Defra and the Welsh government are likely to have to pay European commission’s legal costs for breaching air pollution rules at Aberthaw power station, reports ENDS

The UK breached EU law by allowing a coal-fired power station to emit too much air pollution, the court of justice (CJEU) has said.

In a reasoned opinion, published on 28 June, the CJEU said the UK’s defence of how it regulated Aberthaw power station did not stack up and it should be forced to pay legal costs.

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Source: Guardian Environment

Overseas Development Institute report says crackdown on illegal fishing, and building up national fleets, could generate billions of dollars for the region

If governments in western Africa could end illegal fishing by foreign commercial vessels and build up national fleets and processing industries, they could generate billions of dollars in extra wealth and create around 300,000 jobs, according to a new report (pdf).

The devastating, social, economic and human consequences of overfishing in western Africa’s coastal waters have been well documented but the report, Western Africa’s Missing Fish, by the Overseas Development Institute and Spanish investigative journalists porCausa, lays bare the extent of lost opportunities across countries including Senegal, Mauritania, Liberia, Ghana and Sierra Leone.

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Source: Guardian Environment

Recycling plastic costs councils – and us – millions every year. It’s time refilling old bottles hit the mainstream

While Boris Johnson is busy reducing the size of Europe, his father, Stanley, is appealing to Europe to help us reduce the amount of rubbish we create.

This month, Environmentalists for Europe, the cross-party group co-chaired by Johnson senior, called on the EU to ban non-returnable bottles. Instead, the group said, consumers should be charged a 20p deposit, refundable when they take back the bottle. Or we should make all plastic bottles refillable.

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Source: Guardian Environment

EU departure offers a chance to banish past overfishing and incoherent regulation, says head of industry group, despite warnings exit could hurt fisheries

Scottish fishermen’s representatives were adamant on Tuesday that Brexit would be good news for the 5,000 strong fleet, despite warnings that the uncertainty surrounding the UK’s departure from the EU could hurt fisheries.

Bertie Armstrong, chief executive of the Scottish Fishermen’s Federation, said that leaving the EU would give fleets “the ability to recover proper, sustainable, rational stewardship through our own exclusive economic zone for fisheries”, comparing the situation with Norway and Iceland, which share many key North Sea fishing grounds and are not members of the EU, though they are in the European Economic Area (EEA).

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Source: Guardian Environment

Whoever leads negotiations on leaving the EU faces big choices – any new food policies must have health, the environment and justice at their heart

Food barely featured in the referendum, but years of jibes about Eurocrats controlling our food standards, and myths about bent bananas, left their mark. Food politics will now come to the fore in ways most consumers might not like.

This was predicted by the few studies which bothered to look at this vital area of UK life. The academic reports on Brexit unanimously anticipated not liberation but a period of turmoil and dislocation in the food system.

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Source: Guardian Environment

Climate and energy secretary says while decision to leave will make UK’s role harder, the government’s commitment remains the same

Brexit will make it harder for Britain to play its role in tackling climate change, the UK energy and climate secretary has said.

But Amber Rudd said that the UK remained committed to action on global warming and Whitehall sources have told the Guardian that on Thursday she will approve a world-leading carbon target for 2032.

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Source: Guardian Environment

Despite pressure from students and staff, Harvard leaders have refused to divest

One morning in the summer of 2014, I found myself in the city of Tacloban in the Philippines. The city and surrounding area had been devastated less than a year earlier by Super Typhoon Yolanda. Thousands had been killed; bodies were found for months afterwards.

As part of an international research collaboration, I was interviewing government officials and others throughout the Philippines to assess how to improve preparedness for and response to climate-related disasters. I had already interviewed survivors in cities and villages across the country about the impacts of extreme weather. (And, incidentally, a few weeks later, I would contract dengue and chikungunya—two mosquito-borne diseases aided by climate change in their ongoing spread.) With my prior experience, I thought I was prepared for what I would hear that morning, but I wasn’t.

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Source: Guardian Environment

Australian conservationists spent five months obtaining permissions and planning for a captive breeding programme for the Bramble Cay melomys. But when they arrived on the rodent’s tiny, low-lying island, they discovered they were too late.

The Bramble Cay melomys has become more famous in extinction than it ever was in life. A mouse-like rodent, the melomys amazingly survived on a 3.6 hectare grass-covered cay (a low-lying island in a coral reef) in Australia’s Great Barrier Reef like a ratty Robinson Crusoe for thousands of years. There, it thrived off just a few plant species until human-caused climate change—in the form of rising sea levels and increasing inundations of sea water on the low-lying island—wiped it off the planet.

But, while the extinction has been reported widely, articles have missed an important point: the scientists who uncovered the rodent’s fate had planned to capture individuals and bring them back to the Australian mainland to start a captive breeding programme. They were just too late.

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Source: Guardian Environment

Environment and climate groups publish final scorecards rating main political parties as Australians prepare to vote

If ever there was going to be a climate change election, surely this was going to be it.

As May came and the election date was announced, the implications of the global Paris agreement between more than 190 countries just months earlier were still resonating – the world was moving away from fossil fuels and the challenge to keep global warming well below 2C was agreed.

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Source: Guardian Environment