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The UK government is in the process of changing the rules for property developers. At the moment, a range of wildlife from red squirrels, pine martens, mountain hares, water voles, adders and slow worms have special status.
There has been much hesitation about insect based meats. For millennia in the west we have not eaten insects and so for us the idea is repulsive.
How about feeding the cows the insects? The efficiency of this is lower than if we were to eat the insects ourselves, but a study by the WWF has found that this move would reduce the Soya imports that the uk needs by a fifth by 2050.
In 2019 1 million tonnes of Soya were used, which are thought likely linked to deforestation.
Now this change will need legislation, as currently it is not legal to include insect protein for pigs and poultry. A rapid move by the government could mean that the UK leads the world in this move.
Tesco (a leading supermarket in the UK) worked on this report with WWF and has already put its money where its mouth is by supplying seed money to Entocycle among other similar moves.
We could easily have insect farms in the UK, so this could end up cutting cattle feed carbon footprint by roughly 20%.
Farms need to cut their footprint as well as the rest of the economy in the UK, it is possible that meat without the animal is coming soon, however in the meantime this would allow farms to make their own cuts in line with the rest of the country.
Current prediction is great apes will lose 80% of their habitats by 2050
Of the great ape species, 3 out of the 4 non human species live in Africa. This is why it is so alarming the current estimates are that by 2050 great habitat will have reduced by 80%.
This is also a huge concern for the rest of the world. An 80% reduction in rainforest cover in Africa could make halting global warming impossible.
Obviously there are multiple strands of global warming and halting species loss. Unfortunately this could sink both problems into impossible or near impossible to solve.
Furthermore, there are other sad facts about this idea. Farmland rarely benefits the people who live in its vicinity. The huge plantations of Indonesia have destroyed the rainforests but they have not lifted living standards, indeed in many places they have eradicated the ability for locals to live – forcing them to leave their home.
Game reserves require significant staff to look after the guests. Furthermore, there are a great deal of resources that can be extracted without destroying the trees above. This allows locals to increase their standard of living, while at the same time allowing the rainforests to stay standing and the wildlife that lives there to continue to thrive.
It would seem that it should be possible to dig deep mines under rainforests without cutting the forest down first. Obviously we come back to the problem of poaching that might increase with the mine workers, but the simple fact is that most mines do not disturb the surface (except for the mine entrance). It likely increases mine costs, but given the wealth of minerals that are thought to lie under the Congo rainforest it should be more than worth it.
I do not want to have to explain to my grand children, why there are no great rainforests left in Africa. I have only visited one rainforest (that of the Udzungwas in East Tanzania), but apart from the environmental services that these places provide there are many parts of the planet which rapidly turn to desert if you remove the rainforests covering the ground.
The world is warming. This is something that is now essentially settled. Despite fossil fuel companies arguing the reverse, it was their research 40 years ago (and more) that brought the concerns of global warming first to the attention of humans (though initially they kept these discoveries quiet, and it has only come to light in recent years).
This new research shows that the world is now trapping twice as much energy as it was just 15 years ago.
As around 90% of this energy ends up in the oceans, this is a big problem. While the southern ice cap sits largely on land, the Northern icecap floats on the oceans. This is unfortunately one of the feedback loops that we know about. Ice reflects sunlight (and therefore heat) back into space. As the oceans warm this ice melts, replacing white reflective surface with deep blue absorbing surface – meaning that the oceans then absorb still more heat.
The unfortunate conclusion of the study was that unless this uptake of heat slows fast bigger shifts in climate should be expected.
Home to one of the two remaining populations of mountain gorillas as well as eastern lowland gorillas and chimpanzees. It is one of the best protected central African rainforest, yet satellite imagery shows significant amounts of deforestation.
In April last year, 12 Virunga rangers and 5 civilians were killed in clashes over this environmental destruction.
As in other places, the locals see little benefit from the park, rather they see large amounts of land that they have lost access to. Locals must benefit from the park, as well as efforts made to feed the local population
While currently only exploratory, oil projects in the ecosystems of Namibia and Botswana potentially threaten the survival of 130,000 elephants – one of Africa’s last great wildernesses.
The company ReconAfrica is going ahead with its search despite the threats. At the current time, there are roughly 450,000 elephants in Africa, but that is down from millions just a few short decades ago.
Continue reading “Oil fields of Botswana and Namibia threaten 130,000 elephants”As water warms up, its ability to hold oxygen decreases. This is unfortunate for the plants and wildlife that live in these waters as they cannot survive without oxygen.
Unfortunately in a recent study it became clear that this is occurring in lakes around the world.
It is true that this impact is not being had at all levels of lakes to the same degree. Unfortunately, the majority water life is very depth sensitive and are uncapable of changing their habits to survive this change.
This is a new, and less considered threat of global warming. Unfortunately it could have significant negative effects on the world.
It is unfortunately possible that in the short term this is irreversible, it is merely one more signpost to require us to change our ways faster.
Yesterday I was writing about a series of dams that have collapsed in Brazil. We need to remember that there are two imminent threats that we are facing in the natural world.
We need to cut carbon emissions dramatically, we know as the human race that if we do not cut emissions dramatically and very fast, our planet will go through horrific change from the loss of the ice caps (and the resulting sea level rise) to the desertificion of large parts of the planet – some of this previously being rainforest.
If we cannot halt the loss of areas such as rainforests, the problem becomes even larger as we destroy one of our largest carbon sinks.
In the west, we have a responsibility to not only cut our own emissions to net zero in the space of a few decades, we must also help developing countries grow their own economies and increase the standard of living for their citizens without destroying what remains of the ecosystems that still exist.
Dams are often talked about as a fantastic way to cut carbon emissions. Aside from the fact that many dams in the world are more like a battery (water is pumped up when electricity is cheap and then flows down when it is expensive creating electricity) dams built in rainforests have such a huge initial carbon footprint from the destruction of the rainforest that sat on the land that in some cases the carbon savings will never make up for the carbon loss.
I am not saying that dams are useless. Far from it. However, if your dam is there to cut carbon emissions, it is in the wrong place.
Brazil has gone into dams in a large way. Unfortunately, these are so poorly constructed that they are collapsing. This means that land downstream gets hit twice – firstly loosing most of their water supply as the dam fills and then again as they are deluged with months or years of water in one go. What is worse here, is that many dams here are holding back toxic mud, left over after mining work. As such even after the flood of water has gone down, much of the land it has touched will be less productive.
It is not an either or choice for countries like brazil. They aim to cut carbon emissions by 45% by 2030, however 28-33% of that will come from non-hydropower sources (70%). Indeed in Brazil wind power is generating increasing amounts of their power. Indeed, in terms of installed wind power, Brazil now ranks just 8th in the world. Also given it is a country lying in the tropics, it gets a great deal of sun – there are currently 8.5GW of solar installed meeting 1.5% of Brazils needs. However 3.4GW were added just in 2020. It is therefore highly likely that assuming this acceleration continues perhaps 20% of Brazils electricity needs could come from solar by this date.
We need to cut our emissions dramatically in the next 10 years, however political pressure is often meaning that these efforts are going in the wrong direction.
It is thought that between global warming and habitat loss, 90% of the remaining great ape range will be lost – potentially as early as 2050!
The loss of these rainforests will make climate change mitigation far harder, and I do not wish for my grandchildren to grow up in a world where there is no such thing as a large rainforest. As elsewhere, the loss of the apex species such as great apes both makes conservation harder, and imperils the ecosystem as a whole, as less visitors come so there is less money for protection.
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