Feed aggregator

A new carbon footprint league table for fresh food.

People living upriver from gold-mining are the most contaminated, according to US-based scientists

Ask about the fish in restaurants in the centre of Puerto Maldonado, the biggest town in Peru’s south-east Amazon, and you’ll hear all kinds of things. Some people will shake their heads and say there isn’t any fish on the menu “because of the contamination” or “out of protocol”. Others might say there is fish available, before sometimes hastily clarifying that it comes from farms along the Inter-Oceanica Highway running to Brazil, or from the Pacific coast, or even, according to one chef, all the way from Vietnam.

Why such problems with the fish in this part of the Amazon? Answer: alluvial gold and the mercury required to extract it. The gold-rush in the 8.5m hectare Madre de Dios region began in the 1980s and, by 2012, miners had destroyed more than 50,000 hectares of forest, effectively dumping 100s of tons of mercury into the rivers while doing so. In May this year Peru’s outgoing government announced a pathetic 60-day “declaration of emergency”.

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We have no rituals for coping with extinction, ecological destruction or environmental loss. And that’s a problem. Now, an impassioned group of artists and activists are trying to create them.

In early 2010, artist, activist and mother, Persephone Pearl, headed to the Bristol Museum. Like many concerned about the fate of the planet, she was in despair over the failed climate talks in Copenhagen that winter. She sat on a bench and looked at a stuffed animal behind glass: a thylacine. Before then, she’d never heard of the marsupial carnivore that went extinct in 1936.

“Here was this beautiful mysterious lost creature locked in a glass case,” she said. “It struck me suddenly as unbearably undignified. And I had this sudden vision of smashing the glass, lifting the body out, carrying the thylacine out into the fields, stroking its body, speaking to it, washing it with my tears, and burying it by a river so that it could return to the earth.”

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Ending global legal markets is a great plan A, but that alone won’t stop elephant poaching or stem the illegal consumption of ivory

It appears inevitable now that almost all legal domestic ivory markets will be closed. This is the plan A of a large consortium of animal rights and welfare organisations aimed at stopping elephant poaching – informed by the belief that legal trade provides cover for illegal trade and stimulates demand.

Do away with legal trade, say the ban proponents, and demand will fall. Any elephant ivory seen for sale will be illegal, resulting in the dual benefits of making it easy for law enforcement to take action and for consumers to avoid buying an illegal product. And increasingly this is a majority position. In September International Union for the Conservation of Nature adopted a motion recommending the closing of domestic ivory markets globally. A few weeks later in October a similar proposal was adopted at the 17th Conference of the Parties of Cities, the international convention that regulates wildlife trade.

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Weighing just 750g, the Italian-made frame is stiff in sprints and doesn’t twitch in corners – even during one of the toughest bike challenges around

The greatest compliment you can pay a suit is that you forget you’re wearing it. The fit is so good, the stitching so subtle and the fabric so well cut that it exists as a background reality; seamless tailoring that never distracts by being too lose or too tight. The Sarto Seta is that in a bike, and the sartorial comparison is totally appropriate.

Sarto, an Italian frame builder, has endeavoured to bring Saville Row to the cycling industry, building bespoke made-to-measure bicycles as exclusive and as sought after as classic British tailoring. The company was founded in 1950 by the Sarto family.

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The influential African figure champions smallscale agriculture in an increasingly insecure global climate

At vast global gatherings like the COP22 UN climate conference, which has just concluded in Marrakech, the seductive grandeur of the occasion frequently strips attention from the people, in faraway places, who climate change threatens the most.

But on Wednesday at the COP, during a panel discussion on how agriculture can support the 2030 Sustainable Development Goal for zero hunger, Kanayo F. Nwanze brought these forgotten people into the spotlight with an impassioned plea. To achieve food security in a changing climate, we need to focus on the world’s smallscale farmers—who are not only responsible for the bulk of food production in developing countries, but ironically face some of the worst threats to their own food security, Nwanze said. As the president of the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), an organisation that invests in smallscale agriculture in rural environments around the world, Nwanze’s work to highlight the importance of these farmers on the global agriculture scene won him the inaugural Africa Food Prize in 2016.

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Holmsley Inclosure, New Forest Each silk button spangle gall has a minute larva inside. Looked at later under the microscope, they remind us of a scrumptious doughnut

We drop down the side of this woodland on a bright day buffeted by a cold wind. First planted in 1811 with scots pine and oak, its fences now enclose a wide variety of trees. We turn along the eastern edge to find the lower gate and, on entering, are plunged into a claustrophobic tangle of branches, before quickly coming to a narrow path close set with brambles on one side and hollies on the other. The recent rains have made the soil beneath the fallen leaves a muddy squelch, deeply incised with fresh bike tracks.

Getting our eyes in, we begin to see a host of small brown and greyish fungi tucked into the patchwork of sodden foliage and decaying leaf-fall. For us, most of them are “little brown jobbies”, as they are known to those without sufficient skill to identify them. We notice, too, some so much smaller that we are drawn into a Lilliputian world.

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Theresa May is being warned not to use scientists and academics as pawns in negotiations over Brexit.

The next head of the UN global climate talks calls on the US to save Pacific islands from global warming.

For more than three decades, this man has spent hundreds of hours each year with his forehead pressed to a plane window counting birds. It's one of the longest running and largest wildlife surveys on the planet.

The Obama administration bans offshore drilling in the Arctic but Donald Trump could rip up the ban.

It’s easy to get lost in the old Moroccan medina – just as disorientating as the UN climate process, where emission-cutting goals are being bartered too

Marrakech has an ancient heart — centuries old and unafraid to show it — and it has all the ingredients needed to disorientate an outsider. You get lost, often.

Lanes in the centuries-old medina are narrow and the walls are high, making it impossible to spot a landmark and get a fix on where you are.

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Should we only eat meat we kill ourselves?

Rising sea levels and upstream dams threaten the long term viability of the Mekong Delta, but there is a plan to save it.

Five years after the last rabbit was killed, endangered birds such as the black-browed albatross are growing in numbers

Eight species of threatened seabird have begun to recover on Macquarie Island, signalling a possible end to 130 years of death and destruction on the sub-Antarctic outpost.

The island has been formally declared pest-free, five years after the last rabbit was killed.

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US Department of the Interior says ‘fragile and unique’ Arctic ecosystem at risk if drilling allowed, possibly by pro-fossil fuels Trump administration

Barack Obama’s administration has ruled out drilling for oil and gas in the pristine Arctic Ocean, throwing up a last-ditch barrier to the pro-fossil fuels agenda of incoming president Donald Trump.

The US Department of the Interior said that the “fragile and unique” Arctic ecosystem would face “significant risks” if drilling were allowed in the Chukchi or Beaufort Seas, which lie off Alaska. It added that the high costs of exploration, combined with a low oil price, would probably deter fossil fuel companies anyway.

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Bangladesh and Ethiopia among 48 countries to pledge tougher carbon targets and a switch to 100% renewable energy

Some of the world’s poorest countries have pledged to dramatically cut their carbon emissions and rapidly move to 100% renewable power, as the UN climate summit in Marrakech drew to a close on Friday.

The announcement followed a final declaration by nearly 200 nations affirming their “highest political commitment” to combatting climate change, in a thinly-coded warning to the incoming US president, Donald Trump.

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The survival of elephants depends on what humans do now. Join us on Tuesday 22 November from 1-2.30pm to discuss how to save this threatened species

3.56pm GMT

We know that elephant populations are collapsing at a frightening rate and that the driving forces behind this collapse are a global appetite for ivory and, just as worryingly, human/elephant conflict for space and resources.

Earlier this year, the world’s governments agreed to recommend the closure of domestic ivory markets. This is a serious step towards the eventual complete shutting down of the ivory trade, but now new questions are arising:

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Representatives from 47 of the world's most disadvantaged nations have promised that they will generate all their future energy needs from renewables.

From tractor beams to warp drive, sci-fi has inspired serious real-life research.