Category Archives: Environment

Biden raises hopes of addressing climate crisis as Cop26 nears

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President has vowed to rejoin Paris agreement, cut fossil fuel reliance, and invest in low-carbon growth

Joe Biden’s pledges of strong action on the climate crisis have buoyed international hopes that 2021 can be a breakthrough year, resetting the world on a greener path to net zero greenhouse gas emissions.

Climate experts cheered the inauguration of the new US president, who has vowed to rejoin the Paris agreement, rethink US reliance on fossil fuels, and devote hundreds of billions of dollars in stimulus spending to low-carbon economic growth.

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Sweden to build reindeer bridges over roads and railways

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‘Renoducts’ will help animals who have to roam further for food due to global heating

Sweden is to build up to a dozen bridges so reindeer can safely cross railway lines and major roads in the north of the country as global heating forces them to roam further afield in search of food.

State broadcaster SVT said the transport authority aimed to start work on the first of the new bridges, named “renoducts”, a portmanteau from ren (reindeer) and viaduct, later this year near the eastern city of Umea.

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‘One of a kind’: calls to protect Alabama’s 60,000-year-old underwater forest

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Efforts are under way to designate site of submerged forest off the Alabama coast a marine sanctuary

When divers jump into a particular stretch of water off the coast of Alabama, they travel back to a time before humans arrived in the new world.

Submerged below the waters are the remains of a cypress tree forest that grew 60,000 years ago, but was inundated by the Gulf of Mexico and preserved from decomposition beneath sediment. Nothing like Alabama’s underwater forest, in terms of age or scale, has ever been found.

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Global sales of electric cars accelerate fast in 2020 despite pandemic

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Sales of electric cars rose by 43% while overall car sales slumped by a fifth last year

Global sales of electric cars accelerated fast in 2020, rising by 43% to more than 3m, despite overall car sales slumping by a fifth during the coronavirus pandemic.

Tesla was the brand selling the most electric cars, delivering almost 500,000, followed by Volkswagen. Sales of electric cars more than doubled in Europe, pushing the region past China as the world’s biggest market for them, according to data published on Tuesday by EV-volumes.com, a Sweden-based consultancy.

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The green cleaner: 15 natural ways to spruce up your home – from nettles to rainwater

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Former Bake Off winner Nancy Birtwhistle says we have been ‘brainwashed’ into believing we need harsh chemicals to clean our homes. Here’s how to take a more environmentally friendly approach

It was a filthy washing machine that prompted Nancy Birtwhistle to embrace the power of eco-friendly cleaning. “I was nearly at the point where I thought I needed a new washing machine, because it was a disgrace,” she says. “And that’s the sort of culture we’ve become: ‘I’ll replace it.’” Instead, she gave it a thorough clean and switched to homemade detergent. She says her machine no longer gets gunked up from chemical overload.

Birtwhistle, a no-nonsense retired GP practice manager and grandmother of nine, won the fifth series of The Great British Bake Off in 2014, but she has also become known on social media for her green cleaning tips. Once a fan of bleach and strongly perfumed products, she now makes everything herself. “We’ve been brainwashed into thinking that natural products are inferior to synthetic ones. I used to use bicarbonate of soda in the 1970s, but I stopped using it because there were products I thought would do a quicker job, but they’re causing such a lot of damage to the environment.” She has now written a book, Clean & Green: 101 Hints and Tips for a More Eco-friendly Home, which is packed with advice and ingenious tricks. Green cleaning, she says, is “accessible for everybody. I made the point of making it affordable.” Here are a few of her tips to get you started.

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Electric car batteries with five-minute charging times produced

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Exclusive: first factory production means recharging could soon be as fast as filling up petrol or diesel vehicles

Batteries capable of fully charging in five minutes have been produced in a factory for the first time, marking a significant step towards electric cars becoming as fast to charge as filling up petrol or diesel vehicles.

Electric vehicles are a vital part of action to tackle the climate crisis but running out of charge during a journey is a worry for drivers. The new lithium-ion batteries were developed by the Israeli company StoreDot and manufactured by Eve Energy in China on standard production lines.

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Sámi reindeer herders file lawsuit against Norway windfarm

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Indigenous communities say planned Øyfjellet turbines will interfere with migration paths

Indigenous reindeer herders are bringing a legal action against a proposed wind power project that would be one of the largest in Norway.

The Sámi herders from Nordland county are accusing the Øyfjellet windfarm constructors of breaking licensing agreements which stipulated that construction would not interfere with reindeer migration paths.

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‘We need answers’: why are people living near Dutch goat farms getting sick?

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A decade after an outbreak of Q fever killed 95 people in the Netherlands, scientists fear the emergence of a new disease

In early 2008, Jeannette van de Ven began to see a slightly higher rate of miscarriages among the goats on her dairy farm in the south of the Netherlands.

“We sent the samples to the veterinary authority. Nine out of 10 results showed no explanation. Only maybe toxoplasmosis from cats. We had no cats,” she says.

Van de Ven, who keeps a herd of around 1,700 dairy goats in Noord-Brabant, a province densely populated with goat farms, kept sending samples. Finally, in May 2008 an outbreak of the respiratory infection Q fever was confirmed. It infects livestock including goats, sheep and cattle, and is found in placenta, amniotic fluid, urine, faeces and milk.

The disease turned into a nightmare for the Netherlands after thousands of people also became infected during the outbreak, which lasted from 2007 to 2010. The Dutch government culled more than 50,000 dairy goats on 55 farms in an effort to stop the spread of the disease.

About half of the humans infected ended up developing complications, such as heart failure, and 95 people died.

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Carbon capture is vital to meeting climate goals, scientists tell green critics

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Supporters insist that storage technology is not a costly mistake but the best way for UK to cut emissions from heavy industry

Engineers and geologists have strongly criticised green groups who last week claimed that carbon capture and storage schemes – for reducing fossil fuel emissions – are costly mistakes.

The scientists insisted that such schemes are vital weapons in the battle against global heating and warn that failure to set up ways to trap carbon dioxide and store it underground would make it almost impossible to hold net emissions to below zero by 2050.

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‘My neighbourhood is being destroyed to pacify his supporters’: the race to complete Trump’s wall

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In his final months in office, Donald Trump has ramped up construction on his promised physical border between the US and Mexico – devastating wildlife habitats and increasing the migrant death toll

At Sierra Vista Ranch in Arizona near the Mexican border, Troy McDaniel is warming up his helicopter. McDaniel, tall and slim in a tan jumpsuit, began taking flying lessons in the 80s, and has since logged 2,000 miles in the air. The helicopter, a cosy, two-seater Robinson R22 Alpha is considered a work vehicle and used to monitor the 640-acre ranch, but it’s clear he relishes any opportunity to fly. “We will have no fun at all,” he deadpans.

McDaniel and his wife, Melissa Owen, bought their ranch and the 100-year-old adobe house that came with it in 2003. Years before, Owen began volunteering at the nearby Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge, and fell in love with the beauty and natural diversity of the area, as well as the quiet of their tiny town. That all changed last July when construction vehicles and large machinery started “barrelling down the two-lane state road”, says Owen.

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Left stranded: US military sonar linked to whale beachings in Pacific, say scientists

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Islands surrounded by US military study area, including Guam and Saipan, call for activity that harms the whales to stop

In the midst of the western Pacific, flanked by the world’s deepest ocean trench, the waters off the Mariana Islands are home and habitat to whales, dolphins, and countless other marine mammals as they breed and feed.

It’s also where they encounter the might of the US military.

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Air pollution will lead to mass migration, say experts after landmark ruling

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Call for world leaders to act in wake of French extradition case that turned on environmental concerns

Air pollution does not respect national boundaries and environmental degradation will lead to mass migration in the future, said a leading barrister in the wake of a landmark migration ruling, as experts warned that government action must be taken as a matter of urgency.

Sailesh Mehta, a barrister specialising in environmental cases, said: “The link between migration and environmental degradation is clear. As global warming makes parts of our planet uninhabitable, mass migration will become the norm. Air and water pollution do not respect national boundaries. We can stop a humanitarian and political crisis from becoming an existential one. But our leaders must act now.”

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Pope’s adviser says Covid has highlighted ‘existential’ climate risk

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Focus must be on justice for those fleeing impact of extreme weather events, says new scientific adviser to Vatican

The pope’s newly appointed scientific adviser said the coronavirus pandemic has forced world leaders to face up to the “existential risk” of the climate crisis.

Prof Ottmar Edenhofer said rich countries now had a moral duty to compensate poor countries already suffering the impacts.

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2020 was hottest year on record by narrow margin, Nasa says

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Due to different methods, US Noaa judged year as fractionally cooler than 2016 while UK Met Office put 2020 in close second place

Last year was by a narrow margin the hottest ever on record, according to Nasa, with the climate crisis stamping its mark on 2020 through soaring temperatures, enormous hurricanes and unprecedented wildfires.

The average global land and ocean temperature in 2020 was the highest ever measured, Nasa announced on Thursday, edging out the previous record set in 2016 by less than a tenth of a degree.

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And then there were two: can northern white rhinos be saved from extinction?

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There are only two remaining rhinos of this species, a mother and daughter, but scientists see new hope in stem cell breakthroughs

“I watch these beautiful animals walk the path toward extinction every day,” keeper James Mwenda tells me. He’s out in the Kenyan bush, swatting flies. The anti-poaching K-9 dogs bark in the background. “I’ve watched their numbers fall from seven to two ... Working with them and watching what’s happening – it’s an emotional freefall.” He smiles, clearly resigned to the pain of bearing witness. “But I’ve dedicated my life to it.”

The window to keep the northern white rhino from going functionally extinct to fully extinct is closing fast. Were things left only to nature, the two remaining rhinos – elderly, calm Najin and her feisty 20-year-old daughter Fatu – would be the last of their kind to graze the African grasslands. After civil war, habitat loss, and aggressive poaching, scientists declared the species extinct in the wild in 2008.

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‘Carbon-neutrality is a fairy tale’: how the race for renewables is burning Europe’s forests

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Wood pellets are sold as a clean alternative to coal. But is the subsidised bioenergy boom accelerating the climate crisis?

Kalev Järvik stands on a bald patch of land in the heart of Estonia’s Haanja nature reserve and remembers when he could walk straight from one side of the reserve to the other under a canopy of trees.

Järvik has lived in the Haanja uplands in the southern county of Võru for more than 10 years. His closeness to the forest has shaped his life as a carpenter and the fortunes of the surrounding villages, with their handicraft traditions – a substitute for farming on the poor arable land. Upcountry, travel literature promotes the region to city dwellers, promising its ancient woodlands as a place to rest and reinvigorate the mind.

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‘Tree of life’: aerial photos reveal arboreal patterns at Lake Cakora in NSW – in pictures

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Amateur photographer Derry Moroney lives on the mid-corth coast of New South Wales in the community of Brooms Head. For the past three years he has been photographing landscapes, animals and insects. ‘With our pristine beaches and Yuraygir national park on my doorstep, I really didn’t have to travel very far,’ he says.

In July 2020 Moroney followed the water upstream from the estuary at Brooms Head and stumbled on to Lake Cakora. Using his drone he captured stunning images of arboreal-like drainage channels in Lake Cakora. ‘The tea trees along the banks colour the water running off into the lake after a big storm,’ he says, describing the patterns as ‘like a tree of life’.

You can see more of his work on Instagram at @derry_moroney_photography

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Yellow mealworm safe for humans to eat, says EU food safety agency

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Move paves way for high-protein maggot-like insect to be approved for consumption across Europe

Yellow mealworm finger foods, smoothies, biscuits, pasta and burgers could soon be mass produced across Europe after the insect became the first to be found safe for human consumption by the EU food safety agency.

The delicacies may not be advisable for everyone, however. Those with prawn and dustmite allergies are likely to suffer a reaction to the Tenebrio molitor larvae, whether eaten in powder form as part of a recipe or as a crunchy snack, perhaps dipped in chocolate.

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Why are ocean warming records being broken year after year?

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If you want to understand global heating, you have to measure and examine ocean warming trends

As if 2020 could get any worse, the latest research showed that oceans hit their highest recorded temperatures, a record that keeps getting broken year after year.

Why are the oceans so important? It is quite simple: almost all of the extra heat we gain because of greenhouse gases ultimately ends up in the oceans. In fact, the oceans absorb more than 90% of the excess heat. Consequently, if you want to understand global warming, you have to measure ocean warming.

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