Better management of existing apex predators and compensation schemes for farmers and gamekeepers needed, broadcaster says
Lynx and wolves are likely to become feared and hated if they are reintroduced into Britain’s forests, the adventurer and broadcaster Ray Mears has warned.
Speaking at Cheltenham science festival, he said Britain was not ready for such rewilding schemes, despite the potential ecological benefits.
Continue reading...Populations of bees, spiders, ground beetles and hoverflies have declined twice as fast on land farmed for crops in the past 30 years, despite funding for more sustainable farming methods
Conservation measures over the past 30 years have failed to stop the decline of insects on British farmland, a new report shows. Populations of bees, spiders, ground beetles and hoverflies have disappeared twice as fast in areas intensely farmed for crops, according to the paper, which looked at citizen science data on more than 1,500 invertebrate species.
Although there was a push to intensify agriculture after the second world war, since the early 90s more sustainable and wildlife-friendly farming practices have emerged, with EU agri-environment funding made available for farmers to plant hedgerows and wild flowers, alongside better regulation of pesticides. However, these have not managed to stem biodiversity loss.
Continue reading...Conservationists say plan to increase bearded vulture numbers in north-east would be ‘severely compromised’
Conservationists in Spain are calling for a “profound debate” on how best to balance the protection of wildlife with renewable energy demands after efforts to reintroduce endangered bearded vultures to an eastern area of the country had to be paused because of the threat posed by a huge new windfarm.
The bearded vulture – known in Spanish as the quebrantahuesos, or bone-breaker, because of the way it drops bones from a great height so they shatter and yield their marrow – was common across the country until the 20th century, when it was poisoned and hunted to the brink of extinction.
Continue reading...Analysis shows handful of corporations extract tens of billions of dollars of raw materials a year – and their commitments to restoration vary greatly
A handful of global giants dominate the industrialisation of the Amazon rainforest, extracting tens of billions of dollars of raw materials every year, according to an analysis that highlights how much value is being sucked out of the region with relatively little going back in.
But even as the pace of deforestation hits record highs while standards of living in the Amazon are among the lowest in Brazil, the true scale of extraction remains unknown, with basic details about cattle ranching, logging and mining hard to establish despite efforts to ban commodities linked to its destruction.
Continue reading...Exclusive: Study finds pests could damage crops, and households would incur costs for pesticides, veterinary bills and electrical faults
Failure to stop the spread of an outbreak of invasive fire ants in south-east Queensland could cost the Australian economy more than $1bn a year, including damage to high-value crops, infrastructure and homes.
A previously unreleased cost-benefit analysis, commissioned by a steering committee managing the outbreak of red fire ants and obtained by Guardian Australia, says that eradication of the species provides “much higher returns” than suppression measures that simply limit its spread.
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Continue reading...Photos and videos on phone found near site of men’s killing show some of their last movements in Brazilian Amazon
Some of the last images of Dom Phillips and Bruno Pereira have been found after Indigenous activists recovered a mobile phone Pereira was carrying when the two men were killed in the Brazilian Amazon last year.
The phone was found last October when activists from Univaja, the Indigenous association where Pereira worked, returned to a stretch of flooded forest along the Itaquaí River where the men’s bodies were taken after they were shot dead on their boat on the morning of 5 June 2022.
Continue reading...Analysis shows area includes 9,000 hectares where there was already active logging as pressure grows on government to end practice
Conservationists say forest areas that include 41,000 hectares of nationally important koala habitat have been identified for potential logging on the north coast of New South Wales in the region’s 12-month logging plan.
The analysis, by the North East Forest Alliance, comes as pressure grows on the NSW government to cease logging of native forests after the Victorian government announced logging in its native forests would end in December, six years earlier than planned.
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Continue reading...Yellow flower that only grows in York went extinct in 1991 brought back to life by Natural England experts
York groundsel was a cheerful yellow flower that slipped into global extinction in 1991, thanks to overzealous application of weedkiller in the city of its name.
But now the urban plant has been bought back to life in the first ever de-extinction in Britain, and is flowering again in York.
Continue reading...Devon cattle stand in for extinct aurochs in project aimed at protecting precious species such as sand lizards
The mighty aurochs have gone, as have the tarpan horses and the wild boars, but modern-day substitutes have been drafted in to recreate a large open “savannah” on heathland in Dorset.
Instead of aurochs, considered the wild ancestor of domestic cattle, 200 red Devon cattle are to be found roaming the Purbeck Heaths, while Exmoor ponies are stand-ins for the tarpan horses and curly coated Mangalitsa pigs are doing the sort of rooting around that boars used to excel at here.
Continue reading...Fears biodiversity proposals could be abandoned amid opposition from lobby groups and some countries
MEPs have been accused of whipping up “a culture war against nature” after the fisheries and agriculture committees voted against the EU’s biodiversity restoration law.
Last June, the European Commission revealed proposals for legally binding targets for member states to restore wildlife on land, in rivers and the sea. The nature restoration law was announced alongside separate legislation proposing a crackdown on chemical pesticides with the aim of reversing the catastrophic loss of wildlife on the continent.
Continue reading...Global trade in chocolate, worth more than $1tn a year, is leading to widespread deforestation in Ivory Coast and Ghana
The world’s hunger for chocolate is a major cause of the destruction of protected forests in west Africa, scientists have said.
Satellite maps of Ivory Coast and Ghana showed swathes of formerly dense forest had become cocoa plantations since 2000, according to a study.
Continue reading...‘For just 10% of the stage-three tax cuts, we could recover every one of Australia’s almost 2,000 threatened species,’ says ecologist
Leading Australian scientists have accused the Albanese government of offering “grossly inadequate” funding to stop environmental decline, and warned that failing to protect nature would lead to “an existential threat greater than inflation”.
The Biodiversity Council, an independent research hub, said the limited funding for environment programs announced this week suggested that environment minister Tanya Plibersek’s promised target of ending species extinctions in the country was “still hollow”.
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Continue reading...Scientific committee calls for ‘urgent action’ from the Albanese government to address damage caused to sensitive alpine ecosystems
Feral horses in the Australian alps pose an imminent threat to the Albanese government’s zero extinctions target, a scientific committee that advises the government on endangered species has told a parliamentary inquiry.
The threatened species scientific committee (TSSC) says feral horses “may be the crucial factor that causes final extinction” of six critically endangered animals and at least two critically endangered plants.
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Continue reading...Environmentalists from the Philippines urge investors to avoid LNG projects which they say threaten the Verde Island Passage
Campaigners from the Philippines have urged British banks not to fund the expansion of fossil fuel use in their country. It follows a huge oil spill that threatened a globally important marine biodiversity hotspot.
Filipino environmentalists have travelled to the UK to meet representatives from Barclays, Standard Chartered and HSBC as part of efforts to stop the expansion of liquefied natural gas (LNG) power plants and terminals in and around the Verde Island Passage, a global marine biodiversity hotspot known for its whale sharks, corals, turtles and rich fisheries, which was badly affected by the oil spill this year.
Continue reading...World’s biggest grain trader accused of ‘shoddy due diligence’ on deforestation and alleged rights violations
The world’s largest grain trader, Cargill, is facing a first-ever legal challenge in the United States over its failure to remove deforestation and human rights abuses from its soya supply chain in Brazil.
ClientEarth, an environmental law organisation, filed the formal complaint on Thursday, accusing Cargill of inadequate monitoring and a laggard response to the decline of the Amazon rainforest and other globally important biomes, such as the Cerrado savannah and the Atlantic Forest.
Soya beans bought from third-party traders, which make up 42% of all Brazilian soya Cargill purchases.
Soya beans owned by other companies that passes through Cargill ports.
Indirect land use change.
Soya sourced from the Cerrado savannah.
Soya sourced from the Brazilian Atlantic Forest.
Continue reading...PM says he is pleased to contribute to Friends of the Western Ground Parrot as the king ‘has long championed conservation’
Australia is gifting King Charles III a donation to Friends of the Western Ground Parrot to mark his coronation.
The government has pledged $10,000 to help conserve the critically endangered “shy and rarely seen” species in honour of the monarch, on behalf of the people of Australia.
Continue reading...Conservationists call for national response plan for possible arrival of HPAI H5, which so far has affected 300 species worldwide
Conservationists have warned Australia is poorly prepared for the potential arrival of a deadly form of avian influenza that has killed millions of birds and thousands of mammals overseas.
When HPAI H5 (high pathogenicity avian influenza of subtype H5) arrived in South America late last year it killed more than 60,000 seabirds and 3,500 sea lions within weeks in Peru alone.
Continue reading...Sixty of the keystone species released near Bordeaux to feast on waste from wild cattle and help restore a vital habitat on the Atlantic coast
In a forest clearing filled with cowpats, French history is being made: the country’s first translocation of dung beetles in a nature reserve near Bordeaux.
With the same pomp and ceremony afforded to the release of an Iberian lynx or a European bison, about 60 “ball rolling” insects were brought to the marshy forests of Étang de Cousseau in south-west France on Wednesday to restore a vital ecosystem function on the Atlantic coast.
Continue reading...Artwork exhibited at Kensington Palace among nearly 2,000 artefacts in royal collection
For more than a decade, Prince William has spoken out vehemently against the use of ivory, calling it “a symbol of destruction, not of luxury”. The royal patron of the anti-ivory charity Tusk has lobbied leaders in China, the US and countries across Africa.
He has even said that he wants to destroy all the ivory owned by the royals. In 2019, a spokesperson for William clarified that while destroying all the ivory in the royal collection was beyond the prince’s control, he had “ensured there is no ivory from the collection at Kensington Palace”, his place of residence.
Continue reading...Europe accused of ‘neocolonialism’ for using vassal small island states to sway policy and continue ‘disgraceful plundering’ of distant waters
More than half of the EU’s delegation to a crucial body of tuna stock regulators is made up of fishing industry lobbyists, the Guardian’s Seascape project can reveal, as Europe is accused of “neocolonial” overfishing in the Indian Ocean.
The numbers could shed some light on why the EU recently objected to an agreement by African and Asian coastal nations to restrict harmful fish aggregating devices (FADs) that disproportionately harvest juvenile tuna. Stocks of yellowfin tuna are overfished in the Indian Ocean.
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