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The week's top environment news stories and green events

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Environment news

• Pest caterpillars face helicopter blitz with insecticide
• Ed Davey hits out against coalition climate change sceptics
• Arctic faces further threat from ocean acidification
• Billions of cicadas to invade US east coast after 17 years underground
• Renewable energy firms accuse activists of scaremongering over biomass

On the blogs

• John Abraham: This isn't the weather we grew up with
• Wildlife forced out of California 'salad bowl' by food safety regulations
• India acts to save Asiatic lion by moving it – but hard work has only just begun
• Revealed: Germany's secret bid to kill ban on bee-harming pesticides
• Is China really a climate change leader?

Multimedia

• Delayed Spring – your best pictures
• SeaOrbiter: the spaceship orbiting the Blue Planet – interactive
• The week in wildlife – in pictures
• Impact of deforestation on wildlife in the greater Mekong - in pictures

Features

• Guadeloupe and Martinique threatened as pesticide contaminates food chain
• Brittany villages blazing a trail in energy self-sufficiency
• Are electric vans green?
• Paris shopping centre opens green roof as French cities make room for nature

Best of the web

• Over half the world's population could rely on food imports by 2050 – study
• World's rarest duck on the rebound in Madagascar
• UK nuclear power plans are 'Soviet', says EU energy commissioner

Jobs

• Small & Medium Wind Development Manager at RenewableUK, London, Competitve Salary
• Disaster Risk Reduction Adviser at British Red Cross, London, with some overseas travel, £35,000 p.a. inc ILW
• Climate and Energy Policy Officer at WWF, Edinburgh (initially Dunkeld), £34,345 - £38,412

... And finally

• Kevin McCloud: 'I am a big fan of composting toilets'
Grand Designs' green-minded presenter enthuses over toilets, mending, and his expanding trousers

Environment editor
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A selection of the best images of delayed spring submitted via GuardianWitness

Rachel ObordoGuardian readers

Energy and climate change secretary will use a major speech at Clarence House to promise stronger action on global warming

Ed Davey, the energy and climate change secretary, is to use a major speech at Clarence House on Wednesday afternoon to fight back against the increasingly vocal climate change scepticism among other parts of the coalition.

His uncompromising speech, seen by the Guardian, promises stronger action on global warming and follows the admission by his party leader, Nick Clegg, that green issues are now some of the most serious flashpoints between the coalition partners. The Liberal Democrats have long sought to be seen as strong on the environment, a core issue for the party's voters. But they have suffered setbacks in government as the Treasury has cut renewable energy support and an increasingly vocal number of Tories oppose windfarms, money for low-carbon projects and tougher targets for UK emissions cuts, all of which the Lib Dems support.

The extent of some of the divisions was on display in the European parliament recently, when rebel Tory MEPs played a pivotal role in scuppering plans to rescue the EU's carbon trading system (ETS).

Davey struck a firm stance: "As a politician, you quickly realise that compromise is a part of the game. But there are some issues where you have to draw the line – where you have to stand up and be counted, and you have to do the right thing. I think climate change is firmly in that category."

He quoted David Cameron as saying "we can't afford not to" act on the problem.

Davey was speaking to a conference on preserving tropical forests, an area where progress has been disappointing despite deforestation being one of the leading sources of carbon emissions. The conference was convened by the Prince of Wales, who has set up a working group to find ways of funding forest protection.

Davey pinned his hopes on a global deal to cut greenhouse gas emissions, through United Nations negotiations that are proceeding at a glacial pace, although governments have agreed to write a new agreement by 2015 that would come into force from 2020. "The bottom line is climate change can only be addressed through an international response to reduce emissions."

He also addressed the tricky issue of the future of carbon trading. Davey and allies including France and Germany suffered a serious setback a few weeks ago when the European parliament – aided by most of the UK's Tory MEPS, who defied the official party line – voted against reforms that would have rescued the EU's emissions trading system. Although the CBI supported the reforms, there was heavy lobbying from other EU business groups to reject the reforms, that would have helped to prop up the price of carbon dioxide permits to businesses.

Davey vowed to fight on for reforms to strengthen the troubled system, in which the price of carbon dioxide permits has fallen to record lows, giving companies almost no incentive to reduce their emissions.

"The UK was one of nine member states to announce in a joint statement this week that we want the EU ETS to be reformed so it sends the right price signals to properly stimulate low-carbon investment," he said.

In a side swipe at the business interests that helped to scupper EU ETS reform and that have opposed spending on the low-carbon economy in the UK, Davey pledged: "Across multiple fronts, the UK is mounting a strong, concerted effort to unite and find common ground. Because we cannot gamble our future on vested interest and short-term gain. The stakes are too high."

• Climate change scepticism
• Climate change
• Climate change
• Ed Davey
• Green politics
• Carbon emissions
• Emissions trading

Fiona Harvey
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There's a growing campaign in the US to get universities to stop investing in fossil fuels. UK science should take note

You might have read Naomi Klein on green investment in fossil fuels last week. She points a finger at NGOs who aren't checking whether their sometimes considerable endowments are being put to work in the same industries they campaign against. The context of this is not just that it makes parts of the environmental movement look a bit silly, but the growing disinvestment campaign that Klein has been involved in promoting over the past year.

Disinvestment is, quite simply, the opposite of investment; the campaign invites people to think about where their money is being used. It's a bit like Move your Money, but bigger. There's a good Rolling Stone piece from last February if you want a catch-up on how the campaign has taken off in the US, but really it's growing so fast you'll need to check the 350 website to keep up to date. The campaign has largely been focused on universities, but cities and religious institutions are targeted too. And now groups like WWF and the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Klein's article's ruffled feathers in the US green movement, but there are reasons why UK science should be paying attention. Here are two.

Firstly, it was interesting to see Klein single out the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for particular attention along with the greens, arguing their $958.6m investment in ExxonMobil and BP is hypocritical when they also list malaria as a top priority. This got me thinking about the Wellcome Trust, which also works on malaria and has been developing an interest in climate change as a health issue. I checked its investment policy (you want the "stewardship" pdf) and noticed they don't allow investment in companies that derive material turnover or profit from tobacco or tobacco-related products. Which makes sense, I suppose. But if you're going to make that exception, there are others that could be added too. I know they've been criticised for investing in Wonga, and brushed that off. I guess it'll be a question for their new director.

This is important because – and this is my second point – the disinvestment activity is going trans-Atlantic. As Klein mentions in the Guardian version of her piece, there's a major push on UK higher education planned by People and Planet this summer, and University College London Union has already passed a motion to go "fossil free".

I'm slightly sceptical of this, just because UK universities aren't funded in the same way. Attention might be better focused on pension schemes (and it is being). But, as Bill McKibbin argues, one of the reasons this campaign has worked so well is that it's been grown with students. He argues universities should be taking a lead because they were where we first found out about climate change, they understand maths and, perhaps most of all, are full of young people.

I'm not entirely convinced by this reasoning (especially the maths one). They seem simplistic. But I do agree universities can be spaces for this sort of action. I'd add that universities are highly international spaces, where people are invited to be part of a global community. They're also sites for inter-generational collaboration. And if climate change is anything, it's a global and inter-generational issue.

Instead of disinvestment campaigns, I suspect European universities will lead in other ways in which their campus might become "fossil free". The People and Planet site already has a reasonably impressive list of demands under simply "move their money" including changes in careers advice, a phase-out of fossil fuel research and to demand more research funding on renewables. Recent years have seen growing campaigns to "disarm" universities – e.g. Leeds – not only in terms of shares in arms manufactures, but careers fairs and the money they take for research, which is substantial, as funding from the oil industry can be too.

In some respects, this is less about universities disinvesting, and more the other way around. It's about preventing particular industries from being able to profit from the resources universities hold; the people we train, the cultural authority we hold and, perhaps above all, the focus of the research we do.

I suspect we'll see more of these campaigns in the future. In fact, the University of Oxford will see on Thursday. Its Earth Sciences department is launching a new partnership with Shell. Ed Davey, Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, will be there. And activists are planning to meet him.

• Climate change
• Science policy
• Energy
• Fossil fuels
• Higher education
• Climate change

Alice Bell
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Superfluous food standards imposed by corporate buyers on Salinas Valley 'are degrading habitat and displacing wildlife'

In California's 'salad bowl' – a landscape portioned into emerald fields of spinach, lettuce, kale, and other leafy vegetables, grown to satiate the nation's appetite for greens – hush-hush food safety standards are deforesting land and forcing wildlife out. These practices are unnecessary for ensuring safe food, say experts in a new study, and yet they spell marginalisation for a number of species.

The Californian Salinas Valley is the fertile, riverside floodplain where salad growing is concentrated in the state, and where 70% of America's greens are produced. It is also near to the site of one the most devastating bacterial outbreaks in recent American history. In 2006, E coli bacteria found nestling in the folds of spinach leaves killed five people, and sickened over 200 others.

Spinach was recalled across the United States, and producers suffered a major economic dent due to buyer concern and consumer boycotting. "Everyone wants to trust the food that they eat," says Lisa Schulte Moore, a landscape ecologist working to restore habitat around Iowa's farms, who commented on the new research.

Bacteria could have come from water sources contaminated with fecal matter from livestock farms upstream, bacteria-affected handlers, or from direct contact with wild animals like feral pigs, an investigation by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration later showed. Because of the variability of the threat, and the impact that single-source produce can have on people across the country, the industry dramatically ramped up its food safety standards.

The result was a number of industry-led groups intent on improving safety in salad-growing regions by imposing more stringent regulations on producers who voluntarily joined in. In the Salinas Valley, that industry collective is embodied by the California Leafy Green Products Handler Marketing Agreement (LGMA), which advertises science-based solutions to bacterial spread.

But in the wake of the E coli disaster, some corporate produce buyers have taken matters into their own hands, requiring producers to abide by apparently superfluous safety regulations. Ecologically, these translate into large chunks of land cleared of natural vegetation, and impermeable fencing designed to stave off wildlife, so restricting the movements of deer, coyote, and likely the endangered mountain lion says Sasha Gennet, a Central Coast ecologist with the Nature Conservancy, and an author on the study.

There's no proof that these rules make food any safer. If they did, they'd be included in official, third party-audited guidelines like those put forward by the LGMA, Schulte Moore says.

Maybe most problematically, these businesses are not required to make their dealings transparent, "and therefore even savvy consumers would not have any way to suspect this might be occurring," Gennet adds. "It's been an invisible issue."

What's in it for the buyers? Greens that they deem 'extra-safe', and therefore less likely to cause financial havoc. It's what Schulte Moore calls a "gut reaction", lacking a scientific base. But for farmers, these advances are hard to reject. "There are lots of businesses that enjoy a huge share of the food market," she says, including grocery stores and restaurants. "So by being a kingpin in the supply chain of a food between the producers and the consumers, [buyers] can say, we're not going to buy your product unless you do these things."

Most farmers must accept their land's fate. "Farmers care about their land. Many in this region had invested time and money in conservation, for example wetlands restoration," Gennet says. "I can't imagine it's been an easy choice to reverse all that."

Between 2005 (before the spinach E coli outbreak) and 2009 (three years afterwards) Sasha Gennet and her team took aerial photographs and analysed farmer surveys in the Salinas Valley, picked for its agricultural importance, but also because of its conservation value. The floodplain habitat is a stopover and feeding ground for migrating birds like the Great Blue Heron, its plains and river harbour a number of endangered species like the steelhead salmon, and the waterway connects with one of the country's largest marine sanctuaries.

But in that 2005-2009 period, the area lost 13% of its riverside and wetland habitat. Strips of land—some more than 100 meters wide—were completely cleared or degraded, says Gennet, apparently to create a suitable wildlife buffer, since animals are treated as potential carriers of bacteria.

If the destruction continues at its current rate, the researchers predict natural habitat losses of over 2000 square kilometers in California alone—which incorporates a 20% slash in riverside vegetation across nine Californian counties.

Bare ground also acts like a slipway between farm fields and nearby rivers for the pesticides and fertilizers showered over fresh produce. "Vegetation plays a key role in stabilising soils, in terms of uptake of nutrients and chemicals before it gets in the water way," Schulte Moore explains. Without natural cover to aid drainage, these contaminants sluice across the earth and into the water—bearing untold impacts on aquatic life.

There's the loss of ecosystem services to consider too: an intact system brings with it valuable pollinators, fertile soil, and unpolluted water. On fragmented lands, those features fade away.

Right now, it's not even clear who is instilling these hyper-safe reforms. Because private company activities aren't transparent, it's impossible to tie the changes to anyone in particular. Yet the researchers hold what they call "compelling evidence"—largely through bold farmer testimonies—that the degradation of the land and corporate paranoia are linked.

For consumers, the covert influence of some in the fresh produce industry makes it harder to weed out a good bag of greens from a questionable one. But, says Gennet, the more consumer pressure there is for information about food sources, the more likely big players are to feel the push.

"The health of the food we eat is tied directly to the health of the land it's grown on," she says—an overplayed sentiment to some perhaps, but one that holds true here.

• Food
• Farming
• Wildlife
• Conservation
• Water
• United States
• California
• Food safety

Emma Bryce
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Recent controversies over honey bees remind us of their environmental and economic importance, but should also prompt us to reflect upon the structures of expertise we rely upon

The recent revival in controversies surrounding dying honey bees has brought global attention to issues farmers, beekeepers, politicians and environmental campaigners have long been aware of. Honey bees are in danger. Honey bees play a critical role in pollinating the crops people eat and, as such are both part of the big business of agriculture and a big business in their own right. Bees are important, environmentally and economically.

The debate over what to do about dying honey bees is one the UK has seen, sharply at times recently, with George Monbiot's forthright critique of chief scientific adviser Mark Walport (see also Roger Pielke Jr and James Wilsdon's rejoinder). Beyond the current debate, the honey bee controversy should also lead us to contemplate two broader issues. Namely, the experts on whom we rely and the orientation we take to government regulation.

The first people to recognise the shocking extent of honey bee deaths were beekeepers. In our research, we have found that beekeepers are careful and deeply invested observers, casting their eyes in a systematic fashion over the experiences of individual bees, whole hives, and the surroundings in which their bees pollinate. In France, in the mid-1990s, beekeepers noted that bees foraging on imidacloprid-treated sunflower fields spent "too long" resting or persistently "cleaned" and "scratched" their bodies (see also this pdf). This wasn't normal.

Beekeepers in the US undertook real-time investigations in the fields where their honey bees pollinate. While these beekeepers did not conduct controlled experiments the way scientists do, their work was methodical. While their measures of bee health, like "strong brood", "lots of diverse pollen" and "almost zero stress" are not easily quantifiable, they capture real phenomena and package complex information with multi-dimensional aspects in useful and meaningful ways.

Despite the conclusion of beekeepers across the globe, based on their field research, that neonicotinoid insecticides were likely contributing to increased bee mortality, some chemical company representatives, scientists and government regulators dismissed or disparaged their findings. Our view is that commercial beekeepers have real-time observational knowledge of the crisis facing honey bee pollinators and that we should take their research seriously (see our Social Studies of Science paper for more). Our point is not to say that commercial beekeepers always know best. Rather, it is to argue for more genuinely participatory research that brings beekeepers' knowledge and scientists' knowledge into a creative and egalitarian dialogue toward a fuller understanding of why honey bees are dying.

The broader message from this case is that practitioners on-the-ground often have knowledge gleaned from careful and systematic observation, and we ignore that understanding at our peril. Sadly, this is a lesson that leaders and the public have all too often ignored in our expert-dominated society. We assume that formal credentials and prestigious institutional affiliations are the qualities we should look for in assessing the credibility of contributors to public debate. But there are many cases, like that of the beekeepers, where stakeholders with vested interests and on-the-ground knowledge developed understandings that challenged the views of mainstream established experts and that ended up being central to altering policy and practice. Thus, for example, Aids treatment activists' proposals for new types of drug trials came from their own experiences with Aids. Their ideas were ultimately embraced by medical researchers and are commonplace today (see Steve Epstein's work for more).

In the case of dying bees, beekeepers are suggesting different ways of obtaining understanding than that sanctioned by government officials, chemical companies, and established scientists. It may turn out that the complexity of the ecosystem of which honeybees are a part means that the formal, highly controlled, and ultimately limited experiments which offer the standard approach to understand the problem are not up to the challenges reflected in the epidemic facing honey bees worldwide. Indeed, the sensibilities with which beekeepers approach complexity and uncertainty may provide important lessons for the kinds of problems – from climate change to agricultural food systems – that are now central issues that confront citizens and policymakers.

This leads to a second matter: how much knowledge do we need as a foundation for government regulation? The debate in the EU over restricting the use of systemic insecticides because of their possible role in contributing to honey bee deaths focuses on the so-called precautionary principle (a longer piece here). As also discussed by George Monbiot last week, this is the idea that it is appropriate to restrict the use of assorted chemicals and other materials even in the absence of scientific certainty, when the effect of not doing so could be very serious.

The US government has opposed taking neonicotinoid pesticides off the market in the absence of conclusive evidence of their adverse effects on honey bees. The UK has taken broadly the same position. This is a classic dilemma in science. But it is not simply a matter of data. The US and UK governments share a value-based preference for false negatives over false positives. A false negative amounts to incorrectly concluding that neonicotinoid pesticides are safe when they might not be. Advocates of the precautionary principle share a preference for the reverse. They have supported taking the neonicotinoid pesticides off the market in the face of suggestive evidence based on scientific laboratory and field studies, and beekeepers' observations. Given what is at stake here, we are on the side of those who prefer to err on the side of caution. And as policymakers and citizens increasingly confront complex challenges fraught with tremendous risk, we may want to make a precautionary orientation our default position.

We all eat and so we should all be concerned about the alarming uptick of honey bee deaths, but the current crisis can also be an opportunity to consider how to do things differently.

Daniel Lee Kleinman is the associate dean for social studies in the Graduate School at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a professor in the Department of Community and Environmental Sociology

Sainath Suryanarayanan is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Community & Environmental Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison

The authors are preparing to initiate a project that will bring the various stakeholders involved in the controversy over honey bee deaths in the US together to consider how best to design experiments to understand the phenomenon.

• Agriculture
• Science policy
• Bees
• Insects
• Pesticides

Daniel Lee KleinmanSainath Suryanarayanan
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Assistant U.S. Attorney General Ignacia Moreno's tenure spanned one of the worst disasters in U.S. history, the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico after the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded in April 2010. She oversaw a record civil penalty in the case.

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The proposal for a climate deal by 2015 based on national 'contributions' gained traction UN talks in Germany last week

The United States' proposal to let countries draft their own emissions reduction plans rather than working toward a common target can unlock languishing UN climate negotiations, the US climate change envoy said on Tuesday.

The proposal that a global climate deal by 2015 should be based on national "contributions" gained traction at last week's round of UN talks in Germany, although China, the world's biggest carbon emitter, said it wanted far more binding commitments by wealthy countries.

In the first public US statements on the plan, Todd Stern, the US State Department's special envoy on climate change, told reporters on Tuesday that the US approach was designed to bring as many countries as possible to the table through a form of peer pressure and break the impasse over a successor to the 1997 Kyoto protocol.

"Countries, knowing that they will be subject to the scrutiny of everybody else, will be urged to put something down they feel they can defend and that they feel is strong," Stern said from Berlin during a summit of environmental ministers focused on ways to advance the UN climate talks.

The approach would mean abandoning the format of the Kyoto protocol, to which the United States was not a signatory, which set central goals for industrialised countries to cut emissions by 2012 and then let each work out national implementation.

Stern said that having each country's plans and targets "in an environment of intense public interest" may encourage countries to step up their existing plans.

Stern said countries could submit their initial plans several months before a ministerial meeting in Paris in 2015 to let other countries and stakeholders review the plans, and give enough time to strengthen or clarify the proposals.

The plan, said Stern, would provide an alternative to a negotiation process that has failed so far to deliver a legally binding agreement for both developing and developed countries to reduce their emissions under a common target.

"It is very hard for us to imagine a negotiation with dozens and dozens and dozens of counties actually negotiating everybody else's targets and timetables," Stern said.

In recent weeks, the concentration of carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere has approached 400 parts per million (ppm) for the first time in human history, according to the Scripps Institute of Oceanography, a mostly symbolic threshold but one that shows how rapidly carbon dioxide levels have been rising.

Carbon dioxide concentrations have risen from around 350 ppm in the past 25 years.

"The urgency of the situation is absolutely real but I don't think it has dramatically changed for climate negotiators this week as compared to before the news," Stern said, referring to the Scripps monitoring.

• Carbon emissions
• Climate change
• Global climate talks
• United States
• Kyoto protocol

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Grand Designs' green-minded presenter enthuses over toilets, mending, and his expanding trousers

You can cover a lot of ground in 40 minutes with Kevin McCloud, the presenter of the Grand Designs TV show. We get through his expanding bellows trousers, retail therapy as the thrill of the caveman's kill and why he loves long-drop toilets. I also ask him for his favourite Grand Design projects ever: small is beautiful, it seems.

But I start by asking him what has got him excited today? "I have just got my delivery of Sugru," he says. This turns out to be a kind of putty. "It comes in different colours, you can stretch it and shape it, and then overnight it sets to a hard silicon rubber," he enthuses. "It is for hacking - repairing stuff - like chairs, cameras, ski poles, even trousers."

McCloud in the flesh replicates his screen persona, being simultaneously enthusiastic and thoughtful. The seemingly effortless tumble of words flows from the joys of Sugru to the broader theme of the pleasure of mending and making which, he says, has grown since the economic crisis started in 2008.

Take making new clothes from combinations of old ones, he says: "It is that thing about creative reinvention, isn't it? Its not recycling, it is not even upcycling, it this business of adapting what is there and forming a new idea from a collection of old ones. It's a tangible cross-fertilisation of stuff."

Which brings him on to his trousers. "I bought a pair of trousers when I was 19, and the previous owner had taken them in. Now, I am slightly bigger in the waist than I was then, so I got them taken out again: it is a pair of expanding bellows trousers, and they look as good now as they did when they were made in the 1950s."

McCloud doesn't use the phrase "necessity is the mother of invention", but as we move on to talk about houses, it's clear he treasures the idea. "What happened in 2008 stopped people in their tracks. People stopped looking at their homes simply as commodities to exploit and starting thinking about how they might personalise that space and make them less bland and more autobiographical and that's healthy I think."

He warms to his theme: "People have stopped spending their way out of trouble and begun thinking their way out of trouble. It is very easy to to write the cheque instead of being resourceful, but resourcefulness is the most fascinating part of the design process, solving a problem by thinking hard and finding a solution that works and is affordable."

The theme continues when I ask the inevitable question: what are your favourite Grand Designs projects from the 100 so far? "I am enormously attached to those projects that are small," he says, and names just three. "Ben Law who built his house in the woods for £26,000, that remains the viewers favourite."

"Then Monty Ravenscroft , who did the urban version, and built a house in Peckham with no windows but a giant skylight that he engineered," he says.

The third, says McCloud, was the house on Skye built by Indi Waterstone and partner Rebecca. "I sort of lost my heart to it," he says. "It was tiny and it did not look like a traditional croft. It is wood clad and grass roofed, it looks like a big mossy boulder, a piece of mountain."

What they have in common, he says, is that "the constraints are so severe, due to size and budget, that the ideas that emerge are powerfully inventive."

We circle back to making and mending and McCloud, who comes from a design background, mentions some place mats he has just bought from a young designer. "They are no different really to ones you could buy is a big shop, but they have her name on the back and that attachment of personality to objects is really fundamental. We are divorced, aren't we, from the stories of the things around us."

At this point I ask him what I think might be an awkward question: isn't this all awfully elitist and expensive. McCloud's response is to move up a gear, from enthusiasm to passion.

"I make no apology for that - food is incredibly cheap, clothes are fantastically cheap - we ought to be paying more in pound terms," he says. "We are borrowing money from future generations. We are borrowing the carbon impact, the resource impact from future generations to get stuff cheap now. We have swept the dirt and dust from our society under the carpet - but this carpet is on other side of the planet. It is very convenient, we don't know where this stuff comes from."

McCloud illustrates the point by waving a well-shod foot at me. "My Trickers boots, which I wear all the time, cost £300, but I fully expect them to last 20 years, as did my last boots. [Compared to cheaper shoes that last a year] which is the better value, which is the cheapest in the end?"

I say that for many people buying isn't always about value, but about shopping for its own pleasure: he agrees: "It's a powerful drug, it's a dopamine hit. It's that moment when you leap on the animal with your spear and bag your lunch. That short-term high explains why people keep going out and buying 75 pairs of shoes: they don't want the shoes, they want the hit."

You don't get that hit with mending, I suggest. "What you get from mending, repairing, commissioning is a serotonin hit. It's longer, it's better and it's smoother," he counters, adding: "I wrote a book about these things - nobody read it!"

Lots of people, however, watch Grand Designs. I ask him if the people whose projects he follows don't strike him as, well, a bit as obsessives, single-mindedly building temples to themselves? "We are fascinated by the experimentalists," he says, diplomatically. "The people we film tend to be on the margins, out there trying an idea that are sometimes unprovable. At the point when we film them, they have already invested 3-4 years in the projects. They are brave."

"What they are going through is really extreme, they have borrowed money they don't know if they can pay back and it could completely fail," he continues. "That is very compelling. But there is not always a happy ending. There are some we can't broadcast: they have to have built something in the end."

McCloud says the idea of living off-grid is also an experiment for him. "I go to my cabin in the woods (built for another TV show) and have my off-grid weekends and then think what can I bring back from that? It is a journey of exploration, trying out ideas, asking how can that inform every day living."

"Do I put in a reed bed, a biodigester, or a long drop toilet?" McCloud gets even more enthusiastic at this point. "I am a big fan of long drop, composting toilets - I like the cycle of using waste. When you have experienced one and seen what comes out of the bottom, it is amazing stuff. It's the most beautiful, driest, sweet-smelling compost."

But it turns out that even McCloud's family have their limits. "I appreciate that when it comes to long drop toilets, I am in a minority of people in society," he says wryly. "Life involves other people and it is a compromise. Ask what will my children will put up with and the answer, in the end, is a reed bed."

The Grand Designs Live event runs at London's Excel Centre until 12 May.

• Design
• Home improvements
• Energy efficiency
• Natural resources and development

Damian Carrington
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Scientists have discovered a 10-metre-high rock of granite deep in the Atlantic, suggesting a continent may have existed off the Brazilian coast

The brainchild of an architect, an oceanographer and an astronaut, this 10-storey floating laboratory has a three-year programme to look for sunken civilisations and deepsea lifeforms in the Mediterranean and the Atlantic

Had a great visit and interview today with my new best friend Bob Grafe.  He hosts a radio lawn and garden show on KWED 1580 out of Seguin, TX.  He brought me some goodies from his garden as well as a fig tree and grape vine for the greenhouse.  This is a guy who really knows how to grow stuff...I learned a lot more from him than he did from me.  Will post a link to the webcast when the episode will air.  82,96,63,0,B,0

The number of honeybees has now dwindled to the point where there may not be enough to pollinate some major U.S. crops, including almonds, blueberries and apples. And this year brought farmers closer than ever to a true pollination crisis.

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Science education standards, issued in April, recommend teaching climate change for the first time. But one nonprofit says kids aren't learning enough, soon enough, about how their world will change in the coming decades. The group aims to remedy this with presentations in schools nationwide.

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Why is it necessary for those writing about the future UK energy situation like Michael Hanlon (Energy, not bribery, 2 May) to refer to "the lights going out"? The outcome is likely to be far less dramatic. It's quite correct that a great deal of old coal and nuclear capacity will be retired over the next few years. For the rest of this decade, that will be replaced by as much renewables as can be built (mostly wind) and gas. Most of the gas-fired power generation which is needed has already been built; around 4GW is currently not in operation because it is unprofitable and most of the rest is running at far lower load factors than in previous years. If "the lights threaten to go out", existing gas-fired generation will run at higher load factors and more can quickly be built.

Contrary to Mr Hanlon's assertion, this is unlikely to leave consumers "at the mercy of Russia and Kazakhstan" (neither of which supply the UK with any significant volumes of gas); but there will be increased dependence on Norway, Netherlands, Qatar and perhaps the US. Towards the end of the decade, the UK may produce some shale gas if drilling and fracking prove to be environmentally acceptable; the volumes will not be great and are unlikely to be "cheap" in comparison to imports. Post 2020, other carbon (with carbon capture and storage) and non-carbon generation options may become available, including increased production of shale gas. Outcomes will depend on costs, and costs will be affected by environmental acceptability and carbon pricing.

The future of the UK power sector over the next decade has already been determined: wind and gas may not be the best possible option, but it is far from the worst, in relation to costs and carbon emissions. Apologies for the lack of apocalyptic or visionary sentiments about our future energy situation, but these are simply obscuring rather than illuminating the debate.
Professor Jonathan Stern
Chairman and senior research fellow, natural gas research programme, Oxford Institute for Energy Studies

• Energy
• Energy industry
• Energy
• Gas
• Gas
• Nuclear power
• Wind power
• Renewable energy

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Wenlock Edge: When they first came out, the bumblebees pinged around groggily, searching for holes in which to lay eggs

The carder bumblebee hovered at the mouths of flowering currants with the precision of a docking satellite, a furry ginger blur against carmine pink flowers. This was both astonishing and commonplace, a moment when the tired old days of winter were forgotten. The months of dark rain, wet snow, the ill wind that blew down the ancient Pontfadog Oak and did something to history – all this ended in a whirring of bumblebees and an explosion of flowers.

When their bombastic majesties first came out, they pinged around groggily, searching for holes in which to lay eggs, mistaking a kitchen window or a dog's nose for an entrance to the labyrinth. Now they had shaken off any uncertainties and drilled into the nectar of a thousand flowers. Tiny volcanoes in the earth under trees gave away the hidey-holes of solitary bees, and bee flies came in search of them to flick down eggs so their parasitic grubs could feast on the hatchlings. Violets were blooming on rough verges and wood banks in grey-lilac, white and that unfathomable hue which, like the arrival of swallows, is forgotten until the first time of the year it is seen – the ultra violets, the closest we get to the ultraviolet that bees see. Caterpillars of silver-washed fritillary butterflies grazed on violet leaves in the wood, building themselves slowly into the unbelievable structures that will take off in summer air. 

Peacock, small tortoiseshell and large white butterflies were already there; somehow, against all odds, they survived the winter. Now the chiffchaff came calling – ticking clocks keeping Africa time – into the wood with the pink-flowering currant bushes left from a garden abandoned a century ago. The farmer had sawn up trees storm-fallen across paths and wild cherries blossomed butterfly-white overhead against the most open sky of the year. And at night under the stars, people came to the bonfire, big grins on their faces.

• Bees
• Wildlife
• Insects
• Birds
• Animals
• Rural affairs

Paul Evans
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Heir to the throne forced to shut organic fruit and veg store near Highgrove due to falling trade and rising costs of produce

Britain's weak economy has taken its toll on the nation's poshest greengrocer, with Prince Charles forced to close his organic vegetable store citing falling trade and rising prices.

Charles, the heir to the throne and a champion of the environment, opened a store near his country home Highgrove in Gloucestershire, south-west England, about eight years ago after converting his estate to organic farming in 1986.

The store, The Veg Shed, sold organic vegetables and fruit freshly grown on the estate's Duchy Home Farm and became known for selling edible but oddly shaped organic produce that would normally be rejected by supermarkets.

But a spokeswoman for the prince said the store had closed after it failed to make a profit as it was no longer financially viable. The produce was invariably more expensive than at local supermarkets.

"The Veg Shed has closed, basically in response to consumer trends, a preference for shopping remotely," a spokeswoman from Clarence House, the prince's official London residence, told Reuters on Tuesday.

• Prince Charles
• Food
• Retail industry
• Monarchy
• Farming

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Potsdam Institute projection suggests population growth would increase imported food, even without climate change

Tomatoes from Spain, olive oil from Italy, plums from Chile, salmon from Alaska and green beans from Kenya – how often might some of these ingredients end up in your basket? In the UK most people's shopping trolleys contain a significant proportion of imported foods. But could these foods be grown and produced at home? Which countries are capable of food self-sufficiency? A new series of maps shows which countries could feed their entire population, and which countries are limited by lack of land or water.

Marianela Fader from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Germany, and colleagues, calculated the growing capacity of every country in the world, and compared it with food requirements, both now and projected forward to 2050. Their model employed climate data, soil type and land-use patterns for each country, in order to simulate yields for a variety of types of crop. Using current data on population, and food and water consumption in each nation, they were able to assess what proportion of its food a country could produce.

Although many countries choose to import food right now, the model showed that there are surprisingly few that could not maintain the same diet and still be food self-sufficient. "Today, 66 countries are not able to be self-sufficient due to water and/or land constraints," said Fader. This equates to 16% of the world's population depending on food imported from other countries.

The countries with the most reliance on imports were found in North Africa, the Middle East and Central America, with over half the population depending on imported food in many of these locations. Outside those locations many countries could become food self-sufficient if they chose to.

But roll the clock forward to 2050 and population pressure paints a very different picture. Vast swathes of the global map are coloured red and orange, highlighting those countries that would have to maximize food production – by improving agricultural productivity, and expanding cropland, for example – in order to feed their population. The figures suggest that over half the world's population could depend on imported food by 2050.

"Assuming that all low-income economies achieve full potential productivity by 2050 in addition to full cropland expansion – which would be a huge societal and technological challenge and thus a very optimistic assumption – the food self-sufficiency gap will still be equivalent to about 55–123 million people, with over 20 million in Niger and Somalia alone," explained Fader, whose findings are published in Environmental Research Letters. Add on the impact of climate change – not included in this study – and the problem could be even more severe.

A number of developed countries, including the UK, the Netherlands and Japan, are already unable to meet the food requirements of their populations. This reliance on imports looks set to become worse as population levels rise. However, unlike the developing countries, these nations will probably be able to buy their way out of the problem.

Food security is going to be a big issue over the coming decades. The study indicates that improving agricultural productivity can play a key role in maintaining food security. Meanwhile, a change in diet, such as towards more seasonal and vegetarian food, could also have a significant impact, although this is not explored in the current work.

• Food
• Food security
• Farming
• Climate change
• Water

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Climate change means we are experiencing extreme weather with increasing frequency – and increasing economic cost

It doesn't take a rocket scientist (or an earth scientist for that matter) to know that today's weather isn't the weather we grew up with – and today's climate isn't the climate of yesterday. As a scientist who studies this topic daily, I and my colleagues know why. Human greenhouse gas emissions have led to a 40% increase in the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. As a result, the Earth is gaining energy at an alarming rate.

So what? How will all this energy change the climate (and the weather we experience)? Well some changes are pretty straightforward… First scientists expect that the Earth will globally get warmer, although the warming will happen much faster in some areas than others. We expect the rate of drying (and consequently drought) will increase in some areas while other regions will become wetter with more flooding. We expect to lose ice, see oceans rise, changes to the ocean acidity level, among other changes.

Some changes, however, have been harder to unearth but recent exciting findings are shining some illumination. Among the most exciting areas of research is the connection between loss of arctic sea ice and extreme weather in the Northern Hemisphere. The arctic, which has been warming at an alarming rate has seen an approximately 75% decrease in the summer sea ice volume. Consequently arctic waters, which had been covered by ice, are now absorbing tremendous amounts of solar energy during the summer and releasing it to the atmosphere during the autumn and early winter.

This change in the arctic energy balance has begun to have an effect on the weather patterns, particularly on the jet stream. This rapidly flowing stream of high-altitude air separates the cold dry arctic air from warmer moist air closer to the equator. When that jet stream dips southward, watch out! Cold air and potential downpours or snow storms may be coming your way. Recently, the jet stream has been more likely to be found in an undulating, slowly moving state.

What does this mean to us? It means that we shouldn't be surprised to see more severe weather that lasts for longer durations. Our weather can be expected to whiplash from one extreme to another.

In the U.S. we are seeing some evidence of this. Alternating wet, snowy winters and warm non-winters. Summers of either extreme heat and drought – or unbelievable flooding.

But don't just take my word for it. A leading researcher in this area, Dr. Jennifer Francis says,

The Arctic is warming two-to-three times faster than the rest of the northern hemisphere -- the loss of sea ice, spring snow cover, increased Greenland melting, and permafrost degradation are all symptoms of and contributors to this warming. It's inconceivable that a change of this scale and magnitude will not have substantial impacts on the atmosphere, ocean, and land both within the Arctic and also beyond the Arctic where millions of people live. These impacts will affect not only the physical system -- such as weather patterns and ocean circulation -- but also life on land and in the ocean. Exactly how these effects play out is a wide-open topic of research.

Regarding the specific impact of global warming on Superstorm Sandy, her colleague, Dr. Charles Greene added,

Images of flooded subway stations in New York City, demolished towns on the New Jersey shore, and autumn blizzard conditions in Appalachia will be etched in the nation's psyche for quite some time. With the increasing frequency of extreme weather events serving as a backdrop, many people are asking what role, if any, did anthropogenic climate change play in the development of Superstorm Sandy? If one takes into account the record loss of Arctic sea ice this past September, then perhaps the likelihood of greenhouse warming playing a significant role in Sandy's evolution as an extra-tropical superstorm is at least as plausible as the idea that (she) was simply a freak of nature.

If we are seeing this type of extreme weather already, it makes one wonder what the world will be like in 10, 20, or 50 years. We will certainly have to deal with many more costly weather disasters. More European heat waves like 2003 or 2010; more Midwest United States droughts of 2011 and 2012. Repeated 1000 year floods, larger storms like Sandy, and yes…. We will even see snow… lots of it. Charles Greene's November 2012 Scientific American paper was prescient – he virtually predicted the extreme weather, including Sandy and the series of nor'easters that have battered the Eastern Seaboard this past winter. It makes one wonder about other events. The alternating years of droughts and floods in the Midwest that have converted last year's severe dryout into today's severe floods in Indiana and Illinois? Are they tied to human emissions? What about the oscillating heat waves/drought and flooding episodes in Australia? We can only hope that this emerging science continues to advance so that these questions can be answered.

There are two takeaway messages to all of this. First, all of today's weather is now affected by climate change. Second, there is a tremendous cost to the extremes we are seeing. For those who say taking action to stop climate change is too expensive, we only have to point to the costs we are incurring right now. It is clear that it is too expensive to ignore this problem.

But don't just take it from me, ask my students. Engineering student Sara Backlund, who attends my heat transfer course recently remarked,

Last summer was crazy hot – so hot my soccer games had to be cut short. This spring it is incredibly cold – it's May and we haven't even started practicing and our games are being canceled. Even I can see the weather is changing…

So, it may not take a rocket scientist to tell us we're changing the weather… It might just take a bright engineering student.

• Dr. John Abraham of University of St. Thomas, the Climate Science Rapid Response Team and the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund

• Climate change
• Climate change

John Abraham
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Cities are getting smarter as energy-saving innovations go mainstream and local governments act to open their vast troves of data to provide value for the community

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If your first boss was Bill Clinton, for most of us it would be downhill from there. But not for Conor Riffle. The young American's first job out of college was for the Clinton Foundation in 2006. Tasked with jetting around the world with the president, to understand where the foundation could best focus its efforts on climate change, it was a meeting in London with Ken Livingstone which set Riffle on his current course.

The London mayor was setting up the C20 group of world cities (which became the C40) to tackle climate change. The Clinton Foundation became a big backer and Riffle, his head turned, returned to London to work for the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) to head up its cities programme.

"If you look back at the last decade of climate change there are a lot of non-success stories, and two success stories," argues Riffle. "One is what companies have done, and the other is what cities have done."

CDP was set up to encourage big companies to measure and report their carbon emissions. Its first listings in 2008 covered an impressive 1,550 corporations; the most recent in 2012 had more than 4,000, believed to account for 20% of the world's total emissions. CDP's first cities listing was published in 2011 with 43 cities, and is growing fast with 73 cities in 2012.

Move from management to action

While the initial raison d'être of CDP was "what gets measured gets managed", now its listings have reached a scale where the focus can shift more clearly to action. With two full years of city emissions data and a third currently being collated, Riffle says: "We're finally able to compare year on year, and do things now such as show the most popular emissions reduction actions that cities are taking – because up until this point we haven't really had a good catalogue of that."

The number one action that cities are taking "is working on energy demand in buildings, followed by transport and waste", says Riffle. "That includes financing energy efficiency and retrofits, through policy and incentives for private building owners to undertake energy efficiency measures … it's the easiest action to monetise. Transport and waste are more the classic city concerns – there has been a huge boom in recent years in cities investing in public transport, both in terms of building new subways like Rome and LA, and also the massive proliferation of Bus Rapid Transit systems, effectively a bus running on dedicated bus lanes as pioneered in Bogota and Curitiba."

Open data revolution

Innovations in developing world cities moving into the mainstream is a subject that Riffle admits to "geeking out" on. The second is open data. "We're in the middle of a revolution around cities and open data," he enthuses. "You can do open data in various ways – just put a spreadsheet on your website and people download it, or you can do API implementation which is a key that allows developers to go in and unlock reams of data … city governments are opening up their troves of data on everything from how many wifi hotspots there are in the city or how many parking spaces, through to what are the most popular baby names … The idea is that the city government is swimming in data and they just don't have the resources to take advantage of it because there's so much. So if they are able to open it up in a controlled way and allow people to use it, then they will get massive value in return."

This isn't a "smart cities of the future" concept, but is happening right now. "London's data store makes a great amount of data available including things like real-time updates of tube delays: a number of software developers take that data and package it into apps for mobile phones that residents can download and use to navigate the city more efficiently," says Riffle. "San Francisco has an app that allows you to find the nearest green space, say if you're out walking your dog. These are ways of harnessing the data that cities are swimming in and making it accessible, letting the community find a value in it – that's the point of open data."

Municipal data from city governments is one source, but it is fast being complemented by data from citizens' smartphones and by smart sensors. Cities such as Glasgow and Barcelona are trialling sensors positioned on lamp-posts that can monitor street use, pollution levels and noise levels. The potential, says Riffle, is for cities to act on precise, real-time data rather than guesswork and surveys. "It would help efficiency massively, because not only would it be much more accurate but it would help to identify hotspots and coldspots to find out why emissions from a particular neighbourhood are higher, and which buildings need to be targeted for energy efficiency."

Meanwhile in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, IBM has recently completed a project using anonymous mobile phone information to understand exactly how and where people were using the city's bus network, and redesigned the city bus routes accordingly to be more energy efficient and reduce the average journey time by 10%.

This is a pioneering time, says Riffle. It's still too early to know the best use of open data in making our cities more efficient. He concedes that it is currently mostly used by software developers rather than being necessarily user-friendly for the average citizen. The use of sensors and smartphone data also raises important privacy concerns which need to be addressed. He argues, however, that the potential efficiency gains could be transformational; and that open sourcing could herald a new democratisation of urban life.

So, does he still miss having Bill Clinton as his boss? "You know I do," he laughs ."It was just an honour to work for the president." But he adds: "I've got to say, the management at CDP is just as good." He'll go far this one.

Credits

This content is brought to you by Guardian Sustainable Business in association with Accenture. Paid for by Accenture. All editorial controlled and overseen by the Guardian.

• Smart cities
• Sustainable development

Tim Smedley
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