This post is by Matthew Spencer, global director of landscapes at IDH – the Sustainable Trade Initiative.
All carbon pollution is equal: this is a founding assumption of the UN Climate Convention, because the atmospheric effect of a tonne of carbon dioxide emitted from a smoking tropical tree in Mato Grosso is no different from a tonne billowing from a coal power station in Missouri.
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This post is by Jo Blackman, head of forest advocacy and policy at Global Witness
Since 2017, major UK banks and finance institutions have either provided or facilitated more than £500 million to the Brazilian arms of three of the world’s largest beef companies, all linked to deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon, as our new Global Witness investigation reveals, and hundreds of millions more have flowed into their subsidiary companies. Drawing largely on publicly available data, our exposé found that a chain of actors from cattle ranchers through to multinational beef traders, their US and European auditors, international financiers and the governments that regulate them, are complicit in deforestation. It also uncovered devastating cases of human rights abuses against indigenous and landless peoples. Unless these issues are confronted, the world’s biggest rainforest could face an irreversible tipping point that might destroy its ecology and the communities that live in and rely on it.
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This post is an Inside Track long read by Tony Juniper, writing in a personal capacity. It was first published in the Evening Standard.
For years it has been known that the risk of novel diseases in humans can be increased through our behaviour in relation to the environment and wildlife. Recent events underline the issue. Read more
This post is by Ruth Chambers, senior parliamentary affairs associate at Greener UK, and Caterina Brandmayr, senior policy analyst at Green Alliance.
Over the past few months, we have become acutely aware of just how important supply chains are to our lives, as businesses across the UK are working in extremely demanding circumstances to maintain important supplies of food, water and medical equipment. Read more
This post is by shadow minister for energy and climate change, Barry Gardiner MP. It’s the message he will be taking to the COP21 Global Landscapes Forum in Paris this weekend.
Hovis, Persil, Ginsters, even Mr Kipling’s “exceedingly good” cakes, risk being exceedingly bad for the world’s forests. There’s hardly a domestic product that doesn’t use palm oil. It’s an incredibly useful and profitable natural product, but the relentless drive to plant more and more oil palm trees is devastating some of the most important and biodiversity-rich landscapes in the world. Read more
This post is by Ben Caldecott, Green Alliance trustee, associate fellow of Bright Blue and author of Green and responsible conservatism: embedding sustainability and long-termism within the UK economy.
The build up to the UN climate change conference in Paris this December began at Durban in 2011, when negotiators agreed to deliver a ‘new and universal greenhouse gas reduction protocol, legal instrument, or other outcome with legal force by 2015 for the period beyond 2020’. Paris is the last opportunity to secure such an agreement. Read more
Last Friday we published the first three proposals in a new series in which we’ve asked leading thinkers, from politics, business and green groups, to set out their one big manifesto idea for the next parliament – the one they think will make a big impact in creating a greener Britain.
Today’s three ideas come from Chris Huhne, the Aldersgate Group and, in a joint proposal, the Robertsbridge Group and Greenpeace UK. Read more
