Environment

The 2-inch-wide crack was found after an engineer spotted an odd curve on part of the Wanapum Dam near the town of Vantage. The water behind the dam was drawn down to its lowest level in 50 years.

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If India can deploy adequate technology to treat water, it could significantly expand its water supply and better water means better public health and economic development

The world is not running out of water. The real challenge is to provide enough clean water to a rapidly growing global population (and the attendant demands that come with growth: more energy, more food, more industry, and more consumption). Increasingly irregular weather patterns and natural disasters only exacerbate the situation.

Whether in California or Zhejiang, China, all regions of the world are grappling with often-severe cases of water scarcity. This is a hard nut to crack even in relatively wealthy, developed countries. But in developing countries that lack basic infrastructure, inadequate financial resources combine with rapid urbanisation and increased industrialisation to create crisis.

Nowhere are these challenges more evident than in India.

Today, 1.2 billion people call India home, 377.1 million of whom live in cities. In the next 40 years, India's population is expected to grow by nearly half a billion. In the next two decades alone, 225 million more people will be living in Indian cities. The water required to serve this population today is 740bn cubic metres per year (compared to 102bn cubic metres per year for the UK). By 2030, this number is expected to grow by approximately 200%, to nearly 1.5tn cubic metres per year.

I have been working on water issues in India for nine years, and it has become clear to me that here is a lot the country can and should do to become a wiser steward of its water resources. First among these must be creating adequate treatment infrastructure.

Lack of treatment options lead to two problems: not treating wastewater (ie sewage) before discharging it into waterways pollutes the source, often rendering the water unusable for drinking. The water intended for drinking is withdrawn from this same source, and again not adequately treated, creating significant public health problems: 21% of communicable diseases in India stem from unsafe water. A Yale University study released in late January ranked India 124th out of 178 countries on the 2014 Environmental Performance Index (EPI) in terms of access to water and sanitation.

According to India's Central Pollution Control Board, the country has an installed capacity to treat only about 30% of the household waste it generates – the rest is released into open drains or straight into the ground. And just two cities, Delhi and Mumbai, which generate around 17% of the country's sewage, have nearly 40% of its installed capacity. According to Asit K Biswas and Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, while 90% of households in Delhi are considered to have adequate sanitation because they have indoor toilets, almost all of Delhi's untreated wastewater flows into the Yamuna River, a source of drinking water for cities downstream.

The bottom line is this: if India were to widely deploy adequate treatment technology, the country would be able to significantly expand its available water supply, both for potable and non-potable use. Our economy, industry and most importantly, our people, would reap the benefits.

The challenge is huge, but not intractable. Meeting it will require political will and technological and policy innovation – but as with water crises everywhere, India no longer has the luxury of inaction.

There is cause for hope. India's investment in water and sanitation, including treatment systems, is still low but has increased over the past decade. Results are far from ideal, but nonetheless encouraging. For example in 1980, rural sanitation coverage was estimated at 1%. In 2008, it had expanded to 21%. The ministry of micro, small and medium enterprises and the National Innovation Council also recently announced the launch of the India Inclusive Innovation Fund, designed to invest in several socially-relevant sectors such as water and sanitation.

Government investment and sound policy work. But the private sector can also help: one recent study lists the overall Indian water sector as having investment potential of $130bn by 2030. Another estimates India's total water and wastewater treatment market alone is worth about $420m, growing annually by about 18%. But the government's twelfth five year plan (2012-2017) states that economic growth of 8-9% is possible only if water related requirements of the growing population are met.

The opportunities presented by this market are enormous, and they provide every incentive for the private sector to invest in India, and do what it does best: develop new and better technology, design systems that work for local, specific needs, find efficiencies and of course, be wise stewards of the water we ourselves use.

For example, last autumn our company signed a contract with a global engineering, procurement and construction company to install a biological treatment system in a wastewater plant in Jamnagar, in Gujarat state. The treated wastewater will be reused for non-potable industrial purposes, providing a cheaper alternative to the region's reliance on water from the Narmada River. These are the type of location and application-specific solutions that India will need more as population levels rise in coming years.

One reason I enjoy my work is that in doing each of these, our company certainly benefits, but our employees also have the satisfaction of helping India. Better water means better public health, more widespread economic development and even more food for our fellow citizens. There can be no better definition of shared value.

H. Balasubramaniam (Bala) is managing director of Xylem India.

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• Water
• Sustainability
• India
• Water
• Access to water

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A new cartoon created by John Cook illustrates the failure of climate contrarians to manage global warming risks

Climate change is fundamentally a risk management problem. Whether or not you agree with the 97 percent expert consensus on human-caused global warming, there is an undeniable risk that the consensus is correct and that we're causing dangerously rapid climate change.

Frequently, climate contrarians argue against taking action to mitigate that risk by claiming the uncertainties are too large. One of the most visible figures to make this argument is climate scientist Judith Curry, who said in 2013,

"I can't say myself that [doing nothing] isn't the best solution."

This argument represents a failure to grasp the principles of basic risk management, as illustrated in the following cartoon.

When it comes to managing risk, uncertainty is not our friend. Uncertainty means it's possible the outcome will be better than we expect, but it's also possible it will be much worse than we expect. In fact, continuing with business-as-usual would only be a reasonable option in the absolute best case scenario.

Doing nothing is betting the farm on a very low probability scenario.  It's an incredibly high-risk path that fails to reduce the threats posed by the worst case or even most likely case scenarios. This is a concept Judith Curry understood in 2007, when she wrote,

"The rationale for reducing emissions of carbon dioxide is to reduce the risk of the possibility of catastrophic outcomes. Making the transition to cleaner fuels has the added benefit of reducing the impact on public health and ecosystems and improving energy security ... I have yet to see any option that is worse than ignoring the risk of global warming and doing nothing."

Judith Curry of 2007 got it exactly right. Unfortunately she and her fellow climate contrarians no longer seem to grasp these fundamental principles of risk management.

Failing to mitigate global warming by significantly reducing greenhouse gas emissions is fundamentally equivalent to continuing to smoke cigarettes, driving without a seat belt, or refusing to buy homeowner's insurance. Each situation represents the failure to take action to reduce the risks of a very dangerous outcome.

Even if you personally have doubts about the 97 percent expert consensus on human-caused global warming and the threats it represents, there's a good chance you're wrong. You may also doubt the medical science consensus that smoking causes lung cancer, but acting on that doubt by continuing to smoke is a risky decision. The difference is that in the latter case, you're only risking the health of yourself and those in your proximity. In the case of global warming, you're risking the health of entire ecosystems and future generations.

From a risk management perspective, mitigating the undeniable threat of catastrophic climate change is a no-brainer. So let's stop delaying and denying and get to it.

• Climate change
• Climate change scepticism

Dana Nuccitelli
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The raw ingredients in famous brands are vulnerable to political upheaval, changes in agricultural practices and natural disasters

The perfume industry is facing a major problem: maintaining constant levels of quality is crucial, but it is increasingly difficult to obtain a regular supply of all the necessary natural ingredients. Essential oils such as jasmine, rose, vetiver, ilang-ilang, iris, vanilla, sandalwood or lavender cannot be synthesised in the laboratory. But supplies are dwindling and need to be protected, in some cases by the perfume industry itself.

In 1987, for example, Chanel made an agreement to buy all the jasmine flowers produced by the Mul family, which has been the main source of the flowers in France for five generations. Jacques Polge, Chanel's top "nose" since 1978, made the decision when developers started trying to buy up land around Grasse, where the Muls cultivate three hectares of the precious plant.

The crop of fragrant white flowers – between 10 and 15 tonnes a year – is almost entirely used in Chanel No 5, the perfume created by Ernest Beaux in 1921 and now the world's biggest-selling fragrance. The smallest bottle (30ml) contains the equivalent of 1,000 buds. They are hand-picked in the morning to retain as much fragrance as possible, from August to October – and processed the same day.

The partnership between Chanel and the Mul family has since been extended to include Provence rose, iris, tuberose and an old variety of geranium. The factory located nearby is both a laboratory and a processing plant.

At Guerlain, a subsidiary of LVMH, the head perfumier Thierry Wasser was also responsible for starting jasmine production again in Calabria, Italy. "I spend about a quarter of my time in the fields, talking to growers," he says. His quest for new fragrances has taken him as far as the mountains near Kashan, Iran, in search of the Damascus rose, still grown there using traditional methods. It features in a new eau de parfum.

His work takes him to Tunisia too, to supervise the harvest of orange blossom, of which Guerlain distils 100 tonnes a year for its own use. Here too he sources bergamot, a favourite ingredient in his preparations.

Wasser has set aside a bottle of rose oil, which he considers the most remarkable of last year's harvest. It is the result of a perfect balance between dew and sunlight. Much as with the best wines, the raw materials of perfume are always changing, affected by the soil, sunlight, rainfall and temperature. Their price varies too, depending on crop yields.

None of the big three – Chanel, Guerlain and L'Oréal – have any immediate plans to invest more extensively in growing. They see raising the trees and flowers on which they depend for essential oils as a separate business.

But François Demachy, the nose at Christian Dior Parfums and head of the perfumes division at LVMH, reckons diversification into primary production as a likely move for the industry to make. He says he is "considering [investing] further upstream" in the long term. He is certainly concerned about "availability problems" for certain ingredients, which has prompted him to increase the range of sources for some flowers and even to seal an agreement with a Sri Lankan producer of sandalwood – a rare species protected by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (Cites).

"What was Jean-Paul [Guerlain] thinking of when he put so much sandalwood in Samsara?" his successor Wasser jokes. The price of the essential oil has rocketed since 1989 when the perfume was launched.

Each bottle of perfume is made from raw materials whose quality and cost are sensitive to changes in agriculture, politics, natural disasters, climate and disease. All of which can be a major headache for perfumers.

"Rural flight has substantially reduced these micromarkets all over the world. Farmers are tempted to switch to cereals or oil-producing plants, which often pay much better than flowers. The growers who work for the perfume industry and their pickers do not earn a great deal," says Jean-Pierre Coutauchaud, head of speciality raw materials purchasing at L'Oréal. In the perfumes produced by L'Oréal (Trésor, Lancôme, Armani), natural materials only account for 20% of ingredients, the rest being artificial.

"In Indonesia, the Chinese who used to farm the patchouli fields have been persecuted, forcing them to give up their crops, which in turn led to an incredible price rise," Wasser explains. For several months after the earthquake that devastated Haiti in January 2010 vetiver exports stopped, he adds. On the other hand, the Arab spring in 2011 did not affect the supply of jasmine, despite it being mainly sourced from Tunisia and Egypt.

Nearer to home, the lavender fields of Provence have been severely damaged in recent years by insect-borne bacteria.

"We now keep reserves of strategic raw materials – such as vetiver, vanilla and lavender – selected on the basis of three criteria: they can't be synthesised, only come from a single geographical source and are needed in large quantities," says a spokesperson at Givaudan, which manufactures perfume for several brands.

Givaudan, based in Vernier, Switzerland, is taking steps to mitigate shortages. It has launched schemes to protect and sustain sources of endangered raw materials. It has helped tonka bean growers in Venezuela, restarted sandalwood production in Australia, and helped to improve the quality of benzoin resin in Laos and ilang-ilang in the Comoros islands.

Haiti produces half the world's supply of vetiver. Its roots yield an essential oil with a mysterious dry fragrance akin to smoked wood, which Haitians call the "essence of tranquillity". In 2012 Givaudan started working with Agri Supply, the main producer of the oil. Its refurbished vetiver distillery is now the largest in the world. Some 160 farmers in three villages in the Cayes district have formed a co-operative and negotiated a guaranteed minimum price. They also receive technical support from the Swiss firm.

This article appeared in Guardian Weekly, which incorporates material from Le Monde

• France
• Climate change
• Farming
• Agriculture
• Beauty

Nicole Vulser
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Withdraw, engage or ignore? The oil company's exploration of options in Africa's oldest national park puts its investors, including Aviva and L&G, into a difficult position

A war of words between WWF and UK-listed oil company Soco International about its plans to explore for oil in a world heritage site in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) has come to a head after a ruling by an international tribunal.

Soco, whose preliminary results for 2013 are published tomorrow, has a permit to explore in part of the Virunga National Park, Africa's oldest national park and home to the critically endangered mountain gorillas made famous by the film Gorillas in the Mist.

Some 85% of the park has been allocated as oil concessions by the DRC but WWF says Soco is the only company moving forward with exploration plans. Other companies, such as Total, have committed not to explore within Virunga.

Soco says that the project is in the very early "pre-exploration" phase and any development remains many years away. It adds that "the mountain gorilla habitat is distinctly separate from Soco's area of interest – separated by altitude (as oil exploration does not take place in volcanic mountains, and mountain gorillas do not live in lowland savannah), by distance (approximately 40km) and by the boundary of Block V(the name of its concession) itself".

WWF contends that the company "has breached the most respected global corporate social responsibility standards in its pursuit of oil in Virunga National Park". It complained to the OECD, whose UK National Contact Point published an initial assessment on 14 February which advised further examination by the UK government.

While Soco says that the NCP rejected many of the NGO's allegations, WWF-UK chief executive David Nussbaum responds that the announcement shows "the seriousness of WWF's complaint against Soco's activities". "What are investors to make of this? Mark Campanale, co-founder of Carbon Tracker says Soco's presence in the DRC illustrates the collapse of easy oil. "All the new oil is difficult to access – it's in places like the Arctic or rainforests. Companies are having to go to greater and greater extremes to find ever-smaller amounts of oil."

Many of the company's investors, which include local council pension funds as well as some of the biggest UK and global financial institutions, are passive investors which invest across the entire market and say they have no choice about what companies they invest in because their mandate is to invest in whatever's in the index. They own shares in Soco because it is a constituent of the FTSE 250 index.

One such investor is Aviva. "Operating in a World Heritage Site is obviously a very serious issue and we are prepared to be pretty robust about it. We have been speaking to the company about the fact that this is a big issue for us," says Stephanie Maier, head of corporate responsibility at the group. Even with its passive investments, Aviva's approach is "to use the ownership leverage we have to seek improvements in the companies we hold."

Craig McKenzie, head of sustainability at Scottish Widows Investment Partnership, says there is a limit to the amount of engagement a passive investor can do. "One thing we can do as a tracker fund is to vote our shares and one of the few issues on which you can do that is remuneration and executive pay ... However, a vote on remuneration is quite a crude instrument, which means dealing with particular controversies through that vote is quite hard," he adds. In an ideal world, all investors should be willing to talk to companies about serious environmental and ethical issues, McKenzie says, but it comes down to the resources of the engagement team.

The problem for passive investors is that they are "exposed to pretty much every controversy in the listed space with limited ability to do anything about it". This leads to situations such as the controversy over Soco, which raises uncomfortable questions for investors such as Legal & General Investment Managers, which says it takes sustainability issues very seriously yet also says (without commenting specifically on Soco) it is not in a position to divest its shareholdings in problematic companies.

"Some people may see that as a sign of weakness but we see it as a sign of strength," says Steve Leach, PR manager at L&GIM. "We are invested in these companies for the long term. Improving governance and getting companies in the best shape possible is how we improve our returns."

He stresses that behind-the-scenes engagement is the best way to achieve results. "Just because you don't hear us shouting from the rooftops it doesn't mean we aren't annoyed with some companies," he adds. And while the group's weapons are limited by the inability to divest, "we own 3.5% to 4% of every company in the FTSE so we have quite a lot of influence in the UK particularly."

Publicly, Soco is taking a robust line to WWF's complaint, saying "our shareholders reported to us that they have been relentlessly lobbied by WWF using sensationalist and inaccurate statements ... Our approach has been to openly and transparently explain the scope and extent of our current and planned activities." But Aviva's Maier says "there has been a change in approach from the company. They now understand the need to engage with this issue directly."

If so, it will demonstrate that even passive investors can have an impact on how individual companies behave. But it doesn't address the larger question of how universal investors can reduce their exposure to carbon risks across the board.

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• Finance
• Sustainability
• Africa
• Democratic Republic of the Congo
• Oil
• Oil
• Soco International

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Former NBA star Yao Ming delivers a petition to the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, calling on China's government to ban sales of ivory

Environmental Justice Foundation calls on governments and industry to demand action over labour abuses in fishing sector

Myo Zaw Do*, a Burmese migrant, was sold on to a fishing boat in March last year after being tricked by traffickers who had promised him work in a Thai pineapple factory. His ordeal lasted more than 10 months, during which he claims he was forced to work without pay and subjected to beatings by the captain.

His plight was uncovered during an investigation into rights abuses in the Thai fishing industry by the Environmental Justice Foundation (EJF), a UK-based NGO.

Thailand is the third-largest exporter of seafood in the world, sending nearly a billion euros (£8.2m) of fish to Europe and more than $1.5bn to the US each year. However, allegations of slavery and forced labour have dogged the sector in recent years.

The latest EJF report, Slavery at Sea (pdf), published on Tuesday, follows warnings about brutal labour conditions in the Thai fishing industry sounded by the UN's International Labour Organisation and Human Rights Watch (pdf).

Myo Zaw Do's case was recorded by the EJF last month, after he managed to escape and take refuge in a temple outside Bangkok. He says he was 20 when he left the small town of Kamarsay Sanpya in Burma to find work. He travelled to the border town of Myawaddy, where he paid traffickers to help him make an illegal crossing into Thailand.

He gave brokers $215 upfront and agreed to work off the rest of the fee, $140, in Thailand. He was among a group of 36 migrants from Burma undertaking the long forest trek into Thailand. Three were lost on the way, including an elderly man whom Myo Zaw Do believes was murdered when he became suspicious and refused to continue the journey.

Once across the border, the group was split by the traffickers. Eleven young women were divided into those who would be sold to food factories and those who would be sent to nightclubs and brothels, he says. Six men were transferred in two marked police cars, driven by men in plainclothes, to a port south of Bangkok.

Realising they had been tricked, the other men refused to work on the boats, but Myo Zaw Do says they were lured, one by one, to work on jobs near the broker's house. All six ended up aboard a vessel that headed out to sea.

"We were sold for $430 per person. I felt very depressed when I ended up on the boat. I felt I was in hell," Myo Zaw Do told researchers. He described regular beatings, including one in which his head was smashed so hard on to ice on the deck that he was left partially deaf.

Although the boat returned to port on occasion, Myo Zaw Do says escape was made hard by the close relationship between the local police and boat operators. Vessel owners would pay bribes to the officers to allow them to keep illegal workers. Escapees were returned to the boats or sold on to others offering a better price.

The EJF says Myo Zaw Do's case is one of several it has uncovered of slavery and extreme exploitation in the Thai fishing sector. "Migrant workers in the Thai fishing industry, many of them trafficked illegally, are suffering terrible abuses and all too often are denied their basic human rights," says the foundation's executive director, Steve Trent. "Our governments and the international seafood industry simply cannot continue to ignore this, they must demand immediate reform and action to stop these abuses or refuse Thai seafood that is produced by slaves."

In 2013, the Thai government agreed to tackle trafficking, partly in response to pressure from the US state department, which had the country on its official watchlist for labour abuses. It promised to increase inspection and enforcement. The EJF says its findings show not enough has been done.

*Myo Zaw Do is a pseudonym.

• Fishing
• Slavery
• Seafood
• Thailand
• Burma
• Trade and development

Felicity Lawrence
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Myitsone dam project, at the headwaters of the Irrawaddy, is caught in tug of war between the state and a Chinese corporation

Lapai Zoong kicks the red dirt outside his house and complains that nothing will grow. "The situation here is hopeless," he says. "In the old village we used to grow rice, fruit and vegetables. We were happy. Here they bulldozed the land and there's no soil. Everyone wants to go back to our old village."

But 70-year-old Lapai is not allowed back to his ancestral home just 12 miles to the north, even though the massive dam that was going to flood the village is now in limbo.

The Myitsone dam project lies unfinished in Kachin state, northern Burma, caught in a tug of war between the Burmese government and a powerful Chinese corporation. Lapai, along with 12,000 other Kachin villagers, remain in exile as a political and military drama plays out over the fate of the dam.

It was a project conceived, financed and – so far partially – built by the state-owned Chinese Power Investment Corporation (CPI), to take electricity across the border and help industrialise the Chinese province of Yunnan. At 152 metres high and with a potential capacity of 6,000 MW of electricity, the Myitsone was to be the largest of seven dams at the headwaters of the Irrawaddy River. If completed, it will be the 15th largest dam in the world. But soon after work started in 2009, the project ran into trouble.

Environmentalists objected because the Irrawaddy is Burma's most important water resource, supporting a thriving fishing industry, irrigating Burma's rice bowl, and supplying silt to the Irrawaddy delta. Even the authors of the CPI's own environmental impact assessment wrote that "there is no need for such a big dam", and recommended instead two smaller dams further upstream.

Ordinary Burmese objected because the Irrawaddy is the country's spiritual lifeblood, the subject of stories, songs and poems. With around 90% of the electricity from the dam going to China, the Burmese saw little benefit for themselves.

Finally, the people of Kachin state objected because the 296-square-mile reservoir would not only submerge 63 villages, it would also drown a sacred site at the confluence of the N'Mai and Mali rivers.

As work got underway, the Kachin Independence Army broke a 17-year-old ceasefire to attack the dam site. In 2010, 10 bombs exploded around the dam site, killing a Chinese worker.

Still the Burmese government pushed ahead with the project, keen to placate Burma's staunchest ally and biggest trading partner.

Then in 2011 Burma's new president, Thein Sein, abruptly announced a halt to construction, and promised that the dam would not be built during his term in office. It was a stunning turnaround that infuriated the Chinese.

Now fears are growing that this sleeping dragon at the head of the Irrawaddy will be revived when Thein Sein's term of office expires next year.

Because of military checkpoints that block off the dam site, the only way to get there is to turn off the paved road and onto a dirt road further west. The track weaves through the hills and tropical forests, emerging at Lapai's old village of Tang Hpre, now being reclaimed by the jungle. Wood and thatch houses are falling into disrepair. Orchards are choked by weeds, and trees drop fruit uselessly onto the ground.

"People still sneak back," says Nonkai Dukon, the village pastor, pointing to a family hanging washing on a line in one garden. "Last year 22 people were arrested by the Burmese army for coming back here. But in order to live here again we have to repair a lot of damage to the village and clear the gardens. That's a barrier."

Through a clearing by the side of the dirt road there is a view onto the Irrawaddy and its steep, rocky eastern bank, showing evidence of past construction work. The cliffs had been terraced, and footings for the dam blasted into the hillside.

A few hundred metres upstream the dirt road ends at a headland overlooking the confluence of the N'Mai and Mali rivers, where they join to form the Irrawaddy. According to legend, this is the birthplace of the Kachin people. On the opposite side of the confluence a long concrete building that once housed Chinese construction workers and engineers lies abandoned.

The CPI is still committed to finishing the dam, and has launched a hearts-and-minds campaign to win support from the Kachin.

"Representatives of CPI come here all the time, trying to convince us we are better off in this new village, and telling us how the electricity from the dam will benefit us," says Lapai. "But the electricity doesn't matter to people. What matters is our livelihood."

The environmental group Burma Rivers Network is worried that China will eventually get its way, as it has with so many other projects in Burma. "I think pressure from China will be too strong," says Ah Nan, a spokesperson for the group. But she adds that even if the project restarts the Chinese still face a problem. "It will be difficult to send material to the dam site, because they'll be sending it through a war zone. And this kind of development is only fuelling the conflict."

• Hydropower
• Rivers
• Burma
• South and Central Asia
• Energy
• Conflict and development
• China
• Asia Pacific

Peter Hadfield
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Group of thirteen European ministers, including UK’s Ed Davey, call for EU to adopt climate package despite opposition from Poland

Martin Lukacs: Canadian government closely monitoring how legal rulings and aboriginal protest pose an increasing “risk” for multi-billion dollar oil, mining plans

Martin Lukacs

Is urban cycling worth the risk? Only one way to find out: saddle up and plant two wheels in seven cities around the world

Cycling paths in your city: share your pictures

It was just another morning commute. That is, until a bus driver ran a red light, turned right, and drove straight into Ann-Doerthe Hass Jensen. The bus knocked the social worker off her bike, trapping her underneath, a wheel pinning down and crushing her left foot. It was a school bus heading to a Copenhagen kindergarten, and the children aboard were screaming. Ann was rushed to hospital in excruciating pain, every bone in her foot shattered.

In the six weeks of hospitalisation that followed, part of Ann's foot was amputated. Salvageable bones were wired back into place and skin grafts were taken from her thigh to replace the torn and missing flesh. "I'm pretty lucky," says Ann. "People normally die when this happens."

It was a year before she could walk again. During that year, she had to take a taxi to work every day. "I hated it," she says. "Here, the taxi drivers are a menace, and I was really scared of accidents." She also hated having to wait. Travelling by bike in Copenhagen is often the fastest way to get around, which is the top reason that Copenhageners cycle.

Ann's physiotherapy was tricky. The missing portion of her foot is a crucial stepping point, and its absence affects her balance. But walking wasn't the only part of her rehabilitation.

In Copenhagen – where people own 5.2 bicycles for every car – over a third of residents pedal to work, school or college. So rehabilitation often literally means getting you back in the saddle. The city helped Ann get a specially adapted Nihola cycle: a sturdy, stable threewheeler that has allowed her to regain independent mobility.

In cities across the world, researchers, planners and policymakers are examining the many potential plus points of cycling. Increasing the proportion of people who cycle or walk, rather than drive, could not only reduce air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions, but also lower people's risk of developing a number of diseases. But at what cost? To what extent does cycling in cities expose you to the risk of injury or death? What makes some cities so much safer and attractive for cyclists than others?

The drastically different design and policy approaches taken by large cities in Europe and North America provide some stark comparisons on cycling safety, equity and its impact on public health. To weigh up the risks and benefits of city cycling, and explore what can be learned where public health, urban design and transport engineering meet, I did what I had to do: I hopped on a bike.

Paris has become accustomed to bicycles

In Paris, new bike lanes are pervasive. Though many of the streets are centuries old, sometimes cobbled, and claustrophobically narrow, bike lanes have been prominently marked. There are also some segregated cycle paths, often crazily disconnected – disappearing and appearing again in a seemingly random fashion.

Skinny one-way streets might have bike lanes on the right, so you cycle with the direction of the traffic, or on the left, so you're in the contraflow. On some major streets, like Boulevard Saint-Michel, there are special lanes shared by bikes and buses. Though I felt less squeezed cycling in these wide lanes, where traffic was much lighter than the adjacent lanes for cars, I did feel a little intimidated about sharing the lane with buses.

That said, the Parisian bus drivers gave me plenty of space, and didn't behave aggressively. I did get a sense that traffic here has become accustomed to bicycles. There are some off-street cycle paths too. Zooming alongside the Seine on the elevated bike path, totally segregated from motorised traffic, was pure delight.

Vélib bikes, from Paris's bicycle sharing system, were in use everywhere. I saw men in suits, teenagers, women in chic business attire, pensioners, and female university students riding side by side on the bikes. Posting celebrity Vélib' sightings on social media has apparently become something of a local pastime. The bikes are such a fixture that I saw one young man taking a break on a parked Vélib', feet on the handlebars, chatting on his mobile phone.

In the midst of Paris's cycling revolution, it seemed fitting to meet Ari Rabl at Le Procope, a city restaurant where some of the leaders of the French Revolution gathered. With Audrey de Nazelle, a lecturer at the centre for environmental policy at Imperial College London, Rabl, a consultant and retired scientist at the centre energétique et procédés of the École des Mines in Paris, has looked at the health benefits when people move from cars to walking or cycling.

Rabl explains that they found that the population-level costs due to fatal accidents are outweighed at least tenfold by the health benefits of walking or cycling. Monetising the costs and benefits, Rabl and De Nazelle estimated that for a driver who switches from driving to cycling for their 5km commute, the overall health benefit from physical activity is worth about €1,300 (£1,070) per year. Of course, it's important to point out that while fatal accidents might be reported as small "population-level costs" in public health studies, they have tragic, catastrophic costs for individuals and their loved ones.

Many Danes don't even consider cycling exercise

Four days earlier, and some 1,000 or so kilometres north-east, I'm sitting in a conference room at the University of Copenhagen's department of public health, overlooking the picturesque Lakes area. Around the table are health researchers Astrid Ledgaard Holm, Henning Langberg and Henrik Brønnum-Hansen.

Ledgaard Holm, a doctoral student, has modelled the health impacts of increased cycling. Accounting for physical activity, exposure to accidents and air pollution, she and colleagues found that the overall burden of disease – including heart disease, stroke, type II diabetes, breast cancer, colon cancer, cardiopulmonary disease and lung cancer – was reduced in people who cycled. The positive health effects of increased cycling were more than a third larger than the potential loss of health from bicycle accidents and air pollution.

Other studies investigating the health impacts of cycling have found similar positive benefits, although the magnitude varies. In a different study based in Copenhagen, researchers analysed data from over 13,000 women and 17,000 men to explore the impact of physical activity on mortality. Even after adjusting for other factors, such as physical activity in leisure time, they found that people who did not cycle to work experienced a 39% higher mortality rate than those who did. In other words, cycling improved longevity.

One of the most interesting insights the Danish researchers share is how they've discovered that many Danes don't consider cycling exercise. "People here can easily be riding back and forth 5 km per day, and if you ask them on a questionnaire if they are physically active, they will say 'No, I don't do any exercise'," says Ledgaard Holm. For many here, she says, it's not a choice of activity, but your mode of transport.

What's immediately striking about cycling in Copenhagen is the incredible diversity of individuals on bicycles. Embedding myself in the morning rush-hour traffic on Nørrebrogade, one of Copenhagen's busiest cycle routes, I see a woman in a long flowing black jilbab pedalling a cargo bike with two small children in the basket. I see men of all ages in suits; women in dresses, high-heeled boots and smart coats, flowing garments protected from the spokes by metal skirt guards on the wheel hub. I see university students and children cycling to school; toddlers strapped into child seats on the front or back of mum or dad's bike; and baskets of children pedalled along in sturdy Christiana or streamlined Bullit bikes. Some children ride the cycle paths independently. Others are shepherded by parents cycling alongside, who guide their charges with the occasional gentle hand on the back.

While cycling to interviews at the University of Copenhagen one morning, I happen upon a makeshift memorial on the side of the street. At the intersection of Store Kongensgade and Dronningens Tværgade in the city centre, a stretch of tarmac the length of a body is adorned with fresh flowers and candle jars inscribed with handwritten notes. I discover later that it's where a 20-year-old woman on her bike was struck and killed several weeks earlier by a tourist bus making a right-hand turn.

Decades after streets were first painted with white crosses to mark fallen cyclists, cycling accidents, although rare, are still not taken lightly here. Only one Copenhagen cyclist was killed in 2012, and no year from 1998 to 2012 has seen more than seven cyclists killed in the city, according to Statistics Denmark. These figures are quite something in a city where the population cycles an estimated 1.27m km every day. The risk associated with being a cyclist in Copenhagen "has dropped by more than 70% over the last 15 years" according to Niels Torslov, the city's traffic director. "And it's a very strong story about finding the right measures, and designing a road space in a way that protects the users, especially those cycling."

The use of cycling helmets is growing among Copenhageners, noticeably more than in Amsterdam, where helmet wearing is still very much an exception. At the time of her accident, in 2006, Ann-Doerthe Hass Jensen was wearing a helmet, though clearly, as she says herself, a helmet protects your head but not your feet. She says that working at Copenhagen's Centre for Rehabilitation of Brain Injury, as she does, makes you fanatical about helmets. "There is no way I would not have a helmet on," she says. After several days of exploring Copenhagen by bike, I meet Ann at the centre, where she leads me outside to see her specially adapted tricycle. Her sense of pride is palpable. It takes her between 30 – 40 minutes to make the trip from home to work. "The first few times I got back on a bike again, it was hard. Really, really hard," she says. "There was a lot of crying."

Now, though, there is no stopping her. In her first year of recovery, Ann's rehabilitation team felt she needed to re-establish both the freedom of mobility and the quality of life that her bicycle had previously allowed. It wasn't easy. Beyond the physical challenges of getting Ann back in the saddle, there was another hurdle: her enormous fear. "I had to work with a psychologist … because I was scared like hell," she says. Using cognitive therapy, she and her psychologist worked through the entire experience, going over the incident report in excruciating detail. Pushing through that fear was tough. "It wasn't my perception that was off that day. It was somebody who actually did something wrong. And it took me a while to get my confidence again," she says. Ann's fear was not unreasonable. Her experience wasn't just an accident. It was the action of a negligent driver, whose licence was revoked when the case came to court two years later.

Of all the cities, London was the most terrifying

Research shows that perceived safety is at least as critical as measured safety to the willingness of citizens to hop on a bike. For me, of all the cities I cycled in, London was the most terrifying.

Cyclists were prevalent in the centre of the city, and what immediately struck me, beyond the dense, fast-moving traffic they were attempting to navigate, was the rapid speed they were cycling at. In impromptu interviews with cyclists stopped at traffic lights, I asked one woman why she cycled. Her answer: "I hate the tube, it's really unhealthy and sweaty and overcrowded." Asked if she felt safe cycling, she said, "No. That's the honest answer." But her sentiments weren't shared by everyone I asked. A student who had just moved to London said, "It's about five to 10 years ahead of New York," adding that she felt quite safe cycling on London's cycle superhighways.

I, on the other hand, did not. I spent some time watching cyclists crossing the Southwark bridge section of one of the cycle superhighways. Riding along CS7's blue-painted bike lane on a "Boris bike (Mayor Boris Johnson's cycle hire scheme was introduced in 2010) largely unseparated from mixed, fast-moving traffic, made me anxious and uneasy. What's more, I suffer from asthma, making me a bit of a human canary for air pollution. After the noticeably clean air of Copenhagen, the polluted air of London made for laboured breathing. London is beginning to make progress on provisions for cyclists, and there are good sections of the growing infrastructure, but I saw plenty of room for improvement. On both sides of Southwark bridge, the short, separated span of blue bike lane, protected by a concrete barrier, fed straight into a bus stop. This forced cyclists to choose between two unappealing options: wait like a sitting duck behind the bus while it stops, or pull out into traffic to overtake, and risk being in one of the bus's many blind spots when it pulls out from the kerb.

Peter Wright is the delivery planner for cycling at Transport for London (TfL), the local government body chaired by Johnson. Wright explains that bus-stop bypasses are planned, "to try and avoid conflict so that cyclists don't have to come out into general traffic". A similar hazard was delivery vehicles parked in bike lanes, a common sight in London and Paris.

In November 2013, when asked about the spate of cycling deaths, Johnson told the Guardian that if cyclists did not follow the rules, "there's no amount of traffic engineering that we invest in that is going to save people's lives." To be fair, London's Mayor – a cyclist himself – is making gradual progress. In 2013, TfL announced its safe streets for London plan, which aims to reduce the number of people killed or seriously injured by 40% by 2020. Ben Plowden from TfL surface transport said: "In 2015, we will be spending £145m a year on cycling, or roughly £18 a head, up with the best in Germany and almost on a par with the Netherlands. This represents around 2% of TfL's overall expenditure and is roughly proportionate to the current 2% mode share of cycling." He added that cycle spending would total £913m during the next 10 years, more than treble previously planned levels.

Safety in absence?

It is not completely clear how and why accident rates change as the number of cyclists varies, but a safety in numbers effect seems to occur: safety improves in a city as the total number of cyclists increases. This effect has been seen in studies in Denmark, the Netherlands, 14 other European countries, Australia and 68 cities in California.

"It is likely that causation runs in both directions: safer cycling encourages more cycling, and more cycling encourages greater safety," writes John Pucher, professor of urban Planning at Rutgers University, New Jersey, in his recent book City Cycling. Motorist behaviour probably contributes to this phenomenon. In places like Copenhagen – where four out of five individuals have access to a bicycle – most drivers are also cyclists, and so are accustomed to sharing public space with bicycles.

It can be difficult to compare safety between cities because of the lack of consistency in data collection and because of the need to frame injuries and deaths within the context of exposure – the overall numbers of trips, total distance or time spent cycling. Under-reporting of cycling crashes is also a well-documented problem. Nevertheless, Pucher's 2012 book written with Ralph Buehler listed figures for annual fatalities per 10,000 daily cyclists: Copenhagen 0.3, Amsterdam 0.4, Vancouver 0.9, Toronto 1.3, Portland 1.9, Montréal 2.0, Paris 8.2, London 11.0 and New York 37.6 (all 2010 except Paris, London and New York, 2009).

Unless you are travelling at breakneck speed, though, there is nothing inherently dangerous about cycling – it's the environment you're in that creates danger. Ian Roberts, a professor at the nutrition and public health intervention research unit at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, began his career as a paediatric trauma doctor. "I saw lots of children hit by cars," he says, "and it really is awful." He describes these deaths as "kinetic energy disease" – a reference to the idea of mismatched masses in motion. When one of those masses is protected by metal casing, but the other isn't, it's clear who is more likely to be hurt.

One of the trends Roberts has puzzled over is the long-term decline in the death rates of British pedestrians, despite an increase in motorisation. "Road safety people would point to it as an example of how roads are getting safer. But I was a little bit sceptical … because [the] volume of kinetic energy on the road was going up." An alternative hypothesis was that in industrialised countries, there were fewer people walking, something investigated in research he conducted while working in New Zealand. "Over the years it became obvious that people were walking and cycling less than ever before in the history of humans on the planet," says Roberts. "The world was not getting safer, it was getting more hostile, and people were voting with their feet by getting out of the way."

The bicycle-as-vehicle philosophy

In North America in the 1970s, cyclists – or at least the most vocal advocacy groups purporting to represent them – did not want to get out of the way. So-called vehicular cycling was emerging, a philosophy that has influenced transport policy in both North America and Britain.

Fathered by the Californian industrial engineer and cycling activist John Forester, vehicular cycling encourages cyclists to travel on the road in mixed traffic. On his website, Forester writes: "Vehicular cycling, so named because you are acting as the driver of a vehicle, just as the traffic laws require, is faster and more enjoyable, so that the plain joy of cycling overrides the annoyance of even heavy traffic."

In 1970s California, lots of athletic cyclists were forming touring groups for riding fast on roads, explains Anne Lusk, a research scientist at the Harvard School of Public Health. Back then, she says, such groups may have legitimately feared that US adoption of Dutch-style cycle paths would restrict bike access to roads. "At the time, paths were becoming crowded by joggers, walkers, inline skaters and baby-carriage pushers," says Lusk, so cycling advocates fought forcefully against proposals for cycle paths.

The vehicular cycling philosophy became incorporated into US guidelines for transport design, and its influence was felt for decades, limiting the building of physically separated cycle tracks and putting cyclists on the road with cars. "It's something that really stuck in North America," says Meghan Winters, assistant professor in the faculty of health sciences at Simon Fraser University, Canada. Asked if the philosophy of vehicular cycling is evidence-based, she says no. "But it's something that was sticky and was adopted very broadly for very, very many years," she adds.

Forester's teachings included how to operate as a motor vehicle, with skills like not riding in the door zone (the area next to a parked car where an opened door could hit a moving cyclist). They were useful, says Lusk, in that they did teach people how to bike with cars if they had to. But she does not endorse Forester's view that there should be no cycle lanes painted on the road, no separate cycle tracks and no cycle symbols.

Lusk, and other researchers who have studied the particular needs of certain groups of cyclists – such as women, children, elderly people and parents transporting children – point out that many of these riders cannot operate as a vehicle as confidently as, say, a fit young man on a racing or touring bike. Utilitarian cycling, with bike-specific transport infrastructure, is about being inclusive, addressing the needs of cyclists young and old, male and female. The need for speed is not universal among cyclists, nor is feeling comfortable cycling in heavy, motorised traffic.

It's precisely the recognition that cyclists come in all shapes and sizes, and with all kinds of needs, that has driven the last several decades of cycling infrastructure and policy in Denmark and the Netherlands. Tom Godefrooij of the Dutch Cycling Embassy writes: "Cycling is too important as a mode of transport to leave it only to the daring helmeted cycle warriors in conspicuous jackets. Cycling should not be elitist, but for all."

How northern Europe shunned the car

Outside Amsterdam's Schiphol airport, I see a worker giving his colleague a lift to a plane on the back of his bike, an example of just how deeply embedded cycling is in Dutch culture.

A bicycle is by far the best and quickest way to get around Amsterdam, local journalist Bennie Mols tells me. One new hazard he laments is tourists on bikes, who lack the understanding of how and where to ride. His description stirs a guilty pang. I learn quickly (but too late) that the hand signal for stop is essential in busy bike traffic. Failing to use it as I slow down to navigate, I cause a near-collision as a herd of bicycles behind me screeches to a halt, one woman yelling "seriously?" at me multiple times as she skids to a stop on the grassy verge. Wishing I could dissolve into the bike path, I sheepishly review the hand signals in my guidebook. It's a mistake I don't make again.

Amsterdam and Copenhagen weren't always the cycle-friendly cities they are today. In the Netherlands, as car-buying wealth grew in the postwar era, cycling rates dropped precipitously from about 85% of all trips in the 1950s to about 20% in the early 1970s. As the numbers of cyclists fell, discontent grew over the increasing numbers of cyclists and pedestrians killed in traffic accidents. A journalist whose daughter had been killed in traffic launched the 'Stop Kindermoord' (stop the child murder) movement. There were widespread street protests.

Danish transport policy reached a tipping point in the 1970s and 1980s, when the nation veered away from urban planning dominated by provisions for motorised vehicles, towards the establishment of cycling-specific infrastructure and traffic calming. As Stop Kindermoord emerged in the Netherlands, a corresponding movement grew in Denmark. The public rose up against a proposal to build a major motorway alongside a picturesque area of Copenhagen known as the Lakes. Massive demonstrations ensued. It was during this era that protesters began painting white crosses on the streets where cyclists had been killed in traffic.

So while most other developed nations continued through the 1980s and beyond with road transport design that prioritised the needs of motorised vehicles, a dramatic change was taking place in northern Europe. The shift in thinking catalysed by public protest was that, rather than requiring children and cyclists to adapt to motorised traffic, traffic should adapt to children and cyclists. Northern Europe's shift towards a safer, more convenient infrastructure for cyclists and pedestrians created an unplanned natural experiment – albeit one fraught with uncontrolled variables including car taxes, climate, topography, political differences and dependence on the car industry for employment. Nevertheless, in cities orientated towards motor vehicles, the limited provision of transport routes that safely accommodate bikes and a default assumption that riders will adopt vehicular cycling have resulted in stagnantly low numbers of (mostly male) cyclists, for the best part of three decades.

"There are dramatic differences in terms of cycling rates and cycling safety between those two places [northern Europe and North America]," says Meghan Winters. "So I think the evidence clearly illustrates which one of these strategies is effective if your goal is to get large segments of the population cycling, and cycling safely … In a sense, this is a global experiment on that, and I think North America may be coming around now," she says. Perhaps. But there's a long road ahead.

Montréal is the most cycle-friendly Canadian city

It's the summer of 2013, and Toronto traffic is a mess. In the midst of major street reconstruction and resurfacing, traffic queues bumper to bumper heading south on Bay Street, near City Hall. There are a few demarcated bike lanes, and only one separated bike path (not including completely off-street routes such as the largely recreational path along the lakeshore).

Taxis weave in and out of lanes, sometimes coming very close to the kerb – the space shared with bicycles. It feels like a hostile environment for cyclists, and I do not sense much tolerance of bikes from motorists. One of the cyclists I speak to in an impromptu interview says that it's pedestrians rather than vehicles that he worries about most. Other hazards for Toronto cyclists include streetcars. Their tracks, which can trap a bicycle wheel if crossed in parallel, are particularly nervewracking. Toronto is not an unfamiliar city to me – I lived here for more than a decade – but returning to cycle downtown is not a pleasant experience.

In Vancouver, however, there's a shift in transportation thinking. I note a growing number of bike lanes, segregated bike paths, and painted bike boxes at junctions, which give cyclists a safe place to await a green light and turn safely, ahead of motorists. Though recreational cycling in places like Stanley Park has been possible for decades, it's cycling as transportation that is the focus of the Vancouver city council and mayor Gregor Robertson, who cycles to work.

Some of the new separated bike paths feel very safe and easy to use. But there are still places where lanes end in a fairly hazardous way, such as one junction where the bike lane ends abruptly only to reappear a few metres later in the middle of two lanes of car traffic. Cycling along Dunsmuir and over the bridge viaduct on the fully segregated bike lane feels incredibly liberating. Perhaps I'm pushing my luck riding a bike around downtown Vancouver on Friday the 13th, but where the bike routes are marked, or traffic is calmed, I feel relatively safe.

The science of urban cycling is messy, but the case for separated bike lanes combined with traffic-calming measures (to reduce vehicle speed) is mounting. A 2009 paper that examined findings from 23 studies from across the world suggested that "purpose-built bicycle-specific facilities reduce crashes and injuries among cyclists". Recent research in Vancouver and Toronto by a collaboration of 14 researchers, including Winters, found that "at local street intersections, traditional stops are safer than traffic circles [roundabouts], and at non-intersections, cycle tracks alongside major streets and traffic diversion from local streets are safer than no bicycle infrastructure". Many more studies are forthcoming from the Canadian Cycling in Cities research group.

Montréal is the most cycle-friendly Canadian city I visit. Even where bike lanes are not explicitly marked, motorists are generally patient and considerate in terms of sharing space with cyclists. Though definitely more hilly than Amsterdam and Copenhagen, the undulating topography doesn't seem to be an impediment to Montréalers.

Montréal means 'Mount Royal', referring to the steep – if not entirely mountainous – hill and park near the centre of town. The Plateau area, an uphill climb from the city centre, is one of the most heavily cycled parts of the city. It hosts the city's oldest major bike path, along Rue de Brébeuf, a route that spans the entire island of Montréal. During morning rush hour, I see a steady stream of bikes along Boulevard de Maisonneuve, one of several bidirectional, fully segregated bike paths with bike-specific traffic lights. Bikes are also allowed in Montréal's parks, many of which have trails for recreational or commuting use. It was in Montréal, the only large North American city to have cycling infrastructure dating back to the 1980s, that Anne Lusk and colleagues tested the safety of separated cycling infrastructure versus road cycling. They found that separated cycle tracks have lower crash and injury rates (or at least no higher) than the street, and have seen a similar trend in the USA. And research by Winters and colleagues adds to the evidence, finding that bicycle-specific infrastructure that reduces interactions between cyclists and motor vehicles can reduce the occurrence of injuries, potentially by more than 50%.

Summary

So, how do we make our cities better for cyclists? Safe-cycling cities, policies and legislation already exist, and can inspire others. In Oregon, Portland's vulnerable user law, for example, is modelled on a European safety concept, says lawyer Ray Thomas, a partner at Swanson, Thomas, Coon and Newton – who specialises in cycling law.

In Copenhagen, in one of many chance interviews with cyclists on city streets, I happen upon a young American student – Mike Milan, from Greenville, South Carolina – who is studying architecture there. "As I've learned in my urban design class here, Copenhagen has tried to slow down the city to a human pace, and a human scale," he says. His thoughts conceptually crystallise the city's transport philosophy, and are equally applicable to Amsterdam.

"Making people feel safer on bikes should not mean equipping them with high-vis and reflective helmets," says Jack Harris, owner of London's Tally Ho! Cycle Tours. "We need infrastructure that allows a broader cross-section of society to get onto a bike." The places that are serious about encouraging cycling as a safe, accessible and pleasant mode of transport have some tough decisions to make about vulnerable users, including cyclists, in the allocation of urban space.

At the Copenhagen rehabilitation centre where Ann-Doerthe Hass Jensen works, her physiotherapist colleague Daniel Thue Bech-Pedersen says: "Our main goal of rehabilitation is to allow any individual to be more active again." This can mean being active for work, for leisure, for getting yourself around. "When you can transport yourself and make sure you lower your risk of having another stroke or whatever," he says, "then one plus one equals three."

Ann suffers chronic pain from her foot, wears special orthopaedic shoes and walks with a cane, so getting back to cycling made a massive difference to her mobility. It also gave her back her independence. On her cargo trike, she can take her two-year-old niece out on excursions, something that would be impossible on foot or by bus.

Asked how she feels at this point along her recovery and about riding to work each day, she replies without hesitation: "I love it." Her tricycle has given her much more than just a means of getting about. Being mobile means being independent, but even more, it means being free.

Research for this article was supported in part by a journalism award to Lesley Evans Ogden from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.

This article was commissioned by Mosaic, a new digital publication from the Wellcome Trust dedicated to exploring all strands of the science of life. It is reproduced under a Creative Commons (no derivatives) licence. #citycycling

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Lesley Evans Ogden
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Lock the Gate Alliance members fail to secure any commitments from environment minister on CSG and Maules Creek

Bridie Jabour

Dr Dave Hone: The Daohugou Fauna is rich in dinosaurs, lizards, pterosaurs, salamanders and mammals

Dr Dave Hone

The fourth in our 'can co-ops compete' series looks at the challenges co-ops face when scaling up and moving into new sectors of the economy

A trip to the southern Lake District offers an exemplary lesson in the way that the co-operative model can embrace both multi-billion pound businesses and small – sometimes very small – trading ventures. Buy your supplies for a hike on the hills at the village co-op in Hawkshead and you will be supporting the Co-operative Group, one of the largest co-ops in the world. Buy your provisions in the co-op in the next-door village of Coniston and you are supporting a one-shop co-operative society operating entirely autonomously.

The ability of the co-operative model to fit different business sizes and needs is, according to Gianluca Salvatori, one of its strengths. As chief executive of the European co-operative research institute Euricse, he leads the team which each year examines the trading performance of the co-operative sector worldwide and produces the World Co-operative Monitor.

"From what we have seen from empirical studies, they [co-operatives] seem to be really able to adapt to different contexts," he says. He warns, however, that the co-operative movement has to be prepared to move with the times and be alert for new business opportunities: "We mustn't just repeat the same recipes, the same models as in the past."

More precisely, Salvatori talks about the possibilities for co-operatives in areas such as social care and personal services, healthcare, education and renewable energy generation – often areas of the economy which are being exited by public sector bodies under pressure to reduce public spending. Salvatori's own country, Italy, has seen considerable growth recently in what are known as social co-operatives, delivering services to groups such as the disabled and long-term unemployed. More broadly there is growing interest internationally in the so-called social and solidarity economy (SSE), of which co-operatives comprise a major part. SSE was the theme of the January European conference in Strasbourg, previously reported on in this forum.

In Britain, the 'new ventures' panel established by Co-operatives UK suggested more than ten years ago that the movement should consider entering potentially promising sectors such as childcare, old people's homes provision and energy, areas where co-operative values could be directly relevant. Midcounties Co-operative has since successfully built up a chain of children's nurseries and launched the national energy supplier Co-operative Energy. It has withdrawn from an experiment in old people's care homes, however, on business grounds.

Midcounties' ventures, and the parallel move by the Co-operative Group into legal services, are examples of established co-operatives moving into other sectors. If this can represent the fast track to growth, the more traditional co-operative approach adopts a steady-as-she-goes route of building a new venture through reinvesting profits. This has been the approach chosen by the telephone services provider Phone Co-operative. First established fifteen years ago, it has gradually built up to its present £10m turnover, last year making a record £414,000 profit for its 10,000+ members. The Phone Co-op's story shows that new consumer co-op businesses can both be got off the ground and also be successfully grown.

Nevertheless the Phone Co-op remains a tiny operator in an industry dominated by giant non co-operative firms. Not every recent foray into new business sectors works out, either. The workers' co-operative Poptel, set up in 1983, was an innovative early IT and internet service provider with at its peak over fifty employees. However it found itself starved of the venture capital it needed to break through to the big time and was eventually forced to demutualise and, later, cease trading.

If start-up capital for co-ops can these days be found with relative ease from specialist lenders such as Co-operative and Community Finance, there remains a potential issue facing established co-operatives hoping to scale up their operations once they have passed the test of the first few years. It's a challenge which Gianluca Salvatori understands very well: "At an early stage, co-operatives can find more difficulty than traditional companies in finding capital. It is difficult to find the equivalent of venture capital and other forms of capital like that, " he explains. But he argues that by contrast in the longer-term – freed of short-term shareholder concerns with returns – co-operatives can have more flexibility to reinvest in business development and growth.

Perhaps we should not be surprised if, taking the global picture, the range of trading co-operative businesses shows much the same characteristics as conventional business. There are those co-ops which plod along from year to year with unspectacular growth, but there are also those co-operatives with entrepreneurial flair which produce strong performances for their members. The real opportunity for co-ops, according to Gianluca Salvatori, is to build successful businesses in new areas by emphasising their co-operative values – by aiming for both economic and social returns.

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Andrew Bibby
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Anyone with a computer can now join an Oxford University research project to reveal what role global warming played the UK’s record-breaking wet winter

Damian Carrington

Activists say pollution from Suape industrial complex in Pernambuco state is decimating the local shellfish harvest

Edinilda de Ponto dos Carvalhos, who is in her early fifties, has been a marisqueira, or shellfish fisherwoman, in Suape since she was young. Recently, she says, her work has become much harder.

"There's this chemical product in the water. It has no smell, but it kills everything," she says. She believes the pollution comes from the nearby port complex in the Pernambuco state of Brazil, touted as one of the region's main economic engines.

Another marisqueira, Valeria Maria de Alcántara, says: "The mud makes you itch, because of the oil and because of the debris that they throw in the sea. It burns the skin."

According to the state's rural worker training programme, women comprise 5,200 of the 8,700-strong local fishing community. They harvest shellfish standing in the water or meandering through mangrove forests on the shore.

On this bright morning, Dos Carvalhos and more than 20 other fisherwomen have come to talk about the collapse of their livelihoods as a result of pollution and the decimation of the mangroves. "Fisherwomen, who before in a week would get 20 to 30 kilos of shellfish, now take a whole week to get 2 or 3 kilos," says De Alcántara, sitting on a folding metal chair in a dusty meeting hall.

Hundreds if not thousands of other women along the Pernambuco coast share her experience. Traditionally, marisqueiras' catches sustained their families and any surplus was sold on local beaches and in markets, supplementing the family's main income. De Alcántara says she now works weekends cooking at a beachside bar to make up the financial shortfall caused by the drop in her catch.

"Throughout the history of fishing in Brazil, women's activity has been rendered invisible," says Laurinede Maria Santana. "What these women produce doesn't enter into official fishing statistics."

She says government policy marginalises the women's work, and that it was only in the 1980s, when Brazil adopted its new constitution, that rural women workers won recognition and the right to a minimum pension.

Santana, who was born into a fishing family, supports fishing communities across the north-east through her work with the Pastoral Council of Fisherfolk (PCF), a Catholic group that helps organise artisan fishing communities across the country. In particular, she works with women to raise the visibility of their labour and the fruits of it, along with their self-esteem.

Between 2007 and 2010 the former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva poured about 1.4bn reals (£355m) into the Suape port complex to spur economic growth in his home state of Pernambuco, and private investment has followed.

The complex, just south of Recife, the state capital, is home to more than 100 businesses including an oil refinery, a petrochemical plant and two shipbuilding yards. The expansion has created thousands of jobs, but many are temporary and it has also come at a cost to the environment and communities practising traditional, sustainable livelihoods.

In September 2013, the state government's environmental agency fined the port and industrial complex 2.5m reals for causing environmental damage, exemplified by the dynamiting of a section of coral reef near the port.

A spokeswoman for the port estimates that Suape contributes roughly 10% of the state's annual income. The municipalities closest to the port can levy special industrial taxes on it too, but officials failed to respond to repeated requests for information on how much money this contributes to local coffers and how it is used.

"Suape is one of the current examples of the model of development the Brazilian government is adopting," says the PCF's vice-president, Maria José Pacheco. "It's a model of development based on consumption, exploitation and the concentration of resources."

The PCF has been working with other grassroots organisations to collect enough signatures to present congress with a bill that would establish protective areas around traditional fishing communities.

"These populations have a quality of life much higher, regardless of poverty, than the model that Brazil is offering with the industrialisation model," Pacheco says.

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Guardian Australia: Indian coal company Adani accused of ‘flouting environmental laws’ in it plans to clear habitat of black-throated finch

Helen Davidson

Fly-tipping, illegal tips and tax evasion are resulting in financial loss while posing environmental and health threats

Fly-tipping, illegal tips and tax evasion are costing the UK more than half a billion pounds a year, according to a report on waste crime.

Crimes such as dumped building rubble and deliberate misclassification of waste to evade tax are "widespread and endemic", according to the report commissioned by the Environmental Services Association Education Trust (ESAET) and conducted by Eunomia.

But despite the scale of the problem, the Environment Agency, that tackles waste crime, is set to lose 1,700 staff by the end of the year and has admitted it expects to "reduce our work on illegal waste activities". The Sentencing Council last week recommended increasing fines for waste dumping, from well below £1m to up to £3m.

Barry Dennis, a trustee of the ESAET charity, said: "We need to stop thinking about 'waste crime' as somehow being less important than other crimes. Fly-tipping, rogue waste operations and tax evasion via the misclassification of waste are crimes that create health risks for the public, are costing the taxpayer millions of pounds a year and are funding organised crime."

Dennis notes in the report that "it seems inconceivable that such serious financial pressure [on the EA] will not mean a squeeze on enforcement."

The EA's core spending was £17.4m in 2011-12, falling to £16.9m in 2012-13. ESAET estimate the cost of waste crime to be between £324m to £808m, with a best estimate of £568m, caused by loss of revenue for legal waste sites, tax evasion where, for example, hazardous waste is deliberately classified as standard, and the clean-up costs of fly-tipping.

The report cites several cases of extreme waste crime, including the case of Allan Priest, who allowed 400 tonnes of household waste to be dumped on a trading estate in the Black Country despite not having a permit. He was eventually sentenced to eight months in prison.

Local authorities dealt with more than 711,000 incidents of fly-tipping alone in 2012-13.

As well as financial losses, the report notes that waste crime has environmental and health impacts. "Waste criminals don't recycle, and so frustrate efforts to move material up the waste hierarchy. When waste is illegally exported for cheap, unregulated reprocessing, people in developing countries are exposed to pollution we wouldn't tolerate here," it said.

An EA spokeswoman said: "At this time we are prioritising incident response above all other work. The detail of how different teams within the Environment Agency will be affected is not yet finalised."

• Waste
• Pollution
• Environment Agency
• Crime

Adam Vaughan
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Spare computer time lent to researchers at Oxford University will allow intensive climate modelling of 2013-14 conditions

Citizen scientists can help to solve a critical question raised by England's wettest winter in at least 250 years: was climate change to blame?

Spare home computer time lent to researchers at the University of Oxford will allow an intensive modelling effort to determine whether global warming made the deluge more likely.

The role of climate change in the downpours, that resulted in at least £1bn of flood damage, has been fiercely debated. The prime minister, David Cameron, told parliament he "very much suspected" a link between global warming and climate change, while the statement from the Met Office's chief scientist that "all the evidence suggests a link to climate change" was attacked by leading climate sceptic Lord Nigel Lawson as "absurd".

The result of the study should be ready within a month and follows earlier research which found that heavy flooding in England in 2000 was made two to three times more likely by climate change.

Professor Myles Allen, who leads the weather@home research, said basic physics shows that warm air holds more water and rainfall gets more intense, but added that the chaotic nature of weather means that no specific flood can be attributed to human-induced climate change alone.

"We can, however, ask and answer the question of how the odds of getting an extremely wet winter have changed due to man-made climate change: have past greenhouse gas emissions loaded the weather dice?" Allen told the Guardian. "We need to find out if we are getting "too many double-sixes" with the British weather dice."

He said the team did not know what the result would be and would be discovering the answer at the same time as the public. "It is absolutely possible the experiment will tell us climate change had nothing to do with the extremely wet winter."

The project will see the winter weather of 2013-14 rerun about 30,000 times in computer climate models. One set of models will start with the actual climate conditions at the start of December 2013, while another set will begin with conditions that would have existed in a world without climate change, ie much lower greenhouse gas levels, lower sea surface temperatures and much greater sea ice cover in the Arctic. Comparing how often an extremely wet winter occurs in each set of models will show whether or not global warming loaded the weather dice.

The record wet winter is by definition an extreme event and therefore, to ensure the result is statistically convincing, the models have to be run many thousands of times and therefore require huge computing power. "That is why we are asking for the help of the general public," said Allen. "We will be able to go from speculating about the influence of climate change to providing scientific evidence. The climate is changing, and the sooner we understand in detail what these changes mean for Britain, the better."

Previous research by Allen's team revealed the strong influence of climate change as far back as 2000. A study published in 2011 concluded that serious floods in southern England in 2000 would have been between one-third and one-half as likely in the absence of man-made greenhouse gas emissions. But Allen noted that global warming could be beneficial in some circumstances: the risk of flooding due to the rapid melting of spring snow, which drove widespread flooding in 1947, could be less likely now, he said.

Other so-called "attribution" studies have also linked heatwaves to climate change. The great heatwave that struck Europe in 2003 and led to more than 30,000 deaths was made at least twice as likely by climate change, while the chance of the extreme heat that struck eastern Europe in 2010, killing 50,000 people and destroying the wheat harvest, was tripled by global warming.

The record wet winter in England has prompted a renewed debate on the influence of climate change on extreme weather, which scientists have warned will be intensified in a warmer world.

Climate economist Lord Nicholas Stern said it was "a clear sign that we are already experiencing the impacts of climate change" while Labour leader, Ed Miliband, warned that the UK was "sleepwalking into a national security crisis on climate change". But the environment secretary, Owen Paterson, widely regarded as a climate sceptic, refused to echo Cameron's warning of a link when asked to do so in the House of Commons in January.

• See videos and graphs about the weather@home project here.

• Climate change
• Climate change
• Flooding
• Natural disasters and extreme weather
• Weather
• University of Oxford
• Higher education
• Computing

Damian Carrington
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Russia supplies about 30% of Europe's gas – should we be worried? John Henley reports

Last December, Ukraine's now-deposed, pro-Moscow president Viktor Yanukovych abandoned a trade deal with the European Union in favour of closer ties with Russia. One of the sweeteners in the $20bn support package that helped persuade him was a steep discount – around 30% – on the price that Russia's gas giant, Gazprom, was then charging Ukraine for the natural gas on which it relies. This weekend, as relations between the two countries descended to an alarming new low, Moscow warned that the cut-price deal was unlikely to last much longer.

Gazprom, which controls nearly one-fifth of the world's gas reserves and supplies more than half of the gas Ukraine uses each year, insisted the threatened price rise merely reflected cash-strapped Ukraine's inability to meet its contractual obligations. The state-owned company said that Kiev owes it $1.55bn for gas supplied in 2013 and so far in 2014, and shows little evidence of paying up. But this is not the first time Russia has used gas exports to put pressure on its neighbour – and "gas wars" between the two countries tend to be felt far beyond their borders. Russia, after all, still supplies around 30% of Europe's gas.

In late 2005, Gazprom said it planned to hike the price it charged Ukraine for natural gas from $50 per 1,000 cubic metres, to $230. The company, so important to Russia that it used to be a ministry and was once headed by the former president (and current prime minister) Dmitry Medvedev, said it simply wanted a fair market price; the move had nothing to do with Ukraine's increasingly strong ties with the European Union and Nato. Kiev, unsurprisingly, said it would not pay, and on 1 January 2006 – the two countries having spectacularly failed to reach an agreement – Gazprom turned off the taps.

The impact was immediate – and not just in Ukraine. The country is crossed by a network of Soviet-era pipelines that carry Russian natural gas to many European Union member states and beyond; more than a quarter of the EU's total gas needs were met by Russian gas, and some 80% of it came via Ukrainian pipelines. Austria, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy and Poland soon reported gas pressure in their own pipelines was down by as much as 30%.

While it was eventually resolved through a complex deal that saw Ukraine buying gas from Russia (at full price) and Turkmenistan (at cut price) via a Swiss-registered Gazprom subsidiary, the dispute gave the EU a fit of the jitters: a compelling demonstration, Brussels said, of the dangers of becoming overdependent on one source of supply. But three years later, the same row erupted again: Gazprom demanded a price hike to $400-plus from $250, Kiev flatly refused, and on New Year's day 2009, Gazprom began pumping only enough gas to meet the needs of its customers beyond Ukraine.

Again, the consequences were marked. Inevitably, Russia accused Ukraine of siphoning off supplies meant for European customers to meet its own needs, and cut supplies completely. As sub-zero temperatures gripped the continent, several countries – particularly in south-eastern Europe, almost completely dependent on supplies from Ukraine – simply ran out of gas. Some closed schools and public buildings; Bulgaria shut down production in its main industrial plants; Slovakia declared a state of emergency. North-western Europe, which had built up stores of gas since 2006, was less affected – but wholesale gas prices soared, a shock that was declared "utterly unacceptable" by Brussels.

So last weekend's news that Gazprom intends to start charging Ukraine around $400 per 1,000 cubic metres for its gas, as opposed to the $270-odd it has been paying since Yanukovych spurned Brussels for Moscow – sparking the demonstrations that led to his downfall – might seem alarming. Many industry experts, though, point out that the world has changed since 2009, and that there are any number of reasons why Moscow's natural gas supplies may not prove quite the potent economic and diplomatic weapon they once were.

For starters, we are not now in early January but in March, considered the final month of the continental European heating season, when demand is likely to be highest. Moreover, this has been a particularly mild winter – the mildest since 2008 – and higher than normal temperatures are forecast to continue for several weeks yet, significantly reducing demand for gas and leaving prices at their lowest for two years. Energy market analysts at the French bank Société Générale said in a briefing note last month that European gas demand in 2013 was at its lowest level since 1999. In the UK, gas consumption is currently approaching a 12-year low.

Partly as a result of weaker demand, but also because since the first "gas war" of 2006, many European countries have made huge efforts to increase their gas storage capacity and stocks are high. Some countries, such as Bulgaria, Slovakia and Moldova, which lack large storage capacity and depend heavily on gas supplies via Ukraine, would certainly suffer from any disruption in supplies. But Gas Infrastructure Europe (GIE), which represents the gas infrastucture industry, estimated that in late February European gas storage was 10 percentage points higher than this time last year and about half full; the National Grid puts Britain's stocks at about 25 percentage points above the average for the time of year.

"The conflict won't have any impact at all" on prices, a Frankfurt-based analyst told Bloomberg News. "The gas price is currently influenced by temperatures and storage levels, and both don't favour demand right now." Prices of gas for delivery next month have risen around 10%, but that reflects insecurities in the market about a possible military confrontation between Russia and Ukraine rather than worries about fundamental shortages of supply were Gazprom to turn off the taps, the analyst told the agency.

Other, structural changes have lessened the potential impact on Europe of a disruption to Russian gas supplies through Ukraine. New Gazprom pipelines via Belarus and the Baltic Sea to Germany (Nord Stream) have cut the proportion of Gazprom's Europe-bound exports that transit via Ukraine to around half the total, meaning only about 15% of Europe's gas now relies on Ukraine's pipelines. Gazprom is also planning to start work in 2015 on a Black Sea pipeline (South Stream), meaning its exports to Europe will eventually bypass Ukraine completely. Ukraine itself has cut its domestic gas consumption by nearly 40% over the past few years, halving its imports from Russia in the process.

Moreover, a boom in sales of US shale gas means longstanding gas exporters such as Russia now have to fight for their share of the market. Europe is increasingly installing specialist terminals that will allow gas to be imported from countries such as Qatar in the form of liquefied natural gas – while Norway's Statoil sold more gas to European countries in 2012 than Gazprom did. "Since the Russian supply cuts of 2006 and 2009, the tables have totally turned," Anders åslund, an energy advisor to both the Russian and Ukrainian governments, told the Washington Post.

Gazprom has no wish to see sales to Europe disrupted. At its annual meeting with investors in London on Monday, company officials were optimistic about its prospects despite a 13% fall in its share price triggered by recent events in Ukraine. Indeed, they predicted Russia's share of Europe's total gas supply would actually increase in future as overall consumption – and Britain and Norway's gas production – declines.

Europe accounts for around a third of Gazprom's total gas sales, and around half of Russia's total budget revenue comes from oil and gas. Moscow needs that source of revenue, and whatever Vladimir Putin's geo-political ambitions, most energy analysts seem to agree he will think twice about jeopardising it. Short of an actual war, the consensus appears to be, Europe's gas supplies are unlikely to be seriously threatened.

• This article was amended on 4 March 2014. An error during the editing process led to an earlier version suggesting that the South Stream pipeline would be operational in 2015. Work is expected to start then.

• Ukraine
• Russia
• Gas
• Gas
• Energy

Jon Henley
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