27 Apr 2021

A comprehensive Natural England report on the impact of the nation’s landscape on carbon storage and sequestration, has found that peatlands and native woodlands are habitats which have the greatest capacity to store carbon, but that many others, including coastal and marine habitats such as saltmarsh and seagrass meadows have a significant role to play a […]

27 Apr 2021

Scottish-based developers of the world’s leading floating tidal turbine technology, Orbital Marine Power Ltd, successfully launched its 2MW tidal turbine, the Orbital O2, from the Port of Dundee on 22 April.  It will now be towed to the Orkney Islands where it will undergo commissioning before being connected to the European Marine Energy Centre (EMEC) where […]

27 Apr 2021

Multiple datasets spanning a 16-year period have shown an increase in bluefin tuna, which arrive into the waters of the Celtic Seas and off SW England, the Scilly Isles, and NW Ireland to feed in late summer and autumn according to research led by Cefas and the University of Exeter, published in ICES Journal of […]

27 Apr 2021

Information from established beach litter protocols is insufficient to implement targeted, preventive management measures.  Complementary methodologies, named “Beach litter Deep Dives”, have been developed to get a better understanding of the sources of and behaviour behind littering. Deep dives involve identifying the type, country of provenance and age of household, food, oil and chemical containers. […]

27 Apr 2021

Fish farming may have been devised as a remedy to reinvigorate dwindling fish stocks but this human solution has spawned another problem: lower genetic diversity.  New research shows that the genetic makeup of Atlantic salmon populations from a century ago compared with the current stock across 13 Swedish rivers is more genetically similar than distinct, […]

20 Apr 2021

The Environmental Audit Committee have penned an open letter to Kwasi Kwarteng, Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, in which they call for the government to provide support to a home grown tidal industry to help it reach the point of commercialisation. The committee have recognised and highlighted a number of the […]

20 Apr 2021

Seagrasses, mangrove forests, and coastal wetlands store vast amounts of carbon, and their preservation and restoration hold great potential to bank CO2 and keep it out of the atmosphere.  But can the blue carbon market avoid the pitfalls that have plagued land-based efforts? In the shallow waters off the shores of Virginia, vast meadows of seagrass have been recreated over the past […]