In the late 1990s, while undertaking a Harkness Fellowship in the USA and working on a book on ‘Making Environmental Laws Work’, I visited Silicon Valley to talk to some of the company managers there about environmental regulation and the US computer industry.
On 2 December 2024 at the Oxford Climate Society our climate website The Borrowed Earth Project was proud to launch two highly original reports by its Pakistan Research Fellows.
November 2024 saw the publication of the 2024 5th edition of Halsbury’s Laws of England, Water & Waterways, vols 100 and 101, for which I was Consultant Editor, along with the expert Editor Siobhan McKeering. This made for a busy summer.
I am delighted to have started on 1 July 2024 a 6 month contract working at the Office for Environmental Protection (‘OEP’) – www.theoep.org.uk
It was really welcome to be able to attend an online briefing this week by the Welsh Government Bill team working on proposals for the Environmental Governance and Biodiversity Targets Bill, along with representatives of the UK Environmental Law Association ‘UKELA’ Wales Working Party, NGOs and other stakeholders.
The UK has lost nearly half of its biodiversity since the Industrial Revolution. It has fared worse in this respect than most countries in the EU, the G7 and China. It is consistently in the bottom 10% of nations in the Biodiversity Intactness Index. According to the Royal Society, the abundance of the UK’s estimated 70,000 known species of animals, plants, funghi and microorganisms is declining.
In December 2022, chaired by China and hosted by Canada, the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity reached agreement on the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework an ambitious set of commitments aimed at halting and reversing biodiversity loss and the accelerating rate of species extinctions now thought to threaten 1 million species.
I recently had the opportunity to join a guided walk across chalk grassland at the National Trust’s site at Devil’s Dyke and Saddlescombe Farm, near Brighton in Sussex, led by the Trust’s Lead Ranger Dan Fagan. It was a reminder of how much more you can see and learn about in the company of an expert guide. As well as enjoying spectacular countryside and views, we learned about the huge pressures on England’s chalk grassland, 80% of which has been lost since the 1940s, and the real value of this critical habitat.
Reading long government policy documents sometimes resembles the feeding patterns of the Whale Shark. You need to swallow oceans of print to find the fragments of policy plankton that suggest what is really going on. These are some initial reflections on the UK government’s Plan for Water announced on [ ] April 2023, and their implications in particular for England.
In June 2022 the European Commission proposed a major Nature Restoration Law for the European Union. It has still to be debated and agreed across the Member States and the European Parliament, but it represents a very important initiative. The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework in December 2022 concluded negotiations at COP15 of the Convention on Biological Diversity. Biodiversity internationally is in crisis, with a million species at risk of extinction.
