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Why plastic pollution shouldn't distract from other environmental challenges

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Why plastic pollution shouldn't distract from other environmental challenges

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https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/02/climate-change-obsession-with-plastic-pollution-distracts-attention-from-bigger-environmental-challenges?fbclid=IwAR1YzRePqnIJqr7g-eItT9n5wFxCKEZQC0jeYp0iNVW-JvCMh0Jl_GOOt5A

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An independent coffee chain said it has seen sales fall by £250,000 since it banned single use cups last summer.

Boston Tea Party (BTP) has called for major national and international brands to follow suit.

Owner Sam Roberts said it had factored the loss in takings into its plans and said too many operators were "putting their profits before the planet".

Rebecca Burgess, chief executive of plastic pollution campaign group City to Sea, praised BTP's "bravery".

The chain, which has 21 branches around England and is based in Bristol, started the ban in June 2018.

Customers must bring a reusable cup, drink in or pay a deposit on a cup they can return to any branch.

Mr Roberts said the firm had stopped 125,000 cups going to landfill, sold 40,000 reusable coffee cups and raised £12,000 for local charities with the money saved on buying disposable cups - roughly 10 pence for every cup.

He said: "We have lost around 25% of our takeaway coffee sales but we modelled that into our costs as passing trade who don't want to get involved in the cup loan scheme.

"We sell around £1m in takeaway coffees a year so we've lost £250k but we felt this was a financial loss we had to take.

"We want this to be a call to action to other companies.

"Those using a 25p off a reusable cup scheme - we know first-hand this has a very low penetration and when we launched that scheme ourselves, only 5% of customers took it up.

"There's too many operators not dealing with the problem and putting their profits before the planet.

"At the moment bigger businesses are deploying a smoke and mirrors strategy and not resolving problems while seeming like they are doing something about it.

"We are 100% committed and there's no going back."

Mr Roberts said BTP was able to take the hit because it had such a strong customer base for its food, but said smaller, independent coffee shops would struggle.

A so-called "latte levy" was rejected in the Autumn budget as ministers argued it was better for shops to offer voluntary discounts to customers bringing their own cups.

Ms Burgess said more chains should follow BTP's lead.

"The evidence is clear that levies are effective in changing throw-away behaviour," she said.

"While we celebrate any steps taken by retailers to reduce their use of single use plastics, the discounts currently offered by chains for bringing in their own reusable coffee cup aren't enough to address this growing issue."

What are other coffee chains doing?

Costa Coffee has promised to recycle as many cups as it puts into the market by 2020 and also offers customers a 25p discount on hot beverages if they bring their own reusable cup.

Pret A Manger offers customers a 50p discount on hot beverages if they bring their own reusable cup.

Starbucks offers customers a 25p discount on hot beverages if they bring their own reusable cup. Along with McDonald's it has invested £10m in firms hoping to design a sustainable alternative to the disposable cup.

Caffè Nero says that, along with its competitors, it is "working to increase the number of [coffee cup] recycling points" in the UK.

Caffè Nero, Starbucks, Greggs, McDonald's UK and Pret A Manger are also involved in a cup recycling scheme that funds the collection of takeaway cups for recycling.

A spokesperson for Pret said: "We doubled our discount for customers who bring in their own reusable cup to 50p in January 2018 and, since then, usage has increased almost 20-fold.

"We now serve over 150,000 drinks in reusable cups every week, and since the discount was doubled, Pret customers have saved over six million paper cups."

Starbucks has announced its London cafes will trial a redesigned cup that will be both recyclable and compostable.

A spokesman said: "Our British stores are the first globally to have trialled a 5p charge on takeaway cups."

He said reusable cup uptake had risen from 1.8% to more than 5% in the past 18 months.

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An independent coffee chain said it has seen sales fall by £250,000 since it banned single use cups last summer. Boston Tea Party (BTP) has called for major national and international brands to follow suit. Owner Sam Roberts said it had factored the loss in takings into its plans and said too many operators were "putting their profits before the planet".

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Climate change is a security threat. We must act now

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We must rise above the politics of doubt and accept that climate change leads to a fragile economy and risks human security, writes the prime minister of Bangladesh.

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Last year, the United States introduced tariffs of up to 25% on Chinese imported goods worth US$250 billion. In retaliation, the Chinese government imposed tariffs of 25% on $110-billion worth of US goods - including soya beans, a crop mainly used for animal feed. As a result, exports of US soya beans to China dropped by 50% in 2018, even though the trade war began only midway through the year.

We forecast that a surge of tropical deforestation could occur as a result of the fresh demand being placed on China's other major suppliers to provide up to 37.6 million tonnes of the crop (that is how much China imported from the United States in 2016). Already, two decades of growth in the global market for soya has led to large-scale deforestation in the Amazon rainforest.

As of 2016, Brazil supplied almost half of China's soya-bean imports, and it has the infrastructure and land area to rapidly increase production. We estimate that the area dedicated to soya-bean production in Brazil could increase by up to 39%, to 13 million hectares, extrapolating from the most recent (2016) data from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). For comparison, almost 3 million hectares of rainforest were cleared in 1995 and in 2004, the country's two peak deforestation years (see go.nature.com/2xtkkrd).

We urge the United States and China to adjust their trading arrangements immediately to avoid this catastrophe. We also lay out some of the broader changes needed - globally and within nations - to shield tropical forests from shifting trade patterns.

Bean counting

China depends heavily on soya-bean imports from three trading partners. Brazil is the largest, followed by the United States and Argentina. Ninety-four other countries, including China itself, together produce little more soya than Brazil alone (see 'Soya swings', panel B; and Supplementary Information).

To cope with the current shortfall in US exports, China could reduce its use of soya bean. This seems unlikely given the nation's growing demand for meat. Just a 2% reduction in soya as animal feed would result in the country producing 10 million tonnes less meat each year.

China could increase its own production of soya beans. But it would have to triple it to make up the shortfall. That would require around 13 million hectares of land - an area the size of Greece. This also seems unlikely given the limited fertile land now available for crops.

Some reconfiguration of trade flows might absorb some of the shortfall, as could efforts to substitute other crops into animal feed, such as rapeseed and maize (corn). Last year, Argentina and the European Union started buying soya from the United States for livestock feed and biofuel. This could make soya beans produced by Argentina, or rapeseed produced by the European Union, available for export to China.

But it is unclear whether China will engage in trade deals that would ultimately benefit the United States. Also, globally, soya is the preferred choice for animal feed: it contains both protein and fat, and the crop fixes nitrogen, reducing the need for fertilizer (see 'Uses of Brazilian soya'). Lastly, the contributions made by small producers are tiny compared with what's needed - even accounting for possible increases in production. Russia's plan to boost its production by 20% over the next few years, for instance, would result in future exports of only 0.7 million tonnes.

In our view, the most likely scenario is that Brazil will ramp up its production substantially, and a few other major producers will supply whatever else is needed.

Political, legal and trade-system interventions that have prevented the expansion of soya-bean production in the Amazon are now being weakened. For instance, Brazil's newly elected president, Jair Bolsonaro, limited the land rights of Indigenous people this January (see go.nature.com/2y9rjvn). Indeed, deforestation increased by 29% between 2015 and 2016 (see go.nature.com/2xtkkrd), and jumped by 50% between August and October 2018, during the Brazilian presidential election campaign (see go.nature.com/2uyrjpt).

Also, trade wars have resulted in hikes in soya-bean production in Brazil in the past. Following a 1980 US embargo on soya-bean exports to the Soviet Union, the amount of land devoted to its production in Brazil more than doubled between 1990 and 2010, to 24.2 million hectares. This pushed cattle farming from the southern Cerrado savannah into the Amazon, and caused nearly one-quarter of the total annual deforestation of the Amazon in some years.

Soya scenarios

To get a rough estimate of how global soya-bean production might change under different trade scenarios, we analysed the 2016 data from the FAO database FAOSTAT. This includes 94 nations' total land area dedicated to soya, each country's yield rates and their overall production for the year (see Supplementary Information for methods). It also includes trade data - who exported to China, how much, and so on.

Assuming there is no change in total global demand, an extra 22.6 million to 37.6 million tonnes of soya-bean production in Brazil would satisfy China's needs (see 'Soya swings', panel A).

If all 94 countries help to make up the shortfall, with their percentage contributions staying at current levels, Brazil would need to supply as much as 16.7 million extra tonnes of soya beans. This would require up to 5.7 million hectares more land (a 17.3% increase). Under this scenario, Argentina would then supply an additional 6.1 million to 10.2 million tonnes (requiring 2.0 million to 3.3 million hectares of land at current yields), with all the other producers (excluding China) together producing around the same amount as Argentina.

These figures do not account for the potential cultivation of soya beans on land that is now used for other protein and oil crops, such as maize, palm oil and rapeseed. But the substitution of one crop for another has technical and political limits. In Brazil, for example, soya beans, sugar cane and maize represent around 85% of total crop production, and all three are crucial to the nation's economy. (Sugar cane is used to produce the biofuel ethanol, which gives Brazil independence from the global oil market, and maize is used as livestock fodder.) It is possible to import palm oil from Malaysia or Indonesia, say, but this would cause deforestation in those countries.

The requirements for land could be reduced a little if producers were to increase their yields. The leading soya-bean producers (Brazil, Argentina, Canada and Russia) currently achieve average yields of 1.5-3 tonnes of soya bean per hectare, compared with a US yield of 3.5 tonnes. The United States adds around 62 kilograms of fertilizer per hectare, Canada 60 kg and Brazil 169 kg on nutrient-poor tropical soils. Only Russia (26 kg of fertilizer per hectare) and Argentina (14 kg) could produce more crops per land area by using more fertilizer.

In fact, our figures might well be underestimates. They do not account for hikes in demand that are unrelated to the trade war. In the past two decades, China's use of soya has risen exponentially; since 2000, the country's imports have gone up by 200% from Argentina, by 700% from the United States and by 2,000% from Brazil (see 'Soya swings', panel B). It is highly likely that China's enormous appetite for livestock feed and bioenergy will continue to grow.

A losing battle

China will probably want to reduce its dependence on the United States, even if US President Donald Trump decides to abolish the tariffs on its imports. (These are currently being heavily negotiated.) For instance, the Soviet Union did not go back to buying US soya beans when the 1980 embargo was withdrawn only a year later, seeing them as unnecessary and unreliable. Thus, even under the most optimistic scenarios, millions more hectares of the Amazon rainforest are now threatened. Indeed, the expansion of soya-bean production in areas other than the Amazon, such as in Brazil's Cerrado tropical savannah, will lead to further loss of tropical forest, for example through the displacement of pasturelands.

Leaving aside these potential major changes, current rates of tropical deforestation are projected to release between 87 and 130 gigatonnes of carbon by 2100, and land conversion in general is expected to release more carbon in the tropics than in any other biome this century,. Likewise, species extinctions in tropical forests are already expected to increase until the 2050s, with as many as 19 of every 20 species lost being unknown to science.

Massive deforestation of the Amazon over what's already happening will have profound impacts on global attempts to mitigate climate change and protect biodiversity.

So how can such devastating environmental outcomes from this or future trade wars be avoided?

Remove soya from tariffs. First and foremost, China and the United States should publicly acknowledge their roles in indirectly driving tropical deforestation, and take immediate action to at least remove trade tariffs on the crop.

Diversify suppliers. China should also seek a wider range of suppliers. Even the European Union could be a candidate, although to compete with major producers such as the United States, it would have to reconsider its opposition to genetically modified soya-bean strains that are tolerant to pesticides such as glyphosate.

Improve Brazil's environmental protection schemes. The international community must do more to encourage the Brazilian government to enhance environmental protections. Initiatives such as REDD+, which aims to reward developers and others financially for not clearing forests, provide mechanisms for coordinated action.

Regulatory interventions designed to control the drivers of environmental degradation - or to limit its extent - are also needed. Such interventions are inevitably controversial and contingent on volatile political circumstances, but precedents exist. For example, the European Commission's 1991 Nitrates Directive has led to a 22% decline in the use of fertilizer across Europe since 1990 (ref. ). It forms part of another instrument, the Water Framework Directive, which has reduced nitrogen concentrations in rivers by 21%, ammonium by 75% and phosphorus by 59% since 1992.

Most pertinently, Brazil's Soy Moratorium, in which major traders agreed not to buy soya grown on lands deforested after July 2006, has helped to reduce the conversion of forest to cropland. This was a partial success owing to the various monitoring systems that were deployed to enforce it, such as police helicopters to track illegal logging. That achievement is now threatened, given the rise in rogue logging, indirect land-use changes and political machinations under Bolsonaro's presidency.

Grow locally. Ultimately, growing crops in the countries where they will actually be consumed would give nations better control of production levels and environmental impacts, as well as more economic security.

As part of the mix of solutions, it would help if both China and the European Union intensified their efforts to produce protein crops. This would mean investing more in research and development, as well as in training farmers. Since the early 2000s, China has decreased the amount of land it dedicates to soya-bean production by around 25%, in part because it is cheaper to import from Brazil. The country's five-year average yields are now half of those in Brazil or the United States (see 'Soya swings').

Change consumer behaviour. Over the next few decades, the long-term solution has to involve the global reduction of meat consumption.

One thing that might help is the growing awareness among consumers globally that eating less meat, or buying meat that is sustainably produced, benefits the environment. So far, such awareness has had little impact on production or consumption. A major supermarket chain in Germany reported in June 2018 that, despite consumer surveys indicating demand for sustainable meat products, its customers continued to select the less-sustainable options because they are cheaper.

Educational measures to change consumer behaviours, such as the use of food labelling or 'eco-certification', or information campaigns involving schools, are relatively easy to introduce. But making such measures a legal requirement, and actually changing behaviour, would take too long to lift the current pressures on tropical forests.

Subsidies and taxes that favour sustainable forms of production tend to be effective. But these can require considerable up-front investment from governments. Even then, such market-based policies are often insufficient to avert severe environmental degradation.

In our view, what could be most effective are mechanisms that include the environmental costs of agricultural production in the price of the product. Making these costs unavoidable (rather than relying on consumer choice) could be a robust way of stemming the loss of crucial natural systems. Obviously, proper valuation of environmental costs would have to occur alongside vigorous efforts to reduce those, to ensure that such a strategy does not threaten food security.

Warning signs

Early signs in the current US-China trade war are not encouraging. Brazil has already begun to strengthen its negotiating position by boosting its production. As of late 2018, 75% of China's soya-bean imports came from Brazil - a new record - meaning the entire US shortfall was substituted with Brazilian soya beans (see go.nature.com/2hizafd).

And traders have made their bets. The MSCI Brazil index, which lists the country's 52 largest companies, has risen by roughly 35% since October 2018 (when Bolsonaro was elected and Trump introduced the latest tariffs on Chinese imports). This represents the largest increase of all regional markets at present (see go.nature.com/2cstcwy).

Governments, producers, regulators and consumers must act now. If they don't, the Amazon rainforest could become the greatest casualty of the US-China trade war.

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Why the US-China trade war spells disaster for the Amazon

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Last year, the United States introduced tariffs of up to 25% on Chinese imported goods worth US$250 billion. In retaliation, the Chinese government imposed tariffs of 25% on $110-billion worth of US goods - including soya beans, a crop mainly used for animal feed.

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Republican Senator says solution to climate change 'is to fall in love, get married and have some kids'

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Republican Senator says solution to climate change 'is to fall in love, get married and have some kids'

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(CNN) Utah Sen. Mike Lee on Tuesday called babies and families the solution to climate change in response to a Democratic plan to overhaul the economy through the Green New Deal proposal.

The Republican made the suggestion while blasting the Green New Deal on the Senate floor. Lee employed poster-board sized pictures of the superhero Aquaman and former President Ronald Reagan riding a velociraptor so he could "consider the Green New Deal with the seriousness it deserves."

After lambasting the policy as "the legislative equivalent of Austin Powers' Dr. Evil demanding 'sharks with frickin' lasers on their heads,'" Lee offered his own solution.

"The solution to climate change is not this un-serious resolution that we're considering this week in the Senate, but rather the serious business of human flourishing," Lee said. "The solution to so many of our problems, at all times and in all places, is to fall in love, get married and have some kids."

Lee argued that, because climate change is an engineering challenge, it will be best solved through American families and increasing the US population.

"Problems of human imagination are not solved by more laws, they're solved by more humans," he said. "More people mean bigger markets for more innovation. More babies mean forward-looking adults, the sort we need to tackle long-term, large-scale problems."

Lee is currently working on legislation to support families by providing paid parental leave, his press secretary, Conn Carroll, told CNN.

The senator's comments came ahead of a vote Tuesday afternoon on the Green New Deal, a massive policy proposal championed by freshman Rep. Alexandria Oscasio Cortez, a New York Democrat. T he vote is expected to be blocked by Democrats, who support many of the ideas in the plan but believed Republicans are trying to score political points by forcing a vote.

Lee, however, called the Green New Deal "ridiculous," comparing it to an image of Reagan firing a machine gun while riding a dinosaur. He said that, while the image is "awesome" it did not depict reality.

"This image has as much to do with overcoming communism in 20th Century as the Green New Deal has to do with overcoming climate change in the 21st," Lee said.

He called the policy a "token of tribal identity" rather than a serious policy proposal. He pointed to comments in a set of FAQs, which supporters of the proposal said were prematurely published, that called for getting rid "of farting cows and airplanes." The actual proposal introduced in Congress does not contain that idea.

He claimed that, if the policy passed, those in Alaska would need to travel on tauntauns, mythical creatures from the Star Wars movie franchise. Meanwhile, he said a fleet of 20-foot seahorses, the kind ridden by Aquaman, would be necessary to maintain Hawaii's tourism industry.

Though Lee recognized the proposals on planes and cows are not part of the Green New Deal itself, he said their accidental publication in FAQs was still worrisome.

"The supporters of the Green New Deal want Americans to trust them to reorganize our entire society, our entire economy and restructure our very way of life. And they couldn't even figure out how to send out the right press release," Lee said.

Ocasio-Cortez fired back at Lee on Twitter, Tuesday.

"Like many other women + working people, I occasionally suffer from impostor syndrome: those small moments, especially on hard days, where you wonder if the haters are right. But then they do things like this to clear it right up. If this guy can be Senator, you can do anything," she tweeted.

In another post, the congresswoman criticized Lee for using his congressional allowance on the Aquaman poster while calling the Green New Deal a waste of money.

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Republican senator calls babies the solution to climate change

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(CNN) Utah Sen. Mike Lee on Tuesday called babies and families the solution to climate change in response to a Democratic plan to overhaul the economy through the Green New Deal proposal. The Republican made the suggestion while blasting the Green New Deal on the Senate floor.

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The Anthropocene: The age of mankind - Docu - 2017

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Discussion of weekly news related to the topic of the Unit

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Discussion of weekly news related to the topic of the Unit

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Talk about final solutions on what exactly to do on climate change (perhaps group work to think together?)

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Talk about final solutions on what exactly to do on climate change (perhaps group work to think together?)

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Have access to the PPT created by students for their presentations

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Have access to the PPT created by students for their presentations

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Use more Padlet in class/notify if something appropriate is available on Padlet for us to look at

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Use more Padlet in class/notify if something appropriate is available on Padlet for us to look at

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Use Kahoot! and other interactive tools to engage with debates

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Use Kahoot! and other interactive tools to engage with debates

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A short relevant video showing how the discourse we are discussing has been used by a politician or public figure

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A short relevant video showing how the discourse we are discussing has been used by a politician or public figure

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A brief view of the presentation topic and the debate linked to it

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A brief view of the presentation topic and the debate linked to it

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Grimes announces new album, Miss_Anthropocene

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Grimes announces new album, Miss_Anthropocene

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Grimes has revealed the title of her forthcoming album in a recent Instagram post.

Miss_Anthropocene is described by the avant-pop star as "a concept album about the anthropomorphic Goddess of climate Change", who is "A psychedelic, space-dwelling demon/ beauty-Queen who relishes the end of the world."

"Each song will be a different embodiment of human extinction as depicted through a Pop star Demonology", Grimes continues. "The first song 'we appreciate power', introduced the pro-AI-propaganda girl group who embody our potential enslavement/destruction at the hands of Artificial General intelligence."

While there is still no word on a release date, there might be some be some "synth-based stuff" on the way before Miss_Anthropocene drops, as she explains: "its mostly ethereal nu metal (ish), and I know a lot of ppl miss the synths and whatnot."

Check out the full post below.
Read next: All the weird, innovative and dystopian new audio tech we'll be using in 2019

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Grimes announces new album, Miss_Anthropocene

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Grimes has revealed the title of her forthcoming album in a recent Instagram post. Miss_Anthropocene is described by the avant-pop star as "a concept album about the anthropomorphic Goddess of climate Change", who is "A psychedelic, space-dwelling demon/ beauty-Queen who relishes the end of the world."

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Fresh from the press!

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Eco-fascism is undergoing a revival in the fetid culture of the extreme right | Jason Wilson

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Some see looming ecological collapse as an opportunity to re-order society along their preferred, frankly genocidal, lines

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Quand la Science appelle à l'aide pour l'humanité ? Aurélien Barrau (French subtitles)

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Quand la Science appelle à l'aide pour l'humanité ? Aurélien Barrau (French subtitles)

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Quand la Science appelle à l'aide pour l'humanité ? Aurélien Barrau, Astrophysicien [EN DIRECT]

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Not having children as a political statement about the urgency of the ecological crisis

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Not having children as a political statement about the urgency of the ecological crisis

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Not a neo-Malthusian position...

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BirthStrikers: meet the women who refuse to have children until climate change ends

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A movement of women have decided not to procreate in response to the coming ‘climate breakdown and civilisation collapse’. Will their protest be a catalyst for change?

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https://www.activesustainability.com/sustainable-life/world-energy-efficiency-day/

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A critic of the "Ecomodernist Manifesto"

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A critic of the "Ecomodernist Manifesto"

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Meet the ecomodernists: ignorant of history and paradoxically old-fashioned

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The people behind a manifesto for solving environmental problems through science and technology are intelligent but wrong on their assumptions about farming and urbanisation

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Organic Food not Climate Friendly, Study Reveals

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Organic Food not Climate Friendly, Study Reveals

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A new study conducted by Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden has found that organic food is actually worse for the environment.

Organic food production produces a lower yield per hectare than conventionally-farmed foods due to the lack of fertilisers. To produce the same amount of organic food, farmers therefore need more land. Greater land usage, however, results in higher carbon dioxide emissions through deforestation. Because of this, the climate footprint for organic farming is greater than conventional farming's footprint, because it uses more land. For example, the study found that organic peas have a climate impact 50% higher than conventional peas, purely due to the land required to produce the same yield.

It doesn't stop at vegetables: organic meat and dairy products are worse for the environment, too. These products use organic plant-based feedstock, which requires much more land and results in the same problem.

However, the study does not advocate that conscientious customers simply switch to non-organic produce. Instead, it suggests being aware of the impact different types of food have. For instance, eating organic beans or organic chicken is much better for the climate than to eat conventionally produced beef. It is about selecting the foods with the smallest negative impact on a number of grounds: climate, animal welfare and health benefits, among others.

Ultimately, organic food is not environmentally friendly, but it's not always a foe, either.

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Organic Food not Climate Friendly, Study Reveals

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A new study conducted by Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden has found that organic food is actually worse for the environment. Organic food production produces a lower yield per hectare than conventionally-farmed foods due to the lack of fertilisers. To produce the same amount of organic food, farmers therefore need more land.

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A Huge Climate Change Movement Led By Teenage Girls Is Sweeping Europe. And It’s Coming To The US Next.

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A Huge Climate Change Movement Led By Teenage Girls Is Sweeping Europe. And It’s Coming To The US Next.

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LONDON - A huge student protest movement led almost exclusively by teenage girls and young women is sweeping Europe, and it's on the brink of breaking through in the US.

So far this year, tens of thousands of high school-age students in Belgium, Germany, and Sweden have boycotted class and protested against climate change. The loose movement's inspiration, a 16-year-old girl who began a solitary picket last year outside the Swedish Parliament in Stockholm, has compared the protests to the March for Our Lives movement organized by the Parkland teens in the wake of a shooting at their school that left 17 dead.

In the latest mass climate strikes, large crowds took to the streets in The Hague on Thursday, in the largest such protest in the Netherlands so far. The teens leading the climate strike across the border in Belgium were in Leuven, the country's eighth-largest city, where they told BuzzFeed News they had 12,000 people on the streets in one of many actions across the country.

A climate march last weekend in the Belgian capital, Brussels, drew more than 100,000 people, and one of the country's environment ministers resigned this week after falsely claiming intelligence services had told her the protests were a plot against her.

The protests are injecting a new urgency into the debate around climate change, and calling attention to a lack of action by governments. They are also a sign of the new political power of young women, especially in Europe. Climate strikes have also been organized by students in Australia, and US organizers are planning to participate in an international day of action on March 15.

Jamie Margolin, the 17-year-old founder and executive director of Zero Hour, a group working on the March 15 protest in the US, told BuzzFeed News that climate activism has given young women like her a chance to be heard.

"There aren't very many spaces that I can be in charge of, and what I'm going to say is going to be heard," Margolin said. Her group is led largely by young women of color, which she said should come as no surprise, because people who are already vulnerable are going to be disproportionately hit by climate change. A 2014 report by the World Health Organization outlined that women are more likely to be harmed in the kinds of natural disasters made more likely by global warming, bear greater responsibility for getting access to water, energy, and other basics of domestic life, and often are shut out of opportunities when resources decline.

"If you're a victim of a system of oppression, you're more affected by the climate crisis - that goes for women," she said. "Nobody is going to hand us this. We have to step up and raise our voices."

Some of the most dramatic protests have come in Belgium. For the past four Thursdays, mass walkouts by students have taken place, and at the heart of those actions is a 17-year-old called Anuna De Wever.

De Wever and her best friend, Kyra Gantois, filmed a video and posted it online; they called on students to protest in early January. They expected only a handful of people to turn up, but were stunned to find a crowd of around 3,000. The protests have now grown as large as 30,000 on Thursdays across the country, with even larger protests on the weekend.

"When we started it, Kyra and me, we thought it would be just 20 people," De Wever said in a phone interview with BuzzFeed News from her home in Antwerp. "I'm so thankful to my generation that they really care about it."

De Wever was inspired to act after seeing the video of another teenager, Greta Thunberg from Sweden.

Thunberg was 15 when she launched a solitary protest last August by boycotting school every Friday and picketing in front of the Swedish Parliament to demand the country meet obligations under the Paris climate accords.

Thunberg, who has Asperger's syndrome, has become a celebrity since. She addressed global climate talks last December, the World Economic Forum in Davos in January, and has given her own TED Talk. She has an Instagram with more than 250,000 followers where she posts pictures of world leaders, protests, and her dog. From the very beginning, she called for young people to follow her example.

"We are on a school strike for the climate. ... We urge everyone to do the same wherever you are," she said in the video about her climate strike that first popularized the protests. "Sit outside your Parliament or local government building until your nation is on a safe pathway to a below two-degree warming target."

De Wever told BuzzFeed News that as well as Thunberg's video, two things happened this winter that made her feel like she had to take action: The first was Belgium's decision not to embrace ambitious steps to cut carbon emissions in December. The second was the realization that she would not be 18 before the spring elections in both Belgium and for the Parliament of the European Union. By the time an election came where she would actually have a say, the chance to rein in climate change could be almost gone forever.

The latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, released last October, said the world would see catastrophic impacts from climate change, such as rising seas and coral reefs dying, even if countries managed to limit warming to just 1.5 degrees Celsius, which is the most ambitious target under the existing climate accords. The report also said countries needed to act even faster than they've previous agreed to.

This seems basically impossible especially as the US, one of the largest emitters of greenhouse gases, is actually increasing its emissions. President Donald Trump has rolled back many climate directives and policies, as well as vowed to withdraw the US from the Paris agreement.

It's shocking, De Wever said, that adults should have to be reminded by high school students that they're making decisions that will shape their entire lives.

"Your political games, they're very funny and all, but you're the influences of our future," she told BuzzFeed News. She said the protests, now in their fifth week and drawing tens of thousands in cities across Belgium, have given her a voice that's "better than voting."

Her protests have met a considerable backlash; there have been death threats online now being investigated by police, her mother told BuzzFeed News. (In a lengthy Facebook post, Thunberg wrote this month that she had seen "enormous amounts of hate" about her.)

One of Belgium's environment ministers, Joke Schauvliege, claimed the country's intelligence service had told her the protests were a "setup" and not "spontaneous actions of solidarity with our climate." Schauvliege later resigned after admitting that the security services told her no such thing.

De Wever told BuzzFeed News that her concern about climate change grew directly out of gender advocacy. De Wever, who was assigned female at birth, identified as a boy throughout primary school, and now identifies as gender-fluid and prefers female pronouns. This experience made her comfortable challenging basic assumptions about the world that older people often treat as unchangeable, which she said is also true of the feeling that the steps to stop climate change are out of reach.

"Being gender-fluid by a young age ... how I see the world is a bit different," she said. "I don't look at the mainstream and what they think. I start to have my own values, own principles, and I think about what's not going right in this world and what can I do and improve it instead of just closing my eyes to it - that really scares me."

De Wever became passionate about climate change while attending a youth conference associated with the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women in 2016. There she learned that women often suffer disproportionately during natural disasters compared to men, and so were likely to be hurt the worst by climate change.

De Wever's mother, Katrien Van der Heyden, told her about Thunberg's video in their kitchen one evening last December. She watched it that night, and then announced the following morning she would make a video of her own with her best friend.

"I have to be very honest about this - at this point in time I didn't think it would amount to anything," said Van der Heyden, who now acts as her daughter's de facto press secretary. "I thought, It's a nice little project. She's going to be making that little movie with her friends; it's educational, much better that just staying at home watching Netflix - I underestimated my daughter."

Van der Heyden, a 51-year-old sociologist who specializes in gender equity, said she also underestimated the whole young generation.

As far as she could recall, she said, "It's the very first time in Belgium that a [mass movement was] started by two women and not about feminist rights." When the protests drew tens of thousands, Van der Heyden said, she was stunned to see as many boys as girls in the crowds, and yet no one ever challenged the leadership of the female organizers.

"We, as women leaders, have been pushed aside by men. We were told we can only be leaders [on women's issues]," she said. Van der Heyden said that when she sees boys in the crowd shouting her daughter's name at the rallies, "Every time I'm moved to tears."

"The whole mansplaining mechanism has really disappeared in that generation," she said.

But the decision-makers on climate remain overwhelmingly men. When the UN touted a new focus on gender in the Polish climate talks last year, the best it could come up with was that "more than half" of the working groups hammering out the accord had "female representation of 38 per cent or more."

These protests have been a shot in the arm to well-established environmental protests, said Luisa Neubauer, a 22-year-old from Berlin who led the call for the climate strike in Germany. She'd already been active in Germany's pitched battle over coal mining, which recently has involved environmental activists occupying sites slated for coal mining in the ancient Hambach Forest.

Neubauer - whose Twitter bio reads, "not a German Greta. We are tens of Thousands" - said that the Thunberg's example was inspiring to get more women to speak up in the German movement. Though Germany's chancellor, Angela Merkel, is one of the world's longest serving and most powerful political leaders, Germany actually lags behind many other European countries in gender equality.

"I've been raised in a world where the people leading were men," Neubauer said. "And if you wanted to make it as a woman, then you had to either look like Angela Merkel or participate in Germany's Next Top Model."

Nike Mahlhaus, a 25-year-old activist with the German environmental group Ende Gelände (Land's End), said her organization had battled for years to get women's voices into the environmental discussion. It made a deliberate decision to make women spokespeople because media outlets constantly gravitated toward male activists. So often online, she said, she finds herself facing off online with older men whose views get accepted as common sense while she has to defend herself from attacks of being radical or unhinged.

"The men who comment there are the white middle-aged men who keep this system running by thinking that there is no other option," Mahlhaus said. "It hurts to realize that they have the power to define what is radical and what is reasonable, what is appropriate and what is insane, who we have to respect and who not."

In many places, these young women's protests have been treated with outright scorn. Some of the ugliest came from Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison and his cabinet - which has just five women out of 21 ministers - after a climate strike in November.

"Kids should go to school. ... We do not support our schools being turned into parliaments," Morrison spat during a speech in the House of Representatives. Resource Minister Matt Canavan said kids who care about climate should focus on science class during an appearance on 2GB radio, adding, "The best thing you'll learn about going to a protest is how to join the dole queue."

Despite the huge scale of recent environmental protests in many countries, they have not produced anywhere near the levels of political attention of smaller protests dominated by older people. The Yellow Vest protests in France, a movement dominated by middle-aged activists who rallied in opposition to a hike in the tax on gasoline, are still driving French politics.

A French minister skipped out on the December climate talks in Poland because of the protests, and French President Emmanuel Macron announced he would reverse the tax, which was introduced to combat global warming. But an environmental protest last week drew more than 80,000 people to the streets of Paris alone, larger than the latest Yellow Vest protest. But it received little attention in French media.

"We really need to do something - the younger generation understand it more," De Wever told BuzzFeed News. "We are called young and naive, but maybe being naive is what we need right now. We can look at the planet without being locked in the system."

"This system is just wrong," she said. "It discriminates against people. We're not taking care of this planet."

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A Huge Climate Change Movement Led By Teenage Girls Is Sweeping Europe. And It's Coming To The US Next.

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LONDON - A huge student protest movement led almost exclusively by teenage girls and young women is sweeping Europe, and it's on the brink of breaking through in the US. So far this year, tens of thousands of high school-age students in Belgium, Germany, and Sweden have boycotted class and protested against climate change.

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It means to sustain a current way of living. "Sustainability" essentially is a justification for continuing to act in a particular way. 

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It means to sustain a current way of living. "Sustainability" essentially is a justification for continuing to act in a particular way. 

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Reconciling environmental progress with possible future job losses

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Theoretical perspectives on environmental politics and political economy of environment

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Theoretical perspectives on environmental politics and political economy of environment

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Reconsiling capitalism with the sustainability agenda

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Reconsiling capitalism with the sustainability agenda

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Is this possible? What can be done?

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Social movements perspective

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Whether capitalism is the root cause of the environmental crisis and whether proper environmental management involves a structural change of capitalism

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Foucault- Disciplinary practice, regimes of truth.

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Foucault- Disciplinary practice, regimes of truth.

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How are we institutionalised through certain mechanisms in society, to think in a certain way and to relate to the environment.

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I think it would be really interesting to delve into political debates surrounding population control, and the intersection between family policy and sexuality and ecology.

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How will leaders like the President of Brazil and President of USA affect climate change with their recent policies?

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Neoliberalism and fighting climate change

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Neoliberalism and fighting climate change

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Individual action vs collective responsibility to deal with climate change in the neoliberal age

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Neoliberalism has conned us into fighting climate change as individuals | Martin Lukacs

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Stop obsessing with how personally green you live - and start collectively taking on corporate power

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Great video on climate change, climate change denial, and apathy to living ecologically

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Great video on climate change, climate change denial, and apathy to living ecologically

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Warning: very entertaining; very explicit; lots of wigs

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La sostenibilità è un approccio necessario alla sopravvivenza a lungo termine di ecosistemi disparati

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La sostenibilità è un approccio necessario alla sopravvivenza a lungo termine di ecosistemi disparati

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sustainability means linking ecological, economic and social aspect 

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sustainability means linking ecological, economic and social aspect 

# data[].attributes.headline
Sustainability es una forma linda de conceptualizar la continuación en explotación de recursos en el planeta en lugar de sostener el planeta

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Sustainability es una forma linda de conceptualizar la continuación en explotación de recursos en el planeta en lugar de sostener el planeta

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Carlos A