The Offset

Climate in Focus

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Inside Just Stop Oil

The Glastonbury Conspiracy

Chagos Islands

Activists rally against

Climate denial in Britain’s

Exiled communities fighting

protest crackdown

hippie haven

for their homeland

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Cover photo: The Seven Sisters Cliffs / Milo Thompson Illustrations by Millie Rowlandson

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EDITOR’S LETTER

Letter from the Editor Dear Reader, Editor-in-Chief Oliver Bowbrick Deputy Editors-in-Chief Marta Abreu Joseph Watt News Editor Martin Miraglia Politics Editor David Jenny Science Editor Katie Duffy Business Editor Camilla Mina Lifestyle Editor Jennifer Kennedy Chief Sub-Editor Mary Downer Sub Editors Ben Miley-Smith Elisabeth Montague Production Editor Rae Rostron

The temperature is climbing, sea levels are rising, and extreme weather events are becoming evermore commonplace. The climate crisis increasingly affects every part of our lives.

At the same time, growing nationalism, resource competition, and political backlash against environmental policies undermine the collective action needed to mitigate and adapt.

At The Offset, we take the climate crisis seriously. But we also believe that fatalism is a trap. Climate journalism can often feel distant, abstract and overwhelming. It may flood us with information but offer little clarity.

We want to push back against helplessness – to remind ourselves that there is still time to act. Even if we can’t prevent every consequence, we can strive to understand and respond to what’s unfolding around us.

On these pages, you will find stories that connect the personal with the political, the particular with the universal. The crisis intersects with politics and power, with business, culture, and everyday life.

Based in London, The Offset reports through an international lens, tracing the threads of a crisis that connects people across cultures, borders and generations. We present human stories about the changing climate, focused on the lives it touches.

Yes, this is a crisis. But a crisis is not a catastrophe. This moment requires clarity, humanity, and a global perspective. That’s what we hope to offer, and we’re glad you’re here to read it.

Photo Editor Milo Thompson Art Directors Olivia Taylor Selin Azimkar Digital Editor Ed Harding Social Media Editors Kate Peacock Sophie Storey Podcast Editors Hope Federico Staś Kaleta Reporters Zena Erhabor Flavio Duka

Oliver Bowbrick Editor-in-Chief

The Offset was created as part of the 2024-2025 International Journalism postgraduate course at City St George’s, University of London theoffsetmag.com +44 (0)20 7040 8221 theoffsetmagazine@gmail.com Printed by Rapidity

The Offset Magazine Department of Journalism City St George’s, University of London Northampton Square London EC1V 0HB

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Contents

News

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6

Europe’s coffee imports at risk Climate group sues Shell – again

7

Supermarkets missing climate targets UK workers feel the heat

8

Felling largest trees may protect against drought Sand patterns indicate reef health

9

New data to aid peatlands restoration California farmers go solar

Politics 12 14 16

Climate denial in Glastonbury ‘Repression will backfire’: Just Stop Oil disbands The climate battleground

18

Saving Albania’s Vjosa River

19

The Chagos Islands: Paradise regained?

22 Climate lawfare 24 Big oil returns to Ogoniland

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Science 28

The Knepp rewilding experiment

30

The Fixing Factory

32

Air pollution on the brain

34

Where are the butterflies?

36

Fungi in your walls

58

The Reverend jailed for climate action

38

Coastal communities on the edge

60

Raise a glass for kelp

40

US loss, European gain?

62

It’s not you, it’s the climate crisis

42

Over to AI with the weather

63

No kids allowed

64

Poetry and protest

66

Running for the climate

67

How does your garden grow?

68

Touching grass: ecotherapy explained

Business 46

Sewing sustainability into fashion

48

Growing olives in Britain?

50

Future-proofing bananas

51

Radical pensioners vs. Blackrock

52

The power of community energy

54

Britain’s wine boom

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Lifestyle

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News

Images: (L) Greenpeace / Steve Morgan (R) Oliver Bowbrick

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NEWS

Climate crisis Dutch climate group files second threatens Europe’s lawsuit against Shell coffee imports Oliver Bowbrick Your daily cup of coffee could soon become a luxury treat, according to industry insiders. A recent report shows that more than half of coffee imports into the EU come from countries that are both vulnerable to the climate crisis, and lack the resources to adapt to changes in farming conditions.

Analysis by consultancy firm Foresight Traditions showed that nearly 20 per cent of the 2.7 million tonnes of coffee imported into the EU each year comes from what have been identified as “low readiness countries” – those most at risk of climate disaster.

The coffee industry in the EU and the UK relies on imports from these countries as the European climate does not support commercial coffee growing.

Natalia Moozarmi, founder of London-based wholesaler and retailer Element Coffee, said that she only imports coffee from certain countries “after careful research into sustainable and transparent supply chains.”

Brazil, which exports the highest volume of coffee to Europe, is the point of origin for one of Moozarmi’s best-selling blends.

“In the last year alone, however, we have seen a huge spike in costs – particularly Brazil – due to the heavy frost and poor harvest of previous years,” she said. The climate crisis is set to worsen adverse weather conditions, hitting coffee farmers and their yields.

For many sellers, that means higher prices for customers and likely fewer sales. “Although it will be a tough pill to swallow,” said Moozarmi, “we will all have to accept that eventually coffee will become farmore of a luxury than an easy three-a-day commodity.”

Image: Oliver Bowbrick

Elisabeth Montague

Protestors at Shell’s HQ

The Dutch climate group Milieudefensie (Friends of the Earth Netherlands) has formally notified Shell that it will file a second lawsuit against the oil giant, accusing the company of breaching its legal duty to reduce carbon emissions.

The notice argues that Shell is failing to comply with a 2021 Dutch court ruling that ordered it to cut its global emissions in line with the Paris Agreement to limit the rise in global temperatures to 1.5°C. The new case will focus on Shell’s continued investment in new oil and gas fields across the world. Shell is yet to issue a detailed public response.

It would mark Milieudefensie’s second major legal action against Shell in under five years. Although the earlier ruling was partially overturned on appeal in 2024, the court upheld that Shell has an obligation to address its climate impact.

The warning came just days before Shell’s Annual General Meeting (AGM) was held at London’s Heathrow Airport under high security.

Milieudefensie director Donald Pols asked the board of directors whether Shell would stop expanding fossil fuel operations. The board’s only reply was that they would respond to the legal notice within the four-week deadline.

While the meeting was taking place at Heathrow, activists staged a mock “oil spill” outside Shell’s London headquarters to protest against Shell’s pollution of the Niger Delta, Nigeria.

Amnesty International campaigner, Elaine van der Schaft, said that “Shell has made huge profits at the expense of people in the Niger Delta without taking any responsibility.”

Shell has continued to expand oil and gas production despite the 2021 ruling. The company insists it is investing in “energy security”.

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NEWS

Supermarkets must hit climate targets, say campaigners Campaigners have urged the government to set supermarkets legally binding climate targets as part of the UK’s new food strategy.

A report released by charity Foodrise found that supermarkets are falling behind on their voluntary sustainability pledges. It noted that no major UK supermarket has set out to reduce meat and dairy sales, which account for around half of the sector’s emissions.

“Retailers argue that consumers vote with their feet, but they have a huge amount of power,” said Liam Lysaght, Foodrise’s public affairs and campaigns officer. “What we see instead is a triangle of inaction: government, farmers, and retailers all waiting for each other to move first.”

The charity has urged the government to include mandatory emissions

reporting and to support farmers to transition away from intensive animal agriculture.

Most major retailers such as Tesco, Sainsbury’s, and Waitrose, have signed the British Retail Consortium’s 2020 Climate Action Roadmap. It commits the sector to halving emissions by 2030 and reaching carbon neutrality by 2040, a decade earlier than the government’s target.

But, according to a January analysis

by UK charity The Food Foundation, the sector is underperforming. Carbon emissions in the food industry fell just 17 per cent between 2008 and 2022, compared to 38 per cent across the economy as a whole.

Former prime minister Boris Johnson’s 2022 food strategy was criticised by experts for failing to follow key recommendations, including reducing

Shelves in ASDA, north London

meat consumption.

Last December, a WWF report found that UK retailers were “a long way off achieving many of their climate and nature goals,” including reducing deforestation in their supply chains.

The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has assembled an advisory board to assist with developing the food strategy which includes the CEO of Sainsbury’s and the Regional President of McCain Foods.

Image: Wikimedia Commons / Philafrenzy

Ed Harding

UK workers need protection from extreme heat, study says Image: Flickr / Shopblocks

Sophie Storey

The UK could lose over 100 million working hours this summer unless the government, unions, and employers implement better extreme heat policies, a new study has warned.

A survey by the Grantham Research Institute found that on the hottest days, UK workers reported an average 10 per cent drop in productivity.

The authors said ‘gig economy’ workers like delivery drivers are most affected by extreme heat, due to a lack of protections and limited job flexibility.

“Workers don’t have the necessary information on how to protect themselves,” said Shouro Dasgupta, the paper’s co-lead researcher.

Less than 20 per cent of employees said their employer had made any adjustments to address extreme heat, such as better ventilation or shade.

Deliveroo driver in Manchester

According to the UK Met Office, climate change has a greater impact on extreme temperatures than on average ones. Since 1961, the number of days over 28°C has more than doubled, while days over 30°C have tripled.

Mitigation measures like early warning alerts of high heat days could reduce productivity losses by up to two-thirds, letting workers change when, where, and how they work.

At a recent roundtable on the study, participants called for national heat

policies. These include naming heatwaves like storms to raise awareness, and setting legal workplace temperature limits.

Despite the growing frequency of extreme heat in the UK, there is still no government guidance on a legal maximum working temperature.

“Protecting the workforce is good for growth and good growth strategies must include worker protection,” said Dasgupta, “and better growth means more tax revenue.”

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NEWS

Amazon rainforest could sacrifice its larger trees to survive long-term drought, study finds Rainforests may be able to adapt to warmer and drier conditions resulting from climate change by losing their biggest trees, according to the findings of a 22-year-long study in the northeastern region of the Brazilian Amazon.

Researchers from the University of Edinburgh and the Federal University of Pará, in Brazil, published the results last month. The paper’s lead author, Pablo Sanchez Martinez, described the results as “bittersweet”.

“You have the forest not losing all its biomass and collapsing, so that’s good news, but you also have one-third of the biomass being lost,” he said.

“That’s lots of carbon [released] to the atmosphere.” To study the impact of

climate change on Amazonian rainforests, researchers installed thousands of transparent panels above ground in one hectare of the Caxiuanã forest, to redirect rainfall and simulate drought.

They found that 15 years into the experiment, most of the largest of the 352 trees had died, freeing up water for the surviving trees. He added researchers don’t know if the surviving trees will reach large sizes in the future. Last year, Brazil’s national agency for monitoring natural disasters announced the country was experiencing the worst drought in 70 years. While the 2023 El Niño phenomenon contributed to reduced precipitation, an analysis published by the World Weather Attribution group

Image: Paulo Bittencourt

Marta Abreu

The Amazon rainforest

in January 2024 suggested the severity of the drought is “largely driven by climate change”.

Martinez said deforestation and fires are making things worse because “the water that the forest was moving from the soil to the atmosphere is not being moved anymore,” leading to decreased rainfall.

Sand ‘halos’ offer clues about coral reef health Coral reefs are often seen as the canary in the coal mine for assessing the impact of climate change on Earth’s ecosystems. Now, scientists have identified a new method for monitoring their health.

Researchers have found that seafloor patterns formed by grazing fish could provide clues about reef health, which is increasingly under threat from warming seas, overfishing, and other human activity.

Barren rings of sand that encircle the reefs – known as ‘grazing halos’ – have long puzzled scientists, who have debated whether the empty patches signify health or decline.

The researchers discovered that the arrangement of corals themselves influences whether grazing halos form – challenging the earlier belief that herbivores simply fed closer to coral to avoid predators. “Having

something like this, where you can get a sense of what’s going on – that’s super valuable,” said Lisa McManus, co-author of the study and assistant research professor at the Hawai‘i Institute of Marine Biology, University of Hawaiʻi-Mānoa. Using satellite imagery of Heron Island in Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, the team tested two mathematical models to assess how different coral layouts affect halo formation. The results suggest that changes in the size, shape or visibility of these rings could signal broader shifts in the reef’s food web.

“This is just one tool in your toolkit of the many things you need to measure and pay attention to when you’re trying to evaluate whether your system is doing well or not,” said McManus. The study highlights satellite technology’s potential as a cost-effective, efficient way to track reef health.

Image: Google Earth / University of Chicago

Ben Miley-Smith

Grazing halos on the Great Barrier Reef

Scientists believe this finding offers a promising new tool for spotting early warning signs of ecological distress – and gaining a deeper understanding of the complex dynamics that sustain reef ecosystems.

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NEWS

New map showing degradation of California farmers England’s peatland is important tool for ditch food for solar their restoration panels Milo Thompson Image: Greenpeace / Steve Morgan

Martin Miraglia

Burning peatland in the UK

Peatlands, acting as carbon sinks, play a vital role in regulating the earth’s climate but recently released mapping data shows that 80 per cent of England’s peatlands are dry and degraded.

The 80 per cent figure is undeniably stark, but experts have welcomed the publication of the open source map.

“What you can’t measure, you can’t manage,” said Jane Akerman, programme manager for the UK Peatland Programme. “It’s the best picture we’ve ever had of our peatland resource, which will help us prioritise areas for restoration.”

Peatlands are wetland areas with partially decayed plant matter – or peat – under the surface. The plants that grow on peatlands absorb CO2 through photosynthesis.

Waterlogged conditions mean the plants do not fully decompose, trapping carbon that would otherwise release. Centuries of draining peatlands

to make the land suitable for agriculture, however, has left them dry.

“Per hectare, peatlands store more carbon than tropical rainforests,” said Jonathan Ritson, research fellow at the University of Manchester.

“But if you drain that system, that’s carbon that’s going straight into the atmosphere.”

“But mess around with it, and we’re a bit screwed.”

In addition to storing carbon, healthy peatland can prevent flooding, filter water, and bolster biodiversity.

The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) collected the data for the map using a mix of local surveys, satellite imagery, and artificial intelligence.

DEFRA estimates that degraded peatland accounts for around three per cent of England’s annual greenhouse gas emissions.

The government has pledged to restore around 35,000 hectares of peatland in England by 2030.

Mounting challenges in food production and shrinking costs for energy production are pushing farmers to slowly replace food crops with solar panels on their land, a study on California Central Valley’s land use shows.

“People are using solar to reduce water use … and to feel some financial security,” said Jacob Stid, a researcher at Michigan State University who identified over 900 photovoltaic installations in the area from 2008 to 2018.

The area has some of the most productive agricultural land in the United States, growing almond and orchard crops of global significance.

However, it has been under increased water stress in the last decade, raising costs for fertilisation and irrigation.

At the same time, the cost of solar panels plummeted while solar power incentives were expanded.

Stid’s study examined what happened when farmers decided to install solar on their croplands – in terms of both food production and energy generation.

It found energy generation was more lucrative than food production under all scenarios.

The decade saw 3,930 hectares of land converted from croplands to solar farms.

“Solar has become an agricultural commodity with the existing incentive infrastructure,” Stid said, “and an extremely effective cash crop for farmers.”

While the shift accounts for a small proportion of the area’s 2.63 million hectares of agricultural land, Stid added: “It’s something we should monitor at a crop level to make sure we don’t end up in 2050 having an extreme shortage of, for example, almonds.”

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Politics

Images: (L) Friends of the Earth International / Luka Tomac (R) Wikimedia Commons / Alisdare Hickson

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Images: Joseph Watt

The great big Glastonbury town conspiracy

England’s hippie haven is sliding into climate denial, helped by a controversial ‘truthpaper’ Joseph Watt

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lastonbury farmer Paul Chant lives off-grid, protests against pollution, and builds sustainably powered farm equipment. By all appearances, he is a committed climate change activist – except for one thing: he thinks it’s all a big hoax.

Chant embodies something strange happening in Glastonbury. The small town in the south west of England has long been fertile ground for radical environmentalism, where barefoot hippies sit cross-legged in the square among hand-carved incense burners, singing protest songs for Mother Earth. But the town’s green counter-

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culturalists are now turning into outright climate deniers due, in part, to an independent newspaper promising the “uncensored truth”.

I arrive in Glastonbury in midMay to interview Melissa Taylor, the council’s independent climate emergency and resilience officer.

Among patchouli-scented shops peddling necromancy and shampoo bars, there are two volunteers handing out copies of self-described “truthpaper”, The Light.

“It’s a good read, isn’t it?” says a passerby as I open the centrefold, which claims organisations like the

EU are hiding Satanic pentagrams in their logo. “Time to wake up,” she adds.

“It happened during Covid, there was this split very visibly,” says Taylor, referencing a turn toward climate denial among certain residents. “It appeals to people who think they’re special and know more – ‘ordinary people don’t understand this, so I’m above’.”

The Light was first distributed in September 2020, printing unsubstantiated claims that there was “no evidence” of the pandemic that killed nearly 74,000 in England and

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POLITICS Wales that year alone. The June 2023 issue featured the cover headline “No climate crisis”, publishing disproven reports that carbon dioxide has “zero effect on temperatures”.

The UK-based newspaper has nearly 18,000 subscribers on the messaging app Telegram. According to the BBC, it prints more than 100,000 copies monthly for distribution by local conspiracy groups in at least 30 towns across the UK. The Light did not respond to requests for comment on this article.

I meet Chant on his farm four miles east of Glastonbury. He shows me his cider brewing setup and hydrogenpowered tractors, then quickly moves into tinfoil hat territory. He informs me that everything from climate change and Covid to the nearby Glastonbury festival are schemes concocted by elites to harm and control the public.

It’s grooming, as far as I’m concerned “I deny what they’re telling us and how they’re going about it,” Chant says when asked about rising temperatures. “I deny that there is a crisis, that it’s changed dramatically like that – it hasn’t.”

Despite his views, Chant still invests in clean energy. He just reduces his emissions to avoid “intoxicating” pollutants, rather than negate the effects of climate change.

He supports The Light – “there’s a lot of good in there” – but claims it doesn’t go far enough.

In 2019, the UK became the first major economy to pass laws committing to reducing greenhouse gas emissions to “net zero” by 2050.

This year, Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch called the target “impossible” while the deputy leader of Reform UK Richard Tice said they would scrap “net stupid zero” policies if elected. Data published in March by the Department for Energy Security

and Net Zero shows that a steadily increasing percentage of Brits are “not very” or “not at all concerned” about climate change.

Glastonbury Town Council is one of the few in the UK with a Green Party majority. All councillors are due for re-election next May. If voting had occurred this year, Taylor thinks anticlimate change sentiment and the rise of Reform would have drastically changed the council’s makeup. “They think Reform is anti-establishment,” Taylor says.

Vicki Steward has lived in Glastonbury for over 30 years. Since the pandemic, she has observed a rise in anti-green thinking among traditionally leftist residents, which she believes is largely fuelled by The Light.

“I predicted when I started seeing The Light, when the lockdowns ended, I thought ‘right, the next thing they will move onto is climate change denial’,” Steward says. “I was spot on.

It’s grooming, as far as I’m concerned.

I mean, people have been groomed.”

She says Glastonbury residents have long identified with being in the minority, kicking against authority at the forefront of radical

Left: Paul Chant. Right: Glastonbury Tor

environmentalism. When ideas like net zero were adopted as national policy, it affected their sense of identity. “That’s my only real explanation for what is happening,” she sighs.

“For years, I’ve been so proud of our town and the ethos and communitymindedness of it, and our concern for the environment,” Steward says. “I find it really upsetting … when I see people moving further and further into that space.”

The town’s zero-waste, sustainable supermarket Earthfare stays away from the climate change debate, but has found that residents holding a range of anti-green beliefs will nevertheless still shop there. “Enjoy Glastonbury,” a worker tells me, “the town of many contradictions.”

Susannah Clemence was voted Glastonbury’s “Citizen of the Year 2025” for her community-mindedness and concern for the environment. She runs an “eco-info” stall on Tuesdays during market day, the same day The Light distributors operate.

Residents approach her to share ideas, look at a local bus timetable or argue with her about the reality of the climate crisis. Although she has noticed an increased anti-green sentiment, she says deniers often still support ecological initiatives.

“There’s a lot of people around here really into growing stuff and they might actually be total climate deniers,” she says, stressing the importance of personal engagement over political discourse. Clemence believes the free-thinking tradition of Glastonbury should be upheld, and that radical views are best addressed through community and conversation.

Before I leave, I strike up a conversation with a man named Pock sitting barefoot on the pavement, strumming a ukulele. He tells me not to believe what anyone says about anything, including The Light distributors. “Think for yourself,” he says, then returns to fiddling with his strings.

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POLITICS

‘Repression will backfire’ As Just Stop Oil disbands, how are climate activist groups fighting back against anti-protest laws?

Images: Greepeace

Jennifer Kennedy

JSO activists demonstrate for the right to protest at the Royal Courts of Justice in London

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rt historians and Heinz fans breathed a sigh of relief in April. Just Stop Oil (JSO), the climate activism group responsible for chucking tomato soup over Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, hung up their fluorescent orange vests and declared their demands met. The government has agreed not to issue new oil or gas licenses in the North Sea. JSO’s work is done.

At least, that’s what the activist group said publicly. Privately, the BBC reported, activists admitted that new anti-protest laws have made it impossible for JSO to continue.

Activist and spokesperson James Skeet says that claim is “utter crap”.

“We’re in an increasingly authoritarian state that is rolling out increasingly draconian legislation, so I’m not gonna deny that it’s a challenge for

us,” he says. “But our position has always been that whatever the state throws at us is kind of immaterial when you look at the disruptions that are coming down the line as a result of climate breakdown.”

By “draconian legislation” Skeet refers to two Acts passed by the previous Conservative government.

The Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 first criminalised causing (or planning to cause) “serious annoyance or inconvenience” by creating the statutory offence of “public nuisance”, for which many protestors have since been arrested.

The longest sentence to date was given to JSO activist Roger Hallam, who is serving five years in prison for blocking the M25 motorway in 2022.

The second, the Public Order Act 2023, introduced new offences that

targeted trademark tactics used in disruptive action, such as locking on, in which activists attach themselves to buildings or other large structures.

Punishment for these offences ranges from a fine to three years in prison.

It elicits a discussion around whether that sort of punishment fits the crime The increased threat of arrest and conviction posed by these new laws is, however, having the opposite effect to what the government intended – at least among more radical activists.

“When they’re dishing out fiveyear sentences for being involved in a traffic jam, that’s a net positive for

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POLITICS us,” says Skeet. “It elicits a discussion in society around whether that sort of punishment fits the crime.”

Rather than disbanding, Skeet says that JSO are using the momentum from their win to “mobilise for the next big thing”.

JSO’s younger, tech-savvier sibling, Youth Demand, have just concluded a month of disruptive action across London in April, organised mainly through social media. The campaign followed a police raid on a meeting in the Westminster Quaker House, which made national headlines and resulted in the arrests of five activists (including a journalist from The Offset, who escaped custody unscathed).

We know what prison is like, and we’re no longer scared of prison The youth-led climate and proPalestine activists are equally unfazed by longer prison sentences and heftier fines.

“Any of these consequences, such as arrest and even prison time, are absolutely in no way comparable to the consequences of the evil that the people in charge of this country are perpetrating,” spokesperson Chiara Sarti says. By “evil”, Sarti is referring to Youth Demand’s main campaign issues: the British government’s investment in the fossil fuel industry and its arms sales to Israel.

Like Skeet, Sarti believes the crackdown on non-violent protest movements will come back to bite them.

“Once they start arresting everyone, then we all know what arrest is like, and we’re no longer scared of arrests. Once they put us in prison, we know what prison is like, and we’re no longer scared of prison.”

While JSO and Youth Demand steamroll ahead, other established

activist groups are taking a more pragmatic approach.

Greenpeace spokesperson Kai Tabacek says the organisation supports the right of other groups to carry out disruptive action, but what’s most important is the fight for the right to protest.

“Protests used to be something that we just did, whereas now we’re actually having to campaign for that right, which we’ve never had to do before.”

Greenpeace are planning a nationwide campaign in support of this right, and are also lobbying Parliament to amend the Crime and Policing Bill. If approved, the bill would permit the deportation of any foreign national on a temporary visa who is arrested at a protest – a move that bears a Trumpian resemblance to recent visa revocations of international student activists on US university campuses.

Tabacek says strength will lie in numbers: “We’re trying to work with more diverse groups than we ever have before – groups like Amnesty, Liberty, Human Rights Watch, as well as environmental groups across the spectrum.”

Oscar Berglund, an expert in civil

disobedience at the University of Bristol, has a more pessimistic view of the future of climate activism.

“I don’t think the kind of disruptive activism that Just Stop Oil has done – the more high-profile type, which is very focused on media attention-seeking – is viable anymore.”

“That was a type of protest that came about in a context where people could do that without major legal consequences. And now they have major legal consequences.”

Berglund doesn’t think this is a bad thing; he argues that JSO’s controversial tactics likely discouraged some from joining the climate movement.

“If you are doing things that are broadly seen as legitimate, then you get harder to be cracked down upon.”

“That became some of the problem for JSO, because what they did was so hated by the majority that it was very easy for the police to get away with cracking down on them.”

Whatever the future holds for activists that follow in the footprints of JSO, one thing is clear: climate groups must now balance their battle to save the planet with fighting for the right to throw punches (or soup) in the first place.

Activist groups support JSO members appealing their prison sentences

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POLITICS

The climate battleground How the push for net zero is changing British politics

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referenced a more ominous political threat: the growing popularity of Reform UK, the self-titled “main opposition party”.

After becoming the country’s third most popular party at the 2024 election and its sweeping success in the May English local council elections, Reform is on an upwards trajectory.

Founded by the former UKIP party leader and avid Brexiteer, Nigel Farage, the party has found success with those on the far right. Their target was initially those who may have voted Conservative in the past, and are opposed to immigration and welfare spending.

Now the party seeks to widen its pool of voters by harnessing other narratives enjoyed by far-right politicians around the world – most notably climate denialism.

Reform deputy leader Richard Tice has openly called man-made climate change “garbage” in interviews this year. The MP for Boston and Skegness has since

Nigel Farage speaking with attendees at Bitcoin 2025

announced that the party intends to block renewable energy projects in areas where it won local council elections. Reform also pledges to reinvest in North Sea oil Images: Kate Peacock

ust south of the Houses of Parliament in London, Chris Hamilton stood before an unlikely crowd of oil industry employees and green activists. “Up until last week, I would have introduced myself as a worker at Grangemouth,” said the Unite union convenor from the recently closed oil refinery site in Scotland.

“Today, oil and gas workers are heading towards a cliff edge. This is the opposite of what politicians have been promising.”

Organised by Greenpeace, the rally urged the Treasury to provide a £1.9bn emergency package to workers in the North Sea, where 30,000 jobs could be lost to the renewable energy transition. This protest may point to an uncomfortable truth for Labour – its net zero policy might be edging voters closer to parties on both the left and the far right.

Though angry with the government’s failure to protect workers' interests, most of the speakers

Image: Gage Skidmore / Wikimedia Commons

Kate Peacock

Unions and Climate Groups Protest for funding ahead of Spending Review

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POLITICS

Unions and Climate Groups Protest for funding ahead of Spending Review

and gas operations if they win in 2029.

Such policies set the party’s sights firmly on Scotland, seeking to make gains from both the Scottish National Party and Labour in upcoming parliamentary elections.

Gerry Hassan, writer and professor of social change at Glasgow Caledonian University, said “there is a chasm to be addressed” in Scottish politics.

“Simple messages will cut through to voters. Labour doesn’t have a set of stories about Britain, but Reform has a story – and that story has resonance.”

In Grangemouth, the closure of the oil refinery was symbolic of a failure to protect working people. “Grangemouth is an issue that will haunt both [Westminster and Scottish] governments for a while,” Hamilton says.

“Many people in this town will struggle to vote for Labour again,” he adds. “Reform is more pragmatic on oil and gas.”

Hamilton had been campaigning since 2023 to keep Grangemouth open. He says the site could have been “future-proofed” and workers retrained in the renewables sector, but no one was interested in investing in such changes. “There hasn’t been a just transition – there’s been no transition,” he says.

I think you need to follow the money with Reform The shortcomings of Labour, and past Conservative governments present a great opportunity for Reform, says John Moloney, assistant general secretary for the Public and Commercial Services union. He expresses concerns about their potential replacement’s intentions, though: “Reform know who to target.”

“They have a strong rhetoric and slogans, but it’s false promises for

workers,” Moloney adds. “People in de-industrialising towns need support. Reform only sees [them as] an opportunity.”

As a new party with only six seats in Westminster, Reform is yet to prove whether it will protect worker’s interests in practice.

The party does have a track record of close relationships with the fossil fuel sector. Reform took £2.3m in donations from oil and gas companies and climate deniers from 2019 to 2024, as reported by climate news and investigations outlet DeSmog.

“I think you need to follow the money with Reform,” says Green Party co-leader Carla Denyer.

“When you see who has made donations to the party, you can see where these messages are coming from.”

Denyer remains hopeful that the party will not be sticking around.

“It’s very worrying, but I think they may be a flash in the pan … I think when voters see Reform, their policies, and how they deal with local councils, they will not want to keep them in.”

Her party has also benefited from the falling popularity of Britain’s dominant parties, gaining local council seats from both parties in recent elections. Now as a key player on the left, Denyer hopes that by backing workers’ rights and the “just transition” to renewable energy, voters will have another option that isn’t Labour or Reform.

“The Green Party has the solutions,” Denyer says. “We know how to run local councils and care about people’s interests.”

The rise of smaller parties in the past five years puts the Labour government in a new bind facing attacks from all sides of the political spectrum. While remaining committed to net zero targets, Keir Starmer faces a problem if his party loses their most loyal voters.

Where they go remains to be seen.

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POLITICS Image: Riverwatch / Gregor Subic

Sing me a river Olsi Nika’s fight to save Albania’s Vjosa River Flavio Duka

T

The town’s bay was turning into a vast dumping ground

The Albanian river Vjosa is declared a national park

spent much of his childhood 10 miles away at his aunt’s house, in a village on the riverbank.

“The river had something special that drew us in. We would lose ourselves there all day, under the shadows of the trees.”

Nika went on to study biology at the University of Tirana, in Albania’s capital. While he was away, his hometown experienced a chaotic construction boom.

“Even though it pained me to see the town overtaken by concrete, it was still nothing compared to the invisible impact it was leaving underwater.

The town’s bay was turning into a vast dumping ground.”

This pushed him to pursue his master’s degree in environmental biology, specialising in marine water quality.

After struggling to find a job and feeling like an outsider in the capital city – “I went through the hardest six months of my life” – he saw an opportunity to work with the environmental organisation, coordinating river protection campaigns.

Nika splits his time between family life in Tirana and over a decade of nonstop activism.

One of the river’s particular enchantments is its connection to Lab Iso-Polyphony, a unique, millennia-old singing tradition in

southern Albania protected by Unesco as intangible cultural heritage.

“Every region has its own way of singing. In areas where the river currents are fast, they sing at a faster tempo. The opposite is true in calmer areas.”

Nika and his team have used this distinctive feature to bring attention to the need to protect the river.

As Nika put it as he accepted his honorary award: “Let’s hear the River’s Song and then keep it free.”

Image: Nick St. Oegger

he mighty Vjosa River springs from the Pindus Mountains in Greece, flowing about 50 miles through Greek territory before winding another 120 miles through Albania until it meets the Adriatic Sea. It has always been a source of inspiration for Olsi Nika, who recently won the 2025 Goldman Environmental Prize, alongside his colleague Besjana Guri, for their work protecting the river.

“There is a deity named Vjosa, who in antiquity was called Ao. That is why the river is still called Aos on the Greek side,” he explains, adding that he named his son Aos after the river.

Nika and Guri are the first Albanians to win this prize, often deemed the “Green Nobel Prize”. They are directors of EcoAlbania, a non-profit for environmental protection which has campaigned to prevent widespread dam construction on the river.

Despite being the last wild river in Europe, the Vjosa – which is also a national park – was threatened by plans for eight large hydropower plants and 37 smaller ones.

“Since childhood, I have had a special connection to the sea,” says Nika, remembering how he once thought the river, so enormous, was the sea.

Born and raised in Saranda, a coastal town in southern Albania, he

Olsi Nika

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POLITICS

‘We’re supposed to be nonexistent, but here we are’ Chagos’s original inhabitants fight to protect their island homes Staś Kaleta

A

t the age of 13, Lucy Siatouss was exiled from her home island of Peros Banhos in the Chagos Archipelago, located in the heart of the Indian Ocean. Over 50 years since the Chagossian people were exiled, she is one of the eldest members of the displaced community in Crawley, England. She is one of the few who still remember Chagos’s thriving wildlife, “all the horses, a lot of donkeys,” she says, and how the fishermen would share their abundant catch with the community.

Upon entering the community centre just one hour south of London, it’s immediately apparent that this is a close-knit group. There are around 50 Chagossians at this week’s lunch club, most of whom are already playing their favourite game of bingo. A traditional Chagossian curry is served, and guests are welcomed into the community. Yet there is a sense that many are not so keen to answer questions.

“They’ve spoken about this so much that they’re tired,” explains community organiser Jemmy Simon. “It’s always the same questions that don’t amount to much.” There’s a heaviness

in the hall, and many faces share the same, pained look.

The Chagossian people, the islands’ original inhabitants, were forcibly exiled to Mauritius and the Seychelles by the British between 1967 and 1972. The islands were colonised and the US Navy was handed use of the largest island, Diego Garcia, as a military base.

The Chagossians have been divided between Mauritius, the UK, and the Seychelles ever since, and are still fighting to return home on their own terms.

On 22 May, the UK signed a deal to hand over the Chagos Archipelago to Mauritius, leasing back Diego Garcia for £101m each year for military use.

The deal states that Mauritius is “free to implement a programme of resettlement” and that the UK will establish a trust fund for Chagossians, with the treaty admitting “a deeply regrettable legacy.” A paragraph on the environment adds that both countries will work “with applicable international law on environmental protection.”

The community is far from optimistic. Maxwell Evenor, a

former spokesperson for Chagossian Voices, says that there has long been no consultation with their groups in the UK. “It’s just another government saying whatever they want,” Evenor says.

Beatrice Pompe, who was born on Diego Garcia, issued a last-minute legal action against the deal, arguing that the Chagossian people had not been given a say in the future of the islands. Her bid was dismissed on the day, leaving her to comment that British officials “still want to give a deaf ear to our cries.”

If we are not preserving all these histories from the elders, it will be gone Like most members of the Chagossian community in Crawley, Marie Othello was not born on the islands.

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POLITICS

Lucy Siatouss, now living in Crawley, was exiled from the Chagos Islands at 13

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POLITICS to do what they wanted, fish when they wanted.”

Odette Botjeanne was part of a select group of Chagossians allowed to visit the islands for 15 days in 2017.

She tears up thinking about the beauty of the archipelago: “It’s small, but it’s got power.”

Since the Chagossians have been away, this has “completely changed”, says Siatouss, with many homes “taken over by nature”. They’ve also started losing many of the places where they used to play to rising sea levels.

Evenor says it is no surprise the environment has struggled since their exile because Chagossians lived in harmony with land and sea for over 200 years. “Just like there is a crime against humanity, against us, I think that our environment has also been violated,” he says. They would have known how to protect the islands, while the UK “doesn’t have a big interest in climate change,” Evenor suggests.

We want our land to be there for generations Yet several scientists are now anonymously questioning the logistics of Chagossians resettling on the islands.

One says this is “out of the equation” because it would require expensive infrastructure – like an airstrip – in a harsh and remote location. A 2014 feasibility study conducted by KPMG, a global advisory service, stated that any long-term resettlement would be “precarious and costly.”

The outlook is not all gloomy. The study does admit that “short-term habitation for limited numbers on a subsistence basis would in theory be possible.” Adam Moolna, a lecturer in environment and sustainability at Keele University, says that “with people present and active intervention, we would have no problem maintaining the islands.” Moolna suggests that a potential solution to this “wicked

Odette Botjeanne (left) prepares Chagossian curry at Crawley community centre

problem” would be to involve Chagossians in conservation, training them as rangers in community-led environmental stewardship.

With limited resources it is difficult to enforce preservation in areas like the Chagos Marine Protected Area, warns Moolna. After all, the Chagos Archipelago spans 250,000 square miles, two and a half times the size of the British Isles.

Dr Peter Carr, programme manager at the Chagos Conservation Trust – and thought to be the only person to have visited every island in the archipelago – agrees. He points to the possibility of Chagossians manning research stations “a bit like in Antarctica” and maintaining cultural heritage sites. He cries as he remembers hosting a few of the visiting Chagossians and running reforestation

If we are not preserving all these histories from the elders, it will be gone

courses for their younger kids. “It was an enormous privilege,” he says.

Evenor agrees that “we need to work with environmental protection agencies, because we want our land to be there for generations and generations.” He adds that Chagossian involvement is “an opportunity for better preservation, because we have always lived in harmony with nature.”

He warns, however, that the longer the Chagossians in the UK are not consulted, the more likely this opportunity will be missed. “My great grandma is dead. My grandma is dead. My grandpa is dead … If we are not preserving all these histories from the elders, it will be gone.”

As plates of curry are cleared away and the last bingo numbers are called out, the community is thanked for their generosity and applause breaks out throughout the centre. The heaviness is still there, but Evenor emphasises privately that “we’ll get somewhere.”

“We’re supposed to be nonexistent, but here we are.”

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Image: Shervine Nafissi / Greenpeace

POLITICS

The Swiss Senior Women for Climate Protection Verdict at the European Court of Human Rights

Jury’s out – are courtrooms guilty of climate injustice?

Activists are winning landmark climate litigation cases, only to see them overturned Oliver Bowbrick

V

ictory didn’t hit home for Elisabeth Stern right away.

Swarmed by journalists and jubilant campaigners on the steps of the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, she was simply moving with the crowd. “In the moment, I never have the feelings that one should have,” she says. “It always comes later.”

It would take some time to fully absorb the facts: she and her fellow plaintiffs, Swiss organisation KlimaSeniorinnen (Senior Women for Climate Protection), had just won one of the most significant climate rulings in legal history. In an international

first, the court found that the Swiss government had violated the human rights of these retirement age women by failing to act on the climate crisis.

Stern has watched the effects of this ripple around the world since it was ruled in April 2024. “Six months ago, there were 12 concrete cases that referenced our judgment,” she says. “How many must there be now?” The KlimaSeniorinnen case was a landmark, but not an outlier.

The courtroom has emerged as a key front in the fight for climate justice as plaintiffs seek to hold governments and corporations to account for failing to protect the environment.

According to a report from the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, over 230 new climate-related cases were filed in 2023 alone, bringing the total to over 2,500 worldwide. These cases range from human rights-based claims like Stern’s, to legal challenges against greenwashing where companies are accused of misrepresenting their environmental efforts.

Climate litigation offers a way for advocates to demand accountability where politics has failed, but some of the most high-profile climate wins have now been overturned on appeal. Lawyers have faced aggressive

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Image: Joël Hunn / Greenpeace

POLITICS legal retaliation from large corporations, and critics warn that courtroom drama may obscure deeper structural problems within the environmental movement. What was once hailed as a breakthrough strategy is now being re-evaluated.

“There’s this fantasy that law has been used in some systemic way to limit power,” says environmental historian Jason W. Moore. “It’s absolutely one hundred per cent untrue.”

Moore is among those arguing that climate lawfare reflects the dominance of the “eco-industrial complex” – a professional class of NGOs, lawyers, and academics that he believes has substituted grassroots environmentalism with a bureaucratic approach.

“What’s missing is a political strategy around litigation: one that connects it to mass mobilisation and democratic pressure,” he adds.

Landmark victories can indeed unravel. In 2024, a Dutch court of appeals overturned a ruling that ordered oil giant Shell to slash global carbon emissions by 45 per cent.

Just three years earlier, environmentalists had celebrated the original verdict as a turning point, inspiring copycat cases, and sending shudders through boardrooms.

While the court upheld that Shell owed a “duty of care” to help prevent further damage to the climate, it concluded that the company was not legally required to meet its own environmental targets. The appeal judges found that Dutch courts lacked the authority to impose such obligations on a global company, dealing a blow to campaigners who had hoped for a comprehensive victory.

Then there’s the case of American lawyer Steven Donziger. In 2011, his team secured $9.5bn (£7bn) in damages from Chevron on behalf of Indigenous communities affected by pollution in the Ecuadorian Amazon.

Donziger was later disbarred, subjected to a barrage of lawsuits by the oil and gas company, and charged with contempt of court. He was placed

under house arrest in New York for nearly 1,000 days, and subsequently convicted before his eventual release in 2022.

The initial ruling was also overturned by the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague. Human-rights groups and supporters have described Donziger’s persecution as corporate retaliation – an abuse of the legal system that demonstrates the risks faced by those who challenge powerful

but argues litigation still has a place: “It is a broken tool, but I also think there are a lot of really amazing, dedicated activists who are trying to bring about change within the legal system that we have.”

For Warren, the long-term power of climate litigation may lie less in setting legal precedent than in shaping how the climate crisis is understood and talked about. “Butterfly adjudication”, she explains, describes how even modest cases can have outsized repercussions – shaping public discourse, inspiring future lawsuits, and reframing climate protection as a human right.

“Each case’s value can be understood in terms of its public visibility and the ability of claimants and litigants to be platformed and tell their story.” In that sense, even overturned rulings or partial victories may serve a strategic purpose to set new expectations in legal culture, and public opinion.

I’m not stupid. I can see what’s happening

Elisabeth Stern

fossil fuel interests. Chevron labelled the accusation an “international smear campaign.”

According to the Grantham Research Institute, the number of corporate counterattacks against climate litigation is steadily increasing.

“The legal structures that are being used to advance climate justice,” Moore says, “are also being weaponised to suppress it.”

Still, others insist that the courtroom remains a key environmental battleground. Meredith Warren, a researcher at Queen Mary University of London, acknowledges its flaws

For Elisabeth Stern and KlimaSeniorinnen, the reprisals have been swift. Swiss politicians denounced the judgment, newspapers ran hostile headlines, and Stern and her fellow campaigners were accused of tarnishing the nation’s reputation. “Within Switzerland, it’s a strong wind against us,” she says.

Still, Stern remains composed. “I’m the kind who sees the glass half full,” she says. “At the same time, I’m not stupid. I can see what’s happening.”

If climate litigation has a future, it may look like this: imperfect, hardwon, and fiercely contested. Its victories may be fragile, its setbacks frequent. But for now, its advocates believe it remains one of the few spaces where the powerful can be held to account and where, at least occasionally, justice can be served.

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POLITICS

Drilling fears split Nigeria’s Ogoni people Painful memories are returning decades after their homeland was devastated by oil extraction Images: Friends of the Earth International / Luka Tomac

David Jenny

Reflection in oil polluted river in fishing village Kegbara Dere, Nigeria

O

n the morning of 7 May 2025, members of the B-Dere community of Ogoniland, South Nigeria, woke to crude oil trickling into their fields and houses. The spill was caused by a leak from the Trans-Niger Delta pipeline, used to transport oil to export terminals on the coast from wells in other parts of the country.

This leak is one of many incidents that have blighted the lives of Ogoni people over the past 30 years.

“People are dying every day of air and waterborne pollution,” explains

Nwanam Gold Sorbari, an Ogoni environmental activist.

Oil extraction was banned on Ogoni soil in the early 1990s, but drilling by foreign companies such as Shell has led to severe environmental contamination in the Niger delta.

Soils, rivers, and creeks are to this day tainted by oil, leading to severe disruption to both the ecosystem and the community’s health.

Discussions are now underway to resume oil drilling in Ogoniland.

On 21 January 2025, Nigerian president Bola Tinubu announced that the

country would increase its oil production to 2 million barrels per year by 2027, up from 1.5 million.

Speaking from the State House in Abuja, Nigeria’s capital, and surrounded by representatives of the Ogoni community, Tinubu announced that his national security advisor would consult with local leaders to restart oil extraction in the region.

“We cannot in any way rewrite history,” he said. “But we can correct some anomalies of the past going forward. We cannot heal the wounds if we continue to be angry.”

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POLITICS The announcement caused an outcry from Nigerian and Ogoni environmental advocates, among them Celestine Akpobari, the national coordinator of the Ogoni Solidarity Campaign. He says that the consultation process is biased in favour of the government: “The President is consulting with leaders who are on his side, but he is completely excluding people who are against him.”

“They divide the people, they look for those that are on their side: politicians, parliamentarians that are for oil extraction in Ogoniland, contractors … and pretend that they are discussing with Ogoni people,” he adds.

The people want to see that our environment is being protected The Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP), an umbrella organisation representing the interests of Ogoni people, also refused to take part in the negotiation.

“The Office of the National Security adviser … chooses Ogoni politicians loyal to the ruling party,” says Celestine Viula, chairman and coordinator of MOSOP. While MOSOP has so far distanced itself from the current process, this does not mean that it opposes oil extraction in Ogoniland. Leaders of the organisation argue that oil extraction, if properly managed, could be a source of economic empowerment.

During a press conference in April, Viula outlined that a key condition should be a 20 per cent royalty on oil profit for Ogoni people. Fabeke Douglas, president of the Ogoni Liberation Initiative, also adds that oil companies should clean up the area before resuming drilling operations: “The people want to see that our environment is being protected.”

But MOSOP’s decision to back oil extraction, even under strict

Oil spill in Kegbara Dere, Nigeria

rules, is dividing the Ogoni community. According to Akpobari, the organisation is currently split into different factions: “They are not even qualified to speak for the Ogoni at the moment.”

The environmental activist stands strongly against oil extraction in Ogoniland, arguing that drilling in other parts of the region has worsened living conditions: “All around the Niger Delta are oil producing communities where people are poorer because of oil ... Fishermen can no longer fish and farmers are unable to farm.”

Akpobari explains that younger generations who didn’t experience the previous era of oil extraction are more enthusiastic for drilling to return.

In the past, companies drilling in Ogoniland violently repressed those who opposed their activities. The violence peaked in 1995, when thenMOSOP president Ken Saro-Wiwa was brutally executed with eight other comrades by the Nigerian army.

According to Amnesty International, Shell was complicit in these murders. While Shell has denied any involvement, the company paid a $15.5m (£9.6m) settlement to Saro-Wiwa’s family in 2009.

Sorbari explains that letting the oil industry return to Ogoniland would reopen the wounds of a bloody and painful history. “I grew up as a little girl running around with my mom, holding me to the bush when there were gunshots,” she says. “People lost their children, their mothers, their fathers and their family members. It’s not something anybody can just wake up one day and say, ‘I want oil extraction’.”

Akpobari, who is now 54, believes that the Nigerian government will resume oil extraction one way or another, a prospect that fills him with fear for the future. “I’m afraid I can’t leave here now because I’m old. The best thing would have been to relocate, go to school elsewhere,” he says. “But I have no choice. I’ll be here.”

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SCIENCE

Cattle are often used in rewilding projects to fulfill the role of their wild ancestors

The Knepp experiment: Britain’s rewilding pioneers How one farm changed the conversation on conservation Milo Thompson

N

ed Win pauses at the woodland’s edge and looks around.

A family of long-horned cattle are blocking the path ahead. “They can be very stubborn,” he says. “We’ll have to find another way around.”

At the Knepp Estate in West Sussex, nature is firmly in charge. Landowners Charles Burrell and Isabella Tree shut down the estate’s arable and dairy farming operation in 2000.

Since then, the 3,500 acre plot has been transformed by rewilding. The land, maintained by grazing herbivores like cattle and deer, is left to act out natural processes without significant human intervention.

“Rewilding is about letting nature take the driving seat,” says Win, one of the estate’s guides.

The results of this experiment are startling. The estate has become a wildlife haven, a biodiverse environment with flourishing populations of endangered species. Walking Knepp’s footpaths, you’re likely to see nightingales, turtle doves, white storks, and purple emperor butterflies.

“The relationship between animals and the land is one we’re rediscovering,” says Win. One surprise discovery has been the climate impact. Stopping intensive farming naturally reduced carbon emissions, but the most unexpected benefit lies underground.

“They looked at the below-ground biomass, and the scrubland stores four times more carbon than expected,” says Win, referring to the 2024

Knepp Wildland Carbon Project study. The study, carried out by a coalition of ecological and financial organisations, found that rewilded land stored carbon at rates similar to newly planted woodland.

“More grazing herbivores means plants put more energy into growing roots underground, meaning they store more carbon,” Win explains.

Stopping at an Iron Age pond where “pigs go diving for freshwater mussels”, Win is clear about the financial motivations behind the project.

This isn’t a pipe dream, this actually works

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SCIENCE

Ned Win is training as a “Young Guide”, part of the “Wild Futures” project

“It was a failing farm. We’re standing on about 300 metres of clay, so in the winter it’s soup, and in summer it dries out.” Faced with mounting debts, the estate sold its dairy herd and farm equipment in 2000.

That same year, Dutch ecologist Frans Vera’s seminal rewilding book Grazing Ecology and Forest History was translated into English for the first time. A visit to Vera’s rewilding project at Oostvaardersplassen, east of Amsterdam, inspired Burrell and Tree to follow suit.

After a decade of letting the land fallow, they received funding from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs to rewild in 2010.

Born out of financial insecurity, the estate is now a model of profitable ecotourism. It runs wildlife safaris, a glamping campsite, and a farm-totable restaurant. Without predators, culling herbivores is essential to avoid overgrazing the land, and has led to a lucrative butchery business.

This model, improving biodiversity and carbon storage while turning a profit, is held up by other projects as an example of rewilding’s potential.

The Wild Tolworth project in Kingston aims to become London’s largest rewilded site. Robin Hutchinson,

director of local charity The Community Brain and a leader on the Tolworth project, cited Knepp to the local council to secure their approval.

“The council officer said, ‘Can you show me an example of where it’s been done before?’” Hutchinson says.

“What Knepp has done is allow people to go ‘this isn’t a pipe dream, this actually works’.”

Knepp’s growing popularity has had a significant impact on the local area. Reactions from those living in villages on the estate have been mixed.

Some residents from picturesque Dial Post, on the estate’s southeast corner, are dismayed by the changes.

“It gets so busy now. People come and take photos of my house which is really annoying,” says Leah Taylor, who has lived in the area all her life. “I stand in my window and stare at them and they get all embarrassed.”

According to former resident Angela Montague, increased footfall has brought more litter, fewer parking spots, and visitors who chase vulnerable wildlife for photos.

Montague says this newfound popularity contributed to her leaving the

village she had lived in for 14 years.

“Dial Post, by the time we left, felt it no longer belonged to the residents.”

But many locals profess love for the estate. There has been a positive impact on business in the neighbourhood. Nikki Seaman, who works at The Crown Inn pub, says “we get a lot more walk-ins now, which is great.”

“Most people I’ve spoken to love the estate,” Seaman adds. “Last week we were listening to nightingales everyday, seeing the white storks fly overhead. It’s the best start to your day.”

Despite the mixed reaction from those living nearby, Knepp’s success continues to inspire rewilding projects and future generations alike.

Back at the woodland’s edge, the cattle are starting to clear. Win takes a few cautious steps forward. He reflects on the environmental workshops for children that he runs as part of Knepp’s Wild Futures initiative.

“You’ve got to inspire a love for nature in the next generation,” he says, watching the last calf disappear into the woods. “If they never have any love for it, they’re not going to want to look after it.”

White storks had been extinct in Britain for over 600 years but are now making a return and thriving in the meadows and wetlands of Knepp

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SCIENCE

Doing more with less Powering the green transition through repair and innovation Images: Ed Harding

Ed Harding

A volunteer fixes a sewing machine at Fixing Factory, Camden

I

n a small workshop in Camden, north London, the sound of tools scraping against metal and plastic fills the room. A young woman leans over a workbench, watching as Isaac Winson – today’s stand-in manager – carefully opens up the broken kettle she has brought in. Together, they test the components, clean the electrical contacts, and determine the source of the fault.

This is Fixing Factory, a permanent space for the public to have their appliances and gadgets fixed, free of charge. There’s one simple idea behind this joint venture between climate charities Possible and Restart Project: minimise landfill, save people money, and share repair skills.

But its significance runs deeper.

“It’s about reducing demand for these items in the first place,” says Winson, who hopes that their model can be scaled-up and replicated across the UK and beyond.

Decarbonising our industries and moving away from fossil fuels is an essential and urgent task. But this transition will require massive amounts of critical minerals on top of the existing demand for consumer electronics and everyday items. Extending the life of what we already own can help ease the burden on supply chains, factories, and mines.

The International Energy Agency predicts that demand for lithium, a core component of batteries, may

increase by up to 700 per cent by 2040. Demand for critical materials used in green technology, such as nickel, cobalt, and other rare earth metals, is predicted to at least double.

To power this transition, we’re mining more than ever. But according to Andy Whitmore, freelance researcher and co-founder of campaign alliance London Mining Network, the public don’t have a clear sense of the impact of these projects.

Mining locations are pre-determined by the natural distribution of materials and often proceed without the approval of local people.

“If you’re a community there, then you have to put up with it, and historically they’ve suffered,” Whitmore says.

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SCIENCE This disproportionately affects those living in the Global South. An estimated 85 per cent of lithium is located on, or close to, Indigenous land.

In the “lithium triangle” spanning Argentina, Chile, and Bolivia, extraction is causing land degradation and ecosystem disruption.

The challenge is to meet this demand while mining as little as possible There are also humanitarian issues.

Seventy per cent of the global supply of cobalt comes from the Democratic Republic of Congo, a politically unstable country with an opaque supply chain. Amnesty International has linked child labour and forced displacement to mining operations in the region.

Whitmore notes that cobalt and other materials are also used

in warfare. He and his fellow campaigners are concerned that green technology is being used as a smokescreen to accelerate mining for military projects. They are calling for regulation to ensure transparency on how minerals are used.

“There’s always a ‘justification’ for mining. In colonial times it was just about making money, then it was industrialising, now it’s critical minerals and green transformation,” he says.

While regulation may help curb the worst excesses of the mining industry, it won’t eliminate the demand. The green transition still needs batteries, cables, and circuits, and that means more extraction. The challenge, then, is to meet this demand while mining as little as possible.

Projects like Fixing Factory achieve this on a local scale by keeping devices and resources in circulation. But this isn’t the only frontier of progress.

Steve Kench is the co-founder and chief technology officer of Polaron, a startup using artificial intelligence to optimise advanced materials design

Steve Kench, co-founder and chief technology officer of Polaron

and manufacturing. While their materials have many applications, their primary focus is batteries, such as those used in electric vehicles.

“There are no real competitors to batteries in terms of how to store energy,” says Kench, “so we’re going to need lots of them in the future, regardless of how energy is produced.”

Polaron’s software uses machine learning to analyse the materials used in batteries and simulate changes, helping manufacturers find the optimal arrangement of particles to suit their needs.

Some of this is simply about efficiency – getting more power out of fewer materials faster. But increasingly, their work is also about sufficiency – helping clients understand how their battery needs to perform, identifying the least harmful way to meet this need.

Do the most with what we have before looking underground “If a manufacturer knows how much energy per kilogram they need, then they can start to think about making processing less carbonintensive, or using more recycled materials,” explains Kench.

While Polaron’s process doesn’t eliminate extraction, it ensures that minerals are used to their maximum potential by considering their impact, rather than a pursuit of performance at any cost.

Back in Camden, Winson finishes working on the kettle. He asks the young woman if she would consider coming to one of their training sessions and learning to fix gadgets herself. She eagerly agrees.

Repairing a humble kettle might be a drop in the ocean where minerals are concerned, but it demonstrates a valuable lesson in the green transition: to do the most with what we have before looking underground.

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The cognitive cost of air pollution Mums fight back against the health impacts of pollutants in the air Image: Joe Twigg / Mums for Lungs

Katie Duffy

A street celebration organised by Mums for Lungs in Lambeth, south London

C

aring for children often means monitoring their screen time, making sure they stay active, or encouraging them to eat their vegetables. But how can parents ensure that they’re breathing clean air?

Recent studies from University College London found that exposure to common pollutants, particulate matter (known as PM 2.5) and nitrogen dioxide (NO2), is associated with worse health outcomes in adolescence, and poorer cognition in adults. “[PM 2.5] is a chemical soup of all the fine particles in the air smaller than 2.5 micrometres,” explains Brian Castellani, a professor of social and public health at Durham University.

“These particles come from traffic,

wood burning, industry, and the atmospheric breaking down of gases.”

As a smaller particle, PM 2.5 can cross the blood-brain barrier once inhaled. This means it can have a direct effect on the brain and nervous system, leading to a higher risk of mental and cognitive issues – even dementia – in later life.

Naturally, parents are worrying about how this affects children growing up in polluted cities like London.

As an individual, there’s not much you can do

“I don’t smoke, I try and give my children healthy diets,” says Beth Wan, an NHS physician and mother to two young children. “But air pollution is really worrying because, as an individual, there’s not much you can do. The things that affect air pollution are policy issues.”

Wan has spent the last two years volunteering at Mums For Lungs, a UK-based grassroots campaign group that advocates for cleaner air for everyone, especially children. The organisation works on multiple national campaigns, including Ditch Diesel, which calls for the phasing out of diesel vehicles in the UK by 2030.

More locally, it pushes for “school streets” – roads closed off to vehicles

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Image: Angela Glienicke / Greenpeace

SCIENCE

London, covered by a hazy smog

during school hours – and for children to walk or cycle instead of being driven to school. These initiatives aim to reduce emissions produced by vehicles, including NO2 and PM 2.5.

Road transport produces nearly half of London’s air pollution, according to a 2022 report from the World Economic Forum.

In 2023, the Mayor of London Sadiq Khan announced an expansion of Ultra Low Emission Zones (ULEZ).

These areas, now operating in all 32 boroughs, charge a fee on vehicles that don’t meet emission standards. Transport for London reports a 27 per cent reduction in harmful concentrations of NO2 since the expansion of ULEZ. Wan lives in the London borough of Barnet and is a member of the Barnet Mums for Lungs subdivision.

The group, she explains, offers an invaluable space to voice her personal concerns. Still, getting anything done locally takes time.

“We’ve been waiting six years for a cycle lane to be put in,” she says.

Matthew Hobbs, an associate professor in planetary health at Sheffield Hallam University, led a longterm study which investigated the pollution risk to children’s cognitive

development. The researchers hypothesised that children are “particularly vulnerable” to air pollution because their brains and bodies are still developing.

The study discovered associations between pollutant exposure and impaired cognition, ranging from difficulty concentrating in school to a higher risk of substance abuse later in life.

Even brief exposure to high concentrations of pollutants can have rapid effects. A University of Birmingham study from February found that participants performed more poorly on cognitive tests just four hours after being exposed to PM 2.5.

Given these health risks, it’s no surprise that some parents see climate activism as a parental responsibility.

“After my second daughter was born, I started thinking about the decisions I needed to make to keep my children safe,” says Rowan Ryrie. She co-founded the Climate Parent Fellowship with Our Kids’ Climate, a non-profit that connects grassroots groups and leaders in a child-focused global climate movement.

Rylie co-founded the fellowship in 2021. The programme, which funds

intergenerational and family-led climate causes, including raising awareness about the environmental impact of coal-fired burners in Poland, and pushing for air purifiers in schools in India’s cities.

“The parent-led intergenerational message can be so powerful because it does cut across those political left and right boundaries,” Ryrie says. “Concern for future generations – that’s something that you’ll get a lot of agreement on in different political spaces.”

Our Kids’ Climate also runs the Our Kids’ Air campaign, made up of organisers from seven countries – including South Africa, the US and Ecuador – that demand urgent policy changes and a transition away from fossil fuels.

Castellani says that addressing air pollution must involve “thinking about the practical and everyday barriers and facilitators to change”, ranging from cleaner public transport to greener urban spaces.

“The path forward is clear,” he says. “By continuing to invest in equitable, health-focused interventions, we can build urban environments where clean air is not a privilege, but a shared public good.”

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SCIENCE

Where are the butterflies?

Under threat from extreme weather, community gardens may offer the pollinators a new refuge Elisabeth Montague

F

or many Brits, butterflies are synonymous with summer – colourful insects that populate our gardens and meadows. But this sight is becoming a rarity as the climate crisis and habitat destruction are pushing British butterflies to the brink.

In 2024, more than half of species in the UK were in long-term decline for the first time, according to the UK Butterfly Monitoring Scheme’s (UKBMS) annual results. Last year was also the second worst on record for the decline of common butterfly populations living in parks, gardens, and other natural areas.

UKBMS attributed the national

population decline to pollution, habitat loss, and most pressingly, the climate crisis. Peter Eeles, an award-winning conservationist and lepidopterist – an expert in moths and butterflies – says that the UK’s changing environment is impacting the creatures in a variety of ways.

Wet and overcast weather is having the greatest impact on butterflies.

Butterfly havens are being lost to housing and industrial developments

The UK’s summer of 2024 was the coolest in nearly 10 years, according to the Met Office.

“When that happens, there’s less opportunity for butterflies to find a mate,” Eeles explains, as different stages of a butterfly’s life cycle are triggered by temperature and weather conditions.

Butterfly havens, he highlights, are also being lost to housing and industrial developments, but “everyone can do something on an individual basis if you have a garden”.

It’s a tall ask. One in eight households in the UK have no access to a garden, according to 2020 data from the Office for National Statistics.

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Images: Elisabeth Montague

SCIENCE For people without immediate access to green spaces, community gardening groups are one way of providing habitats for butterflies and other wildlife.

West Ealing Green Spaces (WEGS) has been transforming unused plots of land in the west London borough since 2021.

After noticing a decline in habitats for wildlife in the city, Simone Short, chair of WEGS, says she asked herself: “‘What can we do about it?’ And gardening was the answer.”

Short says that the development was able to go ahead with financial aid from councils and charitable donations, in addition to support from the community including free mulch from local tree surgeons.

Local residents of all ages have also volunteered their time towards the development to bring butterflies and other insects back into their communal spaces.

“Kids will be walking by and they’ll be like, ‘Okay, what do I do?’,” she says. “That’s the best feeling.”

Short encourages volunteers to view gardening as “seeing yourself as part of nature and living in balance with that, as opposed to just ‘what

can we take for ourselves and not give back’.”

Every Saturday, the community group meets to enlist the help of locals including André Short, Simone’s partner, who says he has seen the space transform from a littering hotspot to a butterfly haven.

“It was a labour of love,” he says, “we had to first just spend a year or two getting litter out of the space.”

After years spent cleaning and cultivating the plot, the space has now become an unrecognisable sea of green, teeming with insects.

Having successfully renovated their first green space, the group have now gained permission from Ealing Council to bring life back to other neglected areas across the borough.

“There’s a little corner over there, right across from the park, that needs a little bit of love,” he adds, pointing across the street.

The space has now become an unrecognisable sea of green

Butterflies in Buckfastleigh Butterfly Farm

With Butterfly Awareness Day this month, community green spaces are more important than ever in the UK’s effort to provide habitats for its dwindling populations of butterflies.

“People need places to live, and so you need brick and you need concrete,” André Short explains, “but then after that, I think it’s important to have spaces where wildlife is still able to exist.”

“They were here first, and they also need a home.”

Left: Butterflies in a West Sussez greenhouse, Right: Simone and Andre Short in West Ealing

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SCIENCE

Can fungi insulate your house?

How fungi-based materials could keep your home warm Images: Marta Abreu

Marta Abreu

PhD student Joni Wildman with insulation samples in the lab at the University of Bath

“W

hen you think of fungi in your home, you probably immediately just think about mould,” says Joni Wildman, a PhD student at the University of Bath leading research into fungi-based building materials.

But while she cultivates her specimens on the microwavable packets of rice you might use in your kitchen, Wildman explains that “the fungi we’re using to make these composites are very different from the mould fungi.”

Wildman’s supervisor is Daniel Henk, professor of mycology – the study of fungi – at Bath. As the

fungus digests the material, “they fuse together into making it a big piece of mycelium, a sticky mass of completely interlinked filaments,” Henk explains.

In nature, mycelium is the part of the fungus that is hidden under the soil, unlike mushrooms which are the fruiting bodies. Henk likens this to their new role insulating buildings, “hidden away inside of walls and hopefully never thought about once they’re installed”.

“We never actually let them make mushrooms, so they’re probably very disappointed,” he jokes.

A 2023 UN report stated that the building sector is the largest emitter

of greenhouse gases, globally responsible for 37 per cent of emissions.

These emissions include the production and transportation of traditional insulation materials, like plastic-based expanded polystyrene. Even though they are effective, Wildman explains they require a lot of energy to manufacture and can take thousands of years to degrade.

But without this insulation, excess energy is spent cooling buildings in summer and heating them in winter.

In the UK, homes lose heat up to three times faster than other European countries, making them some of the least energy-efficient on the

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Right: Image courtesy of HBO

Fungi can digest materials including food packaging

continent, according to a 2020 study by the smart home company Tado°.

Wildman hopes that fungi-based insulation materials will become a realistic alternative. Since they are fire-resistant and biodegradable, she says they could find a particular niche in temporary structures like acoustic wall panels.

The materials are already being tested in four buildings across Europe, in partnership with the EU-funded project INBUILT and the insulation company Mykor.

Back in Wildman’s lab, the process also makes use of recycling: the mycelia fuse together on materials that would otherwise be landfill, such as wood from construction or agricultural waste.

Easy to grow, robust, and super cheap These are often difficult to dispose of and some have “a load of nasty chemicals,” Wildman says, but they make an ideal substrate for fungi, constituting the material that they eat and eventually colonise. “They kind of eat everything.”

Once the fungus colonises these materials, the researchers dry the filaments and the specimen dies, stopping its growth. Wildman says these processes can each take a week or two.

Several species of mushroom fungi can be used, as long as they are “easy to grow, robust, and super cheap”, Henk says, aligning with their efficiency goals.

“One of the cool things Wildman has looked at is that there is a mushroom for every environment,” he adds. Fungi are found worldwide, and different species can grow in environments from rainforests to deserts.

That means mycelium-based materials can be grown even in the face of global heating.

The materials can also be engineered in a way that traditional ones cannot. “They’re made with a living thing,” explains Wildman, “so there could be ways to make them more mould resistant without having to apply nasty chemicals.”

One challenge is encouraging the adoption of these sustainable alternatives, says Wildman. “The traditional materials are cheap, easy to make,” she says. “People are kind of used to them [whereas] people don’t know anything about mushrooms or

fungi, and the things they know are the mouldy stuff in the shower.”

Surprisingly, even blockbusters like the HBO adaptation of The Last of Us video game, where a cordyceps fungus causes a zombie outbreak, can widen acceptance. “When the TV series came out, people were much more interested in the research,” Henk acknowledges with a smile. “The more people pay attention, the more we can get done.”

Fungus colonises a host in HBO’s The Last of Us

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SCIENCE

The UK’s disappearing seaside villages North Norfolk coastal communities are being taken by the sea, these are the villagers fighting against it Joseph Watt

A bungalow overhanging the cliffs of Hemsby Beach

N

orfolk seaside village Hemsby looks much the same today as it did in the 1970s. Loud neon coin pushers and flat-roofed Vegas-style bingo halls still line Beach Road, curving east towards the coast, the village’s proudest feature.

The beach itself is one of the few features that has changed dramatically. It has mostly disappeared into the sea – along with three rows of homes.

Hemsby is among the seaside villages in the East of England hardest hit by coastal erosion, having lost more than 300 metres of beach over the last half a century. Reports estimate that 1,305 north Norfolk properties could disappear into the sea within the next 80 years.

The Environment Agency has committed £5.2bn for flood and coastal erosion management projects. But

acessing the funds has proven difficult for communities like Hemsby, where many wooden seaside homes fall outside the criteria for protectable assets.

Kevin Jordan retired to a bungalow here in 2009, after the death of his wife and eldest son made staying in his inland cottage too painful. He planned to spend his retirement on his front porch, playing guitar over the sound of waves folding onto the dunes. Over the next 14 years, those dunes steadily disappeared. His house soon followed.

Jordan’s home was ordered to be demolished by the council in November 2023 after storms left it at risk of falling into the sea. Ten months later, he and two co-claimants lost a High Court case challenging UK climate adaptation plans for failing to protect coastal residents.

He is now appealing to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), claiming that the protections provided under the government’s Third National Adaptation Plan (NAP3) are “hopelessly inadequate”. “It has infringed upon our human rights,” the 70-year-old says. “I lost my home because the government didn’t do anything.”

Jordan’s ECHR submission is under review, bolstered by a scathing review of Britain’s climate change preparedness by the Climate Change Committee, the UK’s independent environment watchdog. Their report concludes that NAP3, enacted in July 2023, “falls far short of what is needed” and requires an “urgent refresh”.

Coastal erosion is a natural process in which waves gradually strip land from the shoreline – albeit one that is

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Images: Joseph Watt

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Simon Measures, head of Save Hemsby Coastline, stands infront of the village’s crumbling seaside cliffs

speeding up due to destructive storms amplified by the climate crisis. North Norfolk coastlines are particularly exposed due to their location.

“They’re basically lumps of clay that stick into the North Sea,” says Gerd Masselink, professor of coastal geomorphology at the University of Plymouth. “The waves just want to straighten out that coastline,” he explains. Masselink says that the geography of the North Norfolk coastline means building defences is harder and more expensive.

“I can’t see anything changing quick enough to rescue this now,” sighs local resident and Save Hemsby Coastline chairman Simon Measures.

“Every time we get a glimmer of hope that something’s happening, it will get slammed in your face again.”

with greater permanence. These requirements exclude Measures’s property, Jordan’s former home, and all other housing on Hemsby’s immediate shoreline due to their wooden builds. “It’s not about properties and assets. It’s about people, homes, and livelihoods,” Measures says.

Great Yarmouth borough councillor James Bensly says Environment Agency funding criteria should be adapted to remove the “chimney formula” and include profits raised through tourism. He believes, with changes, “Hemsby would be well

placed to get sea defences.” But, to Jordan, the damage has already been done. His home remained unprotected until its demolition. “I wish I hadn’t moved. I wish I was still in that cottage.”

“This is a bitter and twisted sadness being here,” he says of being rehoused by the council to a ground floor flat in Martham, a village three miles inland.

“The local authorities and the government have left Hemsby behind.”

Still, he remains undeterred, fixing his sights on his new ECHR submission. “I’m always hopeful. What else have I got?”

This is a bitter and twisted sadness being here In 2023, Hemsby was refused government funding for beach defences because the value of protected assets at risk was not high enough to balance installation costs. Funding criteria includes only houses with brick chimneys, since they are considered structures

A sign warns of unstable cliffs along Hemsby’s coastline

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SCIENCE

Could US loss be European gain?

Image courtesy of Sarah Weisberg

Climate scientists turn to Europe as funding cuts ravage American institutions Camilla Mina

I

n October 2024, marine scientist Sarah Weisberg thought she’d secured her dream job at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the US government scientific agency that plays a crucial role in predicting extreme weather events.

After only a few months, she saw her dream evaporate with Trump’s administration changes. “There was a lot of uncertainty … they terminated the positions of many probationary workers, including mine. That was very difficult,” says Weisberg, who specifically focuses on marine ecosystems. Around a quarter of her coworkers also lost their jobs.

Weisberg is one of the many scientists now leaving the country for better opportunities and working conditions. A recent poll by the journal Nature suggests that 75 per cent of US scientists are considering leaving the nation and looking for jobs in Canada and Europe following the White House’s slash-and-burn policy on academic funding. The grants subject to review were selected due to their association with a list of banned words, including “climate crisis”, “climate science”, and “pollution”.

Many research projects have been cancelled entirely or are now underfunded, significantly affecting areas like climate science and technology. Columbia University lost $400m (£296m) in federal contracts after declining to remove its diversity initiatives. The Trump administration also cut $4m (£2.9m) of Princeton University’s climate research funding,

Weisberg sampling plankton in the field

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Image: European Union

SCIENCE

Image: Gage Skidmore

President von der Leyen presenting the ‘Choose Europe’ Initiative

with the claim that the university creates “climate anxiety” with “exaggerated climate threats”.

The UK and Europe stand to benefit from this brain drain, as American experts from elite universities look for friendlier places of employment.

Britain, which has the advantage of sharing a common language, is the obvious choice – but the situation is complicated by the fact that British universities are facing their own funding cuts. The UK Research & Innovation organisation, responsible for distributing government grants to universities, has seen its £9.1bn budget slashed by £300m.

Four out of five UK universities are considering cutting research spending, with 19 per cent having already done so in the last year, according to a survey by Universities UK. “It’s very far-reaching,” says Joeri Rogelj, director of research at the Grantham Institute and professor of climate science and policy at Imperial College London. “These funding cuts undermine long-term programmes and expertise.”

Rogelj warns that such cuts leave the planet “less prepared for climate extremes that we have experienced over the past years, and will be

continuing to experience in the years and decades to come.”

Opening new fellowship positions is already challenging enough and nowhere near enough to offset the impact of the American cuts, he adds.

Meanwhile, European universities and research centres have moved in the opposite direction, expanding programmes and securing more long-term funding.

On 5 May, French president Emmanuel Macron organised a meeting at Sorbonne University with the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, to discuss the future of climate research. Macron pushed national research institutions in France to welcome American scientists and launched the Choose France for Science initiative to show that France and Europe can be “places of stability and academic freedom for researchers all over the world.”

In a statement posted on X, he said: “This call is directed to all free minds who want to work for science and defend a certain vision of society.

Researchers from all over the world, choose Europe for science!”

Donald Trump at a campaign rally, 2016

We believe that research should be protected as much as possible In his closing speech at the Sorbonne, he said that the initiative has already “generated over 30,000 visits, one-third from the United States, with several hundred application files opened.”

Aix-Marseille University in France also announced that it wants to fund the work of 15 academics in health, astrophysics, and climate in the form of a new Safe Place for Science project, which will be a three-year €15m (£10.9m) programme.

At the Sorbonne conference, Von der Leyen announced “super grants” for scientific excellence via the European Research Council. The council has also decided to double the additional funding available for grantees relocating to Europe.

Other European universities have proposed similar special programmes to attract researchers from abroad.

Jan Danckaert, rector at Vrije Universiteit Brussel in Belgium, explained that now more than ever, European universities need to stand for the values that led to the creation of the European Union.

“We believe, as a university, that research should be protected as much as possible from pressures from outside, whether they be ideological, political, religious or others,” he says.

“The freedom in academia has made Europe grow from the Renaissance until now.”

Weisberg says she didn’t want to leave the US. But, in March 2025, she packed up her life and headed to Denmark, where she now works as a professional advice officer at the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea. Many of her colleagues have not yet found new roles or ways to continue their work.

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Can AI forecast future weather patterns?

The race between traditional meteorology tech and AI Image: European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts

Martin Miraglia

An AI-generated temperature forecast for 6 June 2025

O

n 28 August 2005, Robert Ricks was a meteorologist at the National Weather Service’s (NWS) Forecast Office in Slidell, Louisiana. He knew what was coming.

Katrina was quickly approaching as a Category 5 hurricane.

“It was pretty much destined to hit our way,” he says, but determining the intensity of the landfall was “daunting and uncertain”.

As duty lead forecaster, he took the responsibility of writing the bulletin upon himself, likening Hurricane Katrina’s strength to the devastating Hurricane Camille of 1969.

At 10:11am, his warning for

Katrina had been issued. It spelt doom.

“MOST OF THE AREA WILL BE UNINHABITABLE FOR WEEKS,” one passage reads, warning of water shortages that were due to cause “incredible” suffering.

NWS did not undersell Katrina’s impact. The hurricane and ensuing floods killed almost 2,000 people when dykes around the city failed.

Twenty years later, weather forecasts produced by artificial intelligence models are laying the groundwork to replicate Ricks’s foresight. Experts believe they may enable better decision-making

and eventually replace traditional forecasting technology.

“Weather forecasting is currently based on taking many observations of the atmosphere all over the globe,” explains Alan Thorpe, the former director general of the European Centre for Medium-Range

The sheer pace of AI development is what thrust it into meteorology’s next space race

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Image: Patrick Strandberg

SCIENCE Weather Forecasts (ECMWF). “Those initial observations predict, using a computer model, the future state of the atmosphere.”

This approach, known as numerical weather forecasting, allows meteorologists to quickly produce the weather forecasts we see on our smartphone apps and weather bulletins.

AI models, instead, use “a different approach that bases itself on the historical record of how weather has varied in the past to predict the future,” Thorpe says. The results are promising.

ECMWF has publicly released forecasts from AIFS, its AI model, since late February. Its predictions match the accuracy of traditional forecasts up to five days in the future.

After this point, AIFS ends up taking the lead.

By the tenth day, AIFS is accurate some 57 per cent of the time.

This marks a slight improvement on traditional numerical forecasts in the same timeframe.

Other AI models, mostly developed by tech corporations, are also competing to push the boundaries in weather forecasting.

Google claims its GenCast model was the first capable of producing a 15-day ensemble, which refers to a set of slightly different forecasts based on the same initial conditions. These are then compared to determine the likeliest outcome.

Aside from novelty or performance, the sheer pace of AI development is what thrust it into meteorology’s next space race.

The computational constraints are pretty significant “Back in 2020 I had a 10-year roadmap, and people busted through that in about two years,” says Aaron Hill, an associate professor at the University of Oklahoma whose work focuses on the use of AI in

Supercomputer in Sweden

weather forecasting. But predicting when the next breakthrough may come can be difficult: “If I tell you five [years], it’s probably only going to be one,” he notes.

Some issues do persist. The first is that AI models work at a “very coarse resolution”, in Thorpe’s words.

Weather forecasts are made by dividing the world — or a portion of it — into a grid. Reasonable expectations are based on what the weather will be like at a specific time for each square making up that grid.

As with pixels and image resolution, the forecast will improve in accuracy as the squares making up the grid shrink in size and go up in number.

While traditional weather prediction works on squares of 5.5 by 5.5 miles, machine learning models like AIFS operate on 22 by 22 mile squares, Thorpe explains.

For global predictions, “we can’t really go down to higher resolutions yet, in part because we don’t have the datasets we need … but also the computational constraints are pretty significant,” Hill echoes.

The most comprehensive data source to train an AI model is ERA5,

a database of weather observations collected since 1940 and maintained

by ECMWF. Almost every AI model is based on ERA5, so errors in it may carry through to future forecasts.

“A lot of first iterations of these AI weather prediction models did not predict rainfall, in part because ERA5’s precipitation data … was not very good,” Hill explains.

Most models “only output the six-hour time step, so they skip six hours into the future, and then you have to kind of interpolate in between if you want to see what happened,” explains David Gagne, a machine learning scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado.

Forecasts are, however, becoming more granular. NCAR has just released a collaborative platform called Credit, which allows the entire scientific community access to its AI models including a new atmospheric simulator.

On the back of these developments, the latest generation of AI may better equip forecasters in predicting extreme weather events like Hurricane Katrina.

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Business

Images: Ben Miley-Smith

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BUSINESS

How can fashion be sustainable?

A new wave of innovators are proving how ethical style can be both genuine and affordable Mary Downer

“P

eople don’t know how to shop, and that’s not meant in a patronising way at all,” says Andrea Cheong, author of Why Do I Have Nothing to Wear? and founder of mending workshops across London.

Previously a fashion influencer, Cheong’s career shifted when she began criticising and examining the fundamentals of fashion: their composition and tailoring.

The content creator reviews boutique and high street brands on her Instagram and TikTok channels, unpicking their sustainability claims while testing their materials and quality.

“Sustainable” is a popular greenwashing buzzword used by the fashion industry. Looking at fabric composition is one easy yet effective way to judge the real durability and climate impact of what you’re buying.

“I knew what quality clothes were, because my mother had drilled it into me when I was younger,” Cheong explains, “but I still wasn’t following my own advice.”

“I realised that all these claims of using recycled material weren’t legit, especially when the clothes were constructed so poorly that they were falling apart.”

Cheong hopes to break down the common misconception that price indicates quality.

In one video review of cult designer Sandy Liang, she shows how a £600 jacket is made of 100 per cent polyester, and a £300 grey Left: Bio-based textiles by Ultrafabrics

knitted jumper made of 35 per cent nylon.

“No everyday piece of clothing needs to have synthetics in it. It just doesn’t,” says Cheong.

Synthetic fibres made of crude oil have become responsible for up to nine per cent of annual microfibre pollution ever since they surpassed the use of cotton in the mid 1990s.

Five hundred thousand tons of microfibers are released from these textiles into the ocean each year from washing machines — the equivalent of 50 billion plastic bottles.

Organic materials such as cotton don’t have the same problem, but they still take up valuable land space and use vast quantities of water in the growing and manufacturing process.

As an alternative, some textile companies are developing innovative biobased solutions that make use of waste materials.

“Everything we do going forward is to the sustainability line,” says A.R. Swan, senior marketing director at Ultrafabrics, speaking from the company’s stall at the Clerkenwell Design Fair in central London.

No everyday piece of clothing needs to have synthetics in it Ultrafabrics make sustainable alternatives to animal leather and vinyl fabric (PVC). They think about emissions at every stage of production, from solvent recycling and solar panels at their factory, to

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Images: Milo Thompson

BUSINESS

Swan at the Clerkenwell Design Fair

donations of offcuts to avoid material going to landfill.

The American-Japanese company was established in 1999, when it moved into a Japanese mill that had been in use since the sixties. “The process is pretty much the same, but we’re upgrading the ingredients all the time,” explains senior manager Genevieve Boaler.

These upgrades have led to their biobased collections. “We make a resin out of biobased ingredients to replace [plastics],” says Boaler holding up the supple, leather-like materials and the raw resources they are made from side by side.

Since the company manufactures its products in Japan – where scallops are widely consumed – it repurposes shells by crushing them into a powder that is then spun into yarn.

Back on the high street, Sam

Mabley, co-founder of British ethical clothing brand YesFriends, is working to restructure the business model of fashion to balance affordability, sustainability, and ethical practices.

He learned while running sustainable pop-ups in Bristol that smaller brands will apply a large markup to cover their own costs, followed by another price hike for the retailer. “So if they bought a T-shirt for a fiver, it will cost £25 plus in a store, because you’ve got to account for all of those costs.”

“I was being interviewed for a sustainable fashion blog, and the interviewer said, ‘I’ve heard it costs £30 to make a fully ethical T-shirt,’ and I just thought, ‘that’s not true at all’.”

That’s when Mabley decided to found his company in 2013, selling natural-fibre garments produced in highly certified factories. The starting

price? £12 for a T-shirt or tank top.

Their direct-to-consumer model – shipping straight from factory to shopper – enables these affordable prices. They also ensure high quality working conditions with a pioneering bonus scheme for their garment workers where shoppers can directly tip the people who make their clothes.

“I think it’s simultaneously a really complicated issue, because there’s all these macroeconomic problems going on with it, and it’s governments and trade unions and all of this kind of stuff,” says Mabley.

“Then it’s also a really simple, solvable problem.

If more brands wanted to make changes, they could.”

In the meantime, take Andrea Cheong’s advice: check the inside labels of your clothes.

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BUSINESS

British olive oil could soon be in your kitchen While olive groves invite images of warm Mediterranean hills, global heating is bringing them to an unlikely location Image: Lera Cooke / Ventnor Botanic Garden

Selin Azimkar

Chris Kidd harvesting olives in Ventor Botanic Garden

V

entnor Botanic Garden on the Isle of Wight is not where you would expect to find olive trees.

But, nestled beneath protective cliffs and softened by sea air, the garden is now home to a crop not usually found in Britain – and global heating could bring more of this Mediterranean staple to our shores.

“We’ve got an olive grove here containing about 20 to 30 olive trees, some of which are quite mature,” says Ventnor head gardener Wayne Williams, “and we do have those starting to produce fruits.”

British microclimates – like the one at Ventnor – offer small, sheltered pockets of land where heat gathers and sunlight lingers. Warmth is often trapped by natural features like slopes, stone walls, or nearby bodies of water. These features help to shield

the area from cold winds, and makes frost less likely to settle.

Chris Kidd, the olive garden’s curator, says the grove was planted between 2010 and 2011 and is now beginning to fruit more reliably. As conditions continue to warm, the gardeners are learning from their olive trees to consider other crops that could be grown in the UK’s future climate.

In a hotter future, olive growth will be less dependent on microclimates.

A 2024 scientific review predicted that olive farming will move further north to higher ground, due to rising temperatures, less rain, and poorer soils making it harder to grow olives in traditional regions.

The study notes that farmers will need to adapt how, and where, they grow.

Some British farmers are already

planting olives far beyond the country’s most frost-free southern reaches.

“This year, we’ve had one of the sunniest, driest springs on record, last year it was wet and dull, I’m learning every week,” says David Hoyles, a Lincolnshire-based farmer.

Hoyles spent almost a decade in Portugal and Spain watching olives flourish. Now back in England, he is applying his learnings to The English Olive Company.

“It is my passion and enjoyment of the Mediterranean lifestyle that is driving me. It’s opening other opportunities for farm diversification,” Hoyles says.

His Lincolnshire trees are just beginning to mature. “It will be the first flowering this spring, and then I’ll have a better idea after 2025 as to whether we can produce.”

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British production may become increasingly relevant as traditional olive heartlands in the Mediterranean come under climate-induced pressure.

Dcoop, a major olive oil corporation in southern Spain’s Andalusia region, represents 75,000 families whose farms are facing extreme heat and drought across their olive groves.

Spain produced 850,000 tonnes in last year’s crop, and only 665,000 tonnes the year before. Historically, average production has been in the region of 1.3 million tonnes.

“Droughts don’t necessarily affect the quality of products. The main problem is the fall of the crops,” says Esteban Carneros, the director of corporate relations at Dcoop.

The company has embraced smart farming as a means of adaptation.

Since 2020, they have used technologies like soil sensors and data-driven irrigation systems to improve efficiency.

These systems help to ensure consistent growth through a network of pipes, channels, and sprinklers delivering controlled amounts of water when rainfall is scarce.

“Our farmers are learning by our technician’s advice. We are working on projects to use regenerated waste waters of the city of Malaga in olive yards,” Carneros explains.

Image: Esteban Carneros

Image: Lera Cooke

BUSINESS

Dcoop olive groves in Spain

Fresh British olives from Ventnor Botanic Garden

Despite these tools, some agricultural experts worry that farming practices themselves are part of the problem.

Louise Ferguson, a professor of plant sciences at the University of California’s Davis campus, notes that industrial planting methods worsen the olive trees’ vulnerability to heat and water stress.

While olive trees are naturally adapted to drought, “they weren’t planted at 400 or 800 trees to the hectare like they are now,” she explains, “some of those new orchards in Spain look like rows of boxwood hedges.”

For Annelies Broekman, an agricultural engineer with the

Centre for Ecological Research and Forestry Applications, based in Catalonia, Spain, the focus remains on supporting traditional growing regions.

Broekman welcomes experimentation but questions how far it can go.

“I think it’s beautiful to experiment and to find out the possibilities. But for the UK to save olive production in Europe … I think it’s totally out of scope. It’s nonsense.”

I think it’s beautiful to experiment and to find out the possibilities In the UK, the arrival of olive crops signals both opportunity and loss.

Adapting to climate change may mean letting go of traditional crops while embracing others.

At Ventnor, Williams reflects on which crops might vanish in a warming Britain. “We might not be able to grow apples, cherries, and plums in the future because they need colder winters,” he says, “but we will be able to grow citrus, olives, and dates as the climate changes.”

Whether the UK becomes a key player or a passing note in its future, olive farming is now a living experiment in climate science and farming.

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Image: Greenpeace / Barbara Veiga

BUSINESS

Future-proofing bananas The world’s favourite fruit was engineered for perfection but is now a victim of its own success Ben Miley-Smith

E

nveloped in their own biodegradable packaging, bananas are a remarkably versatile fruit. You can spot it decorating Hindu weddings as a traditional symbol or cradling scoops of ice cream; its leaves are used to roof homes and dress wounds. But the future of the world’s favourite fruit is under threat.

In March, researchers at the University of Exeter warned that growing bananas will become economically unsustainable for much of Latin America and the Caribbean by 2080.

Rising temperatures driven by the climate crisis are expected to make cultivation increasingly difficult.

It’s a sobering forecast for a crop worth $11bn (£8.1m) annually, which is a vital staple food, export commodity, and source of income to around 400 million people, according to Christian Aid. Fears of a banana-less future are nothing new. From the 1830s to the 1950s, the Gros Michel, or ‘Big Mike’, was the world’s banana of choice.

That changed in the 1950s, when the soil-borne fungal Panama disease devastated global plantations. The fungus attacks plants at their roots, cutting off water and nutrients, leaving fields of withered stalks and triggering a worldwide shortage. Producers turned to a tougher alternative in its place: the Cavendish.

It was a supply chain dream: fast-growing, thick and resilient skin, and ideal for shipping. Today, the Cavendish accounts for 99 per cent of global banana exports, with around 50 billion tonnes produced each year, according to The Future Market.

“We want the Cavendish because we are used to the Cavendish. We have no idea that there is another kind of banana,” says Dr Rony Swennen, a banana breeder at the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA).

The Cavendish comes with serious flaws. It guzzles water, depends heavily on pesticides and fertilisers, and is dangerously vulnerable to disease.

A new strain of the Panama disease, Fusarium Tropical Race 4 (TR4), has been spreading since the 1990s.

The Cavendish, like its ill-fated predecessor, is at risk of becoming a monoculture vulnerable to fungi like TR4, says Dr Desalegn Etalo, an expert on Panama disease and assistant professor at Wageningen University & Research. “Nature thrives through variation – it’s what allows ecosystems to adapt and survive.”

Monocultures, where a single crop is grown in a particular area, damage the ecosystems they depend on.

Heavy fertiliser use kills off beneficial microorganisms, creating sterile fields where little survives besides the cash crop. In the short term, it’s

Above: Locals Trade Fruit and Vegetables at a Food Market in São Paulo, Brazil

profitable. In the long run, it causes ecological collapse.

Both Swennen and Etalo agree the banana is far from doomed. The problem, they argue, isn’t the fruit itself, but how we grow it.

To prevent disease, small scale farmers in Africa and Asia practice agroforestry, the cultivation of bananas alongside other crops. This promotes “TR4-suppressive organisms, producing chemicals in the soil that help them to flourish”, explains Etalo.

With alternative farming techniques and consumer tastes shifting beyond the Cavendish, Swennen says the main threat of monocultures can be eradicated. “We grow bananas in a completely wrong way. It belongs in the forests, with a canopy above, and a cover crop on the ground.”

While the Cavendish’s days as top banana may be numbered, the fruit isn’t going anywhere. “It’s just a moment. Saying the banana is finished, I don’t believe it,” says Swennen.

If anything, our palates may be broadened to sample the fruit’s extraordinary diversity, from the rich, dense Matoke to the sweet, vanilla-like Nam Wah. You could even call it a ripe opportunity.

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BUSINESS Image: Dorian Fulvio

The radical pensioners taking on Blackrock Public pension funds are using muscle to fight the corporate world’s retreat from climate commitments Mary Downer

S

ince Donald Trump entered the White House six months ago, there has been an extensive and well-documented pull back from environmental targets across the corporate world. But a movement of public pension funds are looking beyond his presidential term to secure financial backing for a more climate-friendly future.

“New York City is ready to take a stand and be loud about it,” says retiree Dorian Fulvio. Having worked in the city since 1985, Fulvio began investigating her pension fund shortly before retiring from her post as the chief information officer for the comptroller — the city’s chief financial officer and auditor — in 2014.

“I connected the dots that my pension – what I was going to rely on for the rest of my life – was all wrapped up in fossil fuels. And so I needed to do something,” she explains.

Fulvio is one of thousands of members of the New York City Employees’ Retirement System (NYCERS), which manages over $89bn (£66bn) of pension money for the city’s workers. It has a significant history of leveraging its capital in favour of the climate, having voted to divest from fossil fuel reserve owners back in 2021.

We can’t continue to invest in things that are harming us Led by comptroller Brad Lander, the NYCERS scheme recently issued an ultimatum against its asset manager firms, including

Blackrock, for backing down from their climate commitments. They argue that while investment in fossil fuels is evidently damaging to the climate, it’s also a worse financial outcome for shareholders.

Pension funds are a unique yet powerful tool for climate campaigners. Globally, these funds represent over $46trn (£34trn) in assets, but they remain one of the largest institutional investors in fossil fuels. In the UK, it is estimated that every pension holder has an average investment in fossil fuels of over £3,000, according to Make My Money Matter.

“Climate risk is financial risk, and we can’t continue to invest in things that are harming us,” explains Fulvio.

Unlike some other funds, pensions are designed for a longterm trajectory. An employee in their twenties today may not be claiming their retirement until the 2070s, by which time researchers predict the global economy could halve in value without immediate policy action addressing the risks of the climate crisis.

The shareholder is seen as two people: the employee putting money aside today and the retiree spending that money in decades to come. So the pension fund’s fiduciary duty – a commitment to act in the best interest of the investment’s returns – extends to a future in which the climate crisis will have real and costly effects on our societies.

“New York City keeps moving ahead in spite of what’s happening in this current political context, and to kind of combat

Dorian Fulvio campaigning

it too,” says Cassie Cain, climate finance campaigner at Stand.earth, a non-profit research centre providing solutions to climate issues.

Despite this, “there are more fears [from pension funds] of being sued over fiduciary issues”, Cain cautions.

“That’s kind of the climate right now, where people who are taking certain progressive policies are targets, legally.”

This conflict between short-term political shifts and long-term investment outcomes has already led to a lawsuit against NYCERS. In March, three retirees with pensions in the fund accused it of neglecting its fiduciary duty by divesting from fossil fuels.

The case was dismissed by the appellate court after the plaintiffs “failed to establish standing because they did not demonstrate an injury” on their “speculative” claims.

As to the latest ultimatum, their asset managers have until the end of the month to respond. Fulvio is cautiously optimistic about their response.

“How they manage their portfolios for the European market is already considering these things,” she points out.

Their will to replicate these practices in the US remains to be seen.

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Images: Benjamin Miley Smith

BUSINESS

Westmill founder Adam Twine at the wind farm

The communities propelling green energy As local councils fumble millions in climate funds, community energy projects are showing what real climate action can look like Benjamin Miley-Smith

A

mid the twitter of birds and the scent of manure, the steady, hypnotic whoosh of the five wind turbines at Westmill Wind Farm in Swindon hums in the air.

“Building community is very important to me,” says Adam Twine, founder and owner of the land where the wind and solar farm stands in South West England. Dry mud clings to his fingertips, and at any moment he expects to be called away to help deliver a calf.

Community energy projects across the country are trying to follow in Westmill’s pioneering footsteps, but many are struggling to get projects off the ground. In London, councils have been allocated £170m since

2016 through the Mayor of London’s carbon offset fund. The money is meant to be dedicated to local carbon-cutting projects, but less than £40m has been spent.

Twine’s approach to farming mirrors his outlook on life: hands-on, climate-driven, and collective. An anti-nuclear activist in the 1980s, Twine began looking for ways to make his land more sustainable.

Inspired by Denmark’s success with community wind power, where 20 per cent of new projects must be locally owned, Twine set out in 1992 to build the UK’s first community-owned wind farm.

At the time, the UK renewables industry was still in its infancy: the first commercial wind farm

opened in Cornwall in 1991, and the first community-owned project, Baywind in Cumbria, wouldn’t arrive until 1997.

Without a roadmap, Twine spent 12 years battling for planning permission, facing Nimby resistance, concerns over bird populations, and logistical hurdles, before finally getting the green light. The £4.5m cost was raised by 2,400 community members.

The five turbines stand 39 metres tall, with 10-tonne blades collectively generating 1.3 megawatts, enough power for around 1,500 homes.

Westmill is widely regarded as the gold standard for community energy projects in the UK, but newer

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BUSINESS schemes now face escalating obstacles. An April 2025 Guardian investigation revealed £130m of carbon offset funds allocated to London’s 33 councils – 28 of which have officially declared a climate emergency – remains unspent. Intended to support carbon reduction projects, councils blamed a lack of time, resources, and expertise for delays in deciding how to use the money.

Meanwhile, two-thirds of councils admit they are unlikely to meet their net zero targets, saying climate action was being “strangled” by hard-toreach funding pots.

Croydon Community Energy is one group feeling the strain. Founded during the Covid-19 pandemic by Connie Duxbury, also chair of Community Energy London, it launched in November 2021.

Since 2016, Croydon Council has received £5m through the Mayor of London carbon offset scheme but spent just 22 per cent. Worse, the council has been declared effectively bankrupt three times since 2020 and faces a £98m shortfall in 2025-26.

“It’s been hard,” says Duxbury. “Especially since they got rid of subsidies like the feed-in tariff” – a government program that paid households for generating their own renewable energy – “which made previous projects more viable.”

The group proposed installing solar panels on council-owned schools and leisure centres, offering free installation and long-term savings. Instead, the council demanded £72,000 in rent from the community organisation for the privilege of using rooftops that currently stand empty.

It gets people engaged. It makes them feel like they own part of something

According to Croydon Community Energy, installation could have saved the council £100,000.

The group turned to privately owned sites instead. Through a mix of small grants and community fundraising, they raised £120,000 in April, enough to start installing panels on a church, a school, and a Hindu temple.

The benefits of community-owned energy are tangible. Duxbury points to the 2022-23 energy crisis, when wholesale prices spiked and bills for most households soared. Communities supplied by local renewable projects, however, were shielded.

Solar panels at the Westmill Wind Farm

Yet barriers remain. Chiefly, the UK’s clogged grid connection system, where thousands of renewable projects wait years for access to the national grid. Many of these socalled “zombie connections” belong to speculative developers with no serious plans, blocking credible projects for up to 15 years. In April, the government promised to clear the backlog, claiming it would unlock £40bn a year in private investment.

Duxbury remains sceptical. She points to the wider political climate that has stalled community energy projects in recent decades, from the Conservative government’s effective ban on onshore wind to the scrapping of the feed-in tariff. Though Labour reversed the wind ban in July 2024 and pledged to deliver eight gigawatts

of community-owned power by 2030 through its Local Power Plan, Duxbury has doubts – “not unless they fund the sector”, she says.

For her, the true value of community energy isn’t just clean power – it’s what it enables. “It gets people engaged. It makes them feel like they own a part of something.

Loads of groups run food banks or school programmes from the profits.

It’s real end-to-end community stuff.”

Community energy groups and councils need to work together, says Jessica Dunning, a director on the board of Westmill Wind Farm Co-Operative. “The council gives a group legitimacy,” she explains. “You need a cultural shift and you need people’s opinions on these kinds of things to change, and a community energy group is the best place to do that.”

Beyond clean power, these groups have a social role too. “Community energy groups fund poverty alleviation schemes. They have energy advice schemes. They’re working with people in the community that are shut out of the transition and shut out of using energy, in many cases because of the high cost.”

Westmill has proved what’s possible when communities take control of their energy. Out of it grew the Westmill Sustainable Energy Trust charity and the farmer-led NGO Farm Carbon Toolkit, both dedicated to spreading the knowledge and spirit of collective energy.

Back on the wind farm, Twine recalls a moment when it nearly all fell apart. After almost 12 years of planning, spirits were low in one crucial meeting. “I didn’t think it was going to happen,” he says, rubbing his brow.

Then, from the back of the hall, one person stood up in defiance. After all these years, they pleaded, they could not let it fail.

As the turbines turn steadily behind him, Twine explains that’s what truly made Westmill work: the spirit of a community that refused to give up.

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LIFESTYLE

Britain’s winemakers flourish in warmer climates

Poppy the dog in Artelium vineyard

UK vineyards are thriving as temperatures rise, but can they compete against established producers?

David Jenny

O

n a green hillside in East Sussex, thousands of grape vines stretch further than the eye can see. The Artelium vineyard grows a variety of grapes to produce still and sparkling wines.

The company first planted crops in 2018, and produced its first bottle three years later. It now sells its products throughout the UK and exports

to countries from Norway to the US. Artelium is part of a wider boom in British wines. According to WineGB, there were more than 4,000 hectares dedicated to wine production in the UK in 2024, a 74 per cent increase since 2019. This makes wine the UK’s fastest growing agricultural sector.

WineGB projects that there could be almost 7,700 hectares of vines

in the UK by 2032, thanks largely to more favourable conditions caused by the climate crisis.

As a result of global heating, the Met Office projects warmer, wetter winters and hotter, drier summers with more frequent heat waves and heavy rainfall. “The whole ecosystem is changing,” explains Chris ScottGray, a tour guide at Artelium.

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BUSINESS It may be easier to produce wine in England as temperatures rise, but the wine connoisseur warns that conditions may not always favour production. Last year’s unusually rainy weather in June, he explains, actually led to a lower yield of wine produced.

You even find a winery in Yorkshire nowadays

can pop up in unexpected parts of the UK. “You even find a winery in Yorkshire nowadays,” says wine merchant Tom Gilbey.

The acidic nature of grapes grown in England, he explains, are most suited to producing sparkling wines.

“Red wine drinkers want something with a bit of juiciness and body and our climate can’t do that,” he adds.

Gilbey warns that British production still lags behind more established wine-making countries. “Our industry is a fledgling industry. We produce 20 million bottles of wine in the UK, whereas the Champagne region of France alone produces 300 million.”

As the nation’s climate continues to warm, the future of British winemaking looks bright. A combination of innovation and a more favourable climate could position the UK as a contender in the global winemaking market.

Images: David Jenny

At the Artelium wine estate, several weather stations have been installed to monitor the climate.

Scott-Gray explains that frost and wet summers are the biggest threats to winemaking. In cases of frost, bonfires are lit to “move air around to protect the grapes,” he says.

Britain’s wine industry has been around for a long time. Though

often considered to be a 21st century endeavor, winemaking in the UK actually began during the Roman invasion of the British Isles during the first century BCE. But it was only at the end of the 1980s that the industry truly began to develop, thanks to Stuart and Sandy Moss, a wealthy American couple.

The pair bought the Nyetimber Estate and planted their first vines in 1986, “and by 1996, they had won the international wine challenge”, adds Scott-Gray.

Wine production in the UK is concentrated to the southern regions of England, with Kent, Sussex, and Hampshire home to most wineries.

Scott-Gray indicates that the south of the country sits right on the edge of what is traditionally considered a wine-growing area: “Vine is best grown between the latitude of 3050°C, so we are right on the cusp, right on the edge.”

These days, however, a vineyard

Right: Weather machine at Artelium vineyard Left: Artelium wine

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Lifestyle

Images: (L) Rae Rostron (R) Joseph Watt

08/06/2025 19:54:56

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Reverend Helen Burnett’s path to climate activism Rae Rostron

Images: Rae Rostron

An act of faith

Reverend Helen Burnett

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LIFESTYLE

R

everend Helen Burnett is sitting in a pew at the back of her church in Surrey, South East England. “We have to be God’s hands and feet. God’s not going to come in and sort it out – except through us.”

The “it” she refers to is the climate crisis. As both a vicar and a mother of four, the 65-year-old brings the same depth of care to environmental justice as a priest would offer to a parishioner.

Nursing a cup of tea and wrapped in a red shawl to fend off the draft – a shade that matches her glasses, watch strap and lipstick – Burnett says that she was ordained just eight years ago.

But, raised in her father’s vicarage, the self-described liberal Christian has never been a stranger to faith.

“I’m deeply Biblical,” she says, “I take the Bible as our sacred text, but it has to be read through the lens of where we are now.”

“There’s activism that attracts certain personality types and I’m clearly one. There’s being awake to what’s going on in the world and being prepared to keep looking at it, not to look away.”

Burnett is an active member of Extinction Rebellion (XR) and was arrested in 2019 following a protest on Lambeth Bridge in London.

We’re having to live very differently, we need to be able to love each other She assumed she would be ostracised from climate activism because of her profession. “But it was completely the contrary. There I was in my dog collar with people saying, ‘Oh, this is fantastic that you’re here.’”

“My attitude was that my white middle-agedness and middleclassness is a privilege I can use.”

During the protest, she and other XR members sat in the road and

Chaldon Church overlooks Surrey’s North Downs

obstructed traffic for approximately three hours before their arrest. “It felt like it was holy ground.”

Burnett has distrusted the police since she was a teenager after her brother was violently arrested at Notting Hill Carnival. She admits to having an internal conflict as a vicar who “must love everybody. But also thinking, ‘you’re a police officer, I’ve learned not to speak to you.’”

The reverend’s own arrest in 2019 was more discreet. She recalls the arresting officer being apologetic, admitting his Catholic girlfriend would never forgive him. That night, she fell asleep in her cell reading feminist author bell hooks.

This March, she joined a group of women aiming to carry out citizen’s arrests of oil executives from BP and Shell. Although they were unsuccessful, the executives were served with indictment papers accusing them of committing criminal offences. The case is now with the Crown Prosecution Service. “For a while, I had the

grandchildren of Ken Saro-Wiwa living on my road. Shell murdered that man,” she says of her motivations for joining XR. “I wanted to look them in the eye.” The Nigerian environmental activist was executed by the country’s military dictatorship in 1995 after leading a movement that demanded that companies like Shell take responsibility for destructive oil extraction in the Niger Delta.

In June, Burnett will lead a pilgrimage of 60 miles walking through 60 parishes. Each stop will focus on local climate resilience.

“We’re not going to bring down the system that has created climate change,” she says, “so we have to build communities of mutual aid.” She gestures at the rural Surrey town outside the window of her church. “In areas like this, people are pushed away by activism to some extent.”

“But when the time comes, which I think it will, where we’re having to live very differently, we need to be able to love each other.”

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LIFESTYLE

Raise a glass for kelp Hastings rewilding project joins forces with brewery to help revive kelp along the East Sussex coast Images: Milo Thompson

Sophie Storey

Chris Williams, Hastings Kelp Project, looks over the shoreline that will soon house the kelp farm

C

hris Williams, 49, sits down on a black leather sofa in the Hastings Aquarium Café. A large cup of coffee rests next to his open laptop on the table in front of him. He is nursing a slightly sore head after celebrating Hastings Kelp Project’s first birthday the night before.

As project manager, it is a big milestone. And what better way to commemorate it than with a pint or two of freshly brewed kelp beer?

Parts of the southeast coast of England were once so densely blanketed with kelp that its beaches were barely visible. But over the past 20 years, Williams has watched these thriving underwater forests all but disappear.

Fishing trawlers wiped out kelp populations in areas like Worthing by tearing up the rocky seabed and destroying the plant’s natural habitat.

Since the introduction of a trawling byelaw in 2021, which was supported

by the Sussex Kelp Recovery Project, shoots of regrowth have begun to emerge.

Their future still remains precarious as rising sea temperatures, agricultural runoff, and chemical waste from nearby water companies continue to stress the plant.

“It was just really quite sad to see,” Williams says about a walk at Beachy Head last year, where he spotted only a handful of the plants.

In an effort to restore biodiversity

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LIFESTYLE

Chris Williams, Hastings Kelp Project

to the area, Williams launched the Hastings Kelp Project. Inspired by Steve Allnutt – who began cultivating kelp in his Lancing garage in 2023 while working for the NHS – Williams now juggles the project alongside a job in finance.

This year, he partnered with The Brewing Brothers, a local microbrewery, to raise awareness of the plant with his unique product.

Hastings Kelp Project grows a small batch of kelp in independent, domestically maintained tanks that the brewery then incorporates into its brewing process.

at The Brewing Brothers Imperial.

As half of the profits go straight back to the Hastings Kelp Project, drinking a pint of Seaforestation directly supports the initiative – if you can get over the subtle salty aftertaste, which is surprisingly refreshing.

“Everybody that has a pint is helping with the plant,” explains Williams.

For him, getting people to talk about kelp, whether in the lab or at the pub, is all part of the plan.

He hopes to grow the algae in controlled conditions and replant it along 4.5 miles of coastline between Pett Level and Ecclesbourne by spring 2026.

“Hopefully then, by the end of next year, it’ll just be kelp forests everywhere,” he says.

These underwater ecosystems are a powerful tool for tackling the climate crisis. According to the Department of Earth Sciences at Cambridge University, kelp’s ability to grow rapidly makes it an excellent way to capture and store carbon.

Kelp forests also act as great nurseries for fish and soften the impact of storm waves, reducing the threat of coastal erosion.

Hastings Kelp Project is now ready

to install tanks at Hastings Aquarium to trail various heating, lighting, and sediment arrangements in search of the optimum growing conditions for the plant.

There’s so much wonderful world, and life, out there Until now, most of the work has involved administration, fundraising, and navigating permissions from councils and organisations. Williams notes that all eight authorities he needed approval from operate separately, with little coordination.

He is still waiting for one to get back to him.

Nonetheless, Williams remains optimistic and wants to create a “scalable blueprint” for nationwide kelp restoration projects.

“It would be fantastic to see things like this pop up all over the country,” he says. “There’s so much wonderful world, and life, out there. And it could be so much better – hopefully we will get people to see that.”

Everybody that has a pint is helping with the plant The Brewing Brothers have sold the climate-positive Seaforestation ale since 2021, where a tree is planted for every pint bought. Their new Seaforestation brew is currently on a pilot trial at their Imperial branch in Hastings.

What is so special about making a pale ale with kelp? “It makes it taste like the sea, to be honest,” says Joel Thompson, standing behind the bar

Joel Thompson pours a pint of kelp-infused beer, Seaforestation

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It’s not you, it’s the climate crisis Are environmental views becoming a dealbreaker for a new generation of daters?

Ishbel and Danson in Scotland

W

ould you date someone who didn’t feel strongly about climate change? For the eco-conscious singleton, the question has never been more pressing.

In 2024, the world’s largest study on climate change revealed that 69 per cent of people said the climate crisis is impacting their big decisions, from where they choose to work and live to what they buy – and, presumably, who they shack up with.

Sustainable daters say their partner’s views on the environment are among their biggest considerations when looking for a potential match.

Eco-friendly speed dating events like Love and Climate, in New York, are helping to match up green-minded couples. Dating site OkCupid has even introduced a feature that allows its users to filter out climate deniers.

With the climate crisis weighing on our collective consciousness more than ever, it’s hard to imagine dating someone whose perspective on the environment differs dramatically from your own.

Jill Crosby, who launched the eco-friendly dating site Green Singles in 1999, says “it is possible – but it

depends on the level of openness and respect both people bring to the table.”

Crosby has been in relationships where her partner didn’t share her sense of urgency surrounding the climate crisis. “What I learned is that values show up in behaviour more than beliefs.”

One previous partner “wasn’t very vocal” about climate issues, says Crosby, “but they composted, reused everything, and lived very sustainably.”

Another “talked a lot about environmental issues but didn’t walk the talk.”

What Crosby learned from these experiences, she says, is “that actions matter most – and that it’s okay to differ on some topics as long as there’s integrity, openness, and alignment in the bigger picture”.

It can be harder to navigate these differences if you’re not a certified climate dating guru. Sophie, 26, has stuck with veganism her whole life for environmental reasons – which is more than the nurse from Wigan can say about her romantic partners.

Sophie’s ex-boyfriend was a meateater, which led to disagreements between the couple.

“It’s not just because of the meat that it didn’t work out, but it definitely didn’t help the situation.”

Her current partner is “mostly vegan” and “definitely understands why I’m vegan, which is more important to me than him being vegan himself.”

On the other hand, Ishbel, a vegan for whom climate change has been “hugely important in all aspects of my life” for as long as she can remember, is in a long-term relationship with a meat-eater.

The couple manage their dietary differences through compromise and understanding. “My partner isn’t vegan,” the 25-year-old bartender explains, “but he eats pretty much entirely vegan with me.”

The issue, she says, is less straightforward when it comes to dating someone whose views differ significantly from hers: “I probably wouldn’t date someone who works in the oil industry because I want a partner who has the same ideas as me. In a relationship, you want someone that matches your perspective and understands you.”

And what of the omnivore’s perspective?

Ishbel’s handyman partner, Anson, says he loves the challenge of cooking vegan.

“I have to think of different ways to cook things and use different things but still maintain flavour. I really enjoyed that at the start as a challenge, but now it comes second nature.”

“Cooking a cabbage compared to cooking a steak, same difference. It’s all in the seasoning.”

Image: Ishbel

Jennifer Kennedy

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LIFESTYLE

No kids allowed Inside the growing movement of eco-conscious people refusing to procreate Olivia Taylor

T

he consequences of the climate crisis are influencing even the most personal of choices: whether to have a family.

A recent paper published by Nature has found that 52 per cent of people born in 2020 will experience unprecedented lifetime exposure to heatwaves if global heating remains at 1.5°C. It is now an indisputable fact that future generations will be plagued by climate extremes. With that in mind, a growing number of people are confronting the uncomfortable question of whether it is ethical to have children at all.

Each child avoided is less emissions, which is kind of dark and anti-human The Birthstrike Movement has offered a radical solution to this question since its founding in 2019. The movement is characterised by a choice to forgo offspring to protect them from worsening social, economic, and environmental conditions. For some, it’s a personal statement. For others, it’s a collective stand.

Aga Marzalek and her husband Spencer Rocchi describe their choice as an urgent awakening. “I was thinking about kids and all of this throughout my life,” Marzalek says. “But when we found Birthstrike, it really hit home.

We’re striking against what’s happening with the climate crisis by not having kids.”

When asked if their beliefs made them antinatalists – the view that procreation is unethical – both Marzalek and Rocchi point out that they don’t hate children. “We’re not full-blown

antinatalists,” Rocchi says. “I like to think there is a grey area, like if there’s a world worth bringing kids into, if they’re going to have their basic needs met.”

“Having a kid is a selfish thing to do. The climate crisis just puts the nail in the coffin for us.”

For others, the decision of whether to have children is not as final.

Charlotte Lastoweckyi is a member of the UK Youth Climate Coalition and has been a passionate eco-activist since her early teens. “We’re living through a crisis that we didn’t cause, and yet we’re being asked to make impossible choices – like whether or not it’s responsible to bring new life into a world of growing uncertainty,” Lastoweckyi says.

“People should be supported in making the decisions that feel right

for them, without shame,” she says.

Lastoweckyi explains that she is still questioning whether or not to have children. “But if I do, I want them to grow up knowing that I did everything I could to fight for a world where they – and everyone – can live with dignity, safety, and joy.”

Luke Grant, a physical scientist at Environment and Climate Change Canada and co-author of the Nature study, questions the ethics of Birthstrike’s stance. “I don’t know that choosing not to have children forms any solution,” he says. “I suppose it is a solution only in a sense that each child avoided is less emissions, which is kind of dark and anti-human, but otherwise I see it as people avoiding presenting their children with ‘the difficulties ahead’.”

As temperatures rise, the choice to become a parent has become a political statement reflecting individual views on the future of the climate.

While the future remains uncertain, there are some with a fierce commitment to building a world where children can thrive.

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LIFESTYLE

Words into action Liv Torc uses poetry to bring stories of climate activism to life Images: Staś Kaleta

Staś Kaleta

Liv Torc performing at a We Feed The UK event

L

iv Torc, 46, knew she wanted to be a poet from a young age, but remembers her dad being “really clear that was crazy”. “You’ll never make a living,” he told her. He was equally pessimistic about the future of the planet, as Torc outlines in her 2019 poem The Human Emergency: “Dad, is the human race over? Is there still any hope?”

He would lift his pipe to his toothless gums and say nope, And continue to smoke…

She seems on edge about being interviewed, teetering in the seat behind her stall. Torc’s is one of many at this We Feed The UK festival in Bristol, celebrating some of the UK’s best photography and poetry

dedicated to the climate crisis. Torc explains that she is neurodivergent and still gets really nervous before performances. “I don’t really fit into the normal,” she says.

Yet Torc’s modesty belies the fact that the Hot Poets, a group she co-founded to communicate climate change science via spoken word, has attracted international acclaim, including from the UN. Torc herself transforms into a powerful speaker onstage. Her calls to action and powerful gestures quickly fill the room with listeners. “The minute I get on, I’m somebody else,” she says.

Torc points to The Human Emergency as her first work to capture wider acclaim. In it, she expresses fear for her children and offers her

response to climate change as a mother, and to her Dad’s pessimism: …God may not exist, but I know there is something powerfully magic that weaves all our lives, that pokes us and loves us And wants us to evolve and survive.

The poem went viral, inspiring movements like the activist group Mothers Rise Up. Torc says spoken word has a natural ability to bring people together and “ignite the wow” – a personal motto referring to the sense of wonder she believes is latent in each of us.

“When you’re an artist, you don’t have a choice [in what you do],”

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LIFESTYLE

Haiku prompt cards for attendees

Torc says. With a cheeky grin, she mentions an art school project where she put pineapples in sunglasses and hats all over Dartington, in South East England, and got locals to write about them. She once got a school of parents to write poems on bananas in their kids’ packed lunches, and started a viral haiku project during the pandemic, where she put together a weekly video montage of some of the thousands of three-line poems she had received from followers.

There’s so much more power we have to galvanise people, to move people Yet there are two sides to Torc – one of a creative mind, and the other of a marketing strategist. She spent a decade as a media officer in the communications industry, learning to market projects. She tells stories in a way that invites community, something she attributes also to time spent among new-age druids, whom she describes as smart and interesting people who have learnt to live with nature and each other.

In 2022, Torc was chosen to be one of the UN’s 50 international thought leaders, working on poetry projects from Botswana to South Korea.

“We need better stories,” she says, reflecting on her travels, “to share with more people all the great climate action we just don’t hear about.”

Dr Jocelyn Page, a consultant for Greenpeace’s Just Poetry initiative, says that “artivism” like Torc’s is on the rise because “it helps to illustrate and imagine possibilities that might not exist in other forms of activism.”

Activism through art also reaches audiences otherwise put off by traditional forms of protest.

But Torc says she now wants to work more with the local communities “really experiencing” climate change.

“It all matters,” she says, “whether you’re working with international

people at COPs [UN Climate Change Conferences], or at a farm in Somerset.” The next stage is to train more Hot Poets and share their work in schools across the country. Itching to go and write haikus with passersby, Torc recalls one more story before she heads out. She once watched a wellknown poet at Glastonbury Festival perform about climate change and use the line “we’re dead and every part of me knows it.” Her reaction? Not despair, but hope. “Maybe as artists we can do something different. There’s so much more detail and depth that we can get across. There’s so much more power we have to galvanise people, to move people.”

The Hot Poets stall

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Climate charities fail to keep pace with marathon mania Why environmental campaigns should join the race for donations Hope Federico Image: Tom Pagenet

A

s Sasha Woods turned onto the Mall outside Buckingham Palace, her jog slowed to a walk. Four hours, 27 minutes and 26 seconds after the starting gun, Woods accomplished something she never imagined: finishing a marathon.

Over seven hundred charities sponsored nearly 57,000 runners in the 2025 London Marathon. But Woods’s sponsor, Earthwatch Europe, was one of just four participating initiatives centered on climate action.

Marathon fundraising remains largely untapped by climate activist groups. Advocates like Woods are hoping this will change. Research suggests climate initiatives benefit from local, human representation – could marathons become a new means for climate activism and demonstration?

“I realised I wanted to help save the planet,” says Woods, explaining her decision to leave a successful career in genetic research to join Earthwatch Europe as the director of science and policy.

The microbiologist turned environmentalist does not consider herself a runner, but a climate activist: “I’ve always been a fairly active person, but I was never big on running.”

“At Earthwatch, we have places available for running the marathon.

They advertised the ballot for the 2025 London Marathon just after the last one,” she says. “It looked like the most fabulous day – I was like ‘yeah, I could do it, of course I could do it’.”

After her colleague reminded her to start training, she thought: “Gosh, now I’ve got to actually run a marathon.”

London Marathon 2025 runners

Alongside five other runners, Woods raised £9,177 for Earthwatch Europe.

While the London Marathon Group is already promoting 246 charities for next year’s race. Of those, only one – the Worldwide Fund for Nature – advocates for climate action and conservation.

Whether the absence of climate initiatives is the result of disinterest from charities, or a lack of promotion from event organisers, the scarcity is palpable for climate activists like Woods.

She chalks this up to the personal impact of other causes. “It’s not like environmental causes aren’t human causes, but it’s as if they lack a human element.”

Nathaniel Geiger, a professor of climate communication at the University of Michigan, agrees with this sentiment.

“The iconic image for climate change for a long time was a polar bear. Sure, people have sympathy for

polar bears, but they’re also something very distant,” he explains. “For the average person, you can only relate so much to something that you haven’t seen, and that’s so far removed from everyday life.”

“As a result, it feels like this distant, abstract thing. That’s something storytellers and communicators are trying to change.”

Geiger recommends positive displays of activism on a local level to help encourage environmental action.

“Ultimately, people are most motivated to take action when they feel like they’re a part of something bigger. They need to feel inspired but also reached on a personal level.”

For Woods, there is also an abundance of similarities between running a marathon and fighting climate change.

It’s a physically and emotionally grueling fight. When you think you’ve made progress, miles still remain – but you’re never alone in the journey.

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Image: Unsplash / Matt Jones

LIFESTYLE

A paved front garden

How does your garden grow?

Paving trend harms nature and exacerbates flooding Zena Erhabor

O

n an ordinary residential street in Barnet, north London, Lee Neighbour watches as parents double-park for school drop-off. His front garden – once a patch of grass and foliage – is now a slab of grey concrete with just enough room for a car.

“Living near a primary school made parking near impossible,” he says. Like an increasing number of suburban homeowners in the UK, Neighbour paved over his front garden as a practical fix to a daily problem – less hassle, more control, no parking tickets.

Something that affects the climate that people do have control over But as rows of green space across Britain vanish under tarmac and gravel, it raises a bigger question: what happens when thousands of small, apparently sensible choices begin to reshape the environment?

Campaigners argue this growing trend is damaging both neighbourhoods and the natural world.

If you pave it, you reduce the life of the ground “It’s something that affects the climate that people do have control over,” says Donald Power, an officer at the Ealing branch of Friends of the Earth.

He sees the cumulative effects at street level: “It changes the look of a street and makes it look less attractive.”

While the shift may feel subtle, its impacts are profound. “Anything that’s a green space is better for wildlife. A traditional front garden with plants and bushes is a good space for insects and birds.”

“If you pave it, you reduce the life of the ground. Thousands of creatures underground will not be able to survive.”

Paving additionally contributes to rising temperatures in urban areas.

“It’ll make it hotter,” Power explains.

“Vegetation tends to have a cooling effect. Harder surfaces absorb more heat from the sun.”

It also worsens surface flooding, as rainwater is unable to soak into the ground.

The London Climate Resilience Review, a 2024 report commissioned by the Mayor of London, highlighted that London is not prepared for the risks of surface flooding. Extreme weather events in 2021 and 2022, including flash floods and record heat, have exposed the city’s vulnerability to climate threats.

Power believes many residents simply aren’t aware of the knock-on effects on nature. “I think they worry more about their cars and saving money on parking.”

“Although the council wants people to stop, they have created an incentive for people to do it.”

There are other incentives too.

“They want to charge their electric cars from their house,” he says. “It’s cheaper to use electricity from your house than the charging points on the street.”

While convenience and cost are often the motivators, Power challenges the assumption that paving is easier. “It’s not that low maintenance. Weeds grow out between the cracks. People probably spend more on maintenance.”

What can eco-minded front garden owners do? Power recommends low-effort greenery: “cottage garden plants that you could plant, that don’t need much looking after.”

He leads by example: “For 15 years we’ve been planting vegetables in our front garden. It produces lots of food that we eat, lettuce, and strawberries.”

In a changing climate, the smallest patches of green might be doing more than we think.

The choices we make on our doorsteps can shape not just our streets – but our collective future.

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LIFESTYLE

Nature as therapy How a breath of fresh air is the latest treatment for your well-being Images: Rae Rostron

Rae Rostron

The ecotherapy tent in New Addington Circular, a nature reserve

A

t first glance, New Addington in Croydon feels like any other London borough. People are hurrying to work, smoking cigarettes at the tram stop, and weaving through crawling traffic. There are a few trees, some patches of grass, and little to suggest you’re anywhere close to nature. That is, until you reach the New Addington Circular.

This peaceful nature reserve is home to psychotherapist Beth Collier’s Nature Therapy School, where for the past 10 years she has been practicing ecotherapy, helping people reconnect with the natural world and themselves.

Here, Collier leads clients on walks through the woodlands, encouraging them to sit beside trees, listen to the birds, and talk to her as they process their emotions.

“This way of working is really effective with clients who have experienced trauma,” she explains, adding that “nature is so regulating” for our nervous systems.

For Collier, nature changes the way we experience emotion. Outside, our feelings “dissipate as if with the wind … indoors, the feelings and the stress just hang in the room.”

Her path to this work was shaped by her own experiences of isolation.

Raised in rural Suffolk, she grew up without knowing any other people of colour. That sense of disconnection propelled her move to north Croydon, where 70 per cent of the population is Black and brown, where she has established her ecotherapy practice.

Yet here, she notes, access to green space is unequal. According to the Health Foundation, only five per cent of Black British, Caribbean or African people live in neighbourhoods with the most access to green space in the UK. Collier is not alone in her endeavour. Over 8,000 miles away, in Cape Town, South Africa, clinical

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LIFESTYLE psychologist Chesney Ward-Smith also recognises the healing potential of nature.

Ward-Smith works with adolescents aged 12 to 18, many from under-resourced backgrounds. “Their main concerns are poverty, food, school,” she explains. “The idea is to help them connect with nature so that they can care about it.”

To think of ourselves as separate from nature is a fallacy Access is an issue here, too. Many parks and reserves in Cape Town charge entrance fees, creating a barrier to those who can’t afford them.

To help level the playing field, WardSmith works voluntarily to provide young people with equal access to the environment.

“To think of ourselves as separate from nature is a fallacy,” she says.

“We’re not just here frolicking in the grass; there are real, tangible, scientific benefits to being here.”

Both Collier and Ward-Smith have faced scepticism for bringing psychotherapy outdoors.

“There was a lot of pushback in the beginning,” Collier admits, describing how psychotherapy can be ultratraditional in its approach.

Ward-Smith agrees, noting that Western clinical psychology tends to focus on the individual, while ecotherapy allows you to work outside in a group, where “you hope it would expand a sense of self for people.”

Both Croydon and Cape Town grapple with social inequality. For Ward-Smith’s young clients, that stress comes from trauma, poverty, and academic pressures.

“We’re working with dysregulated kids,” she says. “There’s a lot of stress in daily life, high unemployment, and so taking them into the forest, immediately you see a sense of just being able to breathe out.”

In London too, people of colour are more likely to live in areas with higher noise, air pollution, and limited green spaces – a reality Collier says deepens feelings of loneliness and shame, which have real health consequences.

This is rooted in the systemic racism of the environmental movement, she argues. “Wide open space is amazing because our bodies mirror it – that sense of expansion, opportunity, of seeing things differently.”

Beth Collier runs Nature Therapy School, helping people to reconnect with nature

Ecotherapy sessions take place in nature

Farid Kelekun, project manager for Impact on Urban Health, a non-profit that address health inequalities in city life, echoes Collier’s concerns.

“The climate issue is not just an issue of temperatures warming up,” Kelekun explains. “It’s what happens to us once that happens. And how people are disproportionately affected by climate change as a social justice issue.”

In both Cape Town and London, it is those living in the most deprived areas who are the most affected. Cape Town has experienced reduced water supplies, increased heat, and multiple severe droughts, while London faces an increased number of heatwaves, heavy periods of rainfall, and a decrease in air quality.

For practioners in both contexts, ecotherapy isn’t just a therapeutic tool, it’s a way to make nature accessible again.

“We’ll care for nature more when we come to understand our personal relationship with it,” Collier says. “If you’re not connected to it or there’s no nature left to connect to, that’s going to impact us. People underestimate relationally how traumatic that is.”

Ward-Smith shares that view. “If you can’t connect with nature, you’re not going to care about it.”

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Puzzles 70_shorts_puzzles.indd 70

DATING CHAGOS FRONT GARDEN BRAIN DRAIN FUNGI EROSION KELP BUTTERFLIES BANANAS ECOTHERAPY

REWILDING WINE PENSIONS WEATHER MARATHON RIVER OLIVE REFORM CHILDREN

08/06/2025 20:00:33

Down: 1. Shoe-shaped impact on earth (6, 9) 2. Clarkson’s latest endeavour (7) 3. Biannual journey of geese (9) 5. Traffic stop sign and measure of harvest (5) 6. Brainchild of John McCarthy (2) 7. Absence of dependability (10) 12. Expecting (8) 13. Moorlands and site of Napoleonic war prison (8) 14. Energy provided by Greek god Helios (5) Head to theoffsetmag.com for the answers!

71_shorts_puzzles.indd 71

Across: 1. Liquid powering offices worldwide (6) 4. Ill fated mother of Pixar fish (5) 8. Empire on which the sun never set (7) 9. Conglomerate and broadleaf biome (6) 10. 1995 movie featuring Robert the Niro and Al Pacino (4) 11. Inhalation of flavoured fumes (6) 14. Source of sea sounds and pollution (5) 15. Fields of layered decomposing plant matter (9) 16. Former British prime minister known for their dancing skills (3) 17. Private residence protection (9) 18. Antithesis of old age (5)

08/06/2025 20:00:54

In each episode, we go deeper into conversation with individuals tackling the climate crisis in a unique way.

Come with us as we venture from the worlds of mushrooms and poetry, to international courts and football pitches, and lots of other new climate activism.

Scan below to listen!

Images: Greenpeace / Steve Morgan, Oliver Bowbrick

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Podcast

If you’ve enjoyed reading our stories, why not listen to The Offset Podcast?

08/06/2025 20:01:44

Meet The Offset team

Editor-in-Chief Oliver Bowbrick

Deputy Editor-in-Chief Marta Abreu

Deputy Editor-in-Chief Joseph Watt

News Editor Martin Miraglia

Politics Editor David Jenny

Science Editor Katie Duffy

Business Editor Camilla Mina

Lifestyle Editor Jennifer Kennedy

Chief Sub-Editor Mary Downer

Sub-Editor Ben Miley-Smith

Sub-Editor Elisabeth Montague

Production Editor Rae Rostron

Photo Editor Milo Thompson

Art Director Olivia Taylor

Art Director Selin Azimkar

Digital Editor Ed Harding

Social Media Editor Kate Peacock

Social Media Editor Sophie Storey

Podcast Editor Hope Federico

Podcast Editor Staś Kaleta

Reporter Zena Erhabor

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Reporter Flavio Duka

The Offset team would like to thank Yuen Chan, Zing Tsjeng, and Chris Tilbury for their invaluable advice and assistance.

Without them this magazine could not exist.

08/06/2025 20:42:35

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08/06/2025 21:09:21