News wrap
Paul Allen, Wed 21 May 2008
The big green stories of the week and how they were reported in the press
English wildlife under threat
England’s green and pleasant land is beginning to suffer as pressure for land forces species into towns. A study by Natural England has found that a fifth of the country’s distinctive rural landscapes are now showing signs of neglect.
In the Times, countryside editor Valerie Elliott reports that woodlands in particular need new protection measures and that “lack of management is partly responsible for a 50 per cent decline in native woodland butterflies”. Native reptiles and grassland flowers have also declined over the past half-century.
Natural England chief executive Helen Phillips says England needs a “new approach to conservation if we are to tackle effectively the modern pressures on land created by climate change and development”.
The government agency plans to better target its £2.9 billion budget on helping people and nature adapt to climate change and transform its National Nature Reserves. The idea is to turn them into “first-class visitor destinations to bring people closer to nature,” explains Paul Eccleston in the Telegraph.
Environment groups, including the National Trust, the Campaign to Protect Rural England and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB), are backing the push for a radical conservation effort. Speaking to the Guardian, Dr Sue Armstrong-Brown, the RSPB’s head of countryside conservation, said: "with the climate changing and wildlife crashing worldwide, it is time for a new green leadership.”
Climate change ‘loans’
Developing countries have attacked UK government plans to offer global warming loans instead of grants. In the Guardian, John Vidal reports that the money is “not additional British aid and will be administered by the World Bank mainly in the form of concessionary loans, which poor countries will have to pay back to Britain with interest.”
The government now says that an unspecified amount will go out as interest-free loans, but insists it never pledged all of the money would be used as aid. The BBC’s environment analyst Roger Harrabin explains the confusion: “The £800 million total was confirmed in last year's Budget,” he writes. “[But] the word "loan" was not mentioned at the time, so it was assumed by campaigners the money was aid.”
In its defence, the UK's Department for International Development (DfiD) insisted that no one had ever promised that the money would all be aid. In a statement placed on the Dfid website, a government spokeswoman says, "A number of details are still under discussion, including the structure of the funds, how they are governed, which countries are prioritised for funding, and how much money different donors will commit.”
So the developing world countries in question will just have to wait and see.
Drax deal
Drax, the coal-fired power station, and one of Britain’s biggest single polluters, has signed a £50 million deal to develop a biomass factory to help cut its carbon emissions. Mixing materials such as wood chips, sunflower husks or grasses with coal creates biomass electricity.
Chief executive Dorothy Thompson hopes that Drax will become the single biggest biomass-generating unit site in the world. Going on current projections, the project could save 2 million tonnes of CO2 a year and help the power station towards a target of 15 per cent cut in carbon emissions by 2012.
Due for completion in 2009, the generator near Selby in north Yorkshire will be “entitled to government subsidies for renewable-energy sources,” Ms Thompson told the Telegraph.
But Robin Pagnamenta in the Times questions the environmental logic of importing wood from Canada and Scandinavia to be burnt at the power station. Doug Parr, chief scientist at Greenpeace UK, says that Drax’s approach “might cause more harm than good” unless environmental considerations are taken seriously.
Whale hunt
For the third year in a row, Iceland’s commercial whale hunt is set to begin after the government granted a small quota, allowing whalers to catch up to 40 minke whales. Anti-whalers say that the move would threaten Iceland’s economy, which is already struggling.
The decision came after weeks of delay, reportedly because of disagreements within government. Whalers had been asking for a swift decision so they could begin hunting as soon as possible.
BBC News’s environment correspondent Richard Black says the decision rests with the fisheries ministry, which believes there is “no ecological reason to cancel a hunt for 40 minkes when the population in the north Atlantic is believed by the International Whaling Commission (IWC) to number about 174,000.”
And finally…
Australian scientists have been trying out an unusual way to bring an extinct animal back to life. The method involves injecting genetic material from a 100-year-old museum specimen of the Tasmanian tiger into mouse embryos. The scientists’ study, published online by the Public Library of Science, suggests that the marsupial’s genetic biodiversity may not be lost.
The Tasmanian tiger, the largest of the carnivorous marsupials, was wiped out in the wild by intensive hunting in the early 1900s. The striped, wolf-like animals grew up to six feet in length and had long, stiff tails and bulky heads.
“The University of Melbourne team extracted DNA from some of these specimens, and injected a gene… into developing mouse embryos,” explains BBC News’s science reporter Helen Briggs. This is the first time that genetic material from an extinct animal has function in a living host, says the University of Melbourne team, and has huge potential.
“It should also be possible to use this technique with other, much older extinct specimens,” says New Scientist’s Emma Young. These could include such creatures as the mammoth, various dinosaurs and even Neanderthals.
Share this
(What is this?)