Blogs

If you go down to the Natural History Museum today you’re in for a big surprise. Instead of finding an exhibit of extinct teddy bears enjoying a summer picnic, you will find a new certificate displayed on the building’s wall.
 
The document will say that the institution has achieved an E grade for energy efficiency under a new rating system drawn up by the Prime Minister’s Communities and Local Government department.
 
Granted, it is the third worst ranking possible on the A-G scale but is still better than the F grade given to Eland House, the central London HQ of the CLG.
 
The department admits it must do better and is promising more efficient heating and ventilation. It’s a shame it has taken public humiliation to force officials to act.
 
Equally mortifying could be the outcome of the CLG’s eco-towns initiative. Tesco today became the latest developer to withdraw its backing for an eco-town proposal near Cambridge.
 
A quarter of developers behind the 15 shortlisted eco-town plans have now scuttled off, too wary of the extent of public opposition. Eco-towns should be a good idea though, and in principle they still have the RSPB’s support.
 
In practice, schemes are looking less and less green and prompting increasing hostility. The need to travel has not been properly addressed with some schemes seeming to encourage car use; the government has admitted that the final list of 10, now promised next year, could include proposals not currently publicised so being far from democratically approved.
 
And two of the shortlisted projects will endanger important wildlife sites. The first, plans for a new town close to Bordon in Hampshire, will threaten an EU-protected site which is important for Dartford warblers, nightjars and woodlarks.

These birds nest close to the ground and the vast influx of people from a new town will put them at risk from human disturbance and predation by pets.

Initial plans for the second, an eco-town at Weston Otmoor in Oxfordshire, would have destroyed an existing nature reserve forming quarter of a SSSI and current plans could still affect water availability and quality, and cause disturbance. Lost would be rare hay meadows and at risk would be semi-natural woodland and farmland, where turtle doves, skylarks and treesparrows now thrive. All of these birds have suffered steep declines across Britain.
 
Loss of habitat is seriously harming the fortunes of wildlife but so too is disturbance and the arrival of eco-town residents - both people and pets - at these two sites could substantially devalue them for many vulnerable species.
 
Abandoned teddy bears would be a relatively benign outcome. Trampled plants, flattened nests and fleeing wildlife would be more serious. Bordon-Whitehill and Western Otmoor should be dropped from the eco-town list.

It all seemed so easy. You popped to your local supermarket for your favourite sandwich filling, safe in the knowledge that the tuna you were buying ticked all the right environmental boxes.

It was caught using dolphin-friendly methods so these graceful, exuberant creatures, and other sealife, were safe. It was fished in waters where tuna stocks weren’t in danger so unlike the purchase of cod, plaice and numerous others fish, your tuna butty was not encouraging yet more High Seas destruction.

But all is not well on the tuna front either, a Greenpeace report has found. For every 10 kilos of tuna caught for the company John West, for example, one kilo is bycatch. That’s turtles, sharks and even the sublime albatross to you and me.

Until now, we shoppers had assumed that the message ‘dolphin-friendly’ on tins of tuna meant the fishing methods used kept all non-target wildlife safe.

This is not true and the Greenpeace report damns two fishing methods particularly – purse seine nets which encircle schools of fish and everything else with them, and aggregation devices – where fish and other species collect under floating objects.

Add to this, long-line fishing where 10,000 baited hooks are attached to 80-mile lines floating on the sea’s surface and you have an albatross massacre that has put 18 of the 22 albatross species in jeopardy.

Greenpeace says labels must be more explicit and must detail the fishing methods suppliers have used.

The RSPB agrees. Better labelling and better regulation of tuna fisheries is essential to turn tuna fishing into a sustainable operation. If it is not, our albatrosses, turtles and sharks will disappear and so will our favourite lunchtime snack.

Read about the RSPB's Save the Albatross Campaign here

And the Times report on tuna here

Bendy bananas were the classic but this latest Euro-ruling really takes the biscuit.

The European Commission has refused to publish the result of its online poll on biofuels claiming organised and campaign voting stopped individual citizens having their say.

In other words, the votes of more than 47,000 people, who disagreed with Europe’s proposals for raising biofuels’ sales, aren’t valid.

These 47,653 voters said no to raising Europe’s biofuels’ target to 10 per cent by 2020 from the existing five per cent by 2010. They formed 87 per cent of voters - a resounding No to more biofuels.

What if 87 per cent had said Yes? Would their votes have counted? Would the poll have been scrapped? Would the outcome have been buried so deep that only the equivalent of a freedom of information request forced it back to the surface?

This is crunch time for biofuels because next month, MEPs vote on whether to force oil firms to sell more biofuels.

If they say yes, they will be spelling doom for rainforests, peatlands and grasslands, all of which teem with wildlife and store huge amounts of carbon.

If they say no, they will not be shutting the door on biofuels, but instead giving governments more time to ensure fuels cut emissions and don’t cause serious environmental damage. Most existing biofuels are not achieving those aims.

The Commission changed its mind on bananas, but only after years of ridicule.

We don't have time to make the same mistake on biofuels. The EU should take heed of its citizen's votes and act in accordance with their overwhelming wishes. Aren't politicians there for the people after all?

Read more about the RSPB's biofuels campaign here

And here for more on the poll 

Energy company E.ON yesterday used five quotes, from surveyed homeowners living in Kingsnorth, to back a claim that local people support plans to replace the company’s ageing power station with another that will be more efficient but still heavily polluting.
 
It is not certain that E.ON’s new coal-fired development will go ahead – Business Secretary John Hutton will rule later this year – but Mr Hutton is one of several government ministers backing the development.
 
Mr Hutton is a vocal supporter of both coal and nuclear power and wants another seven coal-powered plants to be built in the UK in addition to Kingsnorth II.

Coal is the dirtiest fuel there is and the RSPB, many other groups, scientists and other experts believe new coal-fired power stations should only be allowed if the means to store their carbon emissions are built at the same time.

E.ON’s survey said that 57 per cent of people living near Kingsnorth backed its plans for the new, cleaner power station.
 
Far fewer than you might think in fact, and significantly less than the 67 per cent who told E.ON’s surveyers, MORI, that cutting emissions was vital.
 
Some people added comments to their responses. One said the new Kingsnorth had ‘got to be cleaner’, another that energy for new homes ‘must come from somewhere’ and a third, that ‘a diversity of fuels’ was needed.
 
The RSPB backs these statements together with another respondent’s view that Kingsnorth should only go ahead if the means to store its emissions are built simultaneously. There is no guarantee that this will happen at the time of construction or any time in the future.
 
The government is running a competition for funds to develop carbon storage facilities but if E.ON doesn’t win, the company has already said it will not pay for the technology itself.
 
That means that Kingsnorth II will be twice as polluting as an equivalent gas-powered station and will not store any of those emissions.
 
Of course some of the people of Kingsnorth and the surrounding area want a cleaner power station – we all do - but significantly more of them want emissions cut to tackle climate change.
 
These two aims are not compatible unless all new power stations, starting with Kingsnorth, can store their emissions and store them from the start.

Read E.ON's press release here

Read more on the RSPB and climate change here

A 17-year journey, described as long, complex and frustrating, will soon be over.

This is the time it has taken to win legal protection for a 2,000-acre seascape and landscape on New Zealand’s North Island shore.

Australasian gannets, little blue penguins, killer whales, rare fish and many types of seaweed are amongst at least 600 species this coastal panorama boasts. Some species found last year were new to science and, in a month’s time, all will be part of the newly designated Taputeranga Marine Reserve, on the shores of the city of Wellington.

As the Taputeranga decision was announced in New Zealand last week, the High Court in Australia ruled that Aborigines should control 4,300 miles of Northern Territory coast. Commercial and non-indigenous fishing is now effectively banned in an area said to be the last bastion of a macho, non-indigenous fishing tradition.

The communities to benefit say they have fought for 30 years for the rights to a sea they believe to be theirs. Their management means they can develop a sustainable fishing industry.

On Bempton cliffs in East Yorkshire, about 8,000 northern gannets, closely related to the Taputeranga’s Australasian gannets, are raising several thousand of this year’s offspring.

These young birds will soon fly their craggy ledges to patrol inshore waters in benign, adolescent posses until they too come to breed in about four or five years’ time.

Bempton is England’s only mainland gannet colony and these noisy and quite idiosyncratic birds share this 3.5-mile clifftop RSPB reserve with puffins, razorbills, guillemots and kittiwakes.

More than 200,000 birds return to Bempton in summer, when breeding season activity transforms the site into the most mind-blowing of seabird spectacles.

It is raucously loud, it is undeniably smelly but its frantic busyness is mesmerising. It is life and death, it is a seabird metropolis, it is a privileged front seat view of nature in the raw.

Front seats at the best show, the best concert, the best match can cost a bomb. They can turn out to be worth it, they can be huge disappointments, especially if your team gets thrashed.

Front seats at Bempton, and there are many, cost nothing if you are an RSPB member and just a few quid if you are not. A visit is an hour or a day gripped by the avian fast-track that is hatching to flying and full-blown independence of mum.

Or hatching to plopping if you are a razorbill or guillemot. Turn up at the right time, on the right night, and thousands of these birds will be urging their three-week-old balls of fluff to slither and bounce more than 100 metres from the narrow shelves that have always been home, into the dark, cold, mysterious and dangerous sea below.

Much less of a mystery but just as thrilling is the RSPB’s ambition for Bempton. The reserve’s new manager, Ian Kendall, wants the site to be so good that every visitor Bempton welcomes goes home having had ‘a completely and utterly memorable experience’.

Bempton is such a great place that each of its 800 daily visitors in summer probably does already, yet big plans are still afoot. The importance of Bempton and the viewing opportunities it offers have made us think that it should become England’s national centre for seabirds. Scotland has one – the Scottish Seabird Centre, linked to Bass Rock, where gannets are the spectacle. Bempton has the potential to be just as good.

One role such a centre could perform would be to promote the cause of under siege albatrosses with a web link bringing close-up views of young birds from their cold and windswept Falklands nests to a screen very close to an armchair near you.

Another role Ian Kendall has in mind for the centre is to highlight the importance of legal protection for seabirds, other sealife and the UK’s best marine sites.

Amazingly, the UK has only three marine nature reserves – Lundy Island off the coast of Devon, Skomer Island, Pembrokeshire and Strangford Lough in County Down. No Bempton, no Bass Rock, not even St Kilda or South Stack on Anglesey make the grade.

How can this be? Well, during a long, complex and frustrating journey, the RSPB and many other groups have been urging UK governments to give our most important marine areas legal protection.

The foundations have been laid and a draft Marine Bill was published in April. The real deal is promised this December. Our expectations are high.

And so they should be. The seas around the UK have long been over-used, whether it be from fishing, dredging or development. They lack the safeguards afforded important areas on land yet still host a wealth of wildlife from fragile seahorses to gaping basking sharks and an astonishing 26 different nesting seabirds, including two-thirds of the world’s northern gannets.

Wellington has waited 17 years to win its golden prize, the Northern Territories’ Aborigines have waited 30 and it has been almost three decades since the campaign to protect the UK’s best marine zones began.

Let’s hope our government uses next year’s 30th anniversary to bring that campaign to fruition and finally protect seabirds where the spend most of their lives – at sea.

The gannets at Bempton and elsewhere are doing incredibly well but the species they share the cliffs and seas with are not. They need protection now. They have waited long enough.

Read more about the RSPB's marine campaign here