Business Green

June 1, 2022
The UK government is set to pledge £330m to help developing countries tackle environmental breakdown, conserve nature and deliver on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) on the first day of a major UN environmental summit kicking off tomorrow in Stockholm.

The Stockholm+50 conference has been organised to mark 50 years since the historic United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in 1972, and is expected to see rafts of global politicians, CEOs and civil society leaders in attendance, alongside the launch of a number of fresh environmental commitments.

The £330m set to be officially announced by the UK government tomorrow is earmarked for the Global Environment Facility (GEF), the UN mechanism financing designed to help developing countries meet global nature commitments, in a move aimed at driving finance towards a "nature positive future".

International Environment Minister Lord Zac Goldsmith said scaling finance for nature protection was an economic imperative that would require governments and private actors to pool resources.

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National Geographic

February 25, 2022
In post-war Britain, natural places were in high demand, as expanding cities and industrialisation drove many, including returning heroes, to seek the solace of the countryside and clean air. In 1945, the Government produced a White Paper on National Parks and a National Parks Committee was established, with MP Sir Arthur Hobhouse as Chair. In 1949 the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act finally made the creation of legally protected areas in the UK possible, and the UK’s first National Park, the Peak District, was designated in 1951, followed by another nine throughout the 1950s.

Over seventy years later, the UK is home to several types of nationally protected landscape areas: National Parks (England, Scotland and Wales), Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty or AONBs (England, Northern Ireland and Wales), and National Scenic Areas in Scotland. The current tally of National Parks is 15 – 10 in England (including Wordsworth’s beloved Lake District), three in Wales and two in Scotland – with government agencies in each country holding the power to designate protected areas: Natural Resources Wales, Natural England and NatureScot.

As the UK slowly emerges from the grip of COVID-19, the UK Government is once more turning its attention to these protected places, which provided invaluable sanctuary for so many during some of the darkest hours of the past two years.

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BBC

April, 8, 2021
Speaking at an IMF and World Bank meeting, Prince William said protecting nature continued to play only a small part in combating global warming.

He said investing in reforestation and sustainable agriculture were "cost effective" ways of tackling the issue.

Banks have come under increasing pressure to step up efforts to help fight climate change.

Just this week, Barclays' London headquarters was the target of a protest staged by climate activist group Extinction Rebellion. Members held placards and broke several windows as they called on the bank to stop financing fossil fuel companies.

Addressing central bankers and finance ministers at the spring meetings of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank, the duke said the world's natural habitats continue to decline at an "alarming rate".

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World Economic Forum

December 21, 2020
Scotland is famous for whiskey, haggis and stunning scenery; rolling hills, snow-capped mountains and more than 30,000 freshwater lochs. It is also home to around 90,000 species of animals, microbes and plants.

Now, plans are being proposed to protect as much as one-third of its nature. If enacted, the new laws will help safeguard Scottish biodiversity and the natural economy, which has been valued at around $39 billion.

“Dealing with the twin crises of climate change and biodiversity loss is one of the most important challenges of this generation,” Scotland’s Environment Secretary, Roseanna Cunningham said, announcing the project.

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Euronews

September 28, 2020
The UK has pledged to protect 30 per cent of its land by 2030, in a bid to safeguard biodiversity.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson is formalising this commitment today as part of the Leaders’ Pledge for Nature, a global campaign backed by heads of state from around the world. Over 60 world leaders have signed the pledge, committing to fight pollution, eliminate plastic waste from the oceans, and encourage sustainable economic policies.

The UK is one of the first nations to outline its plan for meeting the 30x30 goal launched by the Campaign for Nature earlier this year. The campaign calls for 30 per cent of the planet’s land to be designated as a protected area in order to halt wildlife loss, as well as boost the global economy.

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WEF Blog

July 1, 2020
The most destructive way to obtain food from the ocean is bottom trawling. Especially egregious are the ships called 'supertrawlers', the largest fishing vessels in the world. Their nets, which are large enough to hold a dozen 747 jets, destroy everything in their paths, including 1,000-year-old deep corals.

Surprisingly, bottom trawling is allowed within some marine protected areas (MPAs) in the UK. Even worse, according to a recent Greenpeace investigation, 25 supertrawlers spent almost 3,000 hours fishing – legally – in 39 different MPAs in the UK in 2019.

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