Category Archives: Conservation

Bee-friendly urban wildflower meadows prove a hit with German city dwellers

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Countrywide scheme is flourishing after being set up to reverse a 75% decline in insect populations

To escape the Berlin bustle on a summer afternoon, all that Derek O’Doyle and his dog Frida have to do is lap the noisy building site outside their inner-city apartment, weave their way through the queue in front of the ice-cream van, and squeeze between two gridlocked lorries to cross over Baerwaldstrasse.

Bordered by a one-way traffic system lies a bucolic 1,720 sq metre haven as colourful as a Monet landscape: blue cornflowers, red poppies, white cow parsley and purple field scabious dot a sea of nettles and wild grass as armies of insects buzz through the air. Two endangered carpenter bees, larger than their honey bee cousins and with pitch-black abdomens, gorge themselves on a bush of yellow gorse.

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New oilfield in African wilderness threatens lives of 130,000 elephants

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Exploratory project in Botswana and Namibia is threat to ecosystems, local communities and wildlife, conservationists say

Tens of thousands of African elephants are under threat from plans for a massive new oilfield in one of the continent’s last great wildernesses, experts have warned.

Campaigners and conservationists fear the proposed oilfield stretching across Namibia and Botswana would devastate regional ecosystems and wildlife as well as local communities.

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The whale sentinel: two decades of watching humpback numbers boom

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After more than 20 years watching from the cliffs of Botany Bay, Wayne Reynolds’ passion is having tangible results

He may have seen it tens of thousands of times before but when Wayne Reynolds spots a whale emerging from the water, he reacts with the excitement of a child pointing out a rollercoaster at an amusement park.

“Oh wow, there’s a minke and her calf,” he yells out with boyish enthusiasm from the rocky cliff at Potter Point in Kurnell, in Sydney’s south. “I just go into auto-mode, I can’t help it.”

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‘Gamechanging’ £10m environmental DNA project to map life in world’s rivers

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eBioAtlas programme aims to identify fish, birds, amphibians and land animals in freshwater systems from the Ganges to the Mekong

Concealed by the turbid, swirling waters of the Amazon, the Mekong and the Congo, the biodiversity of the world’s great rivers has largely remained a mystery to scientists. But now a multimillion-pound project aims to describe and identify the web of life in major freshwater ecosystems around the world with “gamechanging” DNA technology.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and UK-based environmental DNA (eDNA) specialists NatureMetrics have launched a partnership to take thousands of water samples from freshwater river systems like the Ganges and the Niger delta to identify the fish, birds, amphibians and land animals that live in and around them.

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‘We’re causing our own misery’: oceanographer Sylvia Earle on the need for sea conservation

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‘Queen of the Deep’ says it is not too late to reverse human-made damage to oceans and preserve biodiversity

The world has the opportunity in the next 10 years to restore our oceans to health after decades of steep decline – but to achieve that, people must wake up to the problem, join in efforts to protect marine areas and stop eating tuna, according to the oceanographer and deep sea explorer Sylvia Earle.

“We are at the most exciting time maybe ever to be a human, because we’re armed with knowledge,” said Earle, also known as the Queen of the Deep and “her Deepness”. Earle has also set numerous records for deep sea diving, and was the first woman to serve as chief scientist of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

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Finding fangs: new film exposes illicit trade killing off Bolivia’s iconic jaguar

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Undercover documentary investigates the trafficking of Latin America’s big cat to meet demand in China

Elizabeth Unger was a 25-year-old biology graduate working as a PhD research assistant for big cat and climate projects in Latin America when she heard about the Bolivian authorities intercepting dozens of packages containing jaguar fangs sent by Chinese citizens to addresses in China.

“I was really blown away as [the story] was completely under the radar,” she says. Six years later, she is making her directorial debut with a film about the trade, which is contributing to a decline in the population of Latin America’s iconic big cat.

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We are running out of time to reach deal to save natural world, says UN talks chair

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Warning comes amid fears of further delays to Kunming summit, which aims to agree on curbing destruction of ecosystems

The world is running out of time to reach an ambitious deal to stem the destruction of the natural world, the co-chair of negotiations for a crucial UN wildlife summit has warned, amid fears of a third delay to the talks.

Negotiators are scheduled to meet in Kunming, China, in October for Cop15, the biggest biodiversity summit in a decade, to reach a hoped-for Paris-style agreement on preventing wildlife extinctions and the human-driven destruction of the planet’s ecosystems.

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NSW buys 60,000 hectares of farmland near Broken Hill for outback nature reserve

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Purchase of Langidoon and Metford sheep stations is the second-biggest national parks land procurement in NSW in the last decade

The New South Wales government has purchased more than 60,000 hectares of farmland near Broken Hill for an outback nature reserve, home to at least 14 threatened species.

In an effort to expand conservation efforts in the traditionally underrepresented far west of the state, on Monday NSW environment minister Matt Kean announced the government had finalised the purchase of the neighbouring Langidoon and Metford sheep stations.

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A journey down WA’s mighty Martuwarra, raging river and sacred ancestor

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Traditional owners are standing together to protect the Fitzroy – a ‘beautiful, living water system’. Just watch out for the bird-sized spiders …

A Nyikina man, Mark Coles Smith, and his fellow travellers began their 400km journey down the mighty Martuwarra (Fitzroy River) on a flood plain covered in giant spiders.

“Bird-sized” spiders were clinging to the canopy, jostling for space on branches protruding above flood water that stretched for kilometres in every direction.

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Education for girls and vaccines can save Africa from disaster | Phillip Inman

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Parts of the continent potentially face a decade of crisis. These two measures are more important than any other in avoiding it

There are so many good causes in the world it is often difficult to know where aid money should go. As leaders line up to attend the G7 summit in Cornwall, the most effective destinations for aid money have become clearer – a global vaccination programme and improving girls’ education.

This is especially true in sub-Saharan Africa, where so much can go wrong over the next 10 years – a population explosion, massive biodiversity loss, desertification, famine and mass migration to mention just a few – that unless we focus our efforts on vaccines and girls’ education, whatever is done to alleviate poverty or tackle the climate emergency will be threatened or even sabotaged in almost every other region of the world.

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Amazônia: life and death in the Brazilian rainforest

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The 10th edition of the Carmignac photojournalism award was dedicated to the Amazon and the issues related to its deforestation. Photojournalist Tommaso Protti, accompanied by journalist Sam Cowie, travelled thousands of miles across the Brazilian Amazon. From the eastern region of Maranhão to the western region of Rondônia, through the states of Pará and Amazonas, they portrayed modern-day life in the Brazilian Amazon, where social and humanitarian crises overlap with destruction of the rainforest.

As I sat in my hotel room in Marabá, a city in the Amazon state of Pará, Jornal Nacional – Brazil’s flagship news programme – transmitted images of the country’s newly elected president, Jair Bolsonaro. “The Indigenous in their reservations are like animals in a zoo,” he said. It was November 2018.

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‘A kind of rat with thorns’: the comic book busting myths about the Madras hedgehog

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The elusive nocturnal creature is rarely seen in Tamil Nadu. One ecologist has made it his mission to spread the word through colourful adventures

The brightly coloured panels of Brawin Kumar’s comic book tell the story of how two children rescue a hedgehog from an unlicensed medicine man. The mother hedgehog is delighted to be reunited with her little one, as she has lost most of her offspring to road traffic.

Kumar, an Indian researcher and ecologist, came up with the idea of writing the book in Tamil to create awareness among children who live in and around the Madras hedgehog’s habitat. Many of those children will never have seen the nocturnal creature, which, unlike the British hedgehog, aestivates (lies in a state of torpor or dormancy) in the summer instead of hibernating in the winter.

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‘A huge surprise’ as giant river otter feared extinct in Argentina pops up

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Conservationists thrilled at the sighting of the wild predator, last seen in the country in the 1980s

“It was a huge surprise,” said Sebastián Di Martino, director of conservation at Fundación Rewilding Argentina. “I was incredulous. An incredible feeling of so much happiness. I didn’t know if I should try to follow it or rush back to our station to tell the others.”

The cause of the excitement was the sighting, last week, of a wild giant river otter – an animal feared extinct in the country due to habitat loss and hunting – on the Bermejo River in Impenetrable national park, in north-east Argentina’s Chaco province. The last sighting of a giant otter in the wild in Argentina was in the 1980s. On the Bermejo, none have been seen for more than a century.

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Green growth: the save-the-mangrove scheme reaping rewards for women in Kenya

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A community project on the Lamu archipelago trains women in preserving this vital ecosystem and provides business loans

Kenya’s mangroves have been harvested for centuries, the timber used in shipbuilding and for ornate doors and furniture as well as shipped across the Indian Ocean and around the world.

The Lamu archipelago accounts for more than half of Kenya’s mangrove forests. But across the country an estimated 40% of this precious commodity has been degraded, as more mangroves have been cut to provide construction materials and charcoal for cooking, and oil leakages from cruise liners and ships that pass along the coast kill off young saplings. The area has become one of the most degraded marine ecosystems in east Africa.

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Leonardo DiCaprio pledges $43m to restore the Galápagos Islands

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Environmentalist actor, with other conservation groups, aims to rewild the entire archipelago and other Pacific islands in Latin America

Leonardo DiCaprio has announced a $43m (£30.4m) pledge to enact sweeping conservation operations across the Galápagos Islands, with his social media accounts taken over by a wildlife veterinarian and island restoration specialist.

The initiative, in partnership with Re:wild, an organisation founded this year by a group of renowned conservation scientists and DiCaprio, the Galápagos National Park Directorate, Island Conservation, and local communities, aims to rewild the entire Galápagos Islands, as well as all of Latin America’s Pacific archipelagos.

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World is home to 50bn birds, ‘breakthrough’ citizen science research estimates

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University of New South Wales led study suggests six times as many individual birds as humans but that many species are very rare

There are about 50 billion individual birds in the world, according to new research that uses citizen science observations to try to estimate population numbers for almost 10,000 species.

The paper, led by scientists at the University of New South Wales, suggests there are about six times as many birds on the planet as humans – but that many individual species are very rare.

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‘I’m seen as the fool’: the farmers putting trees back into the UK’s fields

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It’s hoped a 12-year trial in Devon will persuade policymakers to back silvopasture to benefit the soil, livestock and climate

Andy Gray stands beside an enormous hill of bare red earth and smiles with a hint of mischief. This is his best field, its soils known as Crediton red land. The region was once known for producing swedes prized by Covent Garden market. Now, every six metres, planted in rows 14 metres apart, stands a tree guard shielding a young oak, aspen or alder.

“You can grow anything on it and I’m planting trees,” says Gray, a 16th-generation Devon farmer. “I’m seen as the fool on the hill. One neighbour said ‘you might as well concrete it over and build houses’. They could be right. Who knows?”

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Campaigners lose court case to stop Ugandan forest clearance

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Court ruling gives go-ahead for sugar plantation in Bugoma forest, home to endangered chimpanzees

Conservationists in Uganda have condemned as “shallow and absurd” a court ruling that authorised the government to allow swathes of a tropical forest to be cleared for a sugar-cane plantation.

Three environmental groups had taken the government to court over a decision to allow Hoima Sugar Ltd to build on 5,500 hectares (13,500 acres) in the Bugoma Forest Reserve.

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Cod almighty: how a ‘mythical’ Faroes delicacy has vanished

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A giant cod that was once a fishing staple is now so rare it has become the preserve of a few fine diners

It was no ordinary cod that Teitur Christensen was preparing. The head chef at Barbara Fish House, one of four restaurants located in tiny wooden houses in Tórshavn, the Faroe Islands’ capital, Christensen was hosting what has become known as a “Bank evening”, because of the main dish. In the small cosy rooms of these ancient houses – one of which was built more than 500 years ago – his team was getting ready to serve what has become an almost mythical fish: the Faroe Bank cod.

The Faroe Bank cod’s reputation is partly built on its size. It is huge: a three-year-old specimen is already twice as large, on average, as the Atlantic cod. But it is also legendary because of its rarity. A genetically distinctive member of the cod family, it was once plentiful before being nearly fished to extinction. In 2008, all commercial fishing of Faroe Bank cod was banned. Only the Faroe Marine Research Institute (Famri) is now allowed to catch them, when its researchers survey the fish population twice a year.

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Floating ‘Wall-E’ scarecrow stops seabirds diving into fishing nets

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Googly-eyed device to be tested in gillnet fisheries after study finds it deters long-tailed ducks

Scarecrows may be outstanding in their field, but now scientists have created an unusual floating version that could help reduce the number of vulnerable seabirds caught by fishing nets.

The device, known as a looming-eyes buoy (LEB), and developed in collaboration with engineers from Fishtek Marine, was trialled in Küdema Bay, Saaremaa island, Estonia, on long-tailed ducks. It uses bright eyespots and looming movements to act as a natural deterrent, preventing seabirds from diving into gillnets – vertical nets used in small-scale fisheries in many countries.

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