08 Jun 2021

This latest Thames water major pollution incident is a timely reminder for the Environmental Audit Committee and their work on water quality in rivers (watch the evidence) of the growing risks of major storms driving significant pollution events. Thames Water has depressing recent record of sewage pollution incidents. Thames Water fined £4 million after catastrophic […]

08 Jun 2021

Direct air capture (DAC) and greenhouse gas removal programme In June 2020 the Prime Minister announced up to £100 million of new research and development funding to help develop direct air capture technologies in the UK. As part of this, the innovation competition seeks to support the development of Greenhouse Gas Removals (GGR) technologies to […]

08 Jun 2021

Natural Capital Evidence Handbook: to support place-based planning and decision-making – NERR092 (naturalengland.org.uk) This report and associated publications is about how to come to shared strategic understanding about the natural environment, in a place, using a natural capital evidence base. It is about working collaboratively and in partnership so that we can do more to […]

08 Jun 2021

In case you have contrived not to have noticed, today is World Oceans Day.  This Marine News will undoubtedly be overtaken by a myriad of announcements, events and videos to mark WOD. Amongst the first out of the blocks is the UN’s The Ocean: Life and Livelihoods, its second fully virtual celebration of WOD, should […]

08 Jun 2021

Pressure is mounting on the UK government to end all new oil and gas exploration and extraction licenses in the North Sea, following the International Energy Agency’s (IEA) landmark warning last month that further investments in new fossil fuel supplies must end this year if the chances of limiting global warming to 1.5°C are to be kept alive.  A […]

08 Jun 2021

The UK’s Joint Nature Conservation Committee (JNCC) is a co-leader of a new global partnership to elevate Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) as a key tool in addressing the twin crises of biodiversity loss and climate change. Ahead of the UN climate change (COP 26) and biodiversity (COP 15) conferences scheduled later this year, Chile, Costa Rica, France, […]

08 Jun 2021

A new study, led by the universities of Exeter and Oxford, and published in Nature Geoscience (paywall), pinpoints the causes of monthly and annual Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC) variation and finds a differing picture at two key locations. The AMOC, which carries warm water from the tropics northward and makes areas including north-west Europe warmer than […]