Category: Europe

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Are the rich countries living up to their promises?

After the Paris climate accord, there are large numbers of climate activists who are becoming increasingly frustrated.

The rich countries promised dramatic cuts to their emissions. These cuts will change the way the world works. However, as they are so far from business as normal, governments need to take a leading role in incentivising and requiring cuts (carrot and the stick).

In the UK, we did some good things, but they did not last. One example, is the green housing grant. This was ostensibly a program designed to get various trades people back to work by retrofitting buildings all over the country. The retrofit should in turn cut the carbon emissions of the house that they are used for, and therefore can help towards meeting our Paris climate accord. However, the program was closed a year earlier than was discussed, with the government claiming that it had succeeded in what it was there to do – namely boost the economy.

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First recorded fatal bear attack in Slovenia in living memory

Bears are highly intelligent fascinating animals. However it must also be remembered, that they are highly efficient predators, and that they are more than capable of defending themselves.

Slovenian brown bear foraging with cubs CREDIT: MARCO SECCH

The Slovenian bear population has tripled in the last 20-years, and there are increasingly loud calls to legalise hunting. This will only make these calls more insistent.

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New youtube video! Beavers of Devon

Although we set up a seeanimalswild youtube website a few years ago, due to Covid and a few other reasons we havent been able to travel and so havent had any videos to put up.

That changed today.

During half term we took our children to east Devon and managed to see the beavers a few times. Here is the video amalgamation of those sightings.

Please do like and subscribe if you like them.

The youtube channel is meant to work with this website.

The video in question is hopefully the first in a long list for the website section “in the shadow of mankind”

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Contradiction of wildlife tourism – do not kill the wild natural world while cutting your emissions

The world has an unfortunate problem. In many parts of the world we are successfully reducing our carbon footprint dramatically, through cleaning our electricity generation among other improvements.

Unfortunately, in our current setup, often the only way to pay for conserving the wild places on our planet is by visiting them, and for most people, this requires long-distance flights.

Something we must avoid in more wealthy countries is to simply halt all tourism to wild places. If in order to cut a few tons of carbon from our personal emissions, we remove the reason to conserve a large rainforest in Africa or Asia, can we really blame the locals when it gets cut down? In theory, money does indeed get sent to some of these countries to pay for offsetting our emissions. Unfortunately this rarely reaches people on the ground.

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Killer whale sighting off Cornwall

John Coe (an old and very well known killer whale) and Aquarius, have been sighted off the coast of Cornwall.

A rare sighting in the south of the UK, this British pod of Orca is heavily endangered. With no calves sighted since 1990 the sightings are only likely to get rarer still.

One of the main causes, is human pollution, due to chemicals such as PCB that wash into the seas of the UK. These can lead to poor health and infertility in the animals in our waters.

This video clip above comes from ITV news, and is hosted on youtube

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The Chernobyl accident was a devastating problem, however it is given a laboratory that we would never have had otherwise

After the Chernobyl nuclear accident an exclusion zone 2660 square kilometres (just over 1000 square miles) hod to be abandoned.

Bears are an apex predator, so their return to Chernobyl is a good sign, this photo was taken elsewhere

Now while the area is horrifically damaged by the the nuclear waste, the absence of humans has been such a boon that wildlife populations in the exclusion zone are doing phenomenally well.

The area hosts several dozen wolves, and bears returned for the first time in 2014 – having been absent from the area for more than a century.

Indeed what is fascinating about the area is the clear evidence that the damage caused by nuclear radiation is nowhere near as damaging as the human population.

Whether this can change and we can allow small pockets of wilderness in the heart of Europe is a question that most would answer no. However given how many benefits will genesis like this give to the area around them, perhaps we should be aiming to create more.

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The UK government banned ivory selling so why are they delaying implementing

Ivory, sometimes known as white gold is a real problem. Often valued as much as gold, the rewards for killing a wild elephant can amount too many decades, sometimes the equivalent of a lifetime’s wage to a poor African or Indian. 

There is much discussion about what should be done with seized Ivory. In theory, it could be sold and the money reinvested in protection. Unfortunately, this has been shown to increase the demand for ivory, therefore increasing its value – making further poaching more not less likely. Burning might be the best plan
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In the UK the government has mandated waste food collection by 2023 – but no funding

A significant percentage of UK household waste is waste food.

Now it is true that better planning, better reuse can greatly reduce this. However only food that is uncooked can be put in a compost heap. The UK produces about 5 million tonnes of food waste year. If this was collected it could reduce emissions dramatically, as well as potentially creating significant biogas for power generation.

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