Environment

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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State of the climate report predicts that, by 2030, Australia's temperature will have risen by between 0.6C and 1.5C

Paul Farrell

Anthony Albanese: Transport, education, climate change ... As contemporary Labor plots its political recovery, we must embrace and modernise the best of our tradition

Anthony Albanese

Duke Energy plants cited for lacking required permits after coal ash coated 70 miles of river in toxic sludge

Blackmore Vale, Somerset: By tradition hedge layers were entitled to what they could get from the hedge – kindling and firewood, nuts and berries, rabbits and other creatures for meat

One test of the density of a good hedge, I was told at the Blackmore Vale annual hedge-laying competition, is that a butterfly should be able to fly into it but not straight through it. To achieve the right base for sufficiently dense, healthy growth, a hedge needs renewal every seven years or so. The traditional skill of hedge laying involves the accurate cutting of the thicker branches to lay them flat as "pleachers" to provide a firm, stock-proof screen at the base, and makes for good, new growth in spring.

The good hedge shelters animals against rough weather, provides safe habitat for small creatures, and makes a wildlife corridor. There was hazel in among the hawthorn and blackthorn in the hedges we were looking at. Dormice love hazelnuts and hate travelling over open country.

Hardy's "Vale of the Little Dairies" (Tess of the d'Urbervilles) is characterised by its irregular patchwork of small fields divided by the lines of ancient hedgerows. Anxiety about the loss of such hedgerows, which elsewhere have been rooted out to allow for large-scale prairie farming, emphasises the precious nature of this particular landscape and of the skills of men and women like those I watched bent over their billhooks on the edge of a soggy pasture.

In the past hedge laying was done by farm labourers who were not specialists such as shepherds or cowmen, and so had little work or pay in winter. By tradition they were entitled to what they could get from the hedge – kindling and firewood, nuts and berries, rabbits and other creatures for meat. Years ago I met a hedge layer who showed me a battered billhook used by his father and grandfather and maybe his great-grandfather before him.

Skilled hedge laying today is costly; we pass many miles of sparse, gappy hedges with barbed wire across the base.

• Farming
• Rural affairs
• Thomas Hardy

John Vallins
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Uncapped, almost unconditional, the vast sums of public money we give to farmers buy only destruction

Just as mad cow disease exposed us to horrors – feeding cattle on the carcasses of infected cattle – previously hidden in plain sight, so the recent floods have lifted the lid on the equally irrational treatment of the land. Just as bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) exposed dangerous levels of collusion between government and industry, so the floods have begun to expose similar cases of complicity and corruption. But we've heard so far just a fraction of the story.

I hope in this article to lift the lid a little further. The issues I've begun to investigate here – the corrupt practices and the irrationality of current policies – should unite both left and right in a demand for change. They should be as offensive to those who seek to curb public spending as they are to those who seek to defend it.

In July 2013 the British government imposed a £26,000 cap on the total benefits a household can receive. In the same month it was pursuing a different policy in urgent discussions in Brussels: fighting tooth and nail to prevent the imposition of a proposed cap precisely 10 times that size (€300,000, or £260,000). The European commission wanted this to be as much money as a single farmer could receive in subsidies. The British government was having none of it.

It won, with the result that this measure is now discretionary – member states can decide whether or not to cap farmers' benefits. Unsurprisingly, the British government has decided not to. The biggest 174 landowners in England take £120m between them. A €300,000 cap would have saved about £70m. If farmers were subject to the benefits cap that applies to everyone else (£26,000), the saving would amount to about £1bn. Why should a cap be imposed on the poor but not the rich?

Last week the MP Simon Danczuk read out a letter in the House of Commons that one of his constituents had received from the Department for Work and Pensions. It told her she was about to "enter the second stage of your intensive job-focused activity". It expressed the hope that "all the activity or training intervention completed so far has not only supported you to achieve your aspirations but has moved you closer to the job market".

Lying in a coma since December had not affected her ability to work, or her progress towards achieving her aspirations. She's in a coma because she suffered a heart attack. The heart attack, her father maintains, was brought about by extreme stress, caused by the threat of having her benefits stopped despite a mental illness so severe that she had been unable to work for 27 years.

Two days before this letter was read to the Commons, the farming minister, George Eustice, was speaking at the conference of the National Farmers' Union. He began by paying "tribute to the great work" of its outgoing president: "Thank you for what you've done." Can you picture a minister in this government saying that about the head of any other trade union? The NFU's primary work is lobbying. Yet the critical distance between government and lobbyists you would expect in a functioning democracy is non-existent.

The closest of neighbours

The same goes for distance of any other kind. The address of Eustice's ministry, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, is 17 Smith Square, London SW1. The address of the National Farmers' Union is 16 Smith Square, London SW1. Though farmers comprise just 0.3% of the population of England and 1.4% of the rural population, ministers treat them and their lobbyists as an idol before which they must prostrate themselves. Rural policy and farming policy are, to the government, synonymous; 98.6% of rural people are marginalised by the decisions it makes.

Eustice continued his speech by announcing that he is seeking to "slash guidance", to "drive down the burden of farm inspections further", and that he is "pushing hard at an EU level for sanctions and penalties to be more proportionate". These are the sanctions and penalties imposed for breaking the conditions attached to farm subsidies. They take the form of a reduction in the benefits a farmer receives. "More proportionate" is the government's code for smaller.

So just as the rules and penalties regulating the ordinary recipients of benefits have become so onerous that many find them almost impossible to meet, the rules and penalties attached to the benefits the rich receive are being reduced.

Subsidies and soil erosion

But how? The conditions attached to farm subsidies (which are called cross-compliance) are already so weak as to be almost non-existent. Let me give you an example. There are several rules which are meant to encourage farmers to protect their soils from compaction and erosion. Their purpose is to sustain fertility, to defend water supplies and the ecology of the rivers and to prevent flooding. Not one of these measures appears to be either functional or enforceable.

All farmers receiving subsidies must complete a soil protection review. This is a booklet they fill in to show that they have thought about soil erosion and identified any problems on their land. Once every 100 years on average, an inspector from the Rural Payments Agency will visit the farm. If the inspectors identify a soil erosion problem, they have the power to, er, offer guidance about how to rectify it. And that, in practice, is it. There are hardly any cases of this guidance being followed up with even the threat of action, let alone the imposition of any penalties. And even the guidance, Eustice now promises, will be "slashed".

Bad enough? Oh no. Most inspectors have no expertise in soil erosion. So all they tend to do during their centennial visits is to ask the farmer whether he or she possesses a soil protection booklet. If the answer is yes, that's job done, even if their soil is rushing off the fields and into the rivers.

To discover whether or not farmers are causing a related problem – soil compaction through the use of heavy machinery in the wrong conditions – inspectors need to dig holes in the fields with a spade, to look at what has happened to the soil layers. But – and here you have a choice of laughing or crying – they do not possess the power to conduct an "invasive investigation" (that is, digging a hole). So they are not permitted even to detect, let alone enforce, a breach of the compaction rules.

Are we there yet? Nope. Even these unenforceable non-rules are deemed too onerous for farmers growing a crop that both strips and compacts the soil faster than almost any other. Because the rows are planted so far apart, and because the soil is left bare through autumn, winter and much of the spring , maize causes more severe erosion than any other cereal crop. Yet, as I pointed out a fortnight ago, maize growers are entirely and mysteriously exempt from the erosion rules.

Questions ignored

Since then I have asked the department five more times for an explanation. While all my other questions have been answered, albeit halfheartedly, this one was not fudged or spun or mangled, but simply ignored. I've never encountered this before: a government department refusing even to acknowledge that a question has been asked. What should I conclude but that the answer is highly embarrassing? I guess that because it's almost impossible to grow maize without wrecking the soil, and because the government's plans for biogas production depend on growing maize to fuel anaerobic digesters, the only way to reconcile this conflict is to remove the crop from the regulations.

In a devastating response to claims made in the Guardian's letters page by the NFU, the soil scientist Robert Palmer calculated that so much compaction and erosion is caused by maize growing that a 10-hectare field causes the run-off of 375m litres of water. Maize expanded 24% between 2012 and 2013, much of it in sensitive catchments. This is a formula for repeated flooding.

As a result of these multiple failures by the government, even Farmers' Weekly warns that "British soils are reaching crisis point". Last week a farmer sent me photos of his neighbours' fields where "the soil is so eroded it is like a rockery. I have the adjoining field … my soil is now at least 20cm deeper than his." In the catchment of the River Tamar in Devon, one study suggests, soil is being lost at the rate of five tonnes per hectare per year.

No enforceable regulations

I could go on. I could describe the complete absence of enforceable regulations on the phosphates farmers spread on their fields, which cause eutrophication (blooms of algae which end up suffocating much of the freshwater ecosystem) when they run into the rivers. I could discuss the poorly regulated use of metaldehyde, a pesticide that is impossible to remove from drinking water. I could expand on the way in which governments all over Europe have – while imposing a temporary ban for flowering crops – permitted the use of neonicotinoid insecticides for all other purposes, without any idea of what their impact might be on animals in the soil and the rivers into which they wash. The research so far suggests it is devastating, but they were licensed before any investigation was conducted.

There is just one set of rules that are effective and widely deployed: those that enforce the destruction of the natural world. Buried in the cross-compliance regulations is a measure called GAEC 12. This insists that, to receive their money, farmers must prevent "unwanted vegetation" from growing on their land. (The rest of us call it wildlife habitat.) Even if their land is producing nothing, they must cut, graze or spray it with herbicides to get their money. Unlike soil erosion, compaction and pollution, breaches of this rule are easy to detect and enforce: if the inspectors see trees returning to the land, the subsidy can be cut off altogether.

Many of the places in which habitats might otherwise be allowed to recover – principally the highly infertile land in the uplands – are kept bare by this rule. It's another means by which floods are hard-wired. The government has just raised the incentive to clear such land, by announcing that hill farmers will now be paid the same amount per hectare as lowland farmers – equalising the rate upwards, not downwards.

Richest people in Britain

It also seems to be on the verge of raising the amount of public subsidy paid to the owners of grouse moors by 84%. These are among the richest people in Britain. The management of their land to maximise grouse numbers involves the mass destruction of predators and the burning of blanket bogs, causing floods downstream and releasing large amounts of carbon. If this looks like the work of a self-serving club of old school chums, that's because it is.

First we give landowners our money – vast amounts of it, uncapped and almost unconditional. Then we pay for the costs they kindly dump on us: the floods, the extra water purification necessitated by the pollution they cause, the loss of so many precious and beautiful places, the decline of wildlife that enchants and enraptures. Expensive, irrational, destructive, counter-productive: this scarcely begins to describe our farming policies.

But it need not be this way. Change the rules, change the incentives, support impoverished farmers to do the right thing, stop support for the rich farmers altogether, and everything else can follow. In my book Feral, I've begun to sketch out what a functioning, lively, wonderful countryside could look like. High in the catchments, where most of the rain falls and the soil is so poor that farming is sustained only through public money, we should be paying the farmers to replant trees, which hold back the water and stabilise the soil.

Replant and rewild

To these returning forests we could reintroduce animals that have been wiped out across much or all of this land: capercaillies, wildcats, pine martens, eagles, lynx, moose, bison, even, in the Scottish Highlands, wolves. Aside from the opportunities this rewilding presents for re-enchanting our lives, experience elsewhere in Europe suggests that eco-tourism has a far higher potential for employment, for supporting communities, for keeping the schools and shops and pubs and chapels open than sheep farming does.

We should turn the rivers flowing into the lowlands into "blue belts" or "wild ways". For 50 metres on either side, the land would be left unfarmed, allowing trees and bogs to return and creating continuous wildlife corridors. Bogs and forests trap the floodwaters, helping to protect the towns downstream. They catch the soil washing off the fields and filter out some of the chemicals which would otherwise find their way into the rivers. A few of us are now in the process of setting up a rewilding group in Britain, which would seek to catalyse some of these changes.

Where soils are fragile and the risk of erosion is high, farmers should be encouraged to move towards regenerative or permacultural techniques: clever new methods that can produce high yields without damaging soil, water and wildlife. A fortnight ago, Rebecca Hosking, a farmer who uses regenerative techniques, published a photo of the confluence of the stream leaving her land with the stream leaving her neighbour's land. His looked like cream of tomato soup; hers was clear.

Corporate welfare

The British government currently spends – on top of the £3.6bn in farm subsidies disbursed in this country – £450m on research and development for the food and farming industries. Much of this money could be characterised as corporate welfare. Yet a search of the British government's website finds not one mention of permaculture. Not a penny of public money is being spent on investigating its potential here.

It's not hard to see how land that is now being pillaged, eroded, polluted and wrecked could be allowed to remain productive – even to produce more food for people than Britain does today (though perhaps less for livestock and biofuel) – while also supporting a vibrant ecosystem. It is not hard to see how public money could be spent to deliver social goods rather than social harms. But for this to happen we must insert a political crowbar between numbers 16 and 17 Smith Square, to prise the government away from the industry it is supposed to regulate.

Twitter: @georgemonbiot. A fully referenced version of this article can be found at Monbiot.com

• Farming
• Flooding
• Pollution
• Rural affairs
• Agriculture
• Soil

George Monbiot
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Operation in South Armagh involves police, Department of Agriculture officials and Food Standards Agency

Searches have begun in Northern Ireland at a suspected illegal slaughterhouse.

The operation involving police, Department of Agriculture officials and the Food Standards Agency focused at a location in South Armagh on Monday, although little detail has been given about it so far.

Chief inspector Davy Beck said the investigation was at an early stage. He confirmed the aim was to address agricultural crime and work with partner organisations to protect the safety of the food chain.

The director of the Food Standards Agency in Northern Ireland, Maria Jennings, said: "The information we have tells us that meat was being produced illegally, without official hygiene checks. We are currently investigating which businesses have been supplied with meat from the plant."

A Democratic Unionist assemblyman for Newry and Armagh, William Irwin, said he had received a number of reports about illegal slaughtering. He said: "I am pleased to see some action being taken on the issue of illegal abattoirs in South Armagh.

"Obviously the health risks to the public through contaminated meat produce sourced from illegal plants with no hygiene regulations or safety standards and, most worryingly, no traceability in place, could be catastrophic. I think all right-thinking people will welcome this operation by the police and other agencies today."

• Police
• Northern Ireland
• The meat industry
• Meat

Henry McDonald
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As some cities face shortages for fighting off cold weather companies are creating innovative deicers made from quirky alternatives

As snow, ice and frigid temperatures continue to pound large portions of the US this winter, salt shortages and strained local budgets have sent states and municipalities scrambling for deicing alternatives.

The US uses millions of tons of rock salt each winter to keep roads and walkways safe, resulting in salty run-offs that pollute local groundwater, lakes, streams and rivers. Beyond sand and gravel, other deicing alternatives keep popping up, including potato juice and swine urea (yes, pig urine). So where are businesses innovating? Many of the alternative deicers highlighted below are sourced from waste products or byproducts of manufacturing processes.

Cheese brine

In Wisconsin, Polk County officials and a local company, F&A Dairy Products, came up with a mutually beneficial solution for cheese brine, a byproduct of making mozzarella and provolone. Local governments save on salt costs by using the brine to deice their roads, and the cheese company saves on disposal costs. Right now local counties use all of the brine that F&A produces, said Chuck Engdahl, F&A's wastewater manager. Salt soaked in cheese brine has a lower freezing point (-21F) than regular salt brine (-6F). Whether or not there's a unique odor, which a few have likened to whey, is disputable.

Beet molasses

Across the Great Lakes States, Beet Heet, a product derived from molasses from sugar beet processing, is deicing roads. Salt treated with Beet Heet, a creation of K-Tech Specialty Coatings in Indiana, is effective at colder temperatures and lowers the freezing point of rock salt. Increased performance reduces the amount of salt needed. It also can be used to pre-treat roads before a storm.

"Beet Heet builds a layer of protection that breaks the ice bond, like spraying Pam on your skillet", said David Tribolet, K-Tech's product specialist. Product sales have nearly doubled every winter for the last three years, and surpassed 1.7m gallons delivered this season, said Denver Preston, sales manager.

Fracking wastewater

In New York State, wastewater from hydraulic fracturing (fracking) of natural gas production has been approved to be spread on the roads of 23 municipalities in seven western counties, according to a recent report by New York's clean water watchdog, Riverkeeper. Fracking brine has a high chloride content and can contain a mix of dangerous contaminants like benzene, toluene and naturally occurring radioactive materials.

"Repeated applications of fracking brine over the course of a winter can accumulate these contaminants, which can then be carried off by storm water and snow melt to contaminate rivers, streams and underground aquifers that feed local drinking water supplies," said William Wegner, Riverkeeper's staff scientist. Fracking wastewaters are regulated at the state level and exempt from the federal hazardous waste clean-up regulations of the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act.

Grass and kitchen waste

Scientists at Wageningen University and Research Center in the Netherlands are working with regional partners and technology firms to create a deicing salt made from biomass sources – roadside grasses or kitchen waste.

The biomass produces an organic salt called calcium magnesium acetate (CMA). CMA also can be produced from fossil fuels, but Dutch scientists developed a way to take biomass and use certain bacteria to convert sugars into acetate, the basis for CMA deicers, and hydrogen. Pieternel Claassen, lead researcher, food and bio-based research at the university, hopes to produce green salt on a larger scale by 2020, pending more research funding.

Fireplace ashes

Burning logs to keep warm produces a lot of ashes. Today's EPA-certified wood stoves and fireplace inserts are cleaner and more energy efficient than traditional wood-burning fireplaces, which use more wood, produce dust and emit harmful toxins. Ashes from wood stoves or fireplaces can be strewn across sidewalks and driveways to increase traction on slippery ice. The best part is that ashes are environmentally friendly and will blow onto or dissolve into local soil, acting as a fertilizer. Ashes also can be composted or saved as fertilizer for spring planting in the garden.

Rachael Post is a writer, digital strategist and professor of social media in Los Angeles.

• Circular economy
• Ethical business
• Innovation

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Some members of US Congress demanding closer scrutiny of pipes following serious spills in Arkansas and North Dakota

Despite this bad political weather, turbines remain safe to turn and provide more reassurance than oil giants

As the price of gas jumps 10% on the spot market in reaction to the Russian military manoeuvres in Crimea, it is time to hug your local wind turbine.

Windfarms get a regular bashing for apparently costing too much to operate, but no one puts a proper price on carbon pollution – or national security.

Until Russian president Vladimir Putin gets control of the wind, turbines are safe to turn regardless of the political climate.

British shale gas frackers may also obtain a mini-boost for their endeavours along the same self-sufficiency lines. It comes as no surprise that Ukraine is a centre of shale exploration as local leaders saw it as a potential alternative to Russian gas.

Meanwhile, if you see the chief executive of BP, Robert Dudley, give him a hug too. He probably needs it, having last year consummated a deal with Russian state-owned Rosneft.

There are already rumblings about sanctions possibly being pursued against Putin and Russia. Dudley will be praying that his 20% stake in the Moscow oil giant does not provide more embarrassment for BP, still in rehab after Deepwater Horizon.

Equally, ExxonMobil and other western oil majors have been cosying up to Russia to win access to their Arctic exploration acreage.

And the City of London loves Russian companies coming to the stock exchange here. Could that trend eventually be affected too?

Meanwhile an extra shudder is in order as you watch those already spooky Uefa Champions League football adverts sponsored by Russia's state-owned Gazprom.

• Gas
• Wind power
• Oil
• Oil and gas companies
• Renewable energy
• Energy
• Commodities
• Vladimir Putin
• BP
• Exxon Mobil

Terry Macalister
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Eurobarometer poll finds public in most financially-hit members states such as Spain and Greece still support moves to greener economy

Fiona Harvey

BusinessGreen: Chief executive angered by right wing think tank’s questions about the profitability of renewable energy investments

Jessica Shankleman

Wolves are top predators that have far-reaching beneficial effects upon entire ecosystems -- including the structure of rivers.

Wolves are crucial for maintaining a healthy ecosystem -- a fact that was conveniently forgotten when they were exterminated from almost all of the continental United States by ranchers, farmers, trappers and hunters.

Meanwhile, the populations of other animals exploded. The entire ecosystem of the American wilderness was changed by rapidly expanding populations of large ungulates.

After decades of political wrangling with those who traditionally persecuted wolves, conservation biologists and activists who supported restoration of wolves finally prevailed: the grey wolf, Canis lupus, was finally reintroduced several areas in the northern Rocky Mountains of the United States. One of those release areas was Yellowstone National Park. Subadult wolves from several packs in Alberta's Mackenzie Valley were captured using tranquilizer darts and released in Yellowstone in January 1995 and again in January 1996.

After an absence of nearly 70 years, the beneficial influences of the reintroduced wolves almost immediately became apparent, and continue to be seen to this day. Since they are apex predators that primarily hunt ailing and aging ungulates -- particularly wapiti, Cervus canadensis, whose populations had exploded in Yellowstone -- wolves halted these herbivores' population expansions whilst improving their overall health. (These animals are more commonly known as "elk" -- note that the narrator in the accompanying video erroneously refers to these animals as "deer", implying that they are European red deer, Cervus elaphus, which they most certainly are not.)

The presence of wolves even substantially changed ungulate behaviours. For example, the wapiti stopped munching their way through the valleys and gorges where wolves could easily ambush them. Thus, native flora was able to re-establish and re-grow, thereby increasing biodiversity by providing food and shelter to a growing variety of plants and animals.

But remarkably, the presence of wolves also changed the rivers. After reintroduction, it was noticed that riverbank erosion decreased so the rivers meandered less, the channels deepened and small pools formed. Why? The recovering vegetation stabilized the riverbanks, which in turn altered the geography of the park itself.

Basically, humans conducted a huge real-life experiment by removing -- and then eventually reintroducing -- an apex predator from a large tract of land. Initially, the ecological changes wrought by the lack of wolves were subtle so they were not generally noticed. But the results of this real-life reintroduction experiment unambiguously indicate that wolves are an integral part of the ecosystem; they certainly are essential to restoring and maintaining the natural ecology of the entire Yellowstone region.

This phenomenon is known amongst ecologists as a "trophic cascade". In this scenario, a top-down cascade was observed when the top predator, the wolf, was exterminated from most of its natural range. Removing the top predator triggered a wide range of effects that cascaded down through the entire web of life. Although only a total of 41 wolves were reintroduced and their total population remains small, they act as ecosystem engineers by creating niches that other animal and plant species can inhabit. This lovely little video documentary shows the cascading effects that restoring wolves to Yellowstone National Park has had:

[Reading this on a mobile device? Here's the video link.]

The narration is excerpted from a TED talk [3:03-6:43] by George Monbiot -- watch it here.

The narrator, George Monbiot, is an environmental activist and a writer at The Guardian. He has traveled widely and suffered a great many adventures at the hands of his fellow humans, wild animals, and a variety of microbes. He can be found on twitter @GeorgeMonbiot.

Also see; News, Information and Recovery Status Reports of grey wolves in the northern Rocky Mountains of the United States.

.. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. ..

GrrlScientist can be found here: Maniraptora. She's very active on twitter @GrrlScientist and sometimes lurks on social media: facebook, G+, LinkedIn, and Pinterest.

• Animals
• Zoology
• Plants
• Biology
• National parks

GrrlScientist
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While 48% of kids want to cycle to school, only 2% actually do. Laura Laker looks at how a school in east London has bucked the trend with as many as 10% of its pupils cycling to school

Laura Laker

Millions of people in southern Africa still lack access to latrines and clean drinking water, says WaterAid

The majority of southern Africans are living in an "unrelenting struggle against sanitation and water poverty," according to a new report that accuses governments in the region of failing to prioritise their plight.

In From promise to reality, the international NGO WaterAid says southern African leaders have fallen behind on their promises to boost public spending on basic services, with the poorest and most vulnerable people hardest hit.

"There is a lot of economic growth in the region... but this is bypassing much of the population," said John Garrett, senior policy analyst at WaterAid, contrasting the optimism over southern Africa's economic prospects with the region's lagging progress on clean water and sanitation targets.

An estimated 174 million people in southern Africa - almost two thirds of the total population - lack access to basic latrines, while more than 100 million go without clean drinking water. Some 120,000 children under the age of five die every year in the region from diarrhoea caused by unsafe water and sanitation.

WaterAid says progress in increasing access to services in southern Africa has been "stubbornly slow" since 1990. In some cases levels of access are "stalling or even falling".

A major increase in resources is needed, particularly in rural areas, it says.

Garrett said sanitation and hygiene have been particularly neglected, with some governments casting these as private issues best left for households and families to address. Where money is available, it often appears to be directed primarily to urban centres at the expense of rural areas.

In 2008, African governments signed the eThekwini declaration committing to spend at least 0.5% of their GDP on sanitation and hygiene, and to put in place separate budget lines to improve accountability and help track progress.

WaterAid says no government in southern Africa has met the spending target.

The NGO's report, which is based on case studies from Madagascar, Malawi, Mozambique, Swaziland, and Zambia, says increased revenue from natural resources should make it easier to fund basic services.

But governments do not always benefit enough from their natural resources and there is little transparency over how that money is spent, it says.

Released ahead of a major high-level meeting on water and sanitation in Washington DC next month, the report also questions how donors allocate their aid to water and sanitation.

It points out that the Seychelles, for example, which has near universal access to water and sanitation, received 50 times as much aid per person as the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which is off-track for both targets and has almost 47 million people without basic sanitation.

The report says governments and aid donors should better prioritise how they spend their money on water and sanitation and commit to ambitious new goals for 2030.

As part of the agreement for what succeeds the millennium development goals (MDGs), which expire in 2015, countries should sign up to achieving universal access to basic drinking water, sanitation, and hygiene by 2030, the report says.

It also calls for a "major drive on affordable housing" across southern Africa and for governments to adopt comprehensive housing plans.

The world met the millennium development goal target to halve the proportion of people without access to improved water sources in 2010 - five years ahead of the 2015 deadline - though deep disparities remain.

In 2011, an estimated 768 million people remained without access to an improved source of drinking water - more than 40% live in sub-Saharan Africa.

Meanwhile, 2.5 billion people lack access to improved sanitation facilities worldwide.

Of the 15 countries in the Southern Africa Development Community, only seven are expected to meet the MDG target on clean drinking water.

Just three - Angola, Botswana, and the Seychelles - are on-track to meet the target to halve the proportion of people without access to basic sanitation by 2015.

• Sanitation
• Access to water
• Water

Claire Provost
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Australia's State of the Climate Report depicts a country where heat extremes are swamping the record books

As one of the country's most popular and iconic poems laments, Australia is a "sunburnt country" of "droughts and flooding rains".

Dorothea Mackellar's My Country endures with its "wide brown land" evoking "flood and fire and famine" and that "pitiless blue sky".

According to the New South Wales State Library, My Country is the "universal statement of our nation's connection to the land".

You can hear the echoes of Mackellar when Australian politicians are asked about the country's increasingly extreme weather events.

When Prime Minister Tony Abbott was asked about recent record breaking heat, he used Mackellar's poem to dismiss any link with climate change.

''They are just part and parcel of life in Australia," Abbott said. "Australia is, to use the famous phrase, a land of droughts and flooding rains."

But the climate that shaped Mackellar's Australia of the early 20th century is going through rapid changes thanks to the long march of human-caused climate change. 

The contradictions that Mackellar helped romanticize have become starker and more extreme.

The latest assessment of the country's climate, just released, finds that the fire seasons are already longer and riskier. The droughts will likely get harder as rainfall shifts.

Mackellar's "jewel-sea" is rising and becoming more acidic.

There's little poetry in the just published State of the Climate Report 2014, produced by the Bureau of Meteorology and the nation's science agency the CSIRO.

But there is a profound truth. The nation is 0.9C hotter than it was when Mackellar's verse was first published in the London Spectator magazine in 1908.

That same year, Australia's Bureau of Meteorology was established and two years after that, a network of meteorological stations had been built.

State of the Climate

The State of the Climate Report is published every two years and summarises the conditions across the "wide brown land".

The 0.9C of average warming seen since 1910 is a seemingly innocuous statistic that hides major shifts in the country's climate. Says the report:

This warming has seen Australia experiencing more warm weather and extreme heat, and fewer cool extremes. There has been an increase in extreme fire weather, and a longer fire season, across large parts of Australia.

Karl Braganza, manager of climate monitoring at the bureau's National Climate Centre, told me:

When you look at large area averages, what looks like a small shift of 0.9C is actually quite large. Take, for example, how a small shift in your average body temperature can have some large impacts.

One example Braganza offers to illustrate the scale of the shift is in the number of times Australia experiences a day that falls in the top one per cent for heat.

Starting from 1910 when Australia's records start, it took 31 years for the country to rack up 28 days hot enough to fall into that top one per cent. 

2013, however, managed to deliver this same number of extremely hot days in a single year.

The report says that seven of Australia's ten warmest recorded years have all happened since 1998.

In the last 15 years, "very warm" months are happening five times more often than they were between 1951 and 1980. There are now one third less cool months than before.

Even though cool records can still be set in a warming climate, the report says that since 2001 there are three daytime heat records being broken for every one cold record.

Nights are also warming faster than days. For every lowest minimum nighttime temperature record being set, there are now five highest minimum temperature records falling.

The risk of bushfires is increasing too.  Across 38 reference stations, the report finds that between 1973 and 2010 there was a statistically significant increase in the number of fire danger days at 16 locations.

The very worst fire-weather days have become more extreme at 24 of the 38 sites (only one location, Brisbane Airport, showed a decrease which was not statistically significant).

All this, the report says, comes as the world's climate system "continues to warm".

It is extremely likely that the dominant cause of recent warming is human-induced greenhouse gas emissions and not natural climate variability.

One study has found that the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere had increased by as much as a factor of five the chances of Australia experiencing a record breaking heatwaves like that of summer 2013.

More sunburn in store

The report points to the likely range of warming the country will experience as global emissions continue to rise. Even under the most optimistic scenario for emissions, Australia will likely be between 1C and 2.5C warmer in 2070 than recent decades.

Higher emissions could see Australia on average almost 6C hotter than Dorothea Mackellar's already sunburnt country. The report concludes:

Atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations continue to rise and continued emissions will cause further warming over this century. Limiting the magnitude of future climate change requires large and sustained net global reductions in greenhouse gases.

Australia is on the extreme end of most aspects of the human-caused climate change issue.

As a victim, the impacts are being seen in the flames of bushfires, in the ever hotter days and warmer nights and in the warming oceans.

As a contributor, the country continues to plough ahead with massive expansion plans for coal and gas exports while taking a leading role in per capita emissions.

Prime Minister Abbott surrounds himself with climate science deniers who think the science is a "delusion" or a cover story for creeping socialism.

Mackellar's verse was once a stand-alone definition of Australia, but not any more. Too much has changed.

• Climate change
• Climate change
• Climate change scepticism
• Wildfires
• Australia
• Tony Abbott

Graham Readfearn
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Massive amounts of money are being spent to clean up after flooding while continuing to create climate disaster

Most conflicts have their profiteers – the black market traders exploiting shortages and arms dealers who play both sides for personal gain. If the latter don't actually create conflict by flooding a region with weapons, they'll readily perpetuate existing conflicts.

History's most famous profiteer is probably the fictional, archetypal American capitalist Milo Minderbender, from Joseph Heller's acidic satire on world war two, Catch-22. He strikes deals with the Germans and, in search of financial return, organises for his own airbase and comrades to be bombed.

In a twisted parallel to Minderbender's amoral machinations, the UK government is playing both sides of the climate conflict.

Rather than being flooded by military hardware, when water deluged swaths of England last month, years of ideologically driven policy on austerity was seemingly ditched when the prime minister, David Cameron, declared: "Money is no object in this relief effort. Whatever money is needed, we will spend it." He went beyond his own environment secretary in linking the floods to climate change.

Less than two weeks later, Cameron again created the impression that money was no object. But this time, it wasn't to tackle global warming, but rather to ensure that the climate will continue to be destabilised. He announced measures worth up to £200bn in effective subsidy for the North Sea oil and gas industry resulting in the production of 3-4bn more barrels of oil "than would otherwise have been produced".

It is like promising to rebuild Dresden while ordering more bombers to flatten it again. There is a kind of closed-loop madness in which the only certainty is that massive amounts of money are being spent to both create disaster and are needed to clean up after it. From the vantage point of the Somerset Levels, you'd be forgiven for thinking that neither state nor market has exactly cracked the optimal allocation of resources needed to solve the nation's – or world's – problems.

Our big banks, underwritten by the public but operating according to a reward system of extortionate private gain, are the embodiment of this problem.

When the majority state-owned RBS – which lends massive amounts of support to the fossil fuel industries – handed out nearly £600m in bonuses in spite of making a loss of more than £8bn, it was merely one example of a still unsolved systemic failing.

Across the sector, if bonuses this year match those of last, it will bring to £80bn the amount paid out since the crisis exploded in 2008.

Oddly, and awkwardly, it's about the same amount as the government's planned cuts to public spending between 2010-15.

But while that squeeze progresses, there was no drop in bankers' share of earnings from the peak of the boom in 2007 to mid-crisis 2011.

While the renewable energy sector struggles amid regulatory and policy uncertainty, the oil and gas industry enjoys cheerleaders at the heart of government environmental policymaking. Yet, going as far back as the campaign to abolish slavery, we have known that in order to cure the economy of an unacceptable dependency we have to remove subsidies from what was wrong, regulate against the wrong and shift investment to positive alternatives.

But at the moment, this is a world in which Joseph Heller might have written a book called Climate-22. England and Wales have just had the wettest winter since records began and the world is on course for catastrophic climate change.

But don't worry, Nigel Lawson is getting equal billing on the BBC again, as if his views are as informed and valuable as the climate scientists he derides. And, heck, what does it matter anyway? Any Milo Minderbender can see that there's money to be made from civilisation falling apart.

www.onehundredmonths.org

• Climate change
• Flooding
• Natural disasters and extreme weather
• Fossil fuels
• Energy
• Green politics

Andrew Simms
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Corporations are introducing sustainable production, with model farms, as production of the popular spice comes under threat

Muffins, perfume, ice-cream, hand soap, even chocolate – no spice is as versatile as vanilla, and none is as popular. Tens of thousands of products contain vanilla but threats loom for the ingredient as growers grapple with fluctuating prices and poor agricultural skills. Now several initiatives are aimed at making vanilla production sustainable.

"We realised that we needed to do something to secure our vanilla supply chain in the long term," explains Clemens Tenge, communications director at Symrise, a global vanilla supplier. In Madagascar, the world's top vanilla-producing country, the spice is under threat: families growing rice and cassava for sustenance often lack re-cultivation skills, forcing them often to clear forested land when a field becomes less productive. That means less space for the island's many species, including vanilla, as the vanilla orchid grows in the shade of trees.

The extreme fluctuations in the world price of vanilla – from €25 (£20) a kilo in 2000 to €400 (£327) in 2004, then down by 90% as buyers switched to synthetic alternatives – also harm production, as farmers feel forced to give up the extremely labour-intensive spice in favour of more dependable crops.

"Vanilla growing is a very specialised farming technique that requires a long-term commitment from the farmers," notes Nathaniel Delafield, chief executive and co-founder of the Malagasy vanilla cooperative Lafaza. "There has to be a certain price point for vanilla to be worthwhile for the farmers."

It's specialised indeed: not only does vanilla require a long curing process, in every country except Mexico (where local bees take care of the task), every flower also has to be hand-pollinated during morning hours.

Corporations are introducing sustainable farming techniques to the East African island in an attempt to solve the problem. Last year, General Mills, the maker of Häagen-Daz ice-cream, announced an initiative to teach sustainable practices to several hundred Malagasy vanilla growers. And this year, Unilever teamed up with its supplier Symrise and GIZ (Germany's federal agency for international sustainable development) to train current and future vanilla growers.

"If we don't enhance vanilla growers' livelihood today, we won't have vanilla tomorrow," says Tenge. "We're establishing model farms in 32 villages to show farmers how they can re-cultivate their fields so they don't have to slash and burn forest land to get new fields. It means they're able to grow vanilla, but we're also teaching them how to grow better vanilla."

The Unilever-Symrise-GIZ partnership is also about to launch three boarding schools for tomorrow's generation of farmers, where 120 teenagers will spend two years learning sustainable practices. Even though some 80% of Malagasy youth become farmers, the country's school curriculum doesn't feature agricultural education.

For Symrise, which supplies vanilla for some 30,000 products, this is the second stage in Malagasy sustainability. The company has already bought its Malagasy supplier, and its locally based sustainability team is now able to trade each vanilla pod. It also operates a tree plant nursery supporting farm diversification, which some 5,000 farmers make use of. "It saves us money and we're able to completely source the product," Tenge says.

Lafaza has another solution: formed by former Madagascar Peace Corps volunteers eight years ago, the company buys its beans directly from Malagasy growers at a price 10-20% higher and shares profits with them. Its American, Malagasy-speaking experts also provide agricultural training to member farmers, and the company is currently building two libraries.

Meanwhile in Tonga, the British vanilla producer Taylor & Colledge is working with local growers to revive production in a sustainable fashion, providing training for current vanilla farmers as well as funds to farmers wishing to start growing the orchid. It's also offering higher prices for the finished product. "We want Tonga to swim in the big sea of vanilla and to have the tools to cope with changing world market prices," says chief executive Dr Sam Himstedt.

In Haiti, formerly a vanilla-growing country, two American women working in conjunction with local farmers have formed the Vanilla Export Company to help the farmers once again tap into the vanilla market.

Yet despite the wide-ranging efforts, the future of the spice remains uncertain. According to the research firm SRI International, the annual production of 15,000 tonnes of vanillin (synthetic vanilla) means that the market for the alternative is almost eight times than that of natural vanilla. "This is about a rural lifestyle and livelihood," Delafield says. "Synthetic vanilla has become so common."

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• Supply Chain
• Farming
• Corporate social responsibility

Elisabeth Braw
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Climbers will have to bring down 8kg of extra waste or face legal action as government tackles rubbish mountain in Himalayas

Climbers scaling Mount Everest will have to bring back 8kg (17.6lb) of rubbish under rules designed to clean up the world's highest peak.

The rule, one of several new measures for mountaineering in Nepal, will apply to climbers ascending beyond Everest's base camp from April, said tourism ministry official Madhusudan Burlakoti.

"The government has decided, in order to clean up Mount Everest, each member of an expedition must bring back at least 8kg of garbage, apart from their own trash," he said.

Authorities would take legal action against climbers who failed to comply, Burlakoti said, although it was unclear whether this would involve a fine or other penalty.

Decades of mountaineering have taken a toll on the peak, which is strewn with rubbish from past expeditions, including oxygen cylinders, human waste and even climbers' bodies, which do not decompose in the extreme cold.

Expeditions will have to submit their refuse to an office to be set up next month at base camp. It will also offer medical aid and mediation services, after a brawl between European climbers and local guides last year.

Although expeditions have to pay a $4,000 (£2,390) deposit, which is refunded once they show they have brought back everything they took up the mountain, enforcement has been a problem.

"Our earlier efforts have not been very effective. This time, if climbers don't bring back garbage, we will take legal action and penalise them," Burlakoti said.

Last month, Nepal cut its fees for individual climbers to Everest and other Himalayan peaks to attract more mountaineers, sparking concerns of increased traffic and more rubbish being left on the mountains.

In an overhaul of security, the new office at Everest base camp will be staffed by soldiers and police so climbers can approach officers with any problems, officials said last month.

Environmental and climbing groups have long sought to focus attention on the waste problem, with clean-up projects having also been organised.

Discarded oxygen and cooking gas cylinders, ropes, tents, glasses, beer cans, plastic and even the remains of a helicopter made up 75 artworks commissioned for a Kathmandu exhibition in 2012, highlighting the environmental impact of alpine tourism.

Everest is a key revenue earner for the impoverished country, with hundreds scaling the mountain every year during the peak climbing season in April and May.

• Mount Everest
• Nepal
• Mountaineering
• Mountains

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