Climate targets seem sensible, but are actually impeding effective action. Let’s do something completely different. By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 29th January 2020
The crisis is not imminent. The crisis is here. The recent infernos in Australia, the storms and floods in Brazil, Madagascar, Spain and the US, the economic collapse in Somalia, caused in part by a devastating cycle of droughts and floods, are not, or not only, a vision of the future. They are signs of a current and escalating catastrophe. This is why several governments and parliaments, the UK Parliament among them, have declared a climate emergency. But no one in government acts as if it is real. They operate within the old world of incremental planning for a disaster that has yet to arrive. Nowhere is this clearer than in the reports of the Committee on Climate Change (CCC), the official body that began with such hope and promise of holding the government to account, but that has now abandoned scientific realities in favour of political priorities. Its latest report, on changing the UK’s land use, is so unambitious that, in some respects, it would take us backwards. For example, it calls for a 20% reduction in our consumption of beef, lamb and dairy – the most carbon intensive foods – over the next 30 years. But it admits that this is a smaller reduction than is likely to happen anyway: there has already been a 20% decline in the consumption of these foods over the past 20 years, and this shift is accelerating rapidly. Cultured meat and milk could replace these sectors almost entirely by 2050. The report makes no mention of rewilding or natural regeneration. The only means it proposes by which trees should return to the land is planting. This is often a slower, more expensive and less effective way of restoring habitats and sucking carbon out of the atmosphere than removing livestock or controlling deer numbers and allowing trees to return by themselves. Its target for reforestation is so feeble that the UK would still have less than half the average current European forest cover by 2050. One of the reasons for this timidity is its preposterous assumption that if land is unsuitable for commercial forestry, it’s unsuitable for trees. There are plenty of places where trees grow well, store carbon and provide magnificent habitats, but won’t produce straight 50-foot poles. It envisages not wild woods, but plantations, whose purpose is the discredited policy of “bioenergy with carbon capture and storage”. This means growing wood to burn in power stations, then capturing and burying the carbon emissions. It will almost certainly cause more harm than good. Could the committee’s enthusiasm have anything to do with the fact that one of its members works for Drax, the energy company pioneering this disastrous technology? Throughout the report, business appears to come first; nature and climate last. All this, the CCC says, is consistent with the target it has set for the government, of net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. It tells me that the rationale for this target “remains valid today”, meeting the UK’s obligations under the Paris Agreement. This agreement commits governments to seek “to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels”. But in November, the UN published a report showing that preventing more than 1.5°C means cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 7.6% every year between now and 2030: a much steeper trajectory than the CCC’s. The committee has set the wrong target, for the wrong date. But I think the problem runs deeper than this. It’s not just the target that’s wrong, but the very notion of setting targets in an emergency. Scotland: The Big Picture @ScotlandTBP
Fantastic to see so many new trees growing along Glenfeshie. This is what a reduction in browsing pressure can do. The National Trust is planning to plant 20 million trees over the next decade as part of efforts to achieve net zero emissions by 2030. The project will cost £90m-100m, and will mark its 125th anniversary.
By the end of the decade, it says the new trees and natural regeneration of woods will cover more than 18,000 hectares (44,000 acres), an area one and a half times the size of Manchester. It will mean that 17% of the land the National Trust looks after will be wooded, up from 10%. The focus will be on planting on farmland – including in upland areas – that the trust owns, rather than in country estates, but the director general, Hilary McGrady, said the National Trust would be working with farmers to deliver the targets. The charity says a similar level of tree cover is needed nationwide to meet government targets to cut greenhouse gas emissions.Other initiatives announced by the trust include maintaining peat bogs, investing in more renewable energy and cutting its carbon footprint. Efforts will focus on the National Trust’s own pollution, but McGrady acknowledged the impact of visitors, many of whom travel by car to the organisation’s properties. ............ “As Europe’s biggest conservation charity, we have a responsibility to do everything we can to fight climate change, which poses the biggest threat to the places, nature and collections we care for,” McGrady said. “People need nature now more than ever. If they connect with it then they look after it. And working together is the only way we can reverse the decline in wildlife and the challenges we face due to climate change.” They have been heralded as one of the biggest and most sustainable options in the fight against climate breakdown, but now Scotland’s woodlands have been proven to positively impact mental health too.
New research, funded by Scottish Forestry, has revealed the power of woodland-based photography in improving mental health and wellbeing. |
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