Trips to the coast, to green spaces in towns and to the countryside all decreased during wet and stormy season

The number of trips made to England’s coasts, parks and countryside between December and February was the lowest in four winters, according to a survey.

Natural England said visits fell 15% from the same quarter last year, from 751.8m to 637.9m visits. It was the first fall recorded by the agency’s monitor of engagement with the natural environment (Mene) survey since 2011, and the lowest level for the season since 2011/12 when there were 628.4m visits.

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Source: Guardian Environment

Lizzie Carr aims to become the first person to stand-up paddleboard 643km along connected waterways from Surrey to Cumbria

A female adventurer is aiming to become the first person to paddleboard the length of England via connected waterways to highlight the issue of plastic pollution.

Lizzie Carr set off on Wednesday morning from Godalming, Surrey, on a 643km journey that is expected to take three weeks.

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Source: Guardian Environment

An architect’s video outlining ambitious proposals for Amman’s biggest urban failure, the Jordan Gate Project, has gone viral. Has previous apathy towards the city’s lack of community life now turned into a hunger for public space?

Architect Hanna Salameh is blunt about how his city is different from many others. “We have no concept of sidewalks,” he says. “We really see them as something you cross over to get to your car. I think that’s why so many people throw trash on the sidewalks – we have no connection to our streets. You don’t walk there and you don’t see it as yours.”

Instead, the streets of the Jordanian capital are something else entirely: slow-moving strips of metallic colour, car roofs gleaming beneath fast food drive-thru signs and glass-fronted malls in interminable gridlock. If Amman was built for cars, it sometimes seems incapable of dealing with them.

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Source: Guardian Environment

With some Indian Ocean tuna stocks on the brink of collapse, the expedition exposes harmful methods by the world’s largest tuna company, Thai Union, owner of John West

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Source: Guardian Environment

Government is wasting time and taxpayers’ money as it faces a second court challenge over illegal air pollution, say green lawyers

The government spent at least £105,000 in legal costs while fighting and losing a court challenge over illegal levels of air pollution, according to data released through freedom of information rules, and now faces further bills from a new case it is contesting.

ClientEarth, the environmental lawyers who defeated the government, say the taxpayers’ money should have been used instead for early and effective action to cut air pollution, which causes 40,000 early deaths a year, according to government figures.

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Source: Guardian Environment

In addition to the estimated $9bn damage to Fort McMurray, ‘the beast’ will affect forests, carbon emissions, air and water pollution and waste

The explosive wildfire in Canada’s tar sands region that forced 90,000 people to flee last week is still burning. By Tuesday, “the beast” had grown to 230,000 hectares, but had moved into largely unpopulated regions east and south of the town of Fort McMurray, Alberta.

Although officials have found 80-90% of the town undamaged, power and water is out, and about 2,400 homes and other buildings have been burned down.

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Source: Guardian Environment

Hoesung Lee, head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, voices hope in battle against 2C increase in warming but warns of ‘phenomenal’ costs

The head of the United Nations climate science panel has declared it is still possible to avoid a dangerous 2C increase in global warming – despite more than a dozen record hot years since 2000. But the costs could be “phenomenal”, he said.

In an interview with the Guardian, Hoesung Lee, the leader of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), defied the bleak outlook of climate scientists who warn the world is hurtling to a 2C rise far faster than anticipated.

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Source: Guardian Environment

Cumbrians see length of time it has taken to repair crucial A591 link after floods as proof of lack of government interest

Its loss has cost businesses 60% of their trade, separated children from their schools and cut the Lake District in half. But five months after floods destroyed one of Cumbria’s key thoroughfares, the road between Grasmere and Keswick finally reopened on Wednesday.

That it took so long to repair the A591 after December’s Storm Desmond is seen by many in the Lake District as a sign of the government’s lack of interest in the north of England, despite its claim to want to build a “northern powerhouse”.

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Source: Guardian Environment

A Minnesota judge found the preponderance of evidence did not favor coal industry climate science denial

Peabody Energy, the world’s largest private sector coal company (now bankrupt), recently faced off against environmental groups in a Minnesota court case. The case was to determine whether the State of Minnesota should continue using its exceptionally low established estimates of the ‘social cost of carbon’, or whether it should adopt higher federal estimates.

The social cost of carbon is an estimate of how much the damages from carbon pollution cost society via climate change damages. In theory, it represents how much the price of fossil fuels should increase to reflect their true costs.

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Source: Guardian Environment