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Monitoring environmental votes by MEPs

A new website called www.EU-votewatch.org has been set up by Friends of the Earth, WWF, Birdlife + Greenpeace in order to help voters see how Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) are voting on environmental issues such as Agriculture, Air pollution, Chemicals, GM food, Liability, Nuclear power, Recycling, Renewables + Transport.

The European Union is responsible for around 90% of environmental laws in the UK, and very few people - if any! - are aware of how their representatives vote on these issues!

Using the www.EU-votewatch.org site it is possible to look at the voting records of individual politicians, countries (e.g. UK) or political blocks (e.g Greens) within the parliament, and to see how the percentage of environmentally friendly votes varies between countries.

Sadly, UK MEPs have the worst record in Europe for voting in favour of supporting the environment, with the majority of UK MEPs (51%) voting against environmental improvements in ten key votes.

At the other end of the scale, Danish MEPs came out on top with 84% of votes in favour of the environment, followed by the Swedes (81%) and the Austrians (77%)...

Five UK MEPs voted against every environment vote they took part in and 10 others voted against the environment 90% of the time. All were either Conservatives or members of the UK Independence Party.

Fifteen UK MEPs have a 100% record of voting green - (10 Liberal Democrats, 2 Green Party, 2 Plaid Cymru and 1 SDLP).

The England, Wales and Northern Ireland political parties' votes for environmental improvement were ranked as follows:

Greens, Plaid Cymru, SDLP - 100%
Liberal Democrats - 99%
Labour - 70%
DUP - 50%
Conservatives - 13%
UUP - 12%
UKIP - 0%

A recent report by the European Commission showed that the UK had one of the worst records for infringement actions for failing to properly implement EU laws. Recent research shows that over 30% of UK citizens are "very worried" about environmental issues. The environment is one of the few areas where the European Parliament has co-decision making powers with the Commission and Council of Ministers and is therefore one of the few areas where MEPs can make a significant difference.

Friends of the Earth's Campaigns Director Mike Childs said:

"European Union laws have been the driving force in cleaning up Britain's drinking water, rivers + beaches. Its waste laws are improving safety standards at waste disposal sites and improving recycling. The EU is an important influence at international negotiations on issues such as climate, trade and wildlife protection. If people want to see further environmental gains then they can use this new interactive website to see how their MEP has voted in the past and which parties are greener than others."

Earth-Info.Net feels that this monitoring should greatly improve transparency + accountability in the EU and help to make it harder for politicians to hide from the consequences of their short-term actions. It is also very good to see different NGOs working together in such a constructive way...

UK seeks to help defeat a murderous Ugandan cult

Later today, the UK's International Development Secretary, Hillary Benn, will be meeting Uganda's President Museveni to discuss what assistance the UK can provide with tackling a crazed + murderous cult, called the Lord's Resistance Army, that has been terrorizing northern Uganda, and forcing abducted children to become soliders, for the past 18 years.

You can listen to this piece from BBC Radio 4's Today Programme if you would like to learn more...

The latest Bretton Woods Project newsletter

The latest edition of the Bretton Woods Project newsletter has just been released.

This update offers plenty of high-quality retrospective analysis and the latest news on the controversial projects + policies of World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, and is well worth a read.

Articles on offer include:

1. The World Bank and IMF at sixty...
2. Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers: a continuation of structural adjustment
3. Life under the IMF's magnifying glass
4. World Bank pushes Malawi agriculture privatisation
5. Iraq and Ethiopia treatment shows debt relief double standards
6. The World Bank's high-risk hypocrisy
7. Parliaments: the missing link in democratising national policy making
8. Parliamentarians increase demands on World Bank
9. IMF selection mess only a symptom
10. 60th anniversary spring meetings protest plans
11. IMF and poverty: strange bed fellows
12. Disengaging from the Fund: possible and worthwhile?
13. Challenges to World Bank report on MDG progress
14. Are you listening carefully?
15. Pakistani hunger strikers seek reparations for damaging project
16. Global warming speaks louder than words
17. Acres debarment: Litmus test for Bank on corruption
18. World Bank faces lobbies on human rights, climate change
19. Congolese groups unite to demand scrutiny of forest policies
20. BWP seeks new Coordinator
21. BWP welcomes Atieno Ndomo
22. At issue - World Bank, IMF: Helping peace or creating conditions for war?

Undercurrents News Network launched

Last night Earth-Info.Net attended the Oxford launch of the Undercurrents News Network, an alternative media group, which plans to help distribute videos highlighting the work of activists from around the world.

Undercurrents have been producing videos, featuring their own alternative news stories, for the past 10 years, and discovered that on average it takes 4 years for these stories to be covered by documentaries on the mainstream media.

Stories featured in the latest video include a demonstration outside a Premier Oil AGM, (protesting at the company's investment in Burma inspite of the ruling regime's appalling human rights record), a mass break-out from the Woomera detention centre in the South Australian desert (where asylum seekers were often detained for months, until UN pressure finally led to the site's closure in April 2003) and a student occupation of the President's office at Harvard University in protest at the university's policy of offering poverty pay to 1000 workers, despite the institutions's own immense wealth ($20 billion) and profits (approx. $150 million per annum).

Why Australia's soil + drinking water are going salty...

The latest edition of BBC Radio 4's Costing the Earth programme investigates the threat posed by dryland salinity to Australia's most productive farmlands + drinking water.

Dryland salinity is caused by a combination of ancient + modern events.

In prehistoric times, the tectonic plate that was to become Australia was located under the sea.

When this plate was eventually lifted above sea-level, salt deposits and evaporation, formed a salt crust that was, only very slowly, washed underground, by many millions of years of rain...

More recently, over the last 200 years, and especially the last 50 years, vast areas of Australia have been cleared for agriculture...

The consequent loss of big trees (which drank, and then sweated large quantities of water, into the air, through their leaves), and their replacement with less thirsty grasses, such as wheat or pasture (which do not), has resulted in water tables, across Australia, being pulled towards the surface, by the heat of the sun.

Unable to escape into the air, this water has started to pool around soil particles close to the surface and, once here, steadily pulled up salts from deep underground (a bit like wet tissue paper soaks up ink).

Gradually, the concentration of salts at the surface has increased and, in more and more places, produced lifeless salt pans... It is almost impossible for most plants to live, or for animals to find untainted water, on such hyper-salty soils. As a consequence, millions of acres of formerly productive land have been turned into lifeless desert.

Unfortunately, it is not just the country people and wildlife that suffer from the impacts of this problem...

Country streams, draining from salty land, eventually flow into rivers which then supply most of Australia's major cities with their drinking water...

Food production, which is already difficult in semi-arid areas, and generally expected to increase, has also become impossible in previously fertile areas, and even native plants, which evolved while areas were salt-free, are unable to survive.

The threat posed by salinity is immense, and this programme does a good job of looking at what the problems are and what can be done to tackle them...

Sellafield's nuclear waste storage is "unacceptable"

The European Union has told the UK government and British Nuclear Fuels that the situation regarding the UK's storage of military + civilian nuclear waste at Sellafield is "unacceptable" and must be addressed within 3 months if stiff penalties are to be avoided.

The Commission is demanding that a plan of action be prepared by June 1st and, that after this date, six monthly reports must be produced on the implementation of the plan.

Inspectors have been granted access to Sellafield since 1991, but are unhappy that some of the contents of storage "ponds" (used to keep waste cool and reduce the amount of radiation that workers are exposured to) cannot be identified or inspected properly, and the EU now wants effective action to be taken to change this, without any further delay or excuses...

In 2001, the Irish, who share the area of sea used by the British to dump Tc-99 waste - which cannot be safely stored and has a half life of 211,000 years - protested about practices at Sellafield under the Convention for the Protection of the Marine Environment of the North East Atlantic and the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.

They almost certainly have a valid point as the respected Norwegian NGO, Bellona, says that scientists have measured an alarming increase in levels of radioactive techetium-99, in sea weed + shell-fish since 1994, when Sellafield dramatically increased its discharges of the compound to the Irish Sea. While, in 2002, the UK's own Royal Society delivered a damning indictment of successive governments and the nuclear industry, accusing them of neglecting the "serious and urgent" problem of disposal...

The Royal Society also estimated that it may cost �85 billion to deal with existing waste, and argued that today's problems are more serious than currently acknowledged + that the current waste management regime falls short of that which could be achieved through the use of currently available technologies!

A new law to protect the Great Barrier Reef

The Australian government is to ban fishing from one third of the Great Barrier Reef and to more strictly limit the movement of shipping near the reef.

Each year, the reef, which is Australia's number one tourist attraction, attracts 1,000,000 tourists and helps to inject A$4.3 billion into the national economy.

However, WWF Australia has recently warned that the reef is likely to be dead within the next 100 years, and will then take between 100 and 500 years to recover - depending on the action taken to tackle predicted climate change and reduce the impacts of human activities, which can harm the reef.

It is therefore very good news that the government has taken such prompt action, and demontrated a willingness to protect the environment, as well as the future of the local tourist industry.

When the new law comes into force, in July, the reef will become the world's largest protected reef system.

Commercial fishermen, who have resisted the ban, will also be offered assistance including: the buying-out of licences and assistance with training for alternative careers.

Valuing all human life v Looking the other way

At a memorial conference to the 800,000 people who died during the 1994 Rwandan genocide, Kofi Annan, the head of the UN (and former head of UN peace-keeping) has expressed his bitter regret that he did not do more to rally international action, and stop the killing.

Sadly, Lieutenant General Romeo Dallaire, the head of the peace-keeping force in Rwanda at the time, has said that he feels the attitudes which prevailed at the time remain... stating "I still believe that if an organisation decided to wipe out the 320 mountain gorillas there would be still more of a reaction by the international community to curtail or to stop that than there would be still today in attempting to protect thousands of human beings being slaughtered in the same country."

DevNetJobs.Org: an international development job service

Jessica Matthews of DevNetJobs.Org has been in touch to let me know about her organisation's (subscription) job service which lists 100s of job opportunities + consultancy assignments in the area of International Development.

In addition, DevNetJobs brings out a free, fortnightly jobs newsletter which may be subscribed to by sending a blank email to:

developmentjobs-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

Environment Expo + World Wide Wattle

Today, an Environmental Expo will be taking place in the "wheatbelt" town of Dalwallinu in Western Australia.

This expo will showcase some of pioneering work that is being done in this biologically diverse region to protect endangered plants, drain cleared farmland suffering from waterlogging + dryland salinity and control introduced weeds + feral pests.

This event will also see the official launch of the World Wide Wattle website, an outstanding labour-of-love produced by, top Acacia taxonomist, Bruce Maslin.

There are over 950 species of Acacia in Australia and they have provided medicine, food, boomerangs + inspiration to people ever since the continent was first settled some 50,000 years ago...

More recently, one species (Acacia pycnantha) has been made Australia's floral emblem, and the plants' unmistakeable flowers and foliage have been used to form the basis for the nation's green and gold sporting colours, coat of arms + symbolic honours. There's even been an official National Wattle Day!

I'm just finishing a PhD on the pollination of these plants, and there are hopes that this work will feed into wider scientific efforts to sustainably revegetate Australia with native plants + provide farmers with alternative industries that are better suited to the country's unique + harsh conditions than the, catastrophically vulnerable, sheep + wheat industries...

It is therefore great to see so much positive work going on in Dalwallinu!

Taking responsibility for "toxic" ships

Greenpeace, Peter Mandleson MP + the GMB trade union are calling on the UK to stop sending "toxic" ships, containing asbestos or dangerous chemicals, to be scrapped in poor countries.

At present, it is common for poorly-paid workers, in countries such as India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, China + Turkey to be inadequately protected, and for the waste to be unsafely disposed of, while old ships are being dismantled.

As a result, Greenpeace is urging ship owners to start applying the so-called proximity principle, and to dispose of their waste locally, to the highest environment and labour standards.

As things stand, navies and shipping firms are able to sell their old ships into a network of traders, who then seek to maximise their profits... with the end result that hazardous ships often go to scrap-yards in countries with the lowest costs, weakest of laws + poorest standards.

You can visit Greenpeace's ship breaking site if you would like to find out more about this issue.

What can stop Africa's brain drain?

Africa is the most incredible + vibrant place Earth-Info.Net has ever visited, and doesn't conform to a vast swathe of negative Western stereotypes.

Despite this, it is undeniable that Africa has more than its fair share of problems. Some of which are eloquently summarised by contributors to a debate organised by the BBC's Africa Live! radio show, entitled:

"What can stop Africa's brain drain?"

Scotland's "Great Barrier Reef" given EU protection

Yesterday, EU Fisheries Ministers agreed to give permanent protection to Scotland's unique cold water coral reefs, the Darwin mounds by banning deepwater bottom trawling in the area.

This ban delivers a promise first made by Margaret Beckett, UK Secretary of State for the Environment made in October 2001, and has been welcomed by WWF-Scotland, who have spent the past 3 years highlighting the damage deep-water trawlers cause to the reef, as they dredge over huge areas of seabed.

Helen McLachlan, Marine Policy Officer for WWF Scotland said "We welcome the protection of this incredible piece of Scottish marine life - a beautiful deepwater habitat rich in wildlife such as sponges, starfish, and deepwater fish. This is our equivalent of the Great Barrier Reef and it was vital that it was protected before it was destroyed forever by deep water trawling".

"Up close the Darwin Mounds, off the Scottish coast, are as beautiful and rich in marine life as the Great Barrier Reef in Australian waters. Thankfully these ancient + fragile coral mounds that have taken thousands of years to grow, have been saved from further destruction with the banning of deep water trawling. We welcome this decision as the first real commitment by Member States to reduce the impacts that fisheries have on our marine environment."

Only discovered in 1998, the Darwin Mounds are a unique collection of cold-water coral mounds (Lophelia pertusa) at a depth of 1000 metres and about 185km northwest of Scotland. They are made up of hundreds of coral reefs up to 5m (16ft) high and 100m (328 ft) wide covering an area of approximately 100 sq km. The reefs support a wide diversity of marine life, such as sponges, starfish, sea urchins, crabs and deep-sea fish including the blue ling, round-nosed grenadier and the orange roughy.

There appear to be rather few photographs of this reef on the web, but the best pictures I could find were taken by Jan Helge Fossa, and accompany this old BBC story.

Protecting the environment + providing clean water

The 8th Special Session of the Governing Council of the UN Environment Porgramme will be taking place in Jeju, South Korea from the 29th-31st March, 2004.

This meeting is due to discuss the Environmental Dimension of Water, Sanitation and Human Settlements.

A full list of the event's notification + working documents as well as further information documents can be found if you follow these links...

Key papers include:

* Financing wastewater collection + treatment in relation to the Millennium Development Goals and World Summit on Sustainable Development targets on water and sanitation.

* Addressing environmental aspects of the water agenda: Activities of the United Nations system: Contribution of the Environmental Management Group to the 8th special session of the Governing Council/global Ministerial Environment Forum and the 12th session of the Commission on Sustainable Development

* Strengthening the scientific base of the United Nations Environment Programme

On a related note, SciDev.Net has recently hosted a good discussion of the relative importance of protecting the environment while addressing poverty alleviation...

The head of the UNDP, Mark Malloch-Brown, states that "The conservation of biodiversity should be seen as a �driver� for poverty alleviation, not just as an end in itself".

While Reginald Victor, professor of biology at Sultan Qaboos University in Oman, asserts that "the conservation of biodiversity can only succeed when it is given priority over development."

This is one of those intractable debates, as both poverty alleviation + the environment are important + under-resourced...

Unfortunately, now that humans have the power to shape the destiny of all life on the planet, our ability to act wisely, and for the good of others, has never been more important...

In Earth-Info.Net's view humans will need to become much better at sharing wealth, knowledge + resources, for either people or the environment to have viable, long-term futures.

This will only be possible if leaders are prepared to take the difficult decisions today, that future generations require of them and the rest of society is prepared to do its bit to make this possible.

What is a Citizens Jury?

What is the best way to reflect public opinion?

An election, an opinion poll, a referendum...

Much depends on the question being asked + who is asking it, but one interesting, new approach is the citizens jury.

A citizens jury exposes a jury, made up of members of the public, to a range of factual evidence, and allows them to interrogate witnesses possessing a variety of different perspectives.

It then asks the jury to reach an informed opinion on the matter at hand, and to make recommendations for action... which can then be fed into a wider public debate.

In the case of a recent GM Jury, oversight was provided by four funders with different vested-interests (Unilever, Greenpeace, The Co-op + The Consumers Association) and input received from an Oversight Panel that included both conventional stakeholders + grassroots community group members.

The agenda for discussions, choice of extra witnesses, and scope of recommendations were partly set by the members of the jury - rather than simply dictated to them by a particular stakeholder. The jury hearings were also open to observers, a summary of proceedings was published on the web, and all jury hearings were recorded so that they could be made available on a publicly - accessible video archive.

Given the hyperbole that tends to surround the discussion of GM technology, the verdict seems very reasonable, worthy of thought + a positive contribution to the debate...

You can follow this link to read about GM Jury verdicts from other countries.

Even in open, representative democracies, Earth-Info.Net feels that the debate of many other complex issues, which do not determine the results of national elections, would benefit from the input of well-organised + representative citizen juries...

Butterflies acting like canaries?

In 2001, The Biodiversity Challenge Group, which comprised of Butterfly Conservation, Friends of the Earth, Plantlife, The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, The Wildlife Trusts and WWF-UK challenged the UK government to reverse the declines of all the UK's threatened species + habitats by implementing a 10-point plan...

The 10 key challenges were as follows:

1. Imagination - deliver a real increase in the extent of priority habitats, including heathland, downland and woodland, in a way that improves public access, human health and biodiversity.

2. Agriculture - shift agricultural payments from intensive production to support for sustainable rural development, including positive wildlife management.

3. Climate change - meet UK targets of cutting carbon emissions by 20 per cent by 2010.

4. Areas of wildlife importance - deliver the positive management of all protected conservation sites (ASSI/SSSIs and Natura 2000 sites), and the conservation of local wildlife sites, over the next five years.

5. Water - ensure the full transposition of the EU Water Framework Directive into UK law and policy, to provide a framework for government, its agencies and industry, to protect and enhance the biological diversity of wetland ecosystems.

6. Coastal - adopt a policy on sea level rise of no net loss of priority wildlife habitats. Use dynamic adjustment of the coast to achieve a net gain of these habitats.

7. Marine environment - introduce a bold package of policy and legislative measures to protect the marine environment.

8. Planning - revise all planning guidance to ensure that the planning system contributes to the maintenance and the positive enhancement of biodiversity.

9. Integration - ensure proper consideration of biodiversity through Strategic Environmental Assessment of all plans, policies and programmes.

10. Information - ensure effective monitoring of species and habitats in the UK, adequate research into biodiversity and the effective distribution of this information.

Today, new research has been published in the journal Science which states that overall, in the UK, 71% of butterfly species have declined over the last 20 years, compared to 54% of native birds over 20 years and 28% of plants over a forty-year period.

Sir David Attenborough, President of Butterfly Conservation, the charity that collated the new butterfly data, said:

"The results show the importance of Britain's long amateur tradition of natural history and underline the enormous value of records gathered diligently by volunteers over many decades. I have always thought that butterflies represented the canaries in the coalmine, giving us early indications of man's impact on the planet. Everyone knows about the decline of the House Sparrow, but British butterflies and other insects are facing an even greater crisis than birds. I am deeply concerned that we must increase our efforts to conserve biodiversity at this critical time and I hope the government demonstrates their own commitment through placing biodiversity at the heart of the new agency recommended in Lord Haskins' review of rural delivery."

See here to visit the UK Biodiversity Action Plan website or to listen to Lord May's thoughts on whether we are heading for a 6th global mass extinction...

Home sweet, Shipping container...

A British architect, Eric Reynolds, of Urban Space Management, has been experimenting with innovative ways of producing energy-efficient and cheap homes + offices, and has settled on converting old shipping containers.

These containers are usually used to transport goods, but can be converted into habitable space with suitable windows, doors, insulation + decoration. Then, by fitting containers together in a variety of ways, buildings of almost any size can be created...

In London, builders usually charge about �120 a square foot ($200) to build a conventional house, whereas high quality space can be built from converted containers for as little as �40 ($70).

As there are millions of old containers, and we currently have a severe shortage of low-cost housing in the UK, this solution appears to have massive potential. Especially, as containers can be transported, very easily, to almost anywhere in the world.

Follow this link to see some pictures of how containers are being used to provide artists with studio space and to help regenerate a run-down area of London.

Guardian Unlimited develops Life

Guardian Unlimited has started to compile it's environment + development stories in an online supplement called Life.

Within this supplement stories are arranged according to themes such as climate change, conservation, global fishing crisis, renewable energy, spreading deserts + water.

Some themes have many more reports than others, but this supplement is a welcome development. In particular, because it offers a simple way of monitoring how stories + issues develop over time.

Helping refugees to return home

The UN high commissioner for refugees, Ruud Lubbers, has said that rich countries should do more to allow refugees to return to their home countries once wars have finished, and stability restored.

He said that as many as 2,000,000 African refugees could now choose to go home and restart their lives, but that international community needs to be prepared to provide long-term funding + commitment in order to make this possible.