By Jon Henley, The GuardianWednesday 27 October 2010 There are six of them, writhing lazily at the bottom of Darryl Clifton-Dey’s plastic tank. “Weird” doesn’t, frankly, do them justice: small, beady eyes; big ugly snout. Sinuous, slimy; even on a sunny morning on the banks of the Thames, faintly sinister. Beasts of legend and bad […]
By Mark Kinver Science and environment reporter, BBC News 29 October 2010 A team of researchers have been trying to identify how jellyfish may benefit from marine ecosystems destabilised by climate change and overfishing. There is concern that a rise in jellyfish numbers could prevent depleted commercially important fish stocks recovering to historical levels. However, […]
By Louise Gray, Environment Correspondent27 Oct 2010 Butterflies and bees are declining because of the loss of wild flowers in the countryside, according to a major Government report. A team of researcher from the Centre for Hydrology and Ecology (CEH) monitored 500 plots of ‘semiwild’ land across the UK between 1990 and 2007 on the […]
By Patrick Hennessy and Rebecca LefortPublished: 8:30PM BST 23 Oct 2010 Ministers are planning a massive sell-off of Britain’s Government-owned forests as they seek to save billions of pounds to help cut the deficit, The Sunday Telegraph has learnt. Caroline Spelman, the Environment Secretary, is expected to announce plans within days to dispose of about […]
By Nigel Hunt; editing by James JukweyMon Oct 18, 2010 4:04pm EDT LONDON (Reuters) – Agricultural crops in Britain may need to be moved to new areas as the threat of both drought and flooding rises in the coming decades, a report [pdf] commissioned by the Royal Agricultural Society of England (RASE) said on Monday. […]
[Desdemona remembers when only “developing nations” had austerity measures clamped onto them.] By Daniel Pimlott and Chris Giles in London and Robin Harding in WashingtonOctober 20 2010 23:30 | Last updated: October 20 2010 23:30 The UK’s Conservative-led coalition has announced the most drastic budget cuts in living memory, outstripping measures taken by other advanced […]
By Louise Gray, Environment Correspondent15 Oct 2010 7:00AM BST Grey partridge, corn bunting and turtle doves have continued to fall in numbers in the last 16 years despite Government promises to halt the decline, according to new figures. The birds were identified as ‘priority species’ for conservation in 1994. Others on the list that have […]
BBC5 October 2010 The cost of dismantling North Sea oil and gas platforms is forecast to reach £19bn over the next 30 years. A new report by industry specialists said there were about 260 platforms to be decommissioned. Consultants Deloittes and Douglas-Westwood said the work presented “big opportunities” for those in the industry. They estimate […]
(PhysOrg.com) — The first detailed measurements of current extinction rates for a specific region have shown that birds are the best group to use to track the losses. The study also reveals Britain may be losing species over ten times faster than records suggest, and the speed of loss is probably increasing: the losses from […]
By Michael McCarthyMonday, 4 October 2010 Forty British wild bird species need special protection to help them survive, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) says today. They range from the once-familiar house sparrows of Central London to the enigmatic and mournful-sounding black-throated divers of the lochs of the Scottish Flow Country, and […]
