bill Shorten, had come to the election promising to end Australia’s ‘climate wars’ with energy reforms that would foster the growth of renewable energy over the country’s traditionally powerful coal industry. It was, Shorten said, time to end a decade of inaction as Australia recovered from its hottest ever summer.
Shorten had been heavily favoured, with betting companies even paying out on a Labor victory in the week before. Instead, the governing coalition of Liberal and National parties was returned to power, aided by a resounding victory in coal country.
In the central Queensland seats of Dawson, Capricornia and Herbert, the swing to the Coalition was 11.3 percent, 10.7 percent and 7.6 percent. Herbert was one of two seats Labor lost in a state where they had to make gains to win government.
In this arid corner of the north east, Indian company Adani plans to dig a massive and controversial new coal mine. The Coalition has backed the project, which still faces state regulatory hurdles, as a job bonanza for central Queensland. Resources minister Matt Canavan’s response to the government’s re-election was a two word tweet: “START ADANI”.
Potential beneficiaries
On the other hand, Labor has remained ambivalent, saying that it won’t block the development, but it won’t give the project federal finance to build a rail link.
One of the single biggest potential beneficiaries of the Adani project is a billionaire businessman called Clive Palmer. His Waratah Coal company holds major mining leases near the Adani site. The rail and port infrastructure that would service the first mine would make his Alpha North and China First Coal projects, which he claims have even larger reserves, all the more likely to proceed.
In this election, Palmer, a former MP, financed one of the most extraordinary guerrilla campaigns in Australian political history. He reportedly spent AU$60m on Labor-bashing advertising for his own United Australia Party. He ran candidates in every seat, but didn’t win a single one.
Then, under Australia’s preferential voting system, Palmer did a deal that meant his 3.4 percent of the national vote flowed to the Coalition. Late on Saturday, he claimed credit for returning the government.
In Queensland, Palmer’s attacks found their mark. According to Richie Merzian, director of the Australia Institute’s climate programme, Labor’s fence-sitting over Adani “meant they were unpopular in Queensland where the Coalition were successful in equating coal and jobs … and not popular enough in Victoria where the population wanted climate action”.
Major setback
The mining union, which is affiliated to Labor, called on the party to back the Adani project. Instead, Shorten’s election offer to communities impacted by the declining coal industry was the establishment of a ‘just transition authority’, but no finance for restructuring their economies.
Wayne Swan, Labor’s national president and a former treasurer, told the ABC his party had failed to reassure communities that view coal as their lifeblood.
Swan said: “What they want is someone who respects the dignity of their work and their lifestyles in their region and the whole country, not just the Labor party, has to come to grips with that challenge.”
After suffering such a major setback, Guardian Australia’s political editor Katherine Murphy questioned whether Labor would “have the resolve to go to another election championing an ambitious policy” on climate change.
But others argued the party needed to double down on its commitments, not only to cutting emissions, but to the regions that feed the biggest coal export industry on the planet.
Greens MP Adam Bandt said on Twitter that if Labor jumped to the conclusion that only a small target could win the climate policy struggle “it could cost us all dearly”. He called for an Australian version of the green new deal, the massive investment in transitioning to a cleaner economy currently championed by progressives in the US and Europe.
Wishful thinking
Bandt said: “The only way out of this cul-de-sac is with a plan for real jobs in new industries located in these coal communities. A ‘green new deal’ can be picked up and applied across party lines and can work as well in Melbourne as in Capricornia if it’s believable.”
Marc Stears, director of Sydney University’s Policy Lab, told Climate Home News Labor needed to “make the economic case for climate reform bigger and more compelling”.
He said the idea of an Australian green new deal was “on the right track” but its proponents needed to “persuade people that it is real and not just wishful thinking”.
Durable compromise
An even stronger lesson for Australia may come from Germany, where coal is every bit as woven into the political, economic and social fabric.
Last week, Angela Merkel said the country would find a path to reach net-zero emissions by 2050. Germany’s coal commission, with representatives from across industry, unions, science and green groups, has set out a plan to manage the end of coal within two decades. That is slower than climate advocates would like, but represents a durable compromise with an influential coal lobby.
Without that type of engagement, Australian Labor remains vulnerable to an industry that has again demonstrated its close ties to power and to the electorate.
This Author
Karl Mathiesen is Climate Home News’ editor. He has written for national newspapers, newswires and magazines in Australia and the UK. This article was first published on Climate Home News.
