It’s good to step out occasionally and gain a wider perspective on  things, and the three-day Bonn meeting  on climate change and nature conservation in Europe was a particularly good occasion.  It mixed ecology, policy and economics – ambitious, but the three pillars needed to get things done!

Setting the scene, we had thoughtful challenges about future conservation objectives, about moving on from goals of…

Post by John Lanchbery, Principal Climate Change Adviser

Yesterday, President Obama launched his climate action plan, which he said was both a moral and an economic imperative, needed to protect future generations – describing the plan as ‘taking action for our kids’. We’ve been waiting for action on the climate for the US for a long time, and the clear line in the sand Obama has drawn this week that firmly associates…

Jim Densham, Senior Land Use Policy Officer, Climate, RSPB Scotland

Nature is good for us. Watching birds in the countryside might be your thing and bring you joy and a sense of wellbeing. But what if it’s not?

Well, nature is still good for you – even if you don’t know it. Our natural environment provides us with food and drinking water; supplies building materials and energy sources; it holds floodwater and…

Steven Ewing, RSPB Senior Conservation Scientist

At this time of year, most of our Slavonian grebes will be sitting on their nests, carefully concealed within emergent loch-side vegetation, patiently incubating their clutches of eggs.  Slavonian grebes are without doubt one of the UK’s most enchanting waterbirds.  Rather drab during the winter period, the birds take on a spectacular breeding plumage – chestnut flanks…

John Lanchbery, RSPB Principal Climate Change Advisor, at the Bonn UNFCCC conference

Thursday and a warm, humid morning breaks over the climate change talks in Bonn.  Up early to ensure that I am sufficiently alert to chair the daily NGO 'political coordination' at nine.

Catch the local underground train-***-tram with Montana Brockley from Canada who is taking in our NGO newspaper (ECO) and Jenny Wong from the…

John Lanchbery, RSPB Principal Climate Change Advisor, at the Bonn UNFCCC conference

It is warm, sunny day here at the UN climate talks in Bonn. It is less warm and sunny inside the main meeting room, however, where Russia has just finally stalled one of the two main technical sessions, the Subsidiary Body for Implementation (SBI). This fuss has been going on for a week now as Russia tried to get retribution for the…

Today DECC has published its new policy on community engagement and benefits for onshore wind developments in England.

Onshore wind is a critical technology if we are to meet our 2020 climate and renewable energy targets, as we have written on this blog before. What’s more, we believe that as long as developers are careful to locate developments in the right places, avoiding ecologically sensitive sites, then we can…

MPs are currently debating the hugely important Energy Bill, which will determine how this country is powered for many years to come.

Yesterday they didn't take the opportunity to amend the Bill so that generating electricity from unsustainable wood would never receive long-term public subsidies. We were disappointed of course, but there will be plenty more opportunities to do this and to stop the world’s forests becoming…

Guest blog from Ellie Crane, RSPB Agriculture Policy Officer

Arable farming is arguably one of the economic sectors most sensitive to climate change.  It is also a very versatile sector: farmers have always had to respond to change.  Modern farming looks quite different from early agriculture, but one thing has remained constant: plants need water, sunlight and CO₂ (plus various nutrients) to grow.

Levels of CO₂ in the…

Ed Davey, the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, has this week called for the EU to stay ambitious on climate change. Critically, he put forward a proposal that the EU adopts a new climate target for 2030 that would see European emissions cut by half against 1990 levels.

Climate change is increasingly putting pressure on wildlife here in the UK  - as you might have seen from last week’s ground-breaking…

Guest post from Rachel Warren, Reader in Integrated Assessment of Climate Change, Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, University of East Anglia

We have just published the first global scale analysis of impacts of climate change on the climatic ranges of 50,000 widespread and common animal and plant species in Nature Climate Change. The main finding is that if no action is taken to reduce the emissions of greenhouse…

State of Nature, a scientific collaboration of 25 UK conservation organisations, saying that our species are  in already trouble, my thoughts  turned to consider how climate change might be part of that.  Especially when this UK report follows a recent global study, suggesting that more than half of common plants and one third of animals could see a dramatic decline this century due to climate change.

State of Nature is…

Helen Blenkharn, Climate Change Policy Officer

I regularly get asked ‘do wind turbines save carbon emissions?’

A recent report by the Committee on Climate Change looks at the UK’s carbon footprint and the lifecycle emissions from different types of electricity supply and so answers the question once and for all. Taking a lifecycle emissions approach is important – it means that the emissions not just from…

The Transport Select committee’s rejection of a Thames Estuary Airport will not be the final word so we won’t be cracking open the fair-trade fizzy pop just yet – that should come later when the Davies commission (we hope) hammers home the final nail.

The Thames and its mighty estuary has been through a lot. Spanish armadas, centuries of international shipping, heavy industry, intensive farming, a sunken…

For a long time, climate change has felt like a distant problem; a cause of concern for our children’s children maybe, but not us.  No longer, however, as our climate is changing before our eyes and we’re being forced to cope with a seemingly endless series of floods and droughts. But if you think it’s bad for us, then take a moment to think about how our wildlife is coping, because a major new repor…

If you want the latest global climate statistics, here they are.

Last year was the ninth warmest on record, says the World Meteorological Organisation’s statement on global climate for 2012.  At 0.45°C above the 1961-90 average, it’s the 27th consecutive year above the long term average global average temperature.

There’s just one year – 1998 – that interrupts the years from 2001 being the hottest we…

Today a coalition of green groups and businesses, including the RSPB, has written to the Secretaries of State for Business and for Energy and Climate Change, Vince Cable and Ed Davey.

We are calling on them to protect the wildlife, climate and jobs that are threatened by the rapid expansion of bioenergy based on burning trees. We want them to act to limit the size of the biomass industry to sustainable levels.

You can…

We all know that we  can’t afford to burn all of our  fossil fuel reserves if we’re to stay within the ‘safe’ climate change of around 2°C average global temperature rise, but a new report last week has revealed just how big the mismatch is between economic and environmental systems.

The new report estimates that burning the coal, oil and gas reserves listed on the world’s stock exchanges…

...Because when it comes to our climate change emissions, it seems that the Government isn’t telling the whole truth. Last month, for the first time in a few years, UK carbon emissions statistics showed an increase (a 4.5% rise in 2012), following a few years of a noticeable downward trend. We’re now, overall, emitting 26% less than in 1990.

But overall, that’s great news right? Not quite.

Yesterday…

Continuing our theme on bioenergy, we invited Danna Smith, Executive Director of Dogwood Alliance to share the threat it poses to America's forests and wildlife...

I was born and raised on the Atlantic coast of the Southern US.  I spent most of my youthful years romping around in the woods, building forts, pretending to be lost in the wild and raised by animals, chasing butterflies, mimicking bird calls and otherwise…

Guest blogger: Matt Williams, Climate Change Policy Officer

My final couple of weeks in the RSPB climate change team are set to be exciting, as MPs prepare to debate the UK’s Energy Bill, which will shape the energy sources used to power Britain for the next forty years. This vital piece of legislation could prove crucial in whether the UK meets its carbon reduction targets, and provides an opportunity for us to shape…

John Lanchbery, Principal Climate Change Advisor

We are not on course to save the world from climate change.  Emissions are not heading downwards so as to ensure an average global temperature rise of less than two degrees, the target agreed by all nations.  Instead they are surging upwards towards a likely rise in temperature of between three and five degrees.  This is bad news for people and bad news for the natural world;…

Sarah Alsbury, RSPB Environmental Management manager

Buildings, or more accurately what goes on inside them, are responsible globally for close to half of human produced greenhouse gas emissions.  Although buildings could be seen as half the problem we should not feel disheartened, as there are many readily available solutions for quickly reducing emissions from buildings. Cost effective measures include heating controls…

Helen Blenkharn, RSPB Climate Change Policy Officer

Last week we posted a blog on our concerns about proposals for a Severn Barrage that are being discussed by a Government committee. The project would involve a shore-to-shore barrage across the Severn Estuary, with potentially catastrophic consequences for the world-class habitats and wildlife that exist there. Barrages such as this are an engineering feat on a huge…

Guest blogger: Jim Densham, Senior Land-Use Policy Officer (climate) at RSPB Scotland

Today a new short story book will be published. Beacons: stories for our not so distant future  is a collection of fictional stories penned by some of the UK’s most well-known authors (including Adam Marek who used to work for the RSPB).  Their theme, in the specially commissioned stories, is visions of our future and how we will…