Wildlife and conservation new, wild travel information and links for booking
Uganda has suffered during lockdown. As much as 7% of the countries population works in tourism, a sector which has been either totally shut down, or greatly reduced over the last few years. Several other countries like Tanzania have suffered in a similar way.
How can we expect countries to protect huge ecosystems if the income to protect them can dry up with no warning?
Continue reading “Lockdown has shown the perils of overreliance on tourism: what to do”I wrote back in March about a Walrus that was seen around Ireland for some time.
There were 2 walrus in British waters last year, a male and a female. The last male walrus and his harem of 3 females were killed back in 1847. Both walrus are thought to be young.
2 Walrus in a country of ours is not many. Indeed, 2 walrus in the waters of the British Isles is very few. However, if the same 2 walrus were to return next year and meet, it is not impossible that young walrus result. This could become the start of a new walrus colony.
We do not think of the UK as an Arctic country, but we are a natural part of the Walrus range so the natural return of these animals would be very positive.
Could Walrus return, and thrive here? could we have a population of hundreds of walrus in a few decades? The advantage of sea-faring mammals, is that they can return on their own. Walrus can be dangerous if humans get too close, never-the-less the risk of harm to humans is incredibly low, indeed far different to that of wolves and bears (and the risks of injury from these species are already very low). The return of walrus can only be good. They are essential for a healthy sea ecosystem, in the same way that land based carnivores are also needed.
Were a male and a female walrus to meet somewhere remote on the coast of Scotland, I could well imagine it being the start of a Walrus colony in the UK once again. The last dominant male and his 3 sows were killed about 150 years ago, it is about time that this animal would return. Walrus have significant impacts on ecosystems that they live in. Indeed, they do so much, that they are known are keystone species. so their permanent return would be highly positive. Importantly, as they prefer feeding at the bottom of shallow waters, eating clams, molluscs, worms, snail, soft shell crabs, shrimps and sea cucumbers, they are not generally competing with any of the species that humans harvest.
I hope to be able to report on more similar visits in the near future.
Incredible progress has been made over the last couple of decades towards greening our grid. Coal is now supplying a very small percentage of our power, and this is likely to fully disappear in the next few years. Gas is the only remaining fossil fuel on our grid. We mad roughly 28 gigawats of electricity from gas in 2018 (last normal year before epidemic). There are plenty of ways to get this from clean sources
As an example, 1 megawatt of solar panels takes roughly 4 acres, and costs about 1 million pounds. Therefore, 1 gigawatt would take roughly 7 square miles and cost roughly 1 billion. That means to replace 28 gigawatt hours of gas generation with solar, would cost roughly 28 billion. The batteries would cost about 2 billion for a similar quantity. In terms of area, we would need roughly 150 miles, which is roughly 2/3 of all the rooftops of the UK housing stock. If, however, all UK commercial governmental and industrial buildings have their roofs covered in solar panels, this would likely take a great deal of the capacity needed. Even if you assume we need extra for night time power, we can not be talking more than 50 billion.
I am not saying that the government needs to invest this now. However, as gas powerplants do not last more than about 25 years, we can assume that by 2050 all the current ones would be decommissioned. If as each gas powered plant goes offline it was replaced with solar and batteries, the cost would be roughly £1.8 billion a year while a huge cost to many countries, would essentially be a rounding error in the UK.
Norway has had incredibly generous electric car subsidies. This has meant that the number of people changing to electric cars are so high that the tax from gas guzzlers is falling faster than they anticipated. Electric cars are already 77.5% of new cars sold. This compares to the UK at 15% of new cars being electric, and the USA 2.6%. I find the USA particularly strange as they are the country which has lead to the rise of Tesla- though admittedly given the rise speed that tesla has been growing, this is probably out of date. With tesla, if the numbers are just 3 years out of date the number of deliveries has trebled (if you look back to 2013, only 8 years, there is only 20,000 sales, yet in 2021 936,000 were sold 4700% growth in 8 years).
Continue reading “Is Norway having problems funding their country without combustion engine cars”Perhaps a more alarming way of looking at this, worldwide fossil fuel subsidies last year were $11 million a minute.
Just think what that amount of money could do for mitigating climate change and reversing the damage on the natural world.
Continue reading “Worldwide fossil fuel subsidies last year were $5.9 trillion!”Across the world many governments make money by allowing hunters to take a certain percentage of their population each year. In most countries this percentage is worked out carefully, so as to not damage the population in the long run.
It has been confirmed! An animal seen in Calvados, France was a male wolf. They have not been seen in this part of France for over 100 years.
In Brazil, one of the main drivers of deforestation is for pasture for beef. It is therefore completely foolish for those in developed countries to eat Brazilian beef – if we do, we are paying them to do the world (and therefore us) incalculable harm.
Importantly, these people can wait. If we have a moratorium on grazing on newly deforested land, the land owner can wait a few years or a decade then its value jumps. This move was taken after it became clear that “cattle laundering” was going on.
Around the world we are in a period where there are lots of people struggling where they are. Whether due to weather or war or crime, there are significant numbers of people who are on the move. Perhaps the most famous is the border wall that Donald Trump ran on. Given that almost all of the people who are illegally in the USA arrive legally and then fail to leave, cutting off the stream of people fleeing violent crime in central America will make little difference to what is going on.
Back in 2019, the conservative government passed a law banning the import of trophies from animals hunted abroad.
Despite their status, various wild species are hunted in the wild and in theory this law would stop this.
Now, you might notice that it is now almost 2022, so what happened? Well it was announced in 2019 queens speech but has not been brought forwards by the conservatives who are currently in power (and suggested the law in the first place). Worryingly, they have not actually announced a timetable of when they will try to enact this law! Given it has been 3 years before they announced it, no firm timetable being in place would suggest that this is still not a certainty. Delay is particularly concerning, as many Conservative supporters are wealthy, so it is reasonable to think that wealthy donors are the reason that this law is taking so long to come into place.
Continue reading “Is the government finally going to ban hunting trophy import”
Join as an ambassador supporter to
support this site, help save wildlife
and make friends & log in
