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Environmental Issues

On the subject of the plastic ducks that went astray - last time I visited Brighton, there was a small gallery selling paintings that someone had done, documenting the possible journeys of the plastic ducks. They were quite good.

http://www.zorian.org/gallery7.htm
 
The supermarket growing food on its roof
Food from the Sky has planted a vegetable garden on a shop roof in north London – and its founder wants other shops around the country to do the same
Laura Barnett guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 9 March 2011 19.59 GMT

Of all the things you might reasonably expect to be doing on a blustery March day, standing on the roof of a supermarket and dragging a rake through a bag of decaying vegetables is probably not one of them. I am on top of Thornton's Budgens supermarket in Crouch End, north London, which volunteers have transformed from a flat expanse of concrete into a flourishing potted garden and vegetable patch.

The project, called Food from the Sky, is an unusual exercise in the principles of permaculture and sustainable gardening, and is the brainchild of former silversmith and art consultant Azul-Valerie Thome. It opened last May, when a crane lifted 10 tonnes of compost and 300 green recycling boxes donated by Haringey Council on to the roof. Now the garden is producing enough vegetables to sell in the aisles downstairs every Friday, and has just won a community prize at the Co-operative's annual People and Environment Achievement Awards.

On a quick tour of the garden, Thome and several volunteers show me an impressive array of vegetables – from peas and potatoes to kale and purple sprouting broccoli – alongside flowers, tiny strawberry and raspberry plants, and a composting area. Here, fruit and vegetables left unsold each day in Budgens are mulched, along with woody branches and soil, by the 20 local people who volunteer in the garden.

Volunteer Peter Budge tells me the conditions are perfect for the plants: the warmth from the supermarket's heating and lighting systems comes up through the roof, sparing the seeds the worst of the frosts – and there are no slugs or snails, while marauding pigeons are deterred by CDs hanging from the perimeter fence. "It might seem mad that we're growing things up here," Budge says, "and it is. But it really works." 8)

The idea came to fruition when Thome returned to London after living in Devon. "I looked up at the roofs and had a vision of them covered with gardens and orchards." She met Andrew Thornton, who manages two north London Budgens stores. "He showed me the roof of the store as a potential space," Thome says.

As well as producing fruit and vegetables to sell, Food from the Sky is, from this weekend, running a course in permaculture, as well as visits for local primary schools. And in one corner of the garden, a group of nondescript lidded boxes contains a project for the future: the Garden of Bangladesh, an exercise in growing the ingredients used in Bangladeshi cooking, such as gourds and coriander, suggested by some of the Bangladeshis who work in the store. "Next up is Sri Lanka," Thome says, "and central Europe is getting jealous."

Thome's ultimate aim is "to create a template to show that produce can be grown in cities, and sold locally. One day, I want to see supermarket roof-gardens all over the country."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2 ... ble-garden
 
Algae bloom 50 miles long found off Cornwall and Devon
A 50-mile-long algae bloom has been discovered off the southern coast of Cornwall and Devon.

The swarm of skeletonema is floating between the Lizard in Cornwall and Salcombe in Devon.
It has only come to the surface because of the warm weather, Plymouth Marine Laboratory (PML) said.

Scientists at the laboratory discovered the bloom, and another off South East Ireland, using satellite images.
The algae is not harmful, the laboratory said.

Dr Peter Miller, Earth observation scientist at PML, said: "Skeletonema is a beautiful microscopic plant that, given the right conditions, reproduces rapidly to cover large areas of coastal seas.
"Over the winter nutrients have built up in the sea and the windy weather we have experienced recently has stirred them up to the surface.

Claire Widdicombe, a plankton ecologist at PML, said: "What is interesting is the timing of the bloom.
"We would normally expect the spring bloom to be a few weeks later than this."

The algae was discovered as part of the AquaMar project.
The project uses images from space as an early warning system to detect algae that might pose a risk to humans and the fishing industry.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-devon-12806139
 
Why Fukushima made me stop worrying and love nuclear power
Japan's disaster would weigh more heavily if there were less harmful alternatives. Atomic power is part of the mix
George Monbiot guardian.co.uk, Monday 21 March 2011 19.43 GMT

You will not be surprised to hear that the events in Japan have changed my view of nuclear power. You will be surprised to hear how they have changed it. As a result of the disaster at Fukushima, I am no longer nuclear-neutral. I now support the technology.

A crappy old plant with inadequate safety features was hit by a monster earthquake and a vast tsunami. The electricity supply failed, knocking out the cooling system. The reactors began to explode and melt down. The disaster exposed a familiar legacy of poor design and corner-cutting. Yet, as far as we know, no one has yet received a lethal dose of radiation.

Some greens have wildly exaggerated the dangers of radioactive pollution. For a clearer view, look at the graphic published by xkcd.com. It shows that the average total dose from the Three Mile Island disaster for someone living within 10 miles of the plant was one 625th of the maximum yearly amount permitted for US radiation workers. This, in turn, is half of the lowest one-year dose clearly linked to an increased cancer risk, which, in its turn, is one 80th of an invariably fatal exposure. I'm not proposing complacency here. I am proposing perspective.

If other forms of energy production caused no damage, these impacts would weigh more heavily. But energy is like medicine: if there are no side-effects, the chances are that it doesn't work.

Like most greens, I favour a major expansion of renewables. I can also sympathise with the complaints of their opponents. It's not just the onshore windfarms that bother people, but also the new grid connections (pylons and power lines). As the proportion of renewable electricity on the grid rises, more pumped storage will be needed to keep the lights on. That means reservoirs on mountains: they aren't popular, either.

The impacts and costs of renewables rise with the proportion of power they supply, as the need for storage and redundancy increases. It may well be the case (I have yet to see a comparative study) that up to a certain grid penetration – 50% or 70%, perhaps? – renewables have smaller carbon impacts than nuclear, while beyond that point, nuclear has smaller impacts than renewables.

Like others, I have called for renewable power to be used both to replace the electricity produced by fossil fuel and to expand the total supply, displacing the oil used for transport and the gas used for heating fuel. Are we also to demand that it replaces current nuclear capacity? The more work we expect renewables to do, the greater the impact on the landscape will be, and the tougher the task of public persuasion.

But expanding the grid to connect people and industry to rich, distant sources of ambient energy is also rejected by most of the greens who complained about the blog post I wrote last week in which I argued that nuclear remains safer than coal. What they want, they tell me, is something quite different: we should power down and produce our energy locally. Some have even called for the abandonment of the grid. Their bucolic vision sounds lovely, until you read the small print.

At high latitudes like ours, most small-scale ambient power production is a dead loss. Generating solar power in the UK involves a spectacular waste of scarce resources. It's hopelessly inefficient and poorly matched to the pattern of demand. Wind power in populated areas is largely worthless. This is partly because we have built our settlements in sheltered places; partly because turbulence caused by the buildings interferes with the airflow and chews up the mechanism. Micro-hydropower might work for a farmhouse in Wales, but it's not much use in Birmingham.

And how do we drive our textile mills, brick kilns, blast furnaces and electric railways – not to mention advanced industrial processes? Rooftop solar panels? The moment you consider the demands of the whole economy is the moment at which you fall out of love with local energy production. A national (or, better still, international) grid is the essential prerequisite for a largely renewable energy supply.

Some greens go even further: why waste renewable resources by turning them into electricity? Why not use them to provide energy directly? To answer this question, look at what happened in Britain before the industrial revolution.

The damming and weiring of British rivers for watermills was small-scale, renewable, picturesque and devastating. By blocking the rivers and silting up the spawning beds, they helped bring to an end the gigantic runs of migratory fish that were once among our great natural spectacles and which fed much of Britain – wiping out sturgeon, lampreys and shad, as well as most sea trout and salmon.

Traction was intimately linked with starvation. The more land that was set aside for feeding draft animals for industry and transport, the less was available for feeding humans. It was the 17th-century equivalent of today's biofuels crisis. The same applied to heating fuel. As EA Wrigley points out in his book Energy and the English Industrial Revolution, the 11m tonnes of coal mined in England in 1800 produced as much energy as 11m acres of woodland (one third of the land surface) would have generated.

Before coal became widely available, wood was used not just for heating homes but also for industrial processes: if half the land surface of Britain had been covered with woodland, Wrigley shows, we could have made 1.25m tonnes of bar iron a year (a fraction of current consumption) and nothing else. Even with a much lower population than today's, manufactured goods in the land-based economy were the preserve of the elite. Deep green energy production – decentralised, based on the products of the land – is far more damaging to humanity than nuclear meltdown.

But the energy source to which most economies will revert if they shut down their nuclear plants is not wood, water, wind or sun, but fossil fuel. On every measure (climate change, mining impact, local pollution, industrial injury and death, even radioactive discharges) coal is 100 times worse than nuclear power. Thanks to the expansion of shale gas production, the impacts of natural gas are catching up fast.

Yes, I still loathe the liars who run the nuclear industry. Yes, I would prefer to see the entire sector shut down, if there were harmless alternatives. But there are no ideal solutions. Every energy technology carries a cost; so does the absence of energy technologies. Atomic energy has just been subjected to one of the harshest of possible tests, and the impact on people and the planet has been small. The crisis at Fukushima has converted me to the cause of nuclear power.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree ... -fukushima
 
George Monbiot is so full of sh!t on this one. You have to wonder if he's been got at.

:confused:
 
Pietro_Mercurios said:
George Monbiot is so full of sh!t on this one. You have to wonder if he's been got at.

:confused:
Click to expand...

Could it be irony/satire falling flat?
 
I respect a man who's prepared to change long-held views in the light of new evidence.

As he says, all forms of energy have risks and side-effects. But we have to weigh all these in a global context. Sticking to what you once thought, in technology as much as in science or politics, is a sign of a closed mind. Circumstances change, and thoughts should change with them.
 
Thunderstorm numbers calculated
By Richard Black, Environment correspondent, BBC News

The Earth sees about 760 thunderstorms every hour, scientists have calculated.
The figure, unveiled at the European Geosciences Union meeting in Vienna, is substantially lower than numbers that have been used for nearly a century.

The new research uses a global network of monitoring stations that detect the electromagnetic pulses produced by major bolts of lightning.
It confirms that thunderstorms are mainly a tropical phenomenon - and the Congo basin is the global hotspot.

Thunderstorms also track the passage of sunlight across the world, with sunny conditions producing greater convection in the air.
"The monitoring stations might miss some bolts of lightning, but we think we're getting the big ones - and that's enough to tell you where the thunderstorms are," said Colin Price, head of the Geophysics and Planetary Sciences department at Tel Aviv University in Israel.
"And so with this global network we're able to improve on numbers that have been in standard use since the 1920s."

The first attempt to estimate thunderstorm numbers is thought to have been made by CEP Brooks in 1925.
At that time, it was customary for weather stations to note days when thunderstorms occurred nearby.
Collecting records where he could, the British climatologist calculated there were around 1,800 per hour on average across the world.
But his research suffered from incomplete data and mistaken assumptions - including that storms were equally distributed over land and sea, whereas the vast majority occur over land.

In the 1950s, OH Gish and GR Wait flew over the top of 21 thunderstorms in the US in aeroplanes carrying equipment capable of measuring voltages and currents in the air.
Extending their readings to the rest of the world, they came up with a global figure of 2,000-3,600 per year.

More recently, satellites have been deployed - but they do not see the whole world.

The new research uses a completely different technique, with more than 40 stations around the world geared up to detect electromagnetic pulses produced by strong lightning bolts.
Triangulating from groups of stations enables the World Wide Lightning Location Network (wwlln.net) to pinpoint flashes.
When they are clustered, a computer algorithm is deployed to assign flashes to their separate parent storms.
Analysing this data for September 2010 produced the average hourly figure of 760.

Each continent shows peaks during its daytime - and globally, the peak time is around noon GMT.
Thunderstorms cluster in the centre of continents in the tropics, with the Congo basin standing out.
"That's perhaps because it's drier there than in the Amazon, for example - thunderstorms seem to form more easily in drier conditions," Dr Price told BBC News.

The network is looking to add new observation points to improve results, and recently initiated a programme to detect explosive volcanic eruptions via the lighning flashes that occur in the ascending plumes of hot ash.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-12991483
 
Wild flower re-planting to boost bee numbers
Wild flowers are to be planted along roadsides, fields and houses to create a network of green corridors or "bee roads" where insects can feed and move around the country more easily.
By Louise Gray, Environment Correspondent 7:00AM BST 12 Apr 2011

The UK has lost more than 3 million hectares of wildflower rich habitat since the Second World War, meaning insects have nowhere to feed. Motorways and housing estates contain few flowers and even gardens and wheat fields are no good because there are not enough nectar-rich native flowers.

The loss is driving a decline in pollinator insects such as hoverflies, bees and butterflies. The insects not only go hungry but are unable to move around the country so breeding pools become smaller and the resilience of the species suffers.

As concern grows for the decline in bees and other insects the Co-operative supermarket is recreating areas of wild flowers and nectar rich plants like lesser knapweed, field scabious and birdsfoot trefoil.

The strips of wildflowers could be planted anywhere, from car parks to playing fields, creating a network of "bee roads" across the country.
Farmers and other landowners like councils will sow wildflowers in two long rows which will eventually stretch north to south and east to west across Yorkshire, restoring a total of five hectares (12 acres) of land in a £60,000 pilot project.

It is hoped that ultimately the whole country will be connected, allowing insects to thrive on a more diverse diet and inter-breed once again.

Paul Monaghan, head of social goals at the Co-operative, said strips of wildflowers will also brighten up the country.
"The UK has lost an alarming 97% of its wildflower meadows since the 1930s and this has had a major impact on pollinator numbers," he said.
"The number of honeybees in the UK has halved in the last 25 years, and three-quarters of butterfly species and two-thirds of moths have seen population declines since the 1970s.

"Given that honeybees alone pollinate a third of the food we eat, a further decline in their numbers could have a devastating impact on our diets in the long run.
"By setting up these 'bee roads', we hope to make life easier for all pollinators and reverse their alarming decline."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/foodanddrink ... mbers.html
 
Waterways to get £110m boost, Caroline Spelman confirms

Otters and salmon will benefit from a £110m boost in spending on England's waterways, the government has said.
Environment Secretary Caroline Spelman said the funds would improve the "health" of lakes, rivers and streams and allow wildlife to flourish by tackling pollution and invasive weeds.

She also said that ministers wanted people to become more involved in caring for their local waterways.
Ralph Underhill, of campaign group Our Rivers, welcomed the announcement.
The funding will be shared between the Environment Agency, Natural England and charities such as the Association of Rivers Trust.

Redundant dams, weirs and landings in England will be removed.
This boost is earmarked for England alone because funding for waterways is devolved in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

Announcing the move, Mrs Spelman said: "The health of our rivers has come along in leaps and bounds, but we still see nasty invasive weeds and lifeless waters blight blue spaces in cities and across our countryside.
"With this funding, we'll help all our waterways and streams thrive by tackling problems that until now have been sitting in the 'too-hard' basket.
"Our new grass-roots approach to boosting healthier waterways and flourishing wildlife has local experience and knowledge at its heart."

Mr Underhill warned that the funding would not "solve all the problems overnight".
But he hailed the announcement as "fantastic news for our rivers and the wildlife they support".
"Rivers are a national asset and in the current financial climate it is great to see a new investment being made in their future," he added. :D

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-13053394
 
How does Fukushima differ from Chernobyl?

Japanese authorities have raised the severity rating of the nuclear crisis at the damaged Fukushima Daiichi power plant to the highest level, seven.
The decision reflects the ongoing release of radiation, rather than a sudden deterioration. Level seven previously only applied to the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, where 10 times as much radiation was emitted.

But most experts agree the two nuclear incidents are very different. Explore the table below to find out how they compare.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-13050228
Click to expand...
I was rather surprised to hear that regular checks are still being carried out on Welsh hill farms, which caught some of the Chernobyl fall-out.

On Your Farm

Broadcast today, 06:35 on BBC Radio 4 and available soon on BBC iPlayer.

25 years after Chernobyl, Caz Graham visits Wales, where radiation still affects farmland.
 
Otters and salmon will benefit from a £110m boost in spending on England's waterways, the government has said.
Click to expand...

I wonder if their staff will benefit too, since they appear to be relying on volunteers to work in payroll. :?
 
Wildlife paradise or lorry park? Fate of Isle of Grain lies in the courts
A disused, contaminated stretch in north Kent is an ecological wonder that charity Buglife is fighting to have recognised
John Vidal guardian.co.uk, Sunday 17 April 2011 18.26 BST

It looks like one of Britain's least attractive places, a blighted stretch of abandoned industrial land littered with plastic, broken concrete, crash barriers and building rubble. Contaminated with asbestos, oil and industrial chemicals, this 189-hectare (467-acre) former BP oil refinery brownfield site on the Isle of Grain in the Thames estuary is a messy, dangerous place.

But the site near Rochester in north Kent is also potentially one of Britain's two or three most important wildlife sites – the equivalent of a national park for bees, butterflies, beetles and other invertebrates. Left alone by humans for nearly 25 years, fenced off and allowed to degenerate by its present owner, National Grid, this remote corner of the Thames Gateway is being compared to a miniature lost world by conservationists who are fighting to avoid its planned destruction to make way for a giant lorry park.

No one knows exactly what nature has squatted here, says Sarah Hensall, a conservation officer with the charity Buglife. In the past 40 years, she says, one person has been allowed in to study its wildlife. In a few hours in August 2009, that researcher found 258 species of invertebrates, birds and reptiles.

Of these, 13 were classified as threatened with extinction on the conservation red list, many were priority species that Britain has to protect in law, 23 were nationally scarce and 11 were considered rare. They included the white eye-stripe hoverfly (Paragus albifrons) – until recently believed to be extinct – and Mellet's downy-back beetle (Ophonus melletii), which is so rare that it has been seen only five times in the UK in the past 20 years. The site is also home to most of Britain's rarest native bees, including the brown-banded carder bee (Bombus humilis) and the shrill carder bee (Bombus sylvarum).

Not surprisingly Hensall, an ecologist, is eager to get on to the site. To find a habitat of this size and quality, she says, is extraordinary. "It looks messy and polluted but sites like this are few and far between. It's perfect 'open mosaic' habitat for bugs, spiders, flies and insects. They need this mix of bare land, pools, ditches. It's got everything. They can burrow in it, bask, shelter and feed there, breed and hibernate. It's just heaven for them."

She wants to take a team of researchers through the fence to study the wildlife. She is confident that if four people could go in for a few days several times over a year, as recommended by government ecologists, they could record 1,000, perhaps even 1,300 species. This would put the old refinery site on a par with West Thurrock marshes, an old power station site in Essex and now better protected after a long struggle.

But it is unlikely she will get permission, because Buglife and National Grid are locked in a court dispute over the future of the site. The company wants to turn it into a giant lorry park and warehousing for Thamesport, Britain's third largest container port, and its plan would sweep away the bug and bee paradise before it had even been properly recorded.

Buglife claims the owners failed to properly assess the impact on the wildlife of the site. "We say that they did not follow the environmental impact survey properly and the council should have insisted on a better inspection. But we don't want to stop development. We want the company and the local Medway council to rethink the plan to save the most valuable parts of the site," Hensall says.

"People and bugs should be able to live side by side. We were not consulted, but somebody has got to stick up for the bugs, give them a voice, too."

National Grid is adamant that it has followed the law. In a statement, a spokesman said: "We did consult with the community and with bodies including Natural England, and we do believe our development will provide a number of benefits for the local area."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2 ... e-paradise
 
What looks derilict to us is often a haven for wildlife, as its uninterfered with.

Look at the site of the new Olympic complex, for example.

And yet as a nation we have too little land.
 
China warns of 'urgent problems' facing Three Gorges dam
Risk of geological disaster, state cabinet admits, as project is linked to soil erosion, quakes, drought and social upheaval
Jonathan Watts in Beijing The Guardian, Friday 20 May 2011

The Three Gorges dam, the flagship of China's massive hydroengineering ambitions, faces "urgent problems", the government has warned.
In a statement approved by prime minister Wen Jiabao, the state council said the dam had pressing geological, human and ecological problems. The report also acknowledged for the first time the negative impact the dam has had on downstream river transport and water supplies.

Since the start of construction in 1992 about 16m tonnes of concrete have been poured into the giant barrier across the Yangtze river, creating a reservoir that stretches almost the length of Britain and drives 26 giant turbines.
The world's biggest hydropower plant boasts a total generating capacity of 18,200MW and the ability to help tame the floods that threaten the Yangtze delta each summer.

But it has proved expensive and controversial due to the rehousing of 1.4 million people and the flooding of more than 1,000 towns and villages. Pollution, silt and landslides have plagued the reservoir area. Given the 254bn yuan (£24bn) cost and political prestige at stake, the government focused for many years on the dam's achievements and attempted to stifle domestic criticism of the project. But its public analysis has become increasingly sober.
A statement on the government's website read: "At the same time that the Three Gorges project provides huge comprehensive benefits, urgent problems must be resolved regarding the smooth relocation of residents, ecological protection and geological disaster prevention."

There were few specifics but China's cabinet, the state council, admitted several problems had not been foreseen.
"Problems emerged at various stages of project planning and construction but could not be solved immediately, and some arose because of increased demands brought on by economic and social development," the statement said.

Since the 1.5 mile barrier was completed in 2006 the reservoir has been plagued by algae and pollution that would previously have been flushed away.
The weight of the extra water has also been blamed for tremors, landslides and erosion of slopes.

To ease these threats the government said last year many more people may have to be relocated. This week it promised to establish disaster warning systems, reinforce riverbanks, boost funding for environmental protection and improve benefits for the displaced.

This is not the first warning. Four years ago the state media quoted government experts who said: "There are many new and old hidden ecological and environmental dangers concerning the Three Gorges dam. If preventive measures are not taken the project could lead to a catastrophe."

Last year, site engineers recommended an additional movement of hundreds of thousands of nearby residents and more investment in restoring the ecosystem.

The government has already raised its budget for water treatment plants but opponents of the dam say this is not enough. "The government built a dam but destroyed a river," said Dai Qing, a longtime critic of the project. "No matter how much effort the government makes to ease the risks, it is infinitesimal. The state council is spending more money on the project rather than investigating fully. I cannot see a real willingness to solve the problem."

The timing of the statement – as the government prepares to flesh out the details of its latest five-year plan – has prompted speculation of a possible push back against hydropower interests.

Peter Bosshard of International Rivers said: "While powerful factions within the government are pushing for the rapid expansion of hydropower projects, others are warning of the social and environmental cost of large dams and the geological risks of building such projects in seismically active regions.
"By highlighting the unresolved problems of the Three Gorges dam now, Premier Wen Jiabao, who has stopped destructive projects in the past, may be sending a shot across the bow of a zealous hydropower lobby which would be only too happy to forget about the lessons of the past."

The frank assessment of the challenges posed and benefits offered by the dam came amid growing concerns about a drought on the middle stretches of the Yangtze. This has left 1,392 reservoirs in Hubei with only "dead water" and has affected the drinking supplies of more than 300,000 people.

Chinese media reported this month that the Yangtze water levels near Wuhan hit their lowest point since the dam went into operation in 2003. Long stretches have apparently been closed to water traffic after hundreds of boats ran aground in the shallows.

There have been claims that the Three Gorges plant has exacerbated the problem by holding back water for electricity generation, but operators claim they have alleviated the problem by releasing 400m cubic metres of water from the reservoir. As a result the levels have fallen below 156 metres – the amount needed for optimum power generation.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/ma ... na-warning
 
Johann Hari: A turning-point we miss at our peril
We have the choice of burning all the oil left and hacking down all the remaining rainforests - or saving humanity
Thursday, 26 May 2011

[...]
Another of those seemingly small moments with a long echo is happening now. A marginalised voice is offering us a warning, and an inspiring way to save ourselves – yet this alternative seems to be passing unheard in the night. It is coming from the people of Ecuador, led by their President, Rafael Correa, and it would begin to deal with two converging crises.

In the four billion years since life on Earth began, there have been five times when there was a sudden mass extinction of life-forms. The last time was 65 million years ago, when the dinosaurs were killed, probably by a meteor. But now the world's scientists agree that the sixth mass extinction is at hand. Humans have accelerated the rate of species extinction by a factor of at least 100, and the great Harvard biologist EO Wilson warns that it could reach a factor of 10,000 within the next 20 years. We are doing this largely by stripping species of their habitats. We are destroying the planet's biodiversity, and so we are making the natural chains that keep us alive much more vulnerable to collapse. This time, we are the meteor.

At the same time, we are dramatically warming the atmosphere. I know it has become terribly passé to listen to virtually all the world's scientists, but I remember the collapsing glaciers I saw in the Arctic, the drying-out I saw in Darfur, and the rising salt water I saw in Bangladesh. 2010 was the joint-hottest year ever recorded, according to Nasa. The best scientific prediction is that we are now on course for a 3ft rise in global sea levels this century. That means goodbye London, Cairo, Bangkok, Venice and Shanghai. Doubt it if you want, but the US National Academy of Sciences – the most distinguished scientific body in the world – just found that 97 per cent of scientific experts agree with the evidence.

So where does Ecuador come in? At the tip of this South American country there lies 4,000 lush square miles of rainforest where the Amazon basin, the Andes mountains and the equator come together. It is the most biodiverse place on Earth. When scientists studied a single hectare of it, they found it had more different species of tree than the whole of North America put together. It holds the world records for different species of amphibians, reptiles and bats. And – more important still – this rainforest is a crucial part of the planet's lungs, inhaling huge amounts of heat-trapping gases and keeping them out of the atmosphere.

Yet almost all the pressure from the outside world today is to saw it down. Why? Because underneath that rainforest there are almost a billion barrels of untapped oil, containing 400 million tones of planet-cooking gases. We crave it. We howl for it. Unlike biodiversity and a safe climate, it's tradable for cash.

Here is a textbook example of what is driving both the sixth great extinction and global warming. We have been putting short-term profits for a few ahead of the long-term needs of our species. Every rainforest on Earth is being reduced to the money that can be stripped from it: yesterday, Brazil's Chamber of Deputies voted to slash the amount of the Amazon that must be preserved by landowners. Except this time, for the first time, the people of Ecuador have offered us an alternative – a way to break this pattern. Alberto Acosta, the former energy minister who drew up the plan, calls it a punto de ruptura – a turning point, one that "questions the logic of extractive development" that drilled us into this species-swallowing hole.

Here's the offer. The oil beneath the rainforest is worth about $7bn. Everybody knows that a stable climate, biodiversity and functioning lungs are worth far more than that. But until now, nobody has been willing to pay. Ecuador's democratic government says that, if the rest of the world offers just half of what the oil is worth – $3.5bn – they will keep the rainforest standing and alive and working for us all. In a country where 38 per cent live in poverty and 13 per cent are on the brink of starvation, it's an incredibly generous offer, and one that is popular in the rainforest itself. As one of its residents, Julia Cerda, 45, told New Internationalist magazine: "With oil, the government just sells it to richer countries and we're left with nothing, no birds or animals or trees."

No country with oil has ever considered leaving it in the ground because the consequences of digging it up are too disastrous. This is a startling attempt to reverse one of the greatest dysfunctions in the global economic system. The market considers things like species diversity, the climate, and the rainforests to be "externalities" – factors not affected by the price and profit mechanisms, so irrelevant, and dispensable. It's a system that, as Oscar Wilde put it, "knows the price of everything and the value of nothing". The people of Ecuador are trying to find a way to get us to see the value of some of the most important things on Earth.

They first made this offer in 2006. So how has the world responded? Chile has offered $100,000. Spain has offered $1.4m. Germany initially offered $50m, then pulled out. Now President Correa is warning that they can't wait forever in a country where 13 per cent are close to starving. If they don't have $100m in the pot by the end of this year, he says, they will have no choice but to pursue Plan B – the digging and destruction of the rainforest.

[...]

This, too, could be a moment where history branches into two directions. On the path to the right, we turn down the chance to restrain ourselves, and decide with a shrug to burn all the oil left in the world's soils, and hack down all the remaining rainforests. Professor James Hansen, the Nasa climatologist, explains where this ends: "We would set the planet on a course to the ice-free state, with a sea level 75 metres higher. Coastal disasters would occur continually. The only uncertainty is the time it would take for complete ice sheet disintegration."

But there is another path, where we choose to protect humanity's habitat – and are prepared to pay for it. If our governments won't accept this offer, at this late moment in these ecological crises, what are they saying about themselves – and about us?

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/co ... 88915.html
 
But, on the other side of the Andes...

Slash and burn: Brazil shreds laws protecting its rainforests
The new bill relaxes laws on the deforestation of hilltops and the amount of vegetation farmers must preserve. Partial amnesties will also be offered for previous fines
By Guy Adams
Thursday, 26 May 2011

Brazil has taken a big step towards passing new laws that will loosen restrictions on the amount of Amazon rainforest that farmers can destroy, after its lower house of parliament voted in favour of updating the country's 46-year-old forest code.

In a move described as "disastrous" by conservationists, the nation's congress backed a bill relaxing laws on the deforestation of hilltops and the amount of vegetation farmers must preserve. The law also offers partial amnesties for fines levied against landowners who have illegally destroyed tracts of rainforest. The legislation, which must still be passed by the Brazillian Senate and approved by President Dilma Rousseff, aims to help owners of smaller farms and ranches compete with under-regulated rivals in countries such as the USA and Argentina.

At present, under Brazil's forest code passed in 1965, 80 per cent of all property in the Amazon basin is supposed to be left as untouched forest. In other parts of the country, that figure ranges from between 20 and 35 per cent, depending on the ecosystem of the particular region.

etc...

http://www.independent.co.uk/environmen ... 89107.html
 
Nature 'is worth billions' to UK
By Richard Black, Environment correspondent, BBC News

The UK's parks, lakes, forests and wildlife are worth billions of pounds to the economy, says a major report.
The health benefits of merely living close to a green space are worth up to £300 per person per year, it concludes.
The National Ecosystem Assessment (NEA) says that for decades, the emphasis has been on producing more food and other goods - but this has harmed other parts of nature that generate hidden wealth.

Ministers who commissioned the NEA will use it to re-shape planning policy.
"The natural world is vital to our existence, providing us with essentials such as food, water and clean air - but also cultural and health benefits not always fully appreciated because we get them for free," said Environment Secretary Caroline Spelman.
"The UK NEA is a vital step forward in our ability to understand the true value of nature and how to sustain the benefits it gives us."

The economic benefits of nature are seen most clearly in food production, which depends on organisms such as soil microbes, earthworms and pollinating insects.
If their health declines - as is currently happening in the UK with bees - either farmers produce less food, or have to spend more to produce the same amount.
Either way there is an economic impact; and on average, the costs are growing over time.

"Humans rely on the way ecosystems services control our climate - pollution, water quality, pollination - and we're finding out that many of these regulating services are degrading," said Bob Watson, chief scientific adviser to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) and co-chairman of the NEA.
"About 30% of the key ecosystem services that we rely on are degrading.
"About 20% are getting better, however - our air quality has improved a lot - and what this report says is that we can do a lot better across the board," he told BBC News.

The 1940s saw the beginning of a national drive to increase production of food and other products such as timber.
Although that was successful, the NEA finds there was a price to pay - England, for example, has the smallest percentage of forest cover anywhere in Europe, while many fish stocks are below optimum levels.

The report says the problem arises largely because currently, only material products such as food carry a pricetag in the market.
By calculating the value of less tangible factors such as clean air, clean water and natural flood defences, it hopes to rebalance the equation.

The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) welcomed the assessment.
"The traditional view of economic growth is based on chasing GDP, but in fact we will all end up richer and happier if we begin to take into account the true value of nature," said its conservation director, Martin Harper.
"Of course no-one can put a pounds and pence value on everything in nature - but equally we cannot ignore the importance of looking after it when we are striving for economic growth."

The NEA seeks to include virtually every economic contribution from eight types of landscape, such as woodlands, coasts and urban areas.
It also provides some local flavours by looking at variations across the UK.

Some figures emerge with precision, such as the £430m that pollinating insects are calculated to be worth, or the £1.5bn pricetag on inland wetlands, valued so high because they help to produce clean water.

Other aspects of the evaluation are less precise because the costs and benefits are harder to quantify, and may change over time.

etc...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-13616543
 
Thousands of fish dead after Thames sewerage overflow
Heavy rain caused 450,000 tonnes of raw sewage to enter the river, killing fish and leaving pollution on the riverbanks
John Vidal, environment editor guardian.co.uk, Thursday 9 June 2011 16.58 BST

Pollution teams on Thursday were still clearing up the Thames in west London four days after 450,000 tonnes of raw household and industrial sewage overflowed into the river. The incident, which occurred after nearly 30mm of rain fell in a few hours on Sunday, killed tens of thousands of fish and left condoms, faeces and other pollution on riverbanks. :shock:

There are fears that a similar incident could mar the Queen's Jubilee celebrations next June when 1,000 ships from around the world will travel with the Queen as she makes her way down the river in a new royal barge to celebrate 60 years on the throne. The chances of the Royal procession having to make its way through a tide of pollution is considered "very unlikely but conceivable", according to sources in the Environment Agency.

There are on average more than 60 significant sewerage incidents a year in the river, with major ones becoming more frequent. Heavy rains after dry spells left the river massively polluted in both 2004 and 2009. In the latest incident, 250,000 tonnes of storm sewage overflowed into the river from drains and a further 200,000 tonnes from the Mogden sewage treatment works in Isleworth. In response, the agency has spent four days pumping oxygen and hydrogen peroxide into the water to try to build back its health.

"This was a very big incident. Much of south-east England could be affected because the tidal Thames is a vital fish nursery for the whole region. There were a lot of juvenile flounders killed, who use the river as a nursery ground. Roach, dace, bream, eels, perch, pike, sea bass and flounder were all killed," said Angling trust's chief executive, Mark Lloyd.

Steve Holmes, a member of Thames Anglers' Conservancy, said he tried to help dying fish by Barnes Bridge. "We saw literally thousands upon thousands of small fish gasping for air on the surface. Many bigger fish had beached themselves."

The incident comes less than a year after the Thames won a global conservation prize for its dramatic recovery after being declared biologically dead in the 1950s. The International Thiess river prize, awarded annually in Australia, saw the Environment Agency receive a prize of £218,000.

Sewage floods into the river as many as 60 times a year because the antiquated, Victorian-age drainage system is unable to handle the quantity of sewage that London now produces.

Thames Water is planning to build the Thames Tideway "super sewer" to collect sewage before it overflows and channel it to a treatment plant, but the £3.6bn 20-mile tunnel along the river bed is not expected to be operational until 2020.

Martin Baggs, chief executive of Thames Water, said in a statement that the company "very much" regretted the fish deaths and environmental damage caused by the sewage. "Incidents like this are clearly totally unsatisfactory in a modern capital city and we have a major programme of work under way to sort the problem out", he said.

Britain agreed to meet EU water quality targets in 1991 but has so far failed to do so.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2 ... mes-sewage
 
UK 'should be made to restock fishing waters'
By Lewis Smith
Thursday, 9 June 2011

The UK and other European countries must be forced by law to restock their seas to give the fishing industry a long-term future, the European Fisheries Commissioner demanded yesterday.

Maria Damanaki told an audience of ministers and environmentalists in London that fish stocks are so depleted there needs to be a legal obligation to improve numbers.

Britain and other nations signed a pledge in Johannesburg in 2002 to restock overfished areas and maintain healthy marine populations by 2015, but many targets look set to be missed.
The deal was non-binding and Ms Damanaki believes that if the targets are to be met, EU countries need to be legally obliged to meet them.

Addressing the Globe World Oceans Day Forum, held at Selfridges department store, she warned that Europe was years behind the US and other major countries in managing its fisheries sustainably.
Rapid and far-reaching reform of the Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) was needed if the UK and the rest of the EU were to catch up, she added.

The commissioner said: "The US, Australia, New Zealand and Norway are already way ahead of us in adopting modern, sustainable policies that deliver good results for the industry and the oceans.
"Though we import 42 per cent of the global trade in fish, Europe is a big fishing power. We simply cannot afford to be so far behind on sustainability."

Ms Damanaki wants to see stocks allowed to recover and for fishermen to be allowed to catch only sustainable quantities. Fishing quotas are supposed to ensure stocks remain healthy but ministers routinely override scientific advice and set quota levels higher than they ought to.

The commissioner added: "In the EU, too many stocks are overfished and catches are only a fraction of what they used to be in the 90s and are still dipping year after year."
Without action, stocks would continue to fall – and declining catches would cause job losses among fishermen, processors, transport companies and retailers, she warned.

In calling for reform of the CFP, Ms Damanaki wants the UK and other EU countries to be given more control over how their fisheries are run instead of being dictated to by Brussels. Europe's "obese" fishing fleets, she insisted, must be reduced further.
"If we get it right, Europeans will have a more ample choice of fresh fish – wild and farmed fish," she said.

"More fish available to consumers means higher intakes of essential fatty acids, which are necessary for good brain and heart functioning. Brain and heart-related diseases are blowing up our healthcare budgets and in the long run, fish consumption can contribute to reduce the pressure."

The reforms may include halting the practice of discarding fish at sea, demanded by the Fish Fight campaign led by celebrity chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. Ms Damanaki said she would put forward more detailed proposals over the summer.

UK Fisheries minister Richard Benyon said halting the "scandalous" practice of discards would be one of the key elements of a reformed CFP.
He said: "Reform... will not be seen as credible unless we deliver a way to eliminate discarded fish and I will be doing all I can to deliver the ambitious reform that the Government and the public want to see.

"Europe has a hugely important role to play in the global governance of fish stocks, so we must make sure that the CFP pursues the same principles of sustainability and fairness outside its waters too."

http://www.independent.co.uk/environmen ... 94936.html

Good to hear the EU talking some sense for once, instead of issuing daft bureacratic diktats.
 
Return of the Rainbow Warrior
The 1985 bombing of the Rainbow Warrior made the converted fishing trawler a campaigning icon. Now, in its 40th anniversary year, Greenpeace is launching its first purpose-built protest ship – one of the most technologically advanced vessels to set sail
Tim Adams The Observer, Sunday 12 June 2011

The secretive shipyards of Bremen in northern Germany are the places where Russian oligarchs and Silicon Valley billionaires go to have their fantasies (and insecurities) made into yachts. In a hangar at the yard of Fassmer on the banks of the River Weser, however, a different kind of £16m dream boat is taking shape.

It is a dream that began more than 25 years ago, when Greenpeace's Rainbow Warrior was sunk in Auckland Harbour by bombs planted by the French secret service. The determination then, from environmental activists across the globe, was that "you can't sink a Rainbow". In the years since, Greenpeace has become perhaps the world's most recognisable and sophisticated global eco-charity. Its ships, however – converted trawlers and gas guzzlers – have never quite lived up to its green aspirations. That is where the dream comes in.

The new Rainbow Warrior III, which I had come to Bremen to get a first look at, will be among the most environmentally advanced ships of its size at sea. The boat – "don't call it a yacht!" I'm told – is nearly 60m long and currently cased in scaffolding, though the distinctive dove of peace and childlike red-and-yellow- and-pink-and-green rainbow is visible on its hull. At the beginning of next month, when the ship is baptised, twin 50-metre masts will be hoisted on its deck to carry 1,200 sq m of sail. A state-of-the-art hybrid engine will be needed for only about 10% of its operational power.

Everything about it, from the paintwork to the insulation, has been designed with sustainability in mind. Each component comes with transparent ethical sourcing. Below deck the ship will house one of the most sophisticated communications operations anywhere on the ocean. As well as all this up-to-the-minute kit, the boat is required to have something that is not mentioned in the hundreds of pages of specification: a soul.

This particular tricky fixture is very much rooted in its history. On one level Rainbow Warrior III is the inspired result of some of the latest thinking in sailboat technology from world-leading – mainly Dutch – computer modellers and wind-tunnel obsessives. On another it is the latest fulfilment of an old Native American prophecy: "There will come a time when the earth grows sick, and when it does a tribe will gather from all the cultures of the world who believe in deeds and not words. They will work to heal it... they will be known as the 'Warriors of the Rainbow'."

etc...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/theobserver/2 ... ry-ethical
 
'Controlled' power cuts likely as Sun storm threatens national grid
By Steve Connor, Science Editor, in Boulder, Colorado
Monday, 13 June 2011

Officials in Britain and the United States are preparing to make controlled power cuts to their national electricity supplies in response to a warning of a possible powerful solar storm hitting the Earth. In an interview with The Independent, Thomas Bogdan, director of the US Space Weather Prediction Centre, said that controlled power "outages" will protect the National Electricity Grids against damage which could take months or even years to repair should a large solar storm collide with the Earth without any precautions being taken.

Dr Bogdan is in close discussions with scientists in the UK Met Office to set up a second space weather prediction centre in Britain to co-ordinate a global response to a threat viewed seriously by both the US and UK governments. One topic of discussion is how to protect national electricity grids from the immense power surges caused by the geomagnetic storms which happen when highly energetic solar particles collide with the Earth's magnetic field.

The most vulnerable parts of the grid are the hundreds of transformers connected to power lines many miles long that can experience sudden current surges during a geomagnetic solar storm, Dr Bogdan said. "It points to a potential scenario where large parts of either North America or northern Europe may be without power from between days or weeks, to perhaps months and, in extreme cases, there are estimates that it could last years," Dr Bogdan said.

The aim of the joint US-UK collaboration is to improve solar weather forecasting to a point where it is possible to warn power companies of an imminent storm. There is a feeling that if a "category 5" solar storm – the biggest of the five categories – were to be predicted, then taking the grid off-line before it is due to hit Earth and letting the storm pass would be better than trying to keep things running, he said.

In 1989, a solar geomagentic storm knocked out the electricity grid across large parts of Canada. The loss cascaded across the United States and caused power problems as far away as California. The greatest fear is a massive storm as big as the one documented by astronomer Richard Carrington in 1859, which burnt out telegraph wires.

"The sort of storms capable of doing that are fairly rare events. We refer to them as 'black swans'," Dr Bogdan said. "If the Carrington event occurred today, and power grid operators did not take efforts to safeguard their infrastructure, then we could be facing a scenario like that."

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/scien ... 96748.html
 
More doom and gloom...

World's oceans in 'shocking' decline
By Richard Black, Environment correspondent, BBC News

The oceans are in a worse state than previously suspected, according to an expert panel of scientists.
In a new report, they warn that ocean life is "at high risk of entering a phase of extinction of marine species unprecedented in human history".
They conclude that issues such as over-fishing, pollution and climate change are acting together in ways that have not previously been recognised.
The impacts, they say, are already affecting humanity.

The panel was convened by the International Programme on the State of the Ocean (IPSO), and brought together experts from different discplines, including coral reef ecologists, toxicologists, and fisheries scientists.
Its report will be formally released later this week.

"The findings are shocking," said Alex Ross, IPSO's scientific director and professor of conservation biology at Oxford University.
"As we considered the cumulative effect of what humankind does to the oceans, the implications became far worse than we had individually realised.
"We've sat in one forum and spoken to each other about what we're seeing, and we've ended up with a picture showing that almost right across the board we're seeing changes that are happening faster than we'd thought, or in ways that we didn't expect to see for hundreds of years."
These "accelerated" changes include melting of Arctic sea ice and the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, sea level rise, and release of methane trapped in the sea bed.

But more worrying than this, the team noted, are the ways in which different issues act synergistically to increase threats to marine life.
Some pollutants, for example, stick to the surfaces of tiny plastic particles that are now found in the ocean bed.
This increases the amounts of these pollutants that are consumed by bottom-feeding fish.
Plastic particles also assist the transport of algae from place to place, increasing the occurrence of toxic algal blooms - which are also caused by the influx of nutrient-rich pollution from agricultural land.

In a wider sense, ocean acidification, warming, local pollution and overfishing are acting together to increase the threat to coral reefs - so much so that three-quarters of the world's reefs are at risk of severe decline.

Life on Earth has gone through five "mass extinction events" caused by events such as asteroid impacts; and it is often said that humanity's combined impact is causing a sixth such event.
The IPSO report concludes that it is too early to say definitively.
But the trends are such that it is likely to happen, they say - and far faster than any of the previous five.

"What we're seeing at the moment is unprecedented in the fossil record - the environmental changes are much more rapid," Professor Ross told BBC News.
"We've still got most of the world's biodiversity, but the actual rate of extinction is much higher [than in past events] - and what we face is certainly a globally significant extinction event."

The report also notes that previous mass extinction events have been associated with trends being observed now - disturbances of the carbon cycle, and acidification and hypoxia (depletion of oxygen) of seawater.
Levels of CO2 being absorbed by the oceans are already far greater than during the great extinction of marine species 55 million years ago (during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum), it concludes.

The report's conclusions will be presented at UN headquarters in New York this week, when government delegates begin discussions on reforming governance of the oceans.

IPSO's immediate recommendations include:

stopping exploitative fishing now, with special emphasis on the high seas where currently there is little effective regulation
mapping and then reducing the input of pollutants including plastics, agricultural fertilisers and human waste
making sharp reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.

Carbon dioxide levels are now so high, it says, that ways of pulling the gas out of the atmosphere need to be researched urgently - but not using techniques, such as iron fertilisation, that lead to more CO2 entering the oceans.

"The challenges for the future of the ocean are vast; but unlike previous generations, we know what now needs to happen," said Dan Laffoley, marine chair of the World Commission on Protected Areas and an adviser to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN).
"The time to protect the blue heart of our planet is now."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-13796479
 
On the other hand:

Salmon numbers leap to reverse two decades of decline in UK rivers
Conservationists say counts are up everywhere except in waters around commercial fish farms. But they don't know why and warn that last year's increase may be a one-off
Robin McKie, science editor The Observer, Sunday 26 June 2011

Against all expectations, salmon numbers are leaping again in British rivers. Conservation scientists have discovered that the fish is staging a comeback in many native streams and waterways.
The return of the salmon is good news for fly fishermen – and for conservationists who have worked hard to restore numbers after the fish's disastrous decline two decades ago.

However, experts warn that the current increase – revealed in statistics for salmon tagged and counted in 2010 and from observations from river banks this year – may only be temporary.
"We still don't know why this is happening. It may just be a one-off or it could be a general trend to a return to healthy salmon numbers in our rivers," said Dr Anton Ibbotson, of the Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust.

Some of the most detailed figures on salmon numbers have come from the river Frome in Dorset. Conservation experts have been able to monitor fish more easily and in greater detail on this modestly sized waterway than on the nation's great salmon rivers such as the Tweed and Tay, and at East Stoke they have introduced a system that can accurately count salmon in the river.

"We used to get more than 2,000 salmon coming back to the river every year," said Ibbotson, head of the trust's salmon and trout centre. "Then, in the early 1990s, that figure plunged to under 500 and it has never recovered – until this year."

This decline affected other rivers, leading to bans on the sale of fresh river salmon caught using rods and restrictions on the use of nets. In the process, wild salmon from rivers like the Wye and Usk disappeared from shops.

As to the cause, experts remain mystified. The life of the salmon is highly complex. Salmon eggs are laid in freshwater streams. The eggs hatch and the young fish live for six months to three years in their home river systems before their body chemistry changes to adapt to salt water. The salmon then migrate to the open ocean where they mature sexually. The adult salmon later return to their native streams to spawn.

Scientists say changes in environmental conditions at any stage in their life cycles, at sea or in their home rivers, could have affected numbers of salmon returning to their home rivers. "There are a host of possible reasons why numbers dropped," said Andrew Flitcroft, editor of Trout and Salmon magazine. "It could have involved alterations in conditions at sea – or in fresh water."

Changes in ocean temperatures and currents, the availability of food in the open seas and the over-exploitation of ocean fisheries have all been suggested as factors. In addition, young salmon may have left their home rivers in a weakened or undernourished condition and were unable to survive the open sea. "Whatever the cause, the impact was considerable," said Mark Lloyd, of the Angling Trust. "About 30% of young salmon used to make it back to their native rivers. By the end of the 20th century, that had dropped to about 0.3%."

However, over the past 12 months this trend has been reversed and salmon numbers – although not reaching the peaks of the 1970s and 80s – have risen remarkably. "There has been a very welcome return in numbers of salmon," said Flitcroft. "In addition, they seem to be coming back in a strong, healthy state."

The comeback is still patchy, Lloyd added. "Most of the east and north of Scotland have done well, as have the Tyne and Wear rivers," he said. "However, the Wye and Usk are still quite badly off – partly because river levels there are quite low, thanks to the recent dry springs and over-abstraction of their waters. It is then easy for cormorants and other birds to pick off salmon in the clear, shallow water."

The major exception to the salmon's successful return is the west of Scotland, a trend blamed by the Rivers and Fisheries Trusts of Scotland on the prevalence of fish farms, which provide jobs for thousands of workers in the Highlands. Wild salmon catches there have continued to decline while they have risen on the east coast, where there are no salmon farms, says the trust. It blames sea lice infestations from farmed salmon cages for infecting migrating wild salmon.

"We can see a clear trend of declining wild salmon catches in areas where the Scottish salmon farming industry operates, in comparison with the east coast," said Dr Alan Wells, policy and planning director of the Association of Salmon Fishery Boards. "There is a clear need to direct research and funding into initiatives that will give greater protection to our wild salmon and sea trout."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2 ... mbers-leap
 
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