For decades, conservation was focused on stemming how much nature was being lost. But a new era of nature positive environmental policy is taking hold worldwide, shifting from preventing further harm to restoring what’s been lost.

In 2022, almost 200 countries signed up to the goal of 30 by 30 – restoring 30% of lands and seas by 2030. Globally, the goal is to restore an area almost the size of India. Australia is working towards this international goal of increasing protection and restoring the highest priority areas under its Strategy for Nature. Over the last two centuries, Australia has already lost much biodiversity.

Laws should play a key role in protecting and restoring nature. But Australia’s national Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act is not currently fit for purpose. The 2020 Samuel Review concluded the existing laws do not “facilitate the maintenance or restoration of the environment”.

In 2022, the Australian government promised to reverse the decline of nature with new nature positive laws which would repair ecosystems and help species recover. Shortly afterwards, parliament created a national Nature Repair Market to provide incentives for land managers to restore degraded ecosystems.

After a failed attempt at reform last year, the federal government last week announced its long-awaited broader reform package. In introducing the bill, Environment Minister Murray Watt said the laws would enable “stronger environmental protection and restoration”. Will these reforms be a game changer for restoration? It’s not so clear.

What would the proposed laws do for restoration?

Labor’s reform bills run to over 550 pages. This level of complexity means it’s hard to give a definitive answer on what the reforms would do for restoration.

At this stage, it appears that while the package contains long-awaited reforms, it falls short on ecosystem restoration.

The cornerstone of the reforms will be a new power for the Environment Minister to create National Environmental Standards, as called for in the Samuel Review. Once in place, they would work by requiring environment approvals not to be inconsistent with any standard.

These standards have been watered down somewhat. The Samuel Review recommended binding national standards which would outline clear requirements for protecting endangered species and other nationally significant matters. Under the current reforms, the minister is not obliged to make any standards and environment approvals need only be “not inconsistent” with them.

The reform package continues Australia’s reliance on environmental offsets – the practice of allowing developers to destroy habitat in one place by “compensating” for it by restoring habitat elsewhere.

The text of the draft bills suggests a developer must compensate for any long-lasting significant impact through offsets or paying a restoration contribution. The goal is to have a net gain for nature.

This sounds promising, but the concept of “net gain” is unclear and the focus on offsets still assumes the loss of nature somewhere.

A better option would be if developers were legally required to explore ways to avoid or mitigate environmental damage first before relying on offsets. While the minister must “consider” this hierarchy of options in making decisions, they’re not actually obliged to apply it.

Overall, this is disappointing. Rather than creating new incentives for restoration at a landscape scale, restoration work will instead be linked to the traditional legal model of approval for specific, environmentally degrading projects through the use of offsets and restoration elsewhere.

The new “restoration contributions” scheme is even more troubling. It would allow developers to contribute to an offset fund rather than undertake the work themselves. This would be a shortcut, allowing developers to pay for environmental destruction.

Offsets should only be used where habitat can genuinely be replaced. But as they stand, these reforms don’t require assessment of whether offsets are even feasible for a particular project. Biodiversity offsets have also been thoroughly criticised for their failure to prevent loss of nature, let alone generate nature positive outcomes.

The reforms would also allow biodiversity certificates issued under the Nature Repair Market to serve as offsets, despite the government ruling this out in 2023. Linking the nature repair market to offsets may divert investment away from some types of restoration projects. It diminishes the net gain from voluntary restoration when the results merely compensate for a loss elsewhere.

Planning across landscapes

To boost ecological restoration, the Samuel Review recommended better planning at the national and regional scale. Taking a zoomed-out view would help environmental planners connect habitat, safeguard climate refuges and protect critical habitat on a landscape scale.

These new reforms seem to be a step forward on this front. The minister, though, would retain a power to make bioregional plans at their discretion. If plans are made under the environment laws, they should specify zones for development and areas where restoration will be undertaken.

It’s heartening to see restoration included in these plans. The problem is, restoration is still tied to land-degrading activities such as mining or land clearing. That is, it’s done as a response to new damage caused to the environment, not to repair already degraded landscapes.

Time for a new model

What’s missing from the proposed reforms is a positive agenda to address Australia’s deep historic losses of nature.

As the draft laws are debated in parliament, the best outcome would be if clear measures to actually restore nature at landscape-scale and to do it actively, rather than as a response to development damage.

An excellent example Australia could look to is the European Union’s Nature Restoration Law adopted last year. It sets ambitious targets to restore the EU’s heavily degraded ecosystems: 30% by 2030, 90% by 2050.

The targets would help restore biodiversity while combating climate change and boosting nature-based adaptation. Under the law, EU states must prepare their own national restoration plans. Prototype ecosystem restoration laws are also being developed by the international Society for Ecological Restoration.

After decades of decline and species loss, Australians deserve environment laws which genuinely protect and restore unique wildlife and ecosystems. The government’s proposed reforms have promise. But they don’t yet make restoration the national priority it must be.

Emille Boulot, Lecturer of Law, University of Tasmania and Jan McDonald, Professor of Environmental Law, University of Tasmania

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

When you think of palms, you might be mentally transported to tropical islands and beaches. But palms are a diverse and interesting group of plants of roughly 180 genera and more than 2,000 species. Most, but not all, grow in the tropics.

Australia has at least 50 native palm species, and one of my favourites is the cabbage tree palm, Livistona australis.

This slender palm can reach 25m or more in height with a stem diameter of 25–35cm. It has an extensive range down the Australian east coast from southern Queensland reaching almost to Orbost in Victoria. It is Victoria’s only native palm.

Strength and beauty

The stem of the cabbage tree palm has a very intricate patterning formed by the old leaf bases, which give the stem its strength.

If the stem is damaged, the cabbage tree palm cannot grow over or heal the damage. So, take care not to harm its stem (or, for that matter, the stem of other palms).

The cabbage tree palm has fan-shaped leaves about 10–30cm long. These occur at the end of leaf stalks (called petioles) that can be 1.5–2m long. Its small (3mm) white flowers are borne on what’s called a panicle (a branching spike), which can be up to 1.5m long.

The fruits are red but turn black when ripe. It’s at this stage they are ready to plant, if you wish to propagate.

Young palms may have little prickles or a rough texture at the base of the leaves. This is a protective mechanism common to many palms – but the long spines on some can really hurt if you’re not careful.

Cabbage tree palms are moderately frost-sensitive, but once they get up to a few metres in height they are quite tough. They’re resilient, drought-tolerant and cope well with full sun.

The older leaves dry out and hang down from the crown and may stay like this for some years. If many accumulate, they can eventually fall. This can be dangerous, so many gardeners have them regularly pruned.

However, in natural sites they are important nesting and feeding sites for birds and small native mammals such as bandicoots. In urban gardens, they may house possums and rodents.

The dead leaves can burn fiercely in a bushfire, but as long as the crown of the stem is not too badly burnt, cabbage tree palms are moderately fire-resistant. New leaves are produced quite quickly as part of the general fire recovery, as seen around Mallacoota and in New South Wales after the 2019–20 fires.

A useful plant

Like other palm species, cabbage tree palms have a long history of human use.

Indigenous people used leaves for basket-weaving, fibres for twines, ropes and fishing lines and medicine.

Young leaves were reported to be quite sweet and were boiled and eaten: hence the name cabbage tree palm.

The fruits are edible, but have to be cooked as they are quite tough. Parts of the stem can also be eaten as the “heart of the palm”. The heart of the palm can also be found in other palm species, such as the coconut palm (Cocus nucifera) or palmetto (Sabal species); the most common heart of the palm species, however, is the cultivated peach palm (Bactris gasipeas).

The crown is the softest part, but consuming it kills the palm.

Like most tall growing palms, the stems are very fibrous, which can make them difficult to cut with a chainsaw; the chain tends to clog.

This fibrous structure makes the stems quite flexible in strong winds, when the palms bend with the wind rather than breaking.

The fibre from cabbage tree palms was used by early European settlers to make a protective sun hat called a cabbage tree hat.

Like many palms, the root systems of cabbage tree palms are shallow, fibrous and very dense, meaning the plants can be readily dug up and transplanted (provided you take a sufficiently large root mass).

This puts natural palm populations at risk if they are dug up and sold without proper regulation.

If you wish to remove a palm, it’s best to dig below the stem and cut the larger fibrous roots. There may be ten or more roots – often 20mm or less in diameter – that can be easily cut, but even one or two can securely anchor the palm.

Patience is a virtue

Like many plants that have an arborescent (meaning tree-like) growth form, Livistona australis takes its time.

Details are sparse, but there are estimates of palms being nearly 400 years old.

Trees operate over much longer time scales than humans do and so when growing cabbage tree palms, you might need to be patient.

The cabbage tree palm can take between 20 and 60 years to develop a proper stem.

If you are keen to see your cabbage tree palm flower, don’t hold your breath. It may take, according to some estimates, 150-170 years before a first flowering. If you can wait that long, it usually happens between August and October.

Gregory Moore, Senior Research Associate, School of Agriculture, Food and Ecosystem Sciences, The University of Melbourne

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Once again, the Nationals have got out in front of the Liberals on a key issue, this time net zero, announcing on Sunday they were dumping their commitment to it.

This is not unexpected, but more than awkward for their Coalition partner. It makes it trickier for the Liberals to retain the target – which is politically important in city seats – albeit in some watered-down form. It raises the question: if the Liberals stick with net zero what does that mean for the Coalition relationship?

And it puts the Liberals under greater pressure to get a policy out quickly. The party will now speed up its release – it was already planning to do this before Christmas.

The early positioning follows the pattern of the Voice referendum, where the Nationals announced their opposition ahead of the Liberals. In climate and energy debates over the years, the Nationals have been earlier out and more stridently conservative than the Liberals.

The Nationals party room, after several hours of discussion on Sunday, agreed unanimously to a revised policy that says Australia should cut its emissions in line with the developed world, rather than moving faster in order to achieve net zero by 2050.

On Saturday, the party’s federal council called on the parliamentary party to drop the net zero commitment. The Nationals signed up to it in 2021 when Scott Morrison was prime minister and Barnaby Joyce was deputy prime minister and Nationals leader.

The council’s resolutions are not binding on the parliamentary party, but the timing of the council and the parliamentary party meeting was coordinated, given it was clear where the party was moving.

Nationals leader David Littleproud told a Sunday news conference, “We are not walking away from reducing emissions. We can peg ourselves to the rest of the world. If the world moves we move with them”.

He described this as an “agile” model, and was anxious to distance it from denying climate change.

Litteproud said Australia had cut emissions more than like countries. “OECD countries have been cutting their emissions by 1% per year. Australia has been cutting its emissions by about 2% per year – double the OECD rate.”

The Nationals policy would tie the reduction to the average of OECD countries (this would exclude China and India which are not full OECD members). Under this formula the Albanese government’s 2035 target of a 62% to 70% cut on 2005 levels would come down to a 30% to 40% cut.

“Our emissions cuts will be capped and calibrated, which is common sense,” Littleproud said.

“The responsibility will be shared and transparent,” he said.

He pointed to the “proven model” of the Emissions Reduction Fund, saying that in 2014–2023 it “facilitated real emission reductions that didn’t ruin the economy.

"We will incentivise lower emissions through a renewed Emissions Reduction Fund. This will be a small fraction of the $9 billion now being spent each year on net-zero subsidies, regulations, and administrative costs.

"Our approach will increase investment in cheaper electricity by broadening the Capacity Investment Scheme [which presently excludes coal and gas] to include all energy technologies and remove the moratorium on nuclear energy,” Littleproud said.

Senator Matt Canavan, one of those leading the work on the new policy, said that under the Albanese government’s plans Australia would be cutting its emissions at a rate three times more than the rest of the world.

Littleproud said he had informed Opposition Leader Sussan Ley of the Nationals’ position. After the Liberal Party reached its position the two parties would talk. He would not speculate on what the Liberals would do.

Liberals gave their views on net zero on Friday at a meeting organised by a Coalition backbench committee.

Within the Liberal Party there is a spectrum of views, with hardline conservatives wanting to ditch the net zero commitment, some moderates strongly believing in keeping the 2050 target firmly in place, and yet others seeking a compromise such as retaining the target as an aspiration.

Environment Minister Murray Watt said once again in the Coalition “we’re seeing the tail wagging the dog”.

“We’ve got the National Party, which didn’t even rate 4% of the vote in the last federal election, dictating terms to the Liberal Party who claim to be the majority party in a coalition,” Watt told the ABC.

He said it was a repeat of the nuclear issue “where the National Party went out first to drag the Liberal Party into supporting nuclear, only to be resoundingly rejected by the Australian people at the last election”.

The Greens’ Sarah Hanson-Young denounced the Nationals’ policy move – and sought to invoke it in relation to another issue, the government’s attempt to get a deal with the opposition or the Greens for its changes to the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act.

“The question I have for the Labor party now is how on earth can you work with such a ridiculous, out-of-touch party like the Coalition in order to pass your environment laws over the next few weeks, or indeed into next year?” Hanson-Young said.

Crossbencher Zali Steggall said the Nationals’ decision showed they were “captured by fossil fuel interests”.

Another independent, Allegra Spender, said the Liberals “are left with a choice – either be honest that the Nationals are once again setting the Coalition’s climate policy, whatever words the Libs come up with to dress up their own policy, or split with the Nationals altogether”.

Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Just as world leaders gather for this year’s COP30 climate summit in Brazil, the government’s announcement of its intention to significantly change New Zealand’s climate change law upends years of cross-party consensus.

All of the proposals pose serious problems, but the change to the zero-carbon provisions in the Climate Change Response Act 2002 runs counter to the underlying purpose of the act to provide accountability for climate change policy.

The government proposes to simplify emissions reduction plans, which are produced every five years to set out policies and strategies to decarbonise every sector of the economy.

It also wants to remove the Climate Change Commission’s role in providing independent advice on emissions reduction plans, and allow more frequent revisions of these plans without public consultation. The changes would also adjust timelines for emissions budgets and reports, and relax deadlines for the government’s response.

In earlier research, we explored why climate change is an especially difficult policy issue. One of the chief reasons is that it is a long-term problem that needs action now.

Political systems are not good at addressing long-term problems. As public policy expert Jonathan Boston has demonstrated, democracies suffer from a short-term focus and find it hard to ask voters for commitments to fix a problem that will unfold over decades.

Consequently, countries have often announced targets for emissions reductions for dates that are decades away, and then walked off.

The classic New Zealand example is when Tim Groser, who was minister for climate change between 2010 and 2015, consulted the public about what New Zealand’s Paris Agreement target should be, but declared that domestic policies to achieve the target were a separate matter for some other time.

There is a tendency for governments to make grand statements on targets without awkward detail about what we have to do to reach them – or to do as little as possible so as not to upset voters.

But we know that won’t work. New Zealand went through a long period of that kind of climate policy making, and it shouldn’t go back.

Why we have climate law and a commission

The solution we settled on for emission targets and policy in 2019 was the Climate Change Response (Zero Carbon) Amendment Act. The act’s core elements are targets, budgets, plans and independent advice.

The long-term emissions targets for 2050 (net zero for long-lived greenhouse gases and a recently weakened target for shorter-lived methane) are supported by five-yearly emissions budgets, which show what has to be done in each period to stay on track for the target.

These budgets break down the distant target into a series of closer, smaller and more manageable ones. Then, for each budget period, there is a plan that sets out the policy actions in different sectors that, taken together, should produce a viable path to the necessary emissions reductions.

The Climate Change Commission is part of this policy system to provide transparency and independent judgement.

It formulates advice on targets, budgets and plans (and on a number of other matters), and that advice is made public. The government may or may not follow the commission’s advice, but usually must respond, again publicly.

The commission’s independence gives it a role different from that of the minister’s department. It is more able to take a long-term perspective, and it can ensure that politically difficult aspects of climate policy are not downplayed.

The act’s zero-carbon provisions, and especially the commission, help ensure climate policy is formulated in ways that are open, well-informed, systematic, effective and equitable. Consultation during the policy process helps build a broad base of support.

Good processes make better policy

Zero-carbon laws have been said to have a quasi-constitutional character. They are like the Public Finance Act or the Electoral Act in providing the rules and structure within which New Zealand makes decisions.

The fundamental premise is that good processes, laws and institutions will produce better politics and better policy. The zero-carbon procedures make it harder to do climate policy badly, and easier to do it well.

We should not stop the commission from giving advice on emissions reduction plans, and we do not want it to be reduced to being a mere technical system monitor. Nor should the plans be narrowed in scope, or made subject to the summary process of amendment the government intends, which avoids robust scrutiny.

Public consultation on budgets and emissions reduction plans should not be discarded, and timeframes for ministerial responses should not be relaxed. We need the commission as a source of independent advice to provide transparency about our policy options.

There may well be opportunities for streamlining the statutory procedures. But this must not weaken the system that gives essential structure to the way we tackle the difficulties of climate change.

The law should only be changed after wide consultation and the building of substantial multi-party support in parliament. That is how the zero-carbon law was enacted in the first place.

Barry Barton, Professor of Law, University of Waikato and Jennifer Campion, Senior Lecturer in Law, University of Waikato

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The discovery of yellow-legged hornet nests in Auckland is frightening.

There have been five confirmed detections to date. Two of these were small nests, more than a kilometer apart, which suggests there are likely more in the region.

Why should we worry? This hornet is a serious concern for all New Zealanders. Yellow-legged hornets are aggressive predators and can become highly abundant. They threaten people’s health, biodiversity and especially honey bees.

The yellow-legged hornet (Vespa velutina) was accidentally introduced into France in 2004. It then spread rapidly, at around 100 kilometres per year, and was established across France by 2017.

The hornet is now well established in Spain, Portugal, Germany and other European countries. It was first detected in the UK in 2016, and its predicted range extends as far north as Scotland. Their success in Europe suggests they could thrive across much of New Zealand.

In some European areas, densities of up to 13 nests per square kilometre have been recorded, with mature nests housing several thousands of workers. Some even reach up to 13,000 individuals.

Risk to people and pollinators

People can die from hornet stings. Yellow-legged hornets will aggressively defend their nests and have been known to attack people even from hundreds of metres away.

In parts of Europe, they are now considered one of the most common causes of anaphylaxis, with multiple stings potentially leading to multi-organ failure. There have also been reports of eye injuries, particularly when well-meaning people attempt to destroy nests. Hornets can spray venom into eyes through the visors of beekeeping suits.

Their diet includes a significant proportion of honey bees. One European study found that 40% of their prey were honey bees, 30% flies and the remainder included other wasps and pollinators. In some high-pressure regions of Europe, beekeepers have reported losses of up to 80% of their hives once yellow-legged hornets became established.

More typical hive losses cluster around 30%. European beekeepers have resorted to desperate control measures – some even stand outside their hives with badminton rackets, swatting the hornets as they hover near the hive entrance.

When preying on honey bees, hornets hover outside hive entrances, waiting for tired bees to return from their foraging trips. The hornet snatches the bee mid-flight, kills it, and carries its body back to its nest as food. If bees sense the hornets, they may stop foraging altogether, staying inside the hive – a behaviour known as “foraging paralysis”.

The yellow-legged hornet poses a serious threat to both native and introduced pollinators, and to pollination itself.

Beekeepers in the UK are intensely worried, with reports of record numbers of nests this year, with infestations as far north as Yorkshire. One nest can consume around 11 kilograms of insects in a single season.

Quick action is key to eradication

New Zealand is uniquely vulnerable to wasp and hornet invasions. Unlike the UK and Europe, our biodiversity did not evolve alongside social hornets or wasps. Our native insects have no co-evolved or natural defences.

Add to that our warm, temperate climate, and it’s no surprise we already have some of the world’s highest wasp nest densities and hold the world record for the largest individual wasp nest, at 3.7 metres long. Hornets would likely become widespread and highly damaging if they established here.

If there is any chance of eradication, we must pursue it now.

Invasive hornets and social wasps are hard to eradicate, but it has been done before. In the United States, a programme to eliminate the giant Asian hornet (Vespa mandarinia) appears to have succeeded.

Closer to home, German wasps were successfully eradicated from the Chatham Islands. And Spain at least temporarily celebrated the eradication of the yellow-legged hornet from the island of Mallorca – although populations have since been rediscovered.

The key to success in any eradication programme is acting early, while populations are still small and localised.

Citizen science has played a vital role in early detection and eradication efforts for many invasive species, including these hornets. We have to find the hornet nests to destroy them and it is crucial to do so early in the year, before new queens and males are produced in autumn.

Public trapping and reporting of sightings have already proved invaluable overseas. We need people engaged and watching for these hornets now. Traps have been designed specifically for yellow-legged hornets in Europe, and the Ministry of Primary Industries would be wise to implement them here.

But homemade traps made from plastic drink bottles, cut in half with the top inverted, can work, too. The hornets are attracted to a range of foods in spring, including protein such as fish or meat, and even beer.

If any country can catch this hornet early, it’s New Zealand. Our tradition of public vigilance and commitment to protecting our unique biodiversity would be of major benefit now.

You can report any suspected sightings either online at report.mpi.govt.nz or by calling the exotic pest and disease hotline on 0800 809 966.

Phil Lester, Professor of Ecology and Entomology, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Along with delegates from all over the world, I’ll be heading to the United Nations COP30 climate summit in the Brazilian Amazon city of Belém. Like many others, I’m unsure what to expect.

This year, the summit faces perhaps the greatest headwinds of any in recent history. In the United States, the Trump administration has slashed climate science, cancelled renewable projects, expanded fossil fuel extraction and left the Paris Agreement (again). Trump’s efforts to hamstring climate action have made for extreme geopolitical turbulence, overshadowing the world’s main forum for coordinating climate action – even as the problem worsens.

Last year, average global warming climbed above 1.5°C for the first time. Costly climate-fuelled disasters are multiplying, with severe heatwaves, fires and flooding affecting most continents this year.

Climate talks are never easy. Every nation wants input and many interests clash. Petrostates and big fossil fuel exporters want to keep extraction going, while Pacific states despairingly watch the seas rise. But in the absence of a global government to direct climate policy, these imperfect talks remain the best option for coordinating commitment to meaningful action.

Here’s what to keep an eye on this year.

A smaller-than-usual COP?

A persistent criticism of the annual climate summits is that they have become too big and unwieldy – more a trade show and playground for fossil fuel lobbyists than an effective forum for multilateral diplomacy and action on climate change. One solution is to deliberately make these talks smaller.

The Belém conference may end up having a smaller number of delegates, though not by design so much as logistical headaches.

Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva backed the decision to invite the world to the Amazon to display how vital the massive rainforest is as a carbon sink. But Belém’s remote location on the northeast coast, limited infrastructure and shortage of hotels have seen prices soar, putting the conference out of reach for smaller nations, including some of the most vulnerable. These constraints could undermine the inclusive “Mutirão” (collective effort on climate change) sought by organisers.

Show me the money

Climate finance is a perennial issue at COP meetings. These funding pledges by rich countries are intended to help poorer countries reduce emissions, adapt to climate change or recover from climate disasters. Poorer countries have long called for more funding, given rich countries have done vastly more damage to the climate.

At COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan last year, a new climate finance goal was set for US$300 billion (~A$460 billion) to be raised annually by developed countries by 2035, with the goal of reaching $US1.3 trillion (~A$2 trillion) in funding from both government and private sources over the same period.

To deliver the second goal, negotiators laid out a “Baku to Belém” roadmap. The details are due to be finalised at COP30. But with the US walking away from climate action and the European Union wavering, many eyes will be on China and whether it will step into the climate leadership vacuum left by developed countries. The EU has only just reached agreement on a 2040 emissions reduction target and an “indicative” cut for 2035.

Climate finance will be the priority for many countries, as worsening disasters such as Hurricane Melissa in Jamaica and Typhoon Kalmaegi in the Philippines once again demonstrate the enormous human and financial cost of climate change.

The latest UN assessment indicates the need for this funding is outpacing flows by 12–14 times. In Belém, poorer countries will be hoping to land agreement on greater finance and support for adaptation. Work on a global set of indicators to track progress on adaptation – including finance – will be key.

Brazilian organisers hope to rally countries around another flagship funding initiative set to launch at COP30. The Tropical Forests Forever Facility would compensate countries for preserving tropical forests, with 20% of funds directed to Indigenous peoples and local communities who protect tropical forest on their lands. If it gets up, this fund could offer a breakthrough in tackling deforestation by flipping the economics in favour of conservation and protecting a huge store of carbon.

2035 climate pledges

Belém was supposed to be a celebration of ambitious new emissions pledges which would keep alive the Paris Agreement goal of holding warming to 1.5°C. Nations were originally due to submit their 2035 pledges (formally known as Nationally Determined Contributions) by February, with an extension given to September after 95 per cent of countries missed the deadline.

When pledges finally arrived in September, they were broadly underwhelming. Only half the world’s emissions were covered by a 2035 pledge, meaning the remaining emissions gap could be very significant. Australia is pledging cuts of 62–70% from 2005 emissions levels.

That’s not to say there’s no progress. A new UN report suggests countries are bending the curve downward on emissions but at a far slower pace than is needed.

How negotiators handle this emissions gap will be a litmus test for whether countries are taking their Paris Agreement obligations seriously.

Rise of the courts

Even as some countries back away from climate action, courts are increasingly stepping into the breach. This year, the International Court of Justice issued a rousing Advisory Opinion on states’ climate obligations under international law, including that national targets have to make an adequate contribution to meeting the Paris Agreement’s temperature goal. The court warned failing to take “appropriate action” to safeguard the climate system from fossil fuel emissions – including from projects carried out by private corporations – may be “an internationally wrongful act”. That is, they could attract international liability.

It will be interesting to see how this ruling affects negotiating positions at COP30 over the fossil fuel phase-out. At COP28 in 2023, nations promised to begin “transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems”. If countries fail to progress the phase-out, accountability could instead be delivered via the courts. A new judgement in France found the net zero targets of oil and gas majors amount to greenwashing, while lawsuits aimed at making big carbon polluters liable for climate damage caused by their emissions are in the pipeline.

An Australia/Pacific COP?

A big question to be resolved is whether Australia’s long-running bid to host next year’s COP in Adelaide will get up. The bid to jointly host COP31 with Pacific nations has strong international support, but the rival bidder, Turkey, has not withdrawn.

If consensus is not reached at COP30, the host city would default back to Bonn in Germany, where the UN climate secretariat is based.

Outcome unknown

As climate change worsens, these sprawling, intense meetings may not seem like a solution. But despite headwinds and backsliding, they are essential. The world has made progress on climate change since 2015, due in large part to the Paris Agreement. What’s needed now on its tenth anniversary is a reinfusion of vigour to get the job done.

Jacqueline Peel, Professor of Law, The University of Melbourne

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Ten years on from the landmark Paris Agreement, countries have taken big strides in limiting emissions and the clean energy transition is accelerating rapidly. But geopolitical headwinds are growing and the damage bill for climate pollution is rising. Climate action hangs in the balance.

Next week, these issues will come to a head as negotiators gather in Brazil for COP30, the 30th annual global climate talks. This year’s talks could be pivotal, as all countries were due to set more ambitious targets to cut emissions. Will the world double down on the clean energy transition – or will momentum stall and fossil fuel interests win out?

Australia has a larger role than its size and clout might suggest. After two decades as one of the world’s worst climate laggards, the new national emissions target compares favourably with much of the developed world. Australia is also bidding to host the next COP talks with Pacific nations.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has attracted some criticism over his decision not to attend the summit. But Climate and Energy Minister Chris Bowen will be there, alongside dozens of negotiators and experts from Australia and the Pacific.

The outcome is uncertain. But for the first time in years, Australia will be a leader in working towards a consensus on a managed transition away from fossil fuels.

What’s at stake at COP30?

The world’s climate talks are returning to their birthplace. The UN Climate Convention was signed in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 before talks began three years later. This year, the 30th Conference of Parties will be held in the Amazonian city of Belém.

For COP30 to succeed, it must firm up global commitment to the Paris Agreement. That may seem hard, given the United States is once again walking away from climate action.

But there is good news. The Paris Agreement is working, slowly but surely. Countries agreed to set emissions targets and increase their ambition every five years. These targets are bending the curve of emissions and limiting warming.

Before Paris, the world was on track for a catastrophic outcome: 4°C degrees of warming this century. The first wave of global emissions targets brought this closer to 3°C. In 2021, upgraded targets brought projections down to 2.1–2.8°C. Tallying up the new round of national targets suggests it may be possible to limit warming to 1.9°C. That assumes, of course, all targets are met in full. The new United Nations emissions gap report suggests 2.3–2.5°C is more likely.

The bad news is the Paris Agreement is not working fast enough. The longer we take to bring global emissions to net zero, the more heating we bake in. Every fraction of a degree intensifies damage to ecosystems and human communities. We are seeing these worsening impacts now at 1.2°C of warming. Almost every corner of the world is already reeling from intensifying heat, storms, floods, droughts and fires.

What can Australia do?

Australia’s delegation will arrive in Belém with a much stronger target: cutting emissions 62–70% by 2035 (from 2005 levels).

This isn’t aligned with the science – a cut of at least 75% is needed to align with the Paris goal of limiting warming to 1.5°C. But it’s an improvement.

Australia’s 2030 target was one of the weakest among wealthy nations. But only a handful of nations now have a more ambitious 2035 target.

That’s not all. Australia’s rapid shift to renewable energy is one of the fastest in the world. One in three Australian homes now has rooftop solar. Grid operators are at the forefront of soaking up more and more clean power. The federal government plans to have the main grid running on over 80% renewable power within five years. These successes offer an encouraging story.

Our turn next?

If the COP31 bid succeeds, it would mean Adelaide would host Australia’s largest ever diplomatic meeting. Success would help cement Australia’s place in the Pacific at a time of increasing geostrategic competition.

In 2022, the Australian government announced its bid to host the COP talks with the Pacific. Since then, Bowen has effectively been auditioning to head the talks, taking on key roles at the annual climate talks. At last year’s talks in Azerbaijan, he co-chaired negotiations for a new global finance goal.

The bid has broad support. But Turkey has refused to withdraw a rival bid. The standoff is expected to be resolved in the second week of talks in Belém.

If Australia secures hosting rights, leaders will have a positive story to tell about the renewables shift. But hosting would also draw attention to Australia’s huge gas and coal exports. Long one of the largest coal exporters, Australia’s gas production has doubled since the 2015 Paris Agreement. The emissions of these exports are three times larger than the entire domestic economy.

Until recently, these exported emissions were considered a customer responsibility. But in July, the world’s highest court found countries are legally responsible for climate damages caused by fossil fuel production and consumption, noting countries approving new fossil fuel projects may be committing “internationally wrongful acts”.

This finding is likely to ripple through these talks. Two years ago, nations at COP28 in Dubai agreed to “transition away from fossil fuels” in their energy systems. Bowen hailed the announcement:

if we are to keep 1.5°C alive, fossil fuels have no ongoing role to play in our energy systems – and I speak as the climate and energy minister of one of the world’s largest fossil fuel exporters.

Bowen and the Australian delegation will have to bring this level of clarity to Brazil amid backsliding by other major fossil fuel exporters such as the United States.

If COP31 comes to Adelaide, Bowen will need to go further. No one has yet given a sunset date for Australia’s fossil fuel industry. Working alongside Pacific nations, Australia can build a global legacy: beginning the managed phase out of fossil fuel production.

Wesley Morgan, Research Associate, Institute for Climate Risk and Response, UNSW Sydney and Ben Newell, Professor of Cognitive Psychology and Director of the Institute for Climate Risk and Response, UNSW Sydney

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

How successful is luxury tourism in Africa? What happens if it fails to produce higher tourism revenues: can it be reversed? And does it depend on what kind of government is in place?

Pritish Behuria is a scholar of the political economy of development who has conducted a study in Botswana, Mauritius and Rwanda to find answers to questions like this. We asked him about his findings.

What is luxury tourism and how prevalent is it in Africa?

Luxury tourism aims to attract high-spending tourists to stay at premium resorts and lodges or visit exclusive attractions. It’s a strategy that’s being adopted widely by governments around the world and also in African countries.

It’s been promoted by multilateral agencies like the World Bank and the United Nations, as well as environmental and conservation organisations.

The logic underlying luxury tourism is that if fewer, high-spending tourists visit, this will result in less environmental impact. It’s often labelled as a “high-value, low-impact” approach.

However, studies have shown that luxury tourism does not lead to reduced environmental impact. Luxury tourists are more likely to use private jets. Private jets are more carbon intense than economy class travel. Supporters of luxury tourism also ignore that it reinforces economic inequalities, commercialises nature and restricts land access for indigenous populations.

In some ways, of course, the motives of African countries seem understandable. They remain starved of much-needed foreign exchange in the face of rising trade deficits. The allure of luxury tourism seems almost impossible to resist.

How did you go about your study?

I have been studying the political economy of Rwanda for nearly 15 years. The government there made tourism a central part of its national vision.

Over the years, many government officials and tourism stakeholders highlighted the challenges of luxury tourism strategies. Even so, there remains a single-mindedness to prioritise luxury tourism.

I found that, in Rwanda, luxury tourism resulted in a reliance on foreign-owned hotels and foreign travel agents, exposing potential leakages in tourism revenues. Crucially, tourism was not creating enough employment. There was also a skills lag in the sector. Employees were not being trained quickly enough to meet the surge of investments in hotels.

So I decided to investigate the effects of luxury tourism in other African countries. I wanted to know who benefits and how it is being reversed in countries that are turning away from it.

I interviewed government officials, hotel owners and other private sector representatives, aviation officials, consultants and journalists in all three countries. Added to this was a thorough review of economic data, industry reports and grey literature (including newspaper articles).

What are your take-aways from Mauritius?

Mauritius was the first of the three countries to explicitly adopt a luxury tourism strategy. In the late 1970s and early 1980s the government began to encourage European visitors to the island’s “sun-sand-sea” attractions. Large domestic business houses became lead investors, building luxury hotels and buying coastal land.

Over the years, tourism has provided significant revenues for the Mauritian economy. By 2019, the economy was earning over US$2 billion from the sector (before dropping during the COVID pandemic).

However, tourism has also been symbolic of the inequality that has characterised Mauritius’ growth. The all-inclusive resort model – where luxury hotels take care of all of a visitor’s food and travel needs themselves – has meant that the money being spent by tourists doesn’t always enter the local economy. A large share of profits remains outside the country or with large hotels.

After the pandemic, the Mauritian government took steps to loosen its focus on luxury tourism. It opened its air space to attract a broader range of tourists and re-started direct flights to Asia. There’s growing agreement within government that the opening up of tourism will go some way towards sustaining revenues and employment in the sector. Especially as some other key sectors (like offshore finance) may face an uncertain future.

And from Botswana?

Botswana followed Mauritius by formally adopting a luxury tourism strategy in 1990. Its focus was on its wilderness areas (the Okavango Delta) and wildlife safari lodges. For decades, there were criticisms from scholars about the inequalities in the sector.

Most lodges and hotels were foreign owned. Most travel agencies that booked all-inclusive trips operated outside Botswana. There were very few domestic linkages. Very little domestic agricultural or industrial production was used within the sector.

However, I found that the direction of tourism policies had also become increasingly political. Certain politicians were aligned with conservation organisations and foreign investors in prioritising luxury tourism. Former president Ian Khama, for example, banned trophy hunting on ethical grounds in 2014. He pushed photographic tourism, where travellers visit destinations mainly to take photos. But critics allege he and his allies benefited from the push for photographic tourism.

Photographic tourism is closely linked with the problematic promotion of “unspoilt” wilderness areas that conform to foreign ideas about the “myth of wild Africa”.

President Mokgweetsi Masisi reversed the hunting ban once he took power. He argued it had adverse effects on rural communities and increased human-wildlife conflict. He believed that regulated hunting could be a tool for better wildlife management and could produce more benefits for communities.

Since the latter 2010s, Botswana’s government has loosened the emphasis on luxury tourism and tried to diversify tourism offerings. It has relaxed visa regulations for Asian countries, for example, to allow a wider range of tourists to visit more easily.

What about Rwanda?

Of the three cases, Rwanda was the most recent to adopt a luxury tourism strategy. However, it has remained the most committed to this strategy. Rwanda’s model is centred on mountain gorilla trekking and premium wildlife experiences. It’s augmented by Rwanda’s attempt to become a hub for business and sports tourism through high-profile conferences and events.

Rwanda invited global hotel brands (like the Hyatt and Marriott) to build hotels and invested heavily in the country’s “nation brand” through sponsoring sports teams. The “luxury” element is managed through maintaining a high price to visit the country’s main tourist attraction: mountain gorillas. Rwanda is one of the few countries where mountain gorillas live.

After the pandemic, the government lowered prices to visit mountain gorillas but has also regularly stated its commitment to luxury tourism.

What did you learn by comparing the three?

I wanted to know why some countries reverse luxury tourism strategies once they fail while others don’t.

It is quite clear that luxury tourism strategies will always have disadvantages. As this study shows, luxury tourism repeatedly benefits only very few actors (often foreign investors or foreign-owned entities) and does not create sufficient employment or provide wider benefits for domestic populations. My research shows that the political pressure faced by democratic governments (like Botswana and Mauritius) forced them to loosen their luxury tourism strategies. This was not the case in more authoritarian Rwanda.

Rwanda’s position goes against a lot of recent literature on African political economy, which argues that parties with a stronger hold on power would be able to deliver better development outcomes.

While that may be case in some sectors, the findings of this study suggest that weaker political parties may actually be more responsive to changing policies that are creating inequality than countries with stronger political parties in power.

Pritish Behuria, Reader in Politics, Governance and Development, Global Development Institute, University of Manchester

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Ukrainians have always felt closely tied to their land, often expressing this through literature and folktales. But these connections have grown even stronger since the country was invaded by Russia in 2022.

Forests, rivers and meadows in Ukraine are considered sacred spaces and important to resilience. As Ukrainians have dealt with the constant stress of war, nature has been a place to reconnect.

Ukraine has also been at the forefront of large-scale nature restoration in Europe in recent years. The country is planning two new national parks: Budzhak Steppes National Natural Park (in the Odessa region in the south) and the Great Carpathians National Park (in the south-west). And a project called Rewilding Ukraine has begun restoring some 13,500 hectares of wetlands and steppe (unforested grasslands) – that’s almost twice as big an area as Manhattan in the US.

This is serious rewilding. Compare this scale to that to one of the best known examples of rewilding in England, for instance – the Knepp Castle estate in west Sussex which involves some 3,500 acres (1416 hectares).

Rewilding these areas of Ukraine has involved the release of over 240 animals of different species, including kulan (wild donkeys), steppe marmots, eagle owls, fallow deer and even hamsters which are native to the region and the building of two breeding platforms for Dalmatian pelicans.

Interventions such as the removal of 200 meters of man-made dams surrounding Ermakiv Island are allowing beavers to thrive and the natural ecosystem to rebalance. There are benefits for the local human populations too, as flooding in villages and towns is reduced.

Help for veterans

The impact of this massive rewilding project is not only being felt in the landscapes of the Danube delta and adjacent Tarutino steppe in south-west Ukraine where vital efforts are being made to preserve this endangered habitat.

An initiative known as Nature for Veterans was launched in 2025 with the aim of helping soldiers and their families find emotional restoration from the horrors of war by immersing them in these newly revitalised areas of south-west Ukraine, far from the frontline.

Many who avoided death in the conflict find themselves severely affected with post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and their loved ones have suffered in their own ways. The value of nature-based therapy for war veterans, particularly those with PTSD, has been understood for many years, since first world war survivors with “shell shock” were commonly prescribed time outdoors.

This has particular relevance to Ukraine today as figures from its ministry of health, suggest that some 1.8 million soldiers and veterans may need psychological support.

Wars and climate change are inextricably linked. Climate change can increase the likelihood of violent conflict by intensifying resource scarcity and displacement, while conflict itself accelerates environmental damage. This article is part of a series, War on Climate, which explores the relationship between climate issues and global conflicts.

Environmental damage

Of course, the war in Ukraine has not only generated a large number of casualties (totalling 400,000), but has also caused enormous destruction to its ecological landscape. Thousands of hectares have been burned, rivers have been polluted by shelling and biodiversity has been interrupted by artillery noise and displacement.

What’s more, as much as 30% of Ukraine has been contaminated by landmines. In total, environmental damage has exceeded US$127 billion (£96 billion).

To some extent, due to the contamination of land, the war has also made it more difficult for Ukrainians to connect with nature. And evidence suggests this disruption has affected their mental health, something that is backed up by research showing people’s relationship with their local environment affects their wellbeing.

For societies facing the constant stress of war and threats to the country’s territorial integrity, landscape and environment, the chance to connect with nature offers important benefits.

In the face of this type of stress, Ukrainians have found ways to restore their lost connections with nature either by rebuilding gardens, adapting to new landscapes and/or finding different ways of sustaining their traditions.

Rewilding is offering renewal and recovery for both Ukraine’s people and its environment.

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Natasha Lindstaedt, Professor in the Department of Government, University of Essex and James Canton, Lecturer in Literature, University of Essex

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Australia’s recycling system has been lurching from one crisis to another for decades. Soft-plastic schemes are collapsing, kerbside contamination is on the rise, and states are still struggling to coordinate a coherent national approach.

But the deeper problem isn’t technical. It’s historical — and moral.

For 70 years, the packaging industry has led advertising and lobbying campaigns that trained us to see waste as an individual failing and a municipal responsibility, rather than a design flaw in the market system itself.

How the recycling myth began in the United States

In the early 1950s, Vermont briefly banned disposable bottles after dairy farmers complained broken glass was killing livestock.

Alarmed, beverage and packaging companies mobilised. They founded Keep America Beautiful, a seemingly civic-minded nonprofit organisation that soon became one of the most influential environmental groups of its era.

The organisation’s famous “litterbug” ads made the problem look simple. People were to blame for pollution. Picking up rubbish became a moral duty. The structural drivers of waste — packaging design, supply chains, and corporate incentives — were hidden from view.

As our new research shows, this kind of early market shaping used moral storytelling to influence how the public understood responsibility for waste — redirecting regulatory attention away from packaging and beverage producers.

The same companies later extended their strategy: lobbying for recycling logos on non-recyclable plastics while fighting container-deposit laws. Recycling became the perfect decoy: a feel-good solution that preserved the disposable packaging economy.

Australia imported the same publicity campaign

The message didn’t take long to cross the Pacific. In 1966, Keep South Australia Beautiful was established with support from a glass manufacturer and a brewery — mirroring the American founding coalition of packaging and beverage firms. Its early focus on litter education and civic pride soon grew into a national movement.

By 1974, Keep Australia Beautiful was running television campaigns with slogans such as “Dopes Rubbish Australia” and the notorious “This little pig” ads in the 1980s. The national “Tidy Towns” awards, sponsored by the Keep Australia Beautiful group, follow a similar script.

The formula was reminiscent of mid-century Americana: shame the public, celebrate personal responsibility, and leave production systems untouched.

How the system was rigged

In the US, industry influence didn’t stop at ad campaigns. Behind the scenes, packaging and beverage companies lobbied governments to make recycling collection and processing a municipal duty. That shifted the costs of their own waste onto municipalities and taxpayers.

Worse, internal industry research showed they knew large-scale plastics recycling was neither technically feasible nor economically viable.

Those findings were quietly buried while the public was urged to rinse and sort non-recyclable materials that were destined for landfill anyway.

Half a century later, the same pattern endures. Most government messaging still focuses on what citizens should do — rinse the yoghurt tub, check the recycling label, avoid contamination — while disposable packaging is produced faster than any municipal system can process it.

Globally, only about 9% of plastics ever made have been recycled.

In Australia, recycling rates for flexible plastics remain near zero. Virgin-plastic production, driven by cheap fossil-fuel feedstocks, still outpaces recycled material by more than 15 to one.

In short, the system works perfectly — not for the environment, but for the packaging and beverage companies that designed it.

Learning from history

Individual behaviour matters, but it is no substitute for structural accountability. Three policy shifts would make a genuine difference.

1. Deposit-return schemes should be expanded and harmonised nationwide. Evidence from Europe shows these programs routinely recover over 90% of containers, compared with less than 60% for kerbside recycling.

2. Stronger regulation is needed. These “extended producer responsibility laws” would mandate that producers and retailers fund collection and processing infrastructure, rather than leaving costs to local councils and ratepayers.

3. Production of virgin plastics needs to be regulated to make recycled materials competitive. Without capping output of new plastic, recycling markets will always be flooded with cheaper raw material. That makes it impossible to create a circular economy.

The story of recycling is not one of public apathy but of institutional design. It’s a story of how industries used moral narratives to deflect responsibility.

From “litterbugs” to “recycling heroes,” the same asymmetric pattern endures. Citizens do the work, municipalities pay for it, and corporations keep the profits. To fix the system, we must first rewrite that story.

Jonathan Baker, Senior lecturer in Strategy, University of Adelaide

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

For decades, wildlife conservation policy has aimed to protect endangered species until there are enough individual animals alive that the species won’t go extinct. Then the policymakers declare victory.

That principle is enshrined in laws such as the U.S. Endangered Species Act and Canada’s Species at Risk Act. It shapes how governments manage wildlife and their habitat, how politicians weigh trade-offs between species protection and human development goals, and how the public understands conservation.

But often, those minimalist population numbers – enough to avoid extinction – aren’t enough to restore ecosystems or cultural connections between people and those animals.

There’s another way of thinking about species recovery: emphasizing not just avoiding extinction but instead enabling species to truly thrive. A shift from conserving minimum populations to restoring thriving populations involves recovering the species’ ecological role, including large parts of its geographic range and genetic diversity, as well as its relationships with people.

The difference between recovering thriving populations instead of traditional minimalist approaches becomes clear when looking at three iconic North American species: gray wolves, grizzly bears and bison.

Gray wolves: More than a number

After decades of federal protection, gray wolves were taken off the list of species protected by the Endangered Species Act in parts of the U.S. in January 2021.

The Trump administration is considering removing federal protections for gray wolves nationwide.

But in the wake of the regional protection removal, states such as Montana and Idaho expanded hunting and trapping seasons for wolves, and some organizations added bounties for killing them.

Officials justified their actions by pointing to the fact that gray wolves had surpassed a minimum population threshold for species survival, and saying that intensive predator control would not jeopardize the species’ long-term viability.

The states’ current population goals would reduce wolf populations to about one-third of current numbers: from 1,235 to 500 in Idaho and from 1,134 to 450 in Montana.

For contrast, there are 3,300 wolves in Italy. That country has an area about 80% of the size of Montana and is home to less prey, less open land and more than 50 times as many people, all of which significantly raise the potential for human-wolf conflict.

So far in Idaho and Montana, gray wolf numbers have stopped increasing and may still satisfy requirements under federal laws protecting the species. But the wolf population there is not robust and thriving – it’s just surviving.

Wolves remain absent from large areas that provide suitable habitat for them. Reducing wolf numbers further, as the states want to do, would limit their ability to reoccupy these areas, where they could restore ecosystems by helping to manage often overabundant prey populations and also inspire millions of people with their wildness.

Grizzly bears: Viable yet vulnerable

Grizzly bear populations in the Greater Yellowstone and northern Continental Divide ecosystems have exceeded the federal recovery targets set decades ago under the Endangered Species Act to prevent the bears’ extinction.

In July 2025, a U.S. House of Representatives committee agreed to remove the species’ protection under the law, which would allow states to permit people to hunt the bears for the first time in decades. But it was overhunting that, in part, drove them to near extinction in the first place.

Government agencies often say that hunting and trapping reduce human conflicts with bears. But scientific and public opinion on that point is far from a consensus. There are effective, nonlethal methods for keeping bears away from humans, such as public education, electric fencing, bear-resistant garbage containers and removal of roadkill and dead livestock.

Once numbering more than 50,000 across at least 18 states in the 48 contiguous United States, grizzlies now number just over 2,000 and occupy less than 5% of their original habitat area. They can be found in only four states.

Current grizzly populations are also not interconnected, despite the availability of suitable habitat for them. That risks genetic isolation of subpopulations, which decreases genetic diversity and their prospects for adaptation and survival. Disconnection of populations also reduces their ability to disperse seeds, improve soil health and prey on other species. Grizzly bears are also an umbrella species, meaning they share habitat with a disproportionate number of other species, so recovering grizzlies benefits the entire food web.

One day, hunting might offer a new way for humans to reconnect with thriving grizzlies. But right now, with populations isolated and vulnerable, opening a hunting season would risk cutting off their chance to thrive in large, unoccupied ranges.

Bison: The illusion of return

Perhaps no species better captures the failure of existing recovery models to move beyond survival toward thriving populations than the bison. Tens of millions of them used to roam North America, shaping grassland ecosystems and playing significant material, spiritual and communal roles in Indigenous cultures.

Hunting for bison hides and tongues reduced their numbers to fewer than 1,000 at the cusp of the 20th century. Today, most bison live on ranches in small, fenced herds. Only 31,000 bison in North America are managed for conservation, and most are in isolated pockets of habitat at the fringe of their historic range. Even in Yellowstone National Park, which supports thousands of bison and provides a glimpse into how bison historically shaped North American ecosystems, the animals are barred from expanding to other parts of their historic range due to concerns about disease transfer to domestic livestock.

Thinking about the bison’s recovery in different terms does not mean tens of millions of them need to be stampeding across the continent. But it could mean large, free-ranging, genetically diverse herds that are integrated into a variety of ecosystems, where they also have a role in cultural revitalization.

A thriving view of species recovery is central to Indigenous-led initiatives, such as those guided by the 2014 Buffalo Treaty, which has been signed by more than 40 Indigenous nations. The treaty helped drive bison reintroduction to Banff National Park in Canada and is currently inspiring the recovery of free-roaming bison on Indigenous reservations across the U.S. and Canada, including the Blackfeet Reservation in Montana and Wind River Reservation in Wyoming.

A broader vision of recovery

Shifting away from the long-standing goal of a minimum viable population would require changes to how recovery targets are set, how success is measured, and how decisions are made when populations reach those minimum thresholds.

While national laws in the U.S. and Canada provide valuable starting points, focusing on species not just surviving but thriving would involve more ambitious goals, longer timelines and stronger human-wildlife coexistence measures. It would also require shifting public expectations away from the idea that recovery ends when minimal legal obligations are met.

Doing so could help combat climate change by restoring the role of large, wild animals in nutrient cycling, as well as reverse ecosystem degradation and help people of all backgrounds reconnect with nature.

As wildlife biologists, we aim to provide the best available science and recommendations to inform the conservation of North America’s wildlife. Yet under the current management paradigm, where recovery often equates to mere survival, we are compelled to ask whether this is enough. Should wildlife conservation aim merely to prevent extinction or to foster populations that thrive? How each and every one of us answers this question will shape not only the future of wolves, grizzly bears and bison, but also the legacy of wildlife recovery across North America.

Benjamin Larue, Faculty Affiliate in Wildlife Biology, University of Montana; Jonathan Farr, Ph.D. Student in Wildlife Biology, University of Montana, and Mark Hebblewhite, Professor of Ungulate Habitat Ecology, University of Montana

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

If you’ve sat in a nail salon recently, you may well have encountered TPO or trimethylbenzoyl diphenylphosphine oxide to give it its full chemical name. You won’t have seen the name on the bottle. But if you’ve had your gelled fingers under a blue-violet lamp, TPO could well have been part of the process.

TPO is what chemists call a photoinitiator – basically, a chemical that reacts when it’s hit with UV light. When your nails go under the lamp, TPO breaks apart and helps link tiny liquid molecules together, turning the polish into that solid, shiny, long-lasting gel layer.

It’s smart chemistry, and it’s one reason gel manicures last so much longer than normal nail polish. But recently, the EU banned TPO because research suggests it might increase the risk of cancer and could be harmful to the reproductive system.

Meanwhile, alternatives such as benzophenone and other common photoinitiators come with concerns of their own.

Benzophenone, for instance, is listed as a possible endocrine disruptor, meaning it may interfere with hormones. Another common substitute for TPO, called TPO-L is harmful to aquatic life and may cause skin allergies. None of this is hidden. The European Chemicals Agency maintains a public database where anyone can look up chemicals and find their hazard classifications and environmental data.

The point is not that nail varnish is dangerous. It is that even everyday products involve chemistry that is more complex than we might assume and that decisions about what is “safe enough” involve weighing risks, benefits and available alternatives.

The same pattern has played out recently with two much wider-reaching chemicals: Pfas, so-called “forever chemicals”, and glyphosate, a herbicide used in agriculture.

Recently, the European Commission announced new restrictions on Pfas in firefighting foam. It did this because Pfas don’t break down in the environment and can build up in living things over time, which can be harmful. Meanwhile, the use of glyphosate has been under review, with the EU approving its continued use and the UK due to make a decision in the next year or so.

None of these decisions happen instantly or automatically. Here is how chemical safety is regulated.

What Reach does

Pharmaceuticals are tightly controlled globally, but chemicals aren’t always regulated as strictly. However, in the EU and UK, chemicals are managed under a system called Reach that is often described as one of the most comprehensive chemical regulations in the world.

The basic difference in how we treat medicines versus chemicals comes down to how we think about risk. Chemicals are expected to be safe when used properly. Medicines, on the other hand, are allowed to have some risks if the benefits outweigh the risks.

That’s why harsh cancer treatments, which can have serious side-effects, are still considered acceptable – because they can save lives. And it’s also why very dangerous chemicals can still be made and used, as long as there are strong safety measures in place.

Under Reach, companies must register their chemicals and provide detailed information on a chemical’s properties, hazards and safe handling. The principle here is: “no data, no market”.

Regulators then evaluate that information – and can request more if needed. Such substances may then be authorised, meaning they can only be used if companies can demonstrate that risks are controlled or that societal benefits outweigh them while safer options are developed.

If a substance poses an unacceptable risk that cannot otherwise be managed, regulators can restrict or ban specific uses of chemicals. Later if evidence emerges that suggests a chemical can cause cancer, harm reproduction, persist in the environment, accumulate in living things, or otherwise be hazardous, it might be added to a list of “substances of very high concern”.

Reach is a strict, step-by-step system that requires companies to prove their chemicals can be used safely. But in reality, we often only learn the full effects of a chemical over time, once it is being used outside the lab and in everyday life. That’s why decisions about chemicals such as TPO, Pfas and glyphosate can change slowly and sometimes take many years to fully settle.

Safe and sustainable by design

As a result of cases such as these, many feel that despite Reach being one of the most comprehensive chemical regulations in the world, it isn’t enough. This has led to a philosophy known as safe and sustainable by design, where, instead of making a chemical and then proving it is safe, a material is designed with safety and disposal or recycling in mind.

In this area, artificial intelligence may well prove to have a major role. AI is increasingly being used to predict toxicity of chemicals and so allow them to be flagged before they are manufactured.

Chemistry has built the modern world, given us durable coatings on the ends of our fingers, high-yield crops, non-stick pans, waterproof jackets and thousands of other unnoticed conveniences. It has also given us chemicals that travel too far, last too long and accumulate where they were never intended.

The challenge is not to stop using chemistry. It is to use it wisely. Whether we are talking about manicures, farmland, or emergency foam, the principle should be the same: use chemistry that does the job, without leaving a legacy. The more we can predict that, the fewer surprises we’ll find later.

Mark Lorch, Professor of Science Communication and Chemistry, University of Hull

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Three environmental defenders – people who take action against the exploitation of natural resources – are murdered or disappeared somewhere in the world every week. The latest report by Global Witness, an NGO that investigates environmental and human rights abuses, has recorded more than 2,250 such cases since 2012.

The vast majority of the 146 land and environmental defenders killed in 2024, according to the report, were murdered in Latin America. Many were opposing large-scale mining, logging or agribusiness projects.

Colombia recorded the highest number of deaths, with 48 defenders killed across the country. But Guatemala proved the most dangerous country per capita, with 20 killings that year. Indigenous people and small-scale farmers in Latin America are particularly exposed. Their lives and livelihoods place them in direct conflict with extractive and criminal interests.

Afro-descendant communities there face the same elevated risk. Many, including Brazil’s Quilombola communities, hold collective ancestral territories and have safeguarded forests and rivers for generations. This custodianship makes them targets.

Women accounted for approximately 10% of victims in 2024, with cases concentrated in Mexico. And multiple attacks killed entire families, including children, suggesting systematic intimidation rather than isolated violence.

Wars and climate change are inextricably linked. Climate change can increase the likelihood of violent conflict by intensifying resource scarcity and displacement, while conflict itself accelerates environmental damage. This article is part of a series, War on climate, which explores the relationship between climate issues and global conflicts.

In a conflict-affected context, or a situation where information is tightly controlled, killings and disappearances are hard to document. Families and witnesses also often stay silent for fear of reprisals. Impunity compounds the problem.

The Global Witness report notes that in Colombia, where environmental defenders have been at risk for decades, only 5% of killings since 2002 have resulted in convictions. Without justice, deterrence is absent, and cycles of violence continue.

Violence against environmental defenders also persists because it works. Removing a community leader, for example, can disrupt resistance for months or years. For corporations, defending against a lawsuit that arises due to violence against environmental defenders costs less than losing a mining concession. And for governments dependent on resource revenues, silencing critics preserves foreign investment.

According to the Global Witness report, nearly one-third of the murders in 2024 were linked to criminal networks. State security forces were directly implicated in others. This dual threat of criminal violence and official complicity is enabled in part by a shrinking ability for people to participate freely in public life.

Civicus, an alliance of civil society organisations that works to strengthen citizen action and civil rights globally, rates more than half of the countries where defenders were killed as “repressed” or “closed”. This means the authorities actively restrict freedoms of association, assembly and expression.

Violence is predictable in such environments. Defenders face not only physical attacks but also criminalisation, harassment and strategic lawsuits designed to exhaust resources and silence dissent. Ecuador demonstrates how quickly this repression can escalate.

In September 2025, the government charged people protesting fuel subsidy cuts and mining expansion with terrorism and froze the bank accounts of dozens of environmental activists without warning. Efraín Fueres, an Indigenous land defender, was shot and killed by security forces during the protests.

The Ecuadorian government is also moving to rewrite the country’s constitution, the world’s only charter recognising nature’s intrinsic rights, ostensibly to combat drug trafficking. But defenders say the real aim is to eliminate legal barriers to extractive industries.

Regional protection

Regional protection mechanisms do exist. But they remain incomplete. The Escazú agreement, a binding treaty signed in 2018 covering Latin America and the Caribbean, requires that states guarantee public access to environmental information, ensure meaningful participation in decisions and actively protect defenders.

Eighteen of the region’s 33 states have ratified the agreement. In April 2024, parties also adopted an action plan that includes free legal aid for defenders, legal training and monitoring through to 2030.

Whether Escazú can reduce killings depends on implementation. Brazil and Guatemala, both high-risk countries where defenders face lethal threats, have not ratified the treaty. Without participation from the deadliest jurisdictions, regional frameworks offer limited protection.

Protection mechanisms frequently fail, not because they are poorly designed but because they operate within systems that structurally favour extractive industries. Police assigned to protect defenders may be drawn from the same units that secure mining sites or suppress protests.

Prosecutors tasked with investigating attacks often depend on governments whose economic prospects rely on the very projects defenders oppose. Judges hearing cases against corporations, for example, may face political pressure when ruling against major investors. Around half of judges in Latin America are political appointees.

Mining and logging companies also fund local employment, infrastructure and sometimes entire regional economies. This creates dependencies that make meaningful accountability nearly impossible. Even well-intentioned protection schemes cannot compensate for the fact that defending land often means obstructing projects that generate revenue for underfunded state institutions.

There is also a critical legal gap at the international level. When severe environmental destruction occurs during peacetime, existing law struggles to hold individuals accountable.

The International Court of Justice addresses state responsibility but cannot prosecute individuals. And while the International Criminal Court prosecutes genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and aggression, environmental harm outside armed conflict falls beyond its reach.

A growing coalition led by Vanuatu, Fiji and Samoa is urging recognition of ecocide as a fifth international crime under the Rome Statute. The proposed definition, developed by an independent expert panel in 2021, would criminalise “unlawful or wanton acts committed with knowledge of a substantial likelihood of severe and either widespread or long-term damage to the environment”.

This would create personal criminal liability for individuals in positions of authority whose decisions lead to mass environmental harm. The theory is that when individual decision-makers face prosecution risk, projects relying on violence and intimidation become personally dangerous to authorise.

Ecocide law would not replace existing regulation or regional treaties but would serve as a backstop when harm reaches catastrophic scale. For defenders, the promise is accountability that reaches beyond hired security to the individuals who profit from or politically enable destruction.

People will always stand up for the places that sustain them. If environmental defenders can operate without fear, everyone benefits. Protecting environmental defenders is not idealism, it is the most pragmatic investment a civilisation can make.

Damien Short, Co-Director Human Rights Consortium, Institute of Commonwealth Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

After years of trying to understand the minds of people who hurt others, I have recently turned my attention as a criminal psychologist from violent crimes to the less well-known world of green crime.

While researching for my new book, Green Crime: Inside the Minds of the People Destroying the Planet and How to Stop Them, I wanted to understand those who pose a threat to us on a much larger scale, at times even an existential level. Why do people choose to destroy the Earth and what can we do to stop them?

When I tell people that I am interested in environmental crimes, they often query two things. First, some ask whether I’m talking about environmental activists. No, people who take to the streets to raise awareness for the planet, even those who commit crimes like vandalising a building, are committing crimes for the environment, not against it. It is a problem that so many people think of the protesters who want to protect the planet before they think of those destroying it.

Second, people often conflate environmental crime and environmental harm. In other contexts, we understand that not all harms are crimes. For example, we know the difference between an aggressive argument and murder. Both are harmful, but only one is a crime. The same goes for environmental issues. There are many things that a company or person can legally do that are harmful to the Earth but are not crimes. Often it is only the most serious forms of environmental harm that are criminalised.

An environmental crime is when someone breaks a law related to destroying or contaminating our earth, air or water, or killing off biodiversity like trees and animals. These green crimes include acts like burning down a protected nature reserve, poaching an endangered species, or releasing toxic untreated water into rivers and lakes that makes people sick.

Alberto Ayala, executive director at the Sacramento Metropolitan Air Quality Management District, exposed what is alleged to be one of the biggest corporate fraud and environmental crime cases of all time: the dieselgate scandal in 2015 when diesel cars were found to be emitting far more toxic air pollution on the roads than when they passed regulatory tests.

When I interviewed him, Ayala made it clear to me that we need people to check that companies aren’t poisoning our air, or selling us things that make us sick or that might explode. Industry has repeatedly proven that it isn’t always going to have our, or the planet’s, best interests in mind. Regulators make sure there are guardrails.

It’s also not just companies we need to pay attention to. A lot of large-scale environmental crime is committed by organised crime syndicates. Some are armed and murder people in the process of committing environmental crimes.

Undercover agents, like those working with the Environmental Investigation Agency (a charity based in London and New York), infiltrate these organised crime networks. Agents gain the criminals’ trust, catch them on hidden cameras, and give evidence bundles to local police or Interpol so they can further investigate and press charges. Environmental lawyers then make sure those charges are turned into convictions.

Once these environmental criminals are caught, there are researchers who help shed light on their mindsets and motivations. Examples include Vidette Bester, who studies illegal miners, and Ted Leggett, who has led research for the UN’s report into world wildlife crime.

Six pillars

By synthesising research like theirs with wider work from the social sciences, I have developed a psychological profile of environmental criminals. I call it the six pillars model. The profile helps to show that their motivations are more nuanced, and at times relatable, than it first appears.

People commit green crimes because they feel it is easier to do something illegal than to do it legally (ease), because they feel they will get away with it (impunity), and because they take more than they need – and take it away from others (greed). Environmental criminals also convince themselves that what they are doing isn’t that bad (rationalisation) and that everyone else is doing it too (conformity). Feeling like there is no other option, either because the person is destitute or because they feel incredibly pressured at work, is also an important factor (desperation).

By understanding these factors we can hopefully recognise the moments when we are at risk of becoming environmental criminals ourselves, or of making other harmful decisions. In the fight for nature, it remains important to reduce our environmental footprint by choosing more plant-based meals, avoiding unnecessary flying, buying vintage rather than new, and insulating our homes.

I do all of these things because I know that not only do they help reduce the harm to nature I personally contribute to, but also because I want to normalise these behaviours in my own social circle. That being said, I also know that me doing these things won’t make nearly as much difference as catching environmental criminals.

We need to include green crime in conversations about how to save our planet. And we need to better acknowledge, and celebrate, the people who are holding environmental criminals accountable.

This article features reference to a book that has been included for editorial reasons, and may contain links to bookshop.org. If you click on the link and go on to buy something from bookshop.org, The Conversation UK may earn a commission.

Julia Shaw, Research Associate, Criminal Psychology, UCL

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Environmental crime is big business, often listed among the world’s top five criminal activities, just behind counterfeiting and drug crime. So it would be reasonable to think it is a big priority for global law enforcement.

But our new research suggests this is not the case. For each country using a global list to track down wanted individuals, less than 2% of the crimes they were wanted for were environmental, on average.

Interpol’s red notices are one of the few ways to understand international law enforcement priorities. When nations submit a red notice, these alert Interpol’s 196 member nations of the details of a wanted person, including physical characteristics and a description of the crime.

Once approved, Interpol publishes this on its list of red notices, and requests that law enforcement agencies including police forces assist in locating the named person – then provisionally arrest them pending extradition or other legal action.

Red notices do help. Recently, Simon Leviev, an alleged fraudster dubbed the “Tinder Swindler”, was arrested after a red notice was issued for allegations of defrauding multiple women he met on the dating app of large sums of money. The notice flagged him as a wanted person when making an international border crossing, promoting cross-border cooperation between police and border forces. He was arrested at the Georgian border for crimes committed predominantly in Norway.

Our research examined how frequently this is used to combat environmental crime, compared with other crimes such as fraud or murder. By analysing red notices, we wanted to know if environmental crime is a global priority.

Our results showed that this tool is rarely used for environmental offences. Of more than 4,400 active Interpol red notices when we did the study in December 2023, just 21 were categorised as environmental crimes. That’s less than 0.5% of the total.

If you’re thinking maybe this tool only works for high-profile individuals, that isn’t the case. Earlier this year, Interpol coordinated a global operation involving 138 countries and regions to arrest 365 suspects and seize 20,000 endangered animals.

And in 2023, Tanzania requested the publication of two red notices which led to cooperation between Tanzania, Thailand and Egypt to track down a wanted individual for tortoise trafficking. The publication of the red notice flagged their wanted status as they crossed an international border, leading to their arrest.

Red notices can evidently be a useful tool in the fight against growing environmental crime.

Why this matters

Environmental crime is vast, including illegal logging, mining, waste trafficking, and the poaching and smuggling of wildlife. Together, these activities generate billions of dollars each year, often ranking just behind the global trade in drugs and arms.

They drive deforestation, pollution and biodiversity loss, while fuelling corruption and violence as they converge with other violent, organised crimes. They can be incredibly harmful not just to the environment but people too.

There is a growing recognition of the impact of pollution on people’s health, for example. Without tackling this crime, growing global commitments to protecting biodiversity, such as through the 30x30 target – where nations commit to protecting and conserving a minimum of 30% of land and sea for biodiversity by 2030 – risk becoming symbolic.

The near-absence of environmental criminals from Interpol’s red notice list matters because it reflects how low environmental enforcement still ranks in global policing priorities. As long as these crimes are treated as less important, they will continue to thrive in the shadows, with enormous social and ecological costs.

Strengthening cooperation between national police forces through means such as Interpol red notices could make a big difference, especially in the face of cuts to international development funding, which may leave some enforcement agencies under-resourced.

Environmental crime isn’t a niche issue, it’s a threat to global security, public health, and issues such as pollution and water quality that the public depend on. If governments truly consider it a crisis, why aren’t more of its perpetrators on the world’s most-wanted list?

The problem may not simply be that governments don’t care. Environmental crime often crosses borders and legal systems. It’s not always clear who is responsible, or even which laws apply.

A crime such as illegal fishing or waste dumping may affect multiple countries, making prosecution difficult. Some nations still treat environmental offences as minor, while others lack the capacity to investigate the crime enough to find out who is responsible.

It is important to understand why nations aren’t using Interpol’s red list more effectively to prosecute environmental crime. Finding out if it’s lack of will, resourcing, or understanding of how to prosecute the perpetrators could be key to tackling environmental crime more effectively.

Diogo Veríssimo, Research Fellow in Conservation Marketing, University of Oxford and Sally Sinclair, PhD candidate at Durrell Institute of Conservation and Ecology, University of Kent

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UK banks, energy giants and arms exporters are at the heart of one of the world’s least-known human rights and environmental crises, our research has revealed.

West Papua – the Indonesian-administered western half of the island also known as New Guinea – hosts much of the world’s third-largest rainforest after the Amazon and Congo basins.

Very few people outside of this region know about the decades of disappearances, torture and mass evictions of people from their land or of the independence struggle led by indigenous people. Even fewer know that the UK government and British companies are remain deeply entangled in the industries driving this destruction.

Our new audit documents, for the first time, how the UK supplies arms and jungle warfare training to Indonesia, while major British corporations – from BP to Unilever – and financial institutions profit from mining, palm oil, gas or logging in the territory, in spite of strong opposition from many people who live there. (BP did not respond to a request for comment; Unilever did not respond on record).

These investments continue a legacy that began with Britain’s brief colonial presence in the 18th century and today links UK companies to an area that has seen mass deforestation, widespread displacement and allegations of torture and extrajudicial killing.

The environmental cost

West Papua has vast deposits of gold, copper and other metals, and major reserves of liquid petroleum gas. The region is home to the Grasberg mine, the world’s largest gold mine and second-largest copper mine.

A 2022 report by local activists estimated that, each day, around 300,000 tonnes of toxic mining waste are dumped into the Ajkwa river system. Fish stocks have been devastated and contaminated mining waste has piled up in and around the river, making it no longer navigable using traditional boats.

Our audit also documents how gold extracted from Grasberg is sold through the London Bullion Market Association and how the London Metal Exchange brands and sells copper from the Grasberg mine. (The LBMA has previously pointed to its responsible sourcing standards, while the LME has previously said it “takes its regulatory obligations seriously, and has appropriate measures in place to comply with such obligations, including in respect of [potentially criminal waste disposal]”).

Palm oil is another key driver of deforestation, and West Papua is the site of a rapid expansion of industrial agriculture which includes the world’s largest deforestation project. Our audit identifies 14 major British investors in West Papuan palm oil plantations, including HSBC. (HSBC did not respond to a request for comment). British firm Unilever sources palm oil from two mills in the region. (Unilever did not respond on the record).

British energy giant BP operates the Tangguh liquefied natural gas facility in West Papua. The project sits in the middle of one of the world’s largest contiguous mangrove forests and occupies 3,200 hectares of land, most of which is designated a “green zone” with extra environmental protections. Our audit estimates the project will ultimately release 1.5 billion tonnes of carbon by the time it is all processed and burned – equivalent to the EU’s entire emissions reductions between 2015 and 2030.

Since production began, BP has faced criticism over alleged ties with Indonesian security, particularly in the forced relocation of ten villages which severed local people from their ancestral fishing grounds (BP did not respond to a request for comment on each of these matters).

A legacy of colonialism – and the cold war

Britain’s role in West Papua began in 1793, when a British naval expedition briefly claimed the territory as “New Albion”. Within a few years the British were gone, and New Guinea soon became a Dutch colony.

But UK interest resurfaced during the cold war, when the west wanted to ensure that West Papua and its huge mineral resources were kept within the US sphere of influence. Through a UN-backed vote called the “Act of Free Choice” – widely criticised as a sham referendum and commonly referred to as the “Act of No Choice” – West Papua was incorporated into Indonesia rather than gaining independence.

This paved the way for the current model of industrial development, in which foreign-backed projects extract enormous wealth while local people miss out or are displaced.

In 2022, the UN’s refugee agency estimated that between 60,000 and 100,000 Papuans had been displaced in the previous four years. Today, the number may be even higher. Human rights defenders we have worked with in the region estimate there are more than 100,000 displaced.

This mass displacement is a direct consequence of large-scale industrial projects led or underpinned by foreign investors. Allegations of systemic torture, state killings and forced evictions continue, while UK companies and investors profit from the industries driving the crisis.

Until the people of West Papua – rather than foreign investors – are given control over their own resources, there is little prospect of an end to repression, mass displacement and poverty.

Samira Homerang Saunders, Researcher, Centre for Climate Crime and Climate Justice, Queen Mary University of London and David Whyte, Professor of Climate Justice, Queen Mary University of London

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The coastlines I trace resemble logos and luxury icons: palms, crescents, pixelated grids, surreal ornaments etched into shallow seas. The cartography is striking. The environmental consequences are very concerning.

There is an urgent need to evaluate the negative effects and risks associated with these artificial structures around the world, especially as climate change makes sea-level rise more extreme.

For ten years, I have been tracking changing coastlines and trying to map the spread of artificial coastal developments. But this is difficult for two reasons.

First, it’s tricky to define what counts as reclamation and what doesn’t. Does a polder (a piece of low-lying land reclaimed from the sea) belong in the same category as a luxury island? Do sea walls belong in the same category as “dredge-and-fill peninsulas” (land created by digging sand from a seabed or river banks that is used to fill an area of water).

Second, at a global scale, constantly updating maps with rapidly changing unnatural boundary designs is a never-ending task, which involves extracting data from satellite images.

The geometry of reclaimed sites and artificial shorelines can seem bizarre – ranging from the leafed fronds of Ocean Flower Island in Hainan, China, to perfect crescents in Durrat Al Bahrain in the Persian Gulf, and straight-edged lattices in Lagos, Nigeria. In most cases, they are designed to look appealing without much consideration of ocean health or storm resilience.

Sharp angles interrupt longshore drift. Features such as headlands, jetties or bends in the coastline block or redirect the flow of sand moved by waves. This causes sand to build up in some areas while leaving other beaches with less sand, leading to erosion.

With artificial coastlines, these effects are amplified – a particular problem in places without the financial means to manage their beaches.

Grid-like canals slice tidal flats into disjointed basins. On maps, the lines are neat – but in reality, they produce messy hydrodynamics and fragmented ecosystems.

Such misplaced “neatness” can have far-reaching consequences. Reclamation destroys mangroves, muddy tidal flats and seagrass meadows – ecosystems which act both as valuable stores of atmospheric carbon and fish nurseries.

Dredging also stirs up sediment which clouds the water downstream, making it harder for coral reefs to survive. This compounds climate stress, acting as a threat multiplier. Most of the artificial coastlines aren’t as resilient to extreme weather as they could be.

Human-made coastal changes disturb natural water flow, often leading to poor water quality, floods and erosion. Coastal communities can lose their fishing grounds and safe landing beaches. Without protective natural ecosystems acting as a buffer against extreme weather, often the poorest coastal communities bear the greatest impacts from coastal erosion and sea-level rise.

There’s also a carbon cost to this type of coastal development. Dredgers, quarrying, cement and machinery all stack up emissions. Add in the lost carbon storage from destroyed wetlands, and reclamation becomes a climate double blow.

How maps become bridges to action

Maps reveal where, when and how much development is occurring. They can become bridges to action if this research into shoreline change is combined with biodiversity surveys (to assess marine life), hydrodynamic modelling (changes to currents) and social impact assessments (how coastal communities are affected).

In my view, environmental impact assessments should look beyond short-term, single-project effects, and consider how multiple projects collectively affect ecosystems over time. Construction approvals should depend not only on each project’s immediate footprint, but on how it will perform across its entire lifetime – for example, how much flood risk it creates and how much carbon it emits or saves.

Using a mix of tools to engage diverse groups – including local communities, policymakers, scientists and educators – can strengthen understanding and action on coastal change. Examples include holding workshops on the interpretation of satellite-derived data and visualisations, creating interactive StoryMaps (digital storybooks using maps, pictures and text to explain a topic), as well as community-driven mapping.

Many coastal and fishing communities located around reclamation sites – who previously had direct access to the coast – are now calling to halt further reclamation. By documenting lost ecosystems, tracing flood pathways and highlighting human stories behind coastal change, we can better understand how vulnerable coastal communities are to land reclamation.

Some damage is irreversible. Natural coastlines are not just scenic – they are self-maintaining, shock-absorbing, carbon-storing infrastructure. A moratorium on new reclamation throughout the world is needed – and a pivot to restoration by rebuilding lost mangroves, protecting tidal creeks and removing “hard edges” where possible.

Mapping alone will not stop coastal development. But it can catalyse coalitions, inform policy, expose hidden costs and redirect finance. It can turn a line on a screen into a line in the sand.

I began my research by trying to define reclamation precisely enough to classify it. But it has revealed a more urgent task: to defend what remains of the natural coastline, and restore what we still can.

The coastline is not a canvas for our extravagant signatures. When protected, it is nature’s living margin which sustains us.

Dhritiraj Sengupta, Visiting Researcher, University of Southampton

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Sean Matthews, the Reform UK leader of Lincolnshire County Council, has said he’ll “lie down in front of bulldozers” to stop Britain’s largest solar farm being built in the county. He’s taking sides in a new rural culture war that pits green energy against the countryside’s traditional image of food and farming.

Reform’s opposition to renewables isn’t surprising. Fossil fuel interests have provided around 92% of the party’s funding according to research by DeSmog (when contacted by DeSmog, Reform did not comment on that finding). But solar farms have become a way for the party to mask these interests by presenting itself as a defender of farms, fields and “common sense” against what Matthews called the “nonsense” of net zero.

Meanwhile, the protest group Farmers to Action has urged supporters to “keep the land growing, not glowing”. Its leader, Justin Rogers, has called climate change “one of the biggest scams that has ever been told”, and the group now operates in lockstep with the Together Declaration, a rightwing campaign group with an explicit anti-net zero agenda.

Yet a recent protest organised by these groups in Liverpool, at the Labour party conference, suggests there is limited enthusiasm in the farming community for these culture wars. While most of the speakers were farmers, very few working farmers showed up. (One of us, Tom, who has been to around 15 of these protests, was there in person and estimates about 50 out of around 300 people present were farmers.)

Those mobilising the culture wars are trying to turn localised rural resentments against solar panels into a wedge issue, and in the process win over rural voters to Reform as the party of anti-net zero. If Reform wins the election, it will seek to impede necessary renewable energy projects.

However, this conflicts with the majority of farmer sentiment, which shows they are concerned by climate change. So, while Reform UK is positioning itself as anti-climate, is the party, despite the rhetoric, actually anti-farmer?

‘You can’t eat electricity’

Research by the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU) found 80% of UK farmers are “concerned about the impact of climate change on their ability to make a living”, while 87% have experienced reduced productivity due to heatwaves, floods or other climate change-induced extreme weather.

For farmers, productivity isn’t just about profit – it’s a central pillar of what sociologists have called the “good farmer” identity. This is the idea that being a successful food producer is central to how many farmers see themselves and their role.

Since the second world war, agricultural innovations have largely been aimed at producing more food, as a way to improve domestic food security.

Now, in essence, they are being asked to shift their identity to embrace energy production along with food production. But planting fields with solar panels clashes with the productivity aspect of what it means to be a good farmer. The truism that “you can’t eat electricity”, as Farmers to Action put it, is trying to speak to this sentiment.

The accusation is that taking land out of production threatens food security. In fact, only around 0.5% of UK farmland needs to be converted to solar to achieve the government’s target figure.

At the same time, as the research by ECIU has found, the very productivity of farming is being threatened by climate change. This presents an apparent tension.

Without urgent climate action, British farms will continue to bear the costs and consequences. Environmentalists and climate activists might wish to take advantage of this tension between what farmers need and what Reform is offering. While Nigel Farage, Richard Tice and co shake their fists at the sun, farmers suffer in the heat.

Corporate profits or community interest?

Many objections to large solar farms are driven by a sense of fairness. For example, a tenant farming family in Yorkshire is about to lose 110 acres of their best arable land – half their farm – to solar panels, without any compensation. This will have a devastating impact on their business – where they have lived and farmed for many decades.

For the landowner, the switch will probably be very lucrative, with energy companies reportedly offering rents as high as £1,000 per acre per year, on long-term contracts.

In this scenario, the landowner wins and the tenant loses, which goes against the principle of a just transition, the idea that those affected by the shift to net zero should not lose out. This is despite the prime minister, Keir Starmer, making a pre-election pledge that tenant farmers would be protected.

Effective green policy must ensure that green transitions benefit those doing the work or opposition will grow. Perhaps if the profits were recouped by local communities, not far-off corporations and large absentee landowners, nimbyism wouldn’t fester so easily.

There are fairer ways to deploy renewables, via initiatives which involve and benefit local communities. An example of this is Cwm Arian Renewable Energy, near to where one of us, Alex, lives. It has used the income from wind energy to support the local community in various ways, such as offering good employment, putting on community events and teaching land skills.

Farmers, like the rest of society, are paying the price of high energy costs. Recent research has shown that wind energy alone has reduced British energy costs by at least £104 billion. Making clear that renewable energy developments can help with lowering energy bills could go some way to overcoming opposition.

Ultimately, farmers still want to farm and produce food. At the same time, agriculture must fit into broader green transitions. The challenge is to take on board the voices and concerns of farmers and see them as part of the transition – not treat them as obstacles to it. If not, there are plentiful voices on the right who are eager to offer them an alternative.

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Alex Heffron, PhD Candidate in Geography, Lancaster University and Tom Carter-Brookes, Leverhulme Doctoral Scholar, Sustainable Rural Futures, Keele University

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Humans have known about, thought about and worried about climate change for millennia.

Since at least the fourth century BC, the ancient Greeks and Romans recognised that the climate changes over time and that human activity can cause it.

They worried deeply about the impact it would have on us as individuals, and on broader society.

The earliest mention of climate change?

Greek writer Theophrastus of Eresus (who lived roughly from 372 BCE to 282 BCE) was a student of Aristotle. He is sometimes credited with the earliest reference to climate change.

In his treatise On Winds, Theophrastus notes people in Crete recognised their climate had changed over the centuries:

[they say] that now the winters are longer and more snow falls, presenting as proof the fact that the mountains once had been inhabited and bore crops, both grain and fruit-tree, the land having been planted and cultivated.

For there are vast plains among the Idaean mountains and among others, none of which are farmed now because they do not bear (crops).

But once, as was said, they were in fact settled, for which reason indeed the island was full of people, as heavy rains occurred at that time, whereas much snow and wintery weather did not occur.

It’s unclear how accurate Theophrastus’ account of Crete’s climate might be or what time period is meant by the word “once”.

Modern scientific studies suggest that from 8000 BCE to 600 BCE Crete experienced various alternations of climate, for example from humid and warm to dry and warm to cold and humid, while in the time when Theophrastus was writing the climate is meant to have been relatively warm and dry.

Theophrastus’ observation shows people handed down information about climate change from generation to generation.

Ancient awareness of the role of humans in climate change

In ancient Greek and Roman times, some were even aware that human actions could contribute to changes in climate.

The Roman aristocrat Pliny the Elder (23/24-79 CE) wrote a work titled Natural History, in which he gave examples of human induced climate change.

In one passage, Pliny noted that

in the district of Larisa in Thessaly the emptying of a lake has lowered the temperature of the district.

According to Pliny, because of this change of climate:

olives which used to grow there before have disappeared, also the vines have begun to be nipped (by frost), which did not occur before.

Pliny noted this kind of change caused by human activity had happened elsewhere in Greece:

The city of Aenos, since the river Maritza was brought near to it, has experienced an increase of warmth and the district round Philippi altered its climate when its land under cultivation was drained.

Ancient awareness of long-term climate changes

Ancient Greeks and Romans understood the climate is not static over time.

The Roman writer Columella (active around 50 CE) noted in his work On Agriculture that climate change had been mentioned by earlier writers:

For I have found that many authorities […] were convinced that with the long passing of the ages, weather and climate undergo a change.

Columella refers to the Roman writer Saserna (who was active in the early first century BCE). Saserna had observed how:

Regions which formerly, because of the unremitting severity of winter, could not safeguard any shoot of the vine or the olive planted in them, now that the earlier coldness has abated and the weather is becoming more clement, produce olive harvests and the vintages of Bacchus (wine) in the greatest abundance.

Saserna did not, however, attribute these long-term climactic changes to human activity. He suggested they were caused by the position of the Earth in relation to the Sun and the other planets, writing that:

The position of the heavens has changed.

Ancient responses to climate change

Greek and Roman writers sometimes complained about the destruction being done to the environment.

Roman writer Pliny the Elder said that:

We taint the rivers and the elements of nature, and the air itself, which is the main support of life, we turn into a medium for the destruction of life.

However, most ancient authors tended not to link environmental damage or pollution with climate change as much as we do today. The exception is when they talk about the draining of lakes or diversions of rivers, which worried many.

Ancient authors did, however, see protection of the environment as a serious concern. Their view was making the environment unhealthy would make people unhealthy, too.

For example, the physician Galen (129-216 CE) said that in his time the Tiber River in Rome was so polluted that it was not safe to eat fish caught there. Nonetheless, many people ate the fish, got sick, and died. The main pollution sources were sewage and rubbish.

Some ancient leaders took action to clean up the environment.

For instance, the Roman emperor Nerva (who ruled 96-98 CE) undertook construction works that caused the appearance of the city to be “clean and altered” and made the air “purer”, according to the Roman writer Frontinus.

What the modern world can learn

Ancient Greek and Roman writings reveal ancient concerns about our negative impact on the environment.

They show that places once rich and fertile later became desolate and barren.

Although the Greeks and Romans linked environmental harm with climate change to a more limited extent than we do today, they nevertheless knew harming the environment could change the climate.

This, they understood, can ultimately bring harm to ourselves personally and to our societies as a whole.

Konstantine Panegyres, Lecturer in Classics and Ancient History, The University of Western Australia

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