History suggests food shoppers only change eating habits in short-term, hence muted reaction from food firms at processed meat and cancer links
Supermarkets and food suppliers, already under fierce pressure over the amount of sugar in the nation’s food, could have done without more revelations about the health consequences of the food we eat.
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Source: Guardian Environment
American Academy of Pediatrics urges doctors and politicians to protect children from environmental threats, such as natural disasters and heat stress
Children are particularly vulnerable to the effects of climate change, according to a new policy statement from the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP).
The statement, published in the online journal Pediatrics on Monday, urged pediatricians and politicians to collaborate to protect children from climate-related threats. Such threats include natural disasters, heat stress, lower air quality, increased infections, and threats to food and water supplies.
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Source: Guardian Environment
Advisory board insists that avoiding red and processed meat is not a protective strategy against cancer
Britain’s meat industry has hit back at the World Health Organisation report that raised alarm over its products by claiming that bacon, sausages and ham cause cancer.
An advisory body funded by British meat producers said the key to preventing cancer was avoiding heavy drinking, not smoking and maintaining a healthy weight. “Red and processed meats do not give you cancer,” said Robert Pickard, a member of the Meat Advisory Panel and emeritus professor of neurobiology at the University of Cardiff.
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Source: Guardian Environment
Oil heartlands of Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Doha and Iran’s coast will experience higher temperatures and humidity than ever before on Earth if the world fails to cut carbon emissions
The Gulf in the Middle East, the heartland of the global oil industry, will suffer heatwaves beyond the limit of human survival if climate change is unchecked, according to a new scientific study.
The extreme heatwaves will affect Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Doha and coastal cities in Iran as well as posing a deadly threat to millions of Hajj pilgrims in Saudi Arabia, when the religious festival falls in the summer. The study shows the extreme heatwaves, more intense than anything ever experienced on Earth, would kick in after 2070 and that the hottest days of today would by then be a near-daily occurrence.
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Source: Guardian Environment
Officials from five continents follow Pope Francis’s encyclical on the environment with demand for complete decarbonisation
The Catholic church has called on UN negotiators convening in Paris at the end of November to agree a goal for “complete decarbonisation” by 2050, and set a legally binding agreement to limit global temperature increase.
The statement, which was announced by the Vatican on Monday and signed by Catholic officials from five continents, represents a sweeping attempt to link climate change to social justice and the exclusion of poor people who stand to lose the most from global warming.
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Source: Guardian Environment
Government seeks to lift a ban on shale gas drilling in drinking water protection zones, key wildlife sites and under national parks. Without these strong rules, fracking should not be allowed in this country
On Tuesday, in a committee room in the House of Commons, the government will try to sneak through fracking regulations that are totally inadequate, completing their U-turn.
In January, under pressure from the public and MPs, ministers caved in and agreed to a crucial Labour amendment to the Infrastructure Bill. This ensured several safeguards had to be met before fracking could go ahead. It meant that fracking could not take place in areas where drinking water is collected or in protected sensitive areas. These areas include Britain’s glorious national parks and our vitally important wildlife sites.
Amber Rudd, now secretary of state for energy and climate change couldn’t have been clearer during the debate. She said: “We have agreed an outright ban on fracking in national parks, sites of special scientific interest (SSSIs) and areas of outstanding natural beauty.”
But just weeks after making this commitment, the government performed a U-turn in the Lords. Ministers sneaked in a weakened version of Labour’s protections. We responded by tabling an amendment in the Commons to reinstate the more stringent safeguards, but the Tories used parliamentary procedures to ensure that the debate overran so MPs were denied a chance to reverse those changes.
Now, the new Conservative government is once again using a parliamentary backdoor to put something through at the committee in the Commons this week. This isn’t good enough. This is a serious issue and it deserves a full debate on the floor of the House.
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Source: Guardian Environment
Experts will take your questions on sponge cities live in the comments section of this page on Monday 26 October between 1-2pm GMT
1.53pm GMT
How can companies integrate sponge city designs into their work and what can be done to encourage this?
Municipalities should take the lead. Water, space, both are primarily public goods. Governments should think about how to create the best enabling environment for innovation in the right direction, creating opportunities for business but for local community initiatives and art, design and creative initiatives as well. The future city is not a matter of building structures, it’s about building communities. Leading themes could be: creating a circular economy, energy self-sufficiency, climate neutrality, zero-fuel-100% electrified transport, closed municipal water cycle.
Several solutions should be brought into play in a Sponge city.. All should focus on saving ressources as energy and water..
Grundfos adds these values into all solutions.. here is an example:
First business needs access to good decision-making information. Not all sites are created equal in terms of their ‘sponge’ potentials and pitfalls. There is no one-size fits all approach within a particular city or watershed.
Business will be more effective, and incentivized to act, when they have access to the information they need. Decision-making tools need to integrate hyper-local, place-specific data and provide business clients with specific, scenario-based answers for the costs and benefits of acting and not acting (including valuing ecosystem services).
For businesses, you can’t manage what you don’t measure. 99% of US business building use their water bill to determine waste that occurred over a month ago. Tracking consumption in real-time can catch mechanical and operational waste when it starts – we finding 20% savings on average with businesses that closely track their water consumption.
1.42pm GMT
Reader Anna Lo Jacomo asks: what is the biggest obstacle to building water-resilient cities?
I guess the greatest obstacle is the political will to act. It’s not a technical problem…
Although LA and dry western cities like it are developing plans to harvest stormwater through re-tooled large-scale infrastructures on publicly owned lands, one large unanswered question is: how do you empower the private sector—from corporate citizens to individual families and neighborhoods—to participate actively in optimizing the surface of the city?
Businesses and property owners need to know, what’s the right move for harvesting, conserving and reusing water on my particular site? Some building sites are good for harvesting stormwater for aquifer recharge; others are better for on-site treatment and retention. Public investement is important, but won’t be enough. Cities need to make it easy for the private sector to do the right thing in the collective interest.
I think the really big challange is that infrastructure is already built to deal with the "old Rainfall".. and only the damages in the future will pay the solution…
So planning the future must not only solve problems, but there should be developed an additional value in raised living quality in the city with the SPonge solution…
I’m hearing discussions on water reuse(post treatment) strategy and infrastructure: For more efficient distribution of treated water for reuse, does it make more sense to treat wastewater locally/regionally versus treatment at a centralized plant?
I like the way Rotterdam (Netherlands) is profiling itself as climate-proof city, see http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/rotterdam-flood-proof-climate-change. On the other hand, it all remains rather a collection of a couple of nice initiatives, with green rooftops, floating houses. At large, nothing is so much more "climate-proof" as in the past.
If we really want to change cities to more resilient communities, a lot needs to happen structurally. We’ll not come there by here and there a good initiative – a few green rooftops – some permeable roads – some reedbeds for wastewater treatment – a multifunctional park with artwork and water storage capacity etc. What we need is the incorporation of climate-neutral design throughout the city – also in existing parts of the city, not just in new buildings. And we need water storage capacity at large scale. Green rooftops should compete with solar panel systems. We should get rid of the urban heat island effect by green city design.
Just want to add what I see as another barrier:
—insufficient understanding of costs/benefits of adopting good "sponge" strategies.
I don’t think there is one main barrier the world over. In some cities (particularly high density developing cities with poor land law enforcement) the issue is space, in others it is political will or justifying the business case (which is why more cities are moving to mandating stormwater retention on private properties), but can also be resistance to part with the beloved car-oriented paved surfaces, or even just knowledge about groundsoils and groundwater table necessary to make effective sponge-like interventions.
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Source: Guardian Environment
UK’s largest open-cast coalmine sits on land owned by Matt Ridley, who argues fossil fuels have ‘economic, environmental and moral benefits’
Protesters have stormed a coalmine on land belonging to Matt Ridley, a prominent climate change sceptic and Conservative member of the House of Lords, chaining themselves to a coal excavator and blockading the entrance.
The group, which call themselves Matt Ridley’s Conscience, raided Lord Ridley’s vast Blagdon family estate in Northumberland, home to England’s largest open-cast coal mine, at dawn on Monday.
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Source: Guardian Environment
Potsdam-based economist Ottmar Edenhofer on the piecemeal nature of climate policy, in an interview with Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
How well can the new head of the IPCC, Hoesung Lee, manage the huge reforms that you and others have publicly asked for?
We’ve put forward suggestions for a feasible programme of reform, but we will see how Hoesung Lee will make this his own. There’s little room for manoeuvre. In a meeting in February in Nairobi, governments decided that they’d prefer to see the status quo upheld. Lee has to be very fast and vigorous if he wants reforms. However he is very dependent upon the IPCC panel agreeing, since only the governments are entitled to a vote and thus get to have a say.
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Source: Guardian Environment
Fires have spread beyond plantations deep into primary forests and national parks, the last strongholds of the endangered apes
Raging Indonesian forest fires have advanced into dense forest on Borneo and now threaten one third of the world’s remaining wild orangutans, say conservationists.
Satellite photography shows that around 100,000 fires have burned in Indonesia’s carbon-rich peatlands since July. But instead of being mostly confined to farmland and plantations, as they are in most years, several thousand fires have now penetrated deep into primary forests and national parks, the strongholds of the remaining wild apes and other endangered animals.
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Source: Guardian Environment