The environment is dominating the airwaves with numerous policy consultations, announcements and debate. But green ambitions and rhetoric must be anchored in law to propel action when all the noise quietens down or future political leaders waiver.
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This post is by Carol Day, legal consultant to the RSPB and public interest law firm Leigh Day and Will Rundle, head of legal at Friends of the Earth.
On Monday, the Judicial Review and Courts Bill will receive its second reading in the House of Commons. Coincidentally, Monday is also when the seventh Meeting of the Parties to the Aarhus Convention opens. This UN convention, to which the UK is party, seeks to ensure that civil society has rights pivotal to the effective functioning of democracy, including access to information, public participation in decision making and access to justice in environmental matters.
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This is an extract from a speech by the Rt Hon Ed Miliband MP, shadow secretary of state for business, energy and industrial strategy, to Green Alliance on 13 October 2021.
I want to try to draw lessons for Glasgow from the ill-fated Copenhagen summit, which I attended as UK climate change secretary, and the successful Paris Summit of 2015. Copenhagen ended in acrimony for a whole range of reasons, but partly it was the result of a breakdown in trust between developing and vulnerable countries on one hand and developed countries on the other.
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This post is by the journalist and author Peter Hetherington.
We are reaching a pivotal moment, a crunch time for food security in a UK which produces barely 60 per cent of the crops it needs. An acute shortage of both HGV drivers, and people prepared to pick veg and fruit (EU nationals now largely denied access to Brexit Britain) has, once again, exposed the fragility of just in time delivery to supermarkets. It’s a system developed for car assembly plants but ill-suited to the vagaries of food distribution across long distances.
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Green Alliance descended on Manchester for the Conservative Party Conference, along with the rest of Westminster, not really knowing what to expect. For many, including Conservatives first elected in 2019, this was their first in-person party event of this parliament. It was a noticeably younger crowd, perhaps a result of traditional members staying at home due to Covid-19, or a newer younger membership?
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