Roughly nine percent of England’s farmland needs to be converted into habitats for wildlife and forest by 2050 in order to meet the country’s nature and net-zero goals, according to a consultation launched by Steve Reed, the United Kingdom’s environment secretary.

Reed announced on Friday the government’s plans for land use changes intended to balance new infrastructure with carbon reduction and nature targets, reported The Guardian.

Under the new land use blueprint, grasslands used for grazing livestock faced the biggest reduction, which Reed said meant eating less meat would be encouraged.

“We know we need to develop a food strategy. If we can give parents better information to make better informed choices, they will do that. I’m sure that there will be no mandate from government about that, but I’m sure those informed choices will then affect what farmers grow, and producers and manufacturers provide, to meet the demands as that changes,” Reed explained, as The Guardian reported.

Land use plan for England to map best areas for farming and nature

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— The Guardian (@theguardian.com) January 31, 2025 at 1:07 AM

Reed said it would be better to restore farmland that floods most years for nature rather than using it to grow food.

“Into the future it is probably not a good idea to keep growing crops in fields like that, because your investment will get destroyed. But what a great location, perhaps, to plant more vegetation, more trees, to help reduce flooding in a nearby urban area,” Reed said.

Reed said the government would use “levers and incentives” to make sure land was used efficiently.

“[O]ur natural world is under threat, with England now one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world. Much-loved British birds and wildlife are at risk of national extinction, whilst our rivers, lakes and seas have unacceptable levels of pollution,” the UK’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) said. “By publishing a Land Use Framework, we will go further by creating a toolkit to support decision making and inform discussion on how we can guarantee our long-term food security, how we can support development and how we can achieve our targets on nature and climate that deliver multiple benefits and support economic growth.”

UK officials have produced maps that show what areas of England have the most potential for various types of nature restoration, as well as the lands most suitable for farming, reported The Guardian.

Under the guidelines, farming will be done more intensively, with more food produced in less space.

“Farming is already going through change: taking on new models of agricultural practice, adapting food production in a changing climate, and building resilience to increased flooding or other global shocks like changing patterns of pests and disease. I know from conversations with farmers and landowners that they not only understand this need for change, but that they are actively delivering it. They know their land best, and it is right that they lead this transition with clarity about land use change so they can plan their businesses,” DEFRA said.

Under the new plans, some arable land next to rivers will be kept free to meet river cleanliness targets, with trees planted to absorb excess nutrient pollution. Areas that need protections — rare peatlands and those with high potential for woodlands — have been highlighted.

I left Steve Reed's #LandUseFramework consultation launch feeling hopeful. For healthy food, green infrastructure *and* nature, it'll need: 🌎a legal link to planning & consenting 🌍rules to target incentives 🌏public interest in private land important for wildlife. www.gov.uk/government/s…

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— Richard Benwell (@richardbenwell.bsky.social) January 31, 2025 at 9:48 AM

“For too long, land use has been viewed in narrow or binary terms, often pitting food production against nature, or farming against biodiversity restoration. We must acknowledge that most of our land can deliver on multiple fronts, safeguarding food production, mitigating climate change and protecting nature,” said Martin Lines, chief executive of the Nature Friendly Farming Network, as The Guardian reported. “The focus must be on maximising the benefits land can provide by embracing its multifunctionality, rather than limiting it to single uses.”

Roughly 70 percent of land in England is used for farming, reported the BBC.

A government analysis found that nearly four million acres of farmland must be repurposed to meet climate and legal environmental targets by mid-century. These include the nine percent taken from food production to be converted to natural habitats like woodlands; five percent still producing food, but mostly repurposed for the environment; four percent that incorporate more trees next to agricultural land; and one percent for small changes like planting herbs and other plants alongside field margins.

“A lot of land at the moment is very unproductive and one of the areas that is most unproductive is some of our grazing land. There’s no way that we can satisfy all the requirements that we need from our land without reducing our meat production,” Henry Dimbleby, National Food Strategy author and co-founder of the Leon food chain, told the BBC. “Meat production is about 85% of our current farming use so we can afford to pull that back a bit in order to restore nature, in order to build houses, in order to get clean energy. That is not a major sacrifice.”

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The decision by the previous Conservative government in the United Kingdom to approve the giant Rosebank oilfield off Shetland was ruled unlawful by an Edinburgh court on Thursday.

The judgment by Lord Ericht at the Court of Session said the carbon emissions that would be created by the burning of oil and gas at the largest untapped oilfield in the UK had not been taken into consideration.

“Today’s ruling is part of a clear trend we’re seeing from courts in the UK – marking the third time in the last year that judges have found that ‘downstream’ emissions must be considered in planning decisions,” said ClientEarth lawyer Robert Clarke, in a press release from ClientEarth. “This is a resounding signal from the courtroom that companies and governments can no longer turn a blind eye to the vast majority of the emissions their coal, oil and gas fields create.”

BREAKING: ROSEBANK OIL FIELD DECLARED UNLAWFUL! This is huge victory for climate justice + people power! Political attention must immediately turn to developing an urgent and fair transition plan for oil workers.

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— Friends of the Earth Scotland (@foescot.bsky.social) January 30, 2025 at 5:07 AM

The court also ruled that consent for Shell’s Jackdaw gas field was unlawful and that owners of both oilfields needed to seek new government approval before production could start, reported BBC News.

The judgment followed a case brought by Greenpeace and Uplift.

Lord Ericht said a more detailed environmental impact assessment would be needed that takes into account the climate effects of burning any extracted fossil fuels.

Work on both fields will be allowed to continue while the new information is gathered; however, no oil and gas can be extracted without the granting of new approval.

Permission for Rosebank’s North Atlantic oil development was given in 2023, while approval for the smaller Jackdaw gas field, located in the North Sea, was granted in the summer of 2022.

Lord Ericht wrote in the 57-page judgment that remaking the decision “on a lawful basis” was in the public interest due to the impacts of climate change, which outweighed the developers’ interests.

Uplift Executive Director Tessa Khan said the current Labour government should deny approval for both projects.

“The climate science is crystal clear that we can’t create new oil and gas fields if we’re going to stay within safe climate thresholds,” Khan said, as BBC News reported.

Philip Evans, a senior campaigner with Greenpeace, called the judgment “a historic win,” reported The Guardian.

“The age of governments approving new drilling sites by ignoring their climate impacts is over,” Evans said. “The courts have agreed with what climate campaigners have said all along: Rosebank and Jackdaw are unlawful, and their full climate impacts must now be properly considered.”

Campaigners had argued that oil and gas exploration in the North Sea would not bring any economic or energy security and that there was no climate rationale behind it.

“Any institutional investor, asset manager or lender backing new fossil fuel projects in the UK is now gambling on a high-risk strategy for its clients with financial prospects seriously in doubt,” Clarke said in the press release. “New fossil fuel projects in the UK have never been a riskier investment – and financial institutions both at home and abroad must take that into account when it comes to their portfolios.”

The International Energy Agency has repeatedly said that there should be no new drilling for oil and gas if we are to keep global heating from exceeding the 1.5 degrees Celsius threshold recommended by the 2015 Paris Agreement.

Climate activists and trade unions have argued that the UK government should be investing in renewable energy in order to meet climate goals and provide cheap and secure energy, The Guardian reported.

James Alexander, UK Sustainable Investment and Finance Association chief executive, called renewables the “UK’s key growth sector of the future.”

“That is where we should be focusing our upskilling efforts and attracting the billions available in private investment,” Alexander said.

The court’s ruling sends the decision on Rosebank — primarily owned by Equinor — and Jackdaw back to the government. A UK Department for Energy Security and Net Zero spokesperson said the government was receiving environmental guidance that takes emissions from oil and gas into account and was expected to deliver an update in the spring.

“We will respond to this consultation as soon as possible and developers will be able to apply for consents under this revised regime. Our priority is to deliver a fair, orderly and prosperous transition in the North Sea in line with our climate and legal obligations, which drives towards our clean energy future of energy security, lower bills, and good, long-term jobs,” the spokesperson said.

Stop Rosebank campaigner Lauren MacDonald said the development would bring more harm than benefits to Scotland.

“Almost all of Rosebank’s oil would be sold overseas, doing nothing to lower our bills or make us more secure, with most of the profits going straight to the state-backed Norwegian firm, Equinor,” MacDonald said, as reported by The Guardian. “It’s not fair that people here are now suffering the impacts of climate change, which is driven by fossil fuels and which will get worse as long as companies are allowed to open huge new drilling sites.”

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With so many media sources these days — commercial television, social media, old-fashioned newspapers — some are bound to be more reliable in terms of accuracy than others.

Researchers have found that people who believe climate change is a conspiracy get most of their news and information about current events from social and commercial media sources.

After Donald Trump was reelected president, chief executive of Meta Mark Zuckerberg fired his company’s social media fact-checkers, with the intention of replacing them with a “community notes” format like the one used by Elon Musk’s platform X. The model relies on corrections added by users to posts that are false or misleading, Mark Andrejevic, a media professor at Monash University’s School of Media, Film, and Journalism, wrote in The Conversation.

The model has been described by Musk as “citizen journalism, where you hear from the people. It’s by the people, for the people.”

However, for this to work, the “citizen journalists,” as well as their readers, must value accuracy, accountability and “good-faith deliberation,” Andrejevic said.

“This is why it’s been so interesting to hear in recent weeks how social media is actually turning away from factchecking: because they’re pretending – and I think it’s a pretence – that they’re being more hands-off; but they’re not hands-off, because they build these algorithms to pump stuff into our feeds,” Andrejevic told Guardian Australia. “Algorithms do that based only on commercial values: is it viral, will it get engagement, will it get attention? Not at all on: is it important, accurate or useful for participating in democracy?”

New research by Andrejevic and his team, conducted in partnership with Essential Media, looked into what those who use social media think of everyday civic values.

For their research report, “Mapping civic disposition, media use and affective polarisation,” the team reviewed existing studies on political polarisation and social cohesion, conducted 10 focus groups and compiled a scale of civic values. The scale aimed to measure people’s levels of trust in the government and media institutions, along with their openness to considering perspectives of others that challenge their own.

The researchers conducted a survey of 2,046 Australians, asking them how strong their belief was in “a common public interest.” They also asked how important it was to them for Australians to be informed about political issues and for civics to be taught in schools.

They inquired about the respondents’ news sources: commercial television, commercial radio, social media, newspapers or non-commercial media.

More than a third of those who relied mainly on commercial television and radio for most of their news agreed with the statement, “fluctuations in the climate are the result of natural cycles that take place regardless of human activity,” reported The Guardian.

A quarter of respondents who primarily got their news from social media believed that the climate crisis was a conspiracy. On the other hand, those who did not believe in climate change conspiracies more often got their information from the public broadcasters SBS and ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation).

Just two percent who relied on public radio for their news and six percent for whom public television was their main source believed climate change was a conspiracy.

“We found people who rely on social media for news score significantly lower on a civic values scale than those who rely on newspapers and non-commercial broadcasters such as the ABC,” Andrejevic wrote in The Conversation. “By contrast, people who rely on non-commercial radio scored highest on the civic values scale.”

Those who relied mostly on non-commercial radio had scores that were 11 percent higher than respondents who relied on social media and 12 percent higher than those who used commercial television as their primary news source. People who relied mainly on commercial radio had the lowest scores.

People who mostly read newspapers, watched non-commercial television and looked to online news aggregators scored higher than those who were reliant on commercial broadcasting and social media.

The survey found that civic value scores went up as the number of media sources people used on a daily basis increased.

“The point of the civic values scale we developed is to highlight the fact that the values people bring to news about the world is as important as the news content,” Andrejevic explained in The Conversation. “For example, most people in the United States have likely heard about the violence of the attack on the Capitol protesting Trump’s loss in 2020. That Trump and his supporters can recast this violent riot as ‘a day of love’ is not the result of a lack of information. It is, rather, a symptom of people’s lack of trust in media and government institutions and their unwillingness to confront facts that challenge their views. In other words, it is not enough to provide people with accurate information. What counts is the mindset they bring to that information.”

So do social media platforms cultivate lower civic values or just cater to them?

“We don’t have the evidence to answer that,” Andrejevic told Guardian Australia. “It could be that social media just attracts people who score lower on these questions; and people who listen to ABC radio tend to score higher because they seek that out.”

Andrejevic pointed out that the long-term concern of social media critics has been that the platforms favor virality and sensationalism over thoughtfulness and accuracy, which does not help democracy.

“Free speech is based on the idea that people have been educated enough in the values of civil society to be willing to engage in good faith discussion, but what you see online is that doesn’t happen at all,” Andrejevic told Guardian Australia. “We wanted to see how the different media actually cater to scoring higher or lower on this set of values that we think are important for democracy.”

According to sociologist Zeynep Tufekci, social media is more about “mocking perceived opponents” and bonding with those who share similar views than meaningful engagement, Andrejevic wrote in The Conversation.

“Platforms want to wash their hands of the fact-checking process, because it is politically fraught. Their owners claim they want to encourage the free flow of information,” Andrejevic said. “However, their fingers are on the scale. The algorithms they craft play a central role in deciding which forms of expression make it into our feeds and which do not.

“It’s disingenuous for them to abdicate responsibility for the content they chose to pump into people’s news feeds, especially when they have systematically created a civically challenged media environment,” Andrejevic added.

The post People Who Get Most of Their News From Social Media Sources Are More Likely to Think Climate Change Is a Conspiracy: Study appeared first on EcoWatch.

A Chemours chemical plant in West Virginia is polluting nearby waters with toxic PFAS “forever chemicals,” according to a new lawsuit brought by the West Virginia Rivers Coalition.

The complaint is the most recent in a fight that has been ongoing since 2001 over pollution from the Washington Works plant, reported The Guardian.

The PFAS-contaminated waste is polluting the Ohio River in the town of Parkersburg, home to approximately 50,000 Appalachian residents. The federal complaint claims that waste produced by the factory contains PFAS at levels much higher than allowed by a 2023 discharge permit.

West Virginia Rivers Coalition is seeking enforcement of the agreement from 2023, as well as $66,000 a day in civil penalties for each violation, plus court costs, West Virginia Public Broadcasting reported.

The Chemours plant was the subject of the 2019 film Dark Waters, which told the story of illnesses suffered by Parkersburg residents due to the PFAS pollution, as well as the lawsuit brought against Chemours, formerly a subsidiary of DuPont, reported The Guardian.

A study that arose from the case exposed the health risks of forever chemicals and cost DuPont roughly $700 million.

Local advocates say the recent lawsuit is part of additional legal actions against the plant that have been brought to fill a void left by ineffective regulatory action.

“We have put up with this for 24 years, and [Chemours] is still polluting, they’re still putting this stuff in the water,” said Parkersburg resident Joe Kiger, one of the original plaintiffs, as The Guardian reported.

Among the contaminants listed in the lawsuit are PFAS, PFOA and GenX, all highly toxic chemical compounds that have been found to cause health problems.

The United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has ordered the chemical plant to take steps to correct its actions, but the lawsuit states that it has not. The complaint alleges residents are prevented from enjoying the river for recreation due to the ongoing pollution.

Chemours said in a statement that the “concerns are being addressed” and that it was working with regulators “to navigate both the consent order and the permit renewal process.”

Residents who spoke with The Guardian said most were not aware of continuing hazards from the PFAS pollution.

“They do what they can to make money,” said West Virginia attorney Harry Deitzler, who helped lead previous lawsuits. “The officers in the corporation sometimes don’t care about what’s right and wrong – they need to make money for shareholders and the lawsuits make everyone play by the same rules.”

A large local employer, Chemours invests heavily in charitable giving, and Kiger said many people support the company despite the pollution.

“That’s the kind of stuff you’re up against,” Kiger said. “It could be snowing out and Chemours would tell everyone it’s 80F [27C] and sunny, and everyone will grab their tan lotion.”

A class action lawsuit in 2004 resulted in approximately $70 million for local residents, but the suit failed to prove that PFAS pollution from DuPont was the cause of widespread health problems — including cancer, high cholesterol and kidney disease — in the region.

Rather than dividing the settlement among tens of thousands of the area’s residents, the money was put toward developing the epidemiological study to verify that the local health issues had been caused by pollution from the factory.

The study of roughly 70,000 people in 2012 showed PFOA was the likely cause of the health problems, and later studies demonstrated links between the chemical and other serious health issues affecting local residents.

In 2017 DuPont and Chemours settled roughly 3,500 injury lawsuits for $671 million, and have since paid for the installation of water filtration systems in the region. Chemours also settled an Ohio state suit in 2023 for $110 million over pollution produced primarily by the Washington Works plant.

Rob Bilott, original leader of the class-action suit, said that at times litigation has been the sole way to see meaningful change, since state regulatory agencies, including the EPA, have been periodically staffed with former managers of DuPont or industry allies.

“It’s infuriating,” Bilott said, as reported by The Guardian. “It took decades of making DuPont documents and internal data public, and getting the story out through movies, news articles, books and public engagement, and that’s what finally pushed the needle here. This is the impact of citizens forcing it through decades of litigation.”

The current complaint is a Clean Water Act citizen’s lawsuit, which gives people the power to request the enforcement of federal law in cases where a polluter is in violation and regulators fail to take action.

The EPA has acknowledged the violation by Chemours, but has “taken no further enforcement action regarding Chemours’s violations as of the date of this complaint,” the lawsuit said.

The post Chemours Chemical Plant Still Polluting West Virginia Water With Toxic PFAS After Almost 25 Years, Lawsuit Claims appeared first on EcoWatch.

The two European countries with the most forested land — Sweden and Finland — are not making enough effort to protect their old-growth and primary forests, according to a new report released by World Wildlife Fund (WWF) on Thursday.

The report, Primary and Old-Growth Forests at Risk in Finland and Sweden, said the two northern European countries are putting these unique ecosystems at risk while falling short of pledges made under the European Union’s Green Deal and Biodiversity Strategy.

“Publicly available evidence shows both Finland and Sweden are deviating from EU policies,” said forest expert Mai Suiminen with WWF Finland, in a press release from WWF. “This cannot continue if we are serious about tackling the climate and biodiversity crises.”

The objective of the EU Green Deal is to strictly protect old-growth and primary forests in Europe.

However, the Swedish and Finnish governments are exploiting loopholes and allowing logging in forests that must be safeguarded. Every year, thousands of acres of forests that have high conservation value are cut down, despite being essential for biodiversity, climate stability and long-term ecological health.

WWF emphasized that the protection of these forests is not only important for achieving Europe’s biodiversity and climate goals, but for maintaining the political credibility of the EU.

“Forest protection isn’t just a nice-to-have; it’s fundamental to the success of a sustainable and circular bioeconomy,” said Peter Roberntz, WWF Sweden forest expert, in the press release.

According to the Swedish Forest Industries Federation, forestry supports roughly 140,000 jobs in the Nordic country, reported AFP.

Forests are the planet’s second-largest carbon sink after oceans, helping to mitigate climate change.

The EU’s Nature Restoration Law stipulates that by 2030 one-fifth of natural areas — including marshes and all forests, not only protected areas — must be restored to the same state they were in 75 years ago.

“The current government has shown a low ambition to strictly protect primary and old-growth forests on private lands,” WWF said. “Consequently, Sweden has an ongoing loss of primary and old-growth forests due to clear-cutting.”

Peter Kullgren, Sweden’s rural affairs minister, said the criticism was unfounded.

“Sweden is a leader in forest protection,” Kullgren told AFP in a written statement. “Over 25 percent of Sweden’s forests have already been taken out of production, and over 10 percent are already strictly protected. This makes Sweden one of the EU countries closest to achieving the biodiversity goal.”

An article published last year by the Swedish Species Information Centre at Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU) said the country’s forests are not in the same shape they were in in 1950.

The article argued that much of Sweden’s forest biodiversity was not faring well.

“Logging of high nature-value forests is one of the main reasons why forest species” are threatened, the SLU article said.

SLU added that sufficiently ancient forests in Sweden have become “rare,” as “only a few percent of productive forest land can be qualified as old in the biological sense,” reported AFP.

WWF listed several recommendations in its report, including respecting the rights of the Indigenous Samí People and imposing a moratorium on logging of delineated old-growth and primary forests in Sweden.

WWF called upon the European Commission to track implementation of the EU’s Biodiversity Strategy.

“The consequences of inaction would be severe. Continued logging of primary and old-growth forests will not only undermine Europe’s environmental goals but also erode public trust in national governments and the EU itself,” said Anke Schulmeister-Oldenhove, manager of forests at the WWF European Policy Office, in the press release. “The EU Commission’s workshop in Helsinki must be a turning point. We urge decision-makers to put words into action and ensure Europe’s last great forests are protected before it’s too late.”

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