The Arctic has warmed nearly four times faster than the global average since 1979. Svalbard, an archipelago near the northeast coast of Greenland, is at the frontline of this climate change, warming up to seven times faster than the rest of the world.
More than half of Svalbard is covered by glaciers. If they were to completely melt tomorrow, the global sea level would rise by 1.7cm. Although this won’t happen overnight, glaciers in the Arctic are highly sensitive to even slight temperature increases.
To better understand glaciers in Svalbard and beyond, we used an AI model to analyse millions of satellite images from Svalbard over the past four decades. Our research is now published in Nature Communications, and shows these glaciers are shrinking faster than ever, in line with global warming.
Specifically, we looked at glaciers that drain directly into the ocean, what are known as “marine-terminating glaciers”. Most of Svalbard’s glaciers fit this category. They act as an ecological pump in the fjords they flow into by transferring nutrient-rich seawater to the ocean surface and can even change patterns of ocean circulation.
Where these glaciers meet the sea, they mainly lose mass through iceberg calving, a process in which large chunks of ice detach from the glacier and fall into the ocean. Understanding this process is key to accurately predicting future glacier mass loss, because calving can result in faster ice flow within the glacier and ultimately into the sea.
Svalbard (in red) belongs to Norway and is one of the northernmost places int he world. Peter Hermes Furian / shutterstock
Despite its importance, understanding the glacier calving process has been a longstanding challenge in glaciology, as this process is difficult to observe, let alone accurately model. However, we can use the past to help us understand the future.
AI replaces painstaking human labour
When mapping the glacier calving front – the boundary between ice and ocean – traditionally human researchers painstakingly look through satellite imagery and make digital records. This process is highly labour-intensive, inefficient and particularly unreproducible as different people can spot different things even in the same satellite image. Given the number of satellite images available nowadays, we may not have the human resources to map every region for every year.
A novel way to tackle this problem is by using automated methods like artificial intelligence (AI), which can quickly identify glacier patterns across large areas. This is what we did in our new study, using AI to analyse millions of satellite images of 149 marine-terminating glaciers taken between 1985 and 2023. This meant we could examine the glacier retreats at unprecedented scale and scope.
Svalbard is slightly smaller than Scotland yet has more than 2,000 glaciers. RUBEN M RAMOS / shutterstock
Insights from 1985 to today
We found that the vast majority (91%) of marine-terminating glaciers across Svalbard have been shrinking significantly. We discovered a loss of more than 800km² of glacier since 1985, larger than the area of New York City, and equivalent to an annual loss of 24km² a year, almost twice the size of Heathrow airport in London.
The biggest spike was detected in 2016, when the calving rates doubled in response to periods of extreme warming. That year, Svalbard also had its wettest summer and autumn since 1955, including a record 42mm of rain in a single day in October. This was accompanied by unusually warm and ice-free seas.
How ocean warming triggers glacier calving
In addition to the long-term retreat, these glaciers also retreat in the summer and advance again in winter, often by several hundred metres. This can be greater than the changes from year to year.
We found that 62% of the glaciers in Svalbard experience these seasonal cycles. While this phenomenon is well documented across Greenland, it had previously only been observed for a handful of glaciers in Svalbard, primarily through manual digitisation.
Svalbard’s many glaciers grow and shrink with the seasons. Wildnerdpix / shutterstock
We then compared these seasonal changes with seasonal variations in air and ocean temperature. We found that as the ocean warmed up in spring, the glacier retreated almost immediately. This was a nice demonstration of something scientists had long suspected: the seasonal ebbs and flows of these glaciers are caused by changes in ocean temperatures.
A global threat
Svalbard experiences frequent climate extremes due to its unique location in the Arctic yet close to the warm Atlantic water. Our findings indicate that marine-terminating glaciers are highly sensitive to climate extremes and the biggest retreat rates have occurred in recent years.
This same type of glaciers can be found across the Arctic and, in particular, around Greenland, the largest ice mass in the northern hemisphere. What happens to glaciers in Svalbard is likely to be repeated elsewhere.
If the current climate warming trend continues, these glaciers will retreat more rapidly, the sea level will rise, and millions of people in coastal areas worldwide will be endangered.
Climate and environmental protest is being criminalised and repressed around the world. The criminalisation of such protest has received a lot of attention in certain countries, including the UK and Australia. But there have not been any attempts to capture the global trend – until now.
We recently published a report, with three University of Bristol colleagues, which shows this repression is indeed a global trend – and that it is becoming more difficult around the world to stand up for climate justice.
This criminalisation and repression spans the global north and south, and includes more and less democratic countries. It does, however, take different forms.
Our report distinguishes between climate and environmental protest. The latter are campaigns against specific environmentally destructive projects – most commonly oil and gas extraction and pipelines, deforestation, dam building and mining. They take place all around the world.
Climate protests are aimed at mitigating climate change by decreasing carbon emissions, and tend to make bigger policy or political demands (“cut global emissions now” rather than “don’t build this power plant”). They often take place in urban areas and are more common in the global north.
Four ways to repress activism
The intensifying criminalisation and repression is taking four main forms.
1. Anti-protest laws are introduced
Anti-protest laws may give the police more powers to stop protest, introduce new criminal offences, increase sentence lengths for existing offences, or give policy impunity when harming protesters. In the 14 countries we looked at, we found 22 such pieces of legislation introduced since 2019.
2. Protest is criminalised through prosecution and courts
This can mean using laws against climate and environmental activists that were designed to be used against terrorism or organised crime. In Germany, members of Letzte Generation (Last Generation), a direct action group in the mould of Just Stop Oil, were charged in May 2024 with “forming a criminal organisation”. This section of the law is typically used against mafia organisations and had never been applied to a non-violent group.
Criminalising protest can also mean lowering the threshold for prosecution, preventing climate activists from mentioning climate change in court, and changing other court processes to make guilty verdicts more likely. Another example is injunctions that can be taken out by corporations against activists who protest against them.
3. Harsher policing
This stretches from stopping and searching to surveillance, arrests, violence, infiltration and threatening activists. The policing of activists is carried out not just by state actors like police and armed forces, but also private actors including private security, organised crime and corporations.
In Germany, regional police have been accused of collaborating with an energy giant (and its private fire brigade) to evict coal mine protesters, while private security was used extensively in policing anti-mining activists in Peru.
4. Killings and disappearances
Lastly, in the most extreme cases, environmental activists are murdered. This is an extension of the trend for harsher policing, as it typically follows threats by the same range of actors. We used data from the NGO Global Witness to show this is increasingly common in countries including Brazil, Philippines, Peru and India. In Brazil, most murders are carried out by organised crime groups while in Peru, it is the police force.
Protests are increasing
To look more closely at the global picture of climate and environmental protest – and the repression of it – we used the Armed Conflicts Location Event database. This showed us that climate protests increased dramatically in 2018-2019 and have not declined since. They make up on average about 4% of all protest in the 81 countries that had more than 1,000 protests recorded in the 2012-2023 period:
Climate protests increased sharply in the late 2010s in the 14 countries studied. (Data is smoothed over five months; number of protests is per country per month.) Berglund et al; Data: ACLED, CC BY-SA
This second graph shows that environmental protest has increased more gradually:
Environmental protests in the same 14 countries. Data: ACLED, CC BY-SA
We used this data to see what kind of repression activists face. By looking for keywords in the reporting of protest events, we found that on average 3% of climate and environmental protests face police violence, and 6.3% involve arrests. But behind these averages are large differences in the nature of protest and its policing.
A combination of the presence of protest groups like Extinction Rebellion, who often actively seek arrests, and police forces that are more likely to make arrests, mean countries such as Australia and the UK have very high levels of arrest. Some 20% of Australian climate and environmental protests involve arrests, against 17% in the UK – with the highest in the world being Canada on 27%.
Meanwhile, police violence is high in countries such as Peru (6.5%) and Uganda (4.4%). France stands out as a European country with relatively high levels of police violence (3.2%) and low levels of arrests (also 3.2%).
In summary, while criminalisation and repression does not look the same across the world, there are remarkable similarities. It is increasing in a lot of countries, it involves both state and corporate actors, and it takes many forms.
This repression is taking place in a context where states are not taking adequate action on climate change. By criminalising activists, states depoliticise them. This conceals the fact these activists are ultimately right about the state of the climate and environment – and the lack of positive government action in these areas.
Cyclone Chido was an “intense tropical cyclone”, equivalent to a category 4 hurricane in the Atlantic. It made landfall in Mayotte, a small island lying to the north-west of Madagascar on December 14, generating wind gusts approaching 155mph (250km/hr). Later on, it hit Mozambique, East Africa with the same ferocity.
This storm skirted north of Madagascar and affected the Comoros archipelago before making landfall in Mozambique. It is well within the range of what is expected for this part of the Indian Ocean. But this region has experienced an increase in the most intense tropical cyclones in recent years. This, alongside its occurrence so early in the season, can be linked to increases in ocean temperatures as a result of climate change.
News of the effects of tropical cyclone Chido in Mayotte, Mozambique and Malawi continues to emerge. Current estimates suggest 70% of Mayotte’s population have been affected, with over 50,000 homes in Mozambique partially or completely destroyed.
Ongoing conflict in Mozambique and undocumented migration to Mayotte will have played a key role in the number of deaths and the infrastructure damage.
Assessing how these cyclones characteristics are changing across southern Africa is part of the research we are involved in. Our team also studies how to build resilience to cyclones where conflict, displacement and migration magnify their effects.
A human-made disaster?
The risk that tropical cyclones pose to human life is exacerbated by socioeconomic issues. Migrants on Mayotte, many of whom made perilous journeys to escape conflict in countries such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, now make up more than half of the island’s population.
Precarious housing and the undocumented status of many residents reportedly made the disaster more deadly, as people feared evacuation would lead them to the police. On islands with poor infrastructure such as Mayotte, there is often simply nowhere safe to go. It takes many days for the power network and drinking water supply to be restored.
The situation is particularly complex in Mozambique. The ongoing conflict and terrorist violence, coupled with cyclones, including Kenneth in 2019, has caused repeated evacuations and worsening living conditions. Cabo Delgado and Nampula in the far north of Mozambique, the provinces most affected by both Chido and the conflict, rank among the poorest and most densely populated in the country due to limited education, scarce livelihood options and an influx of people displaced by violence.
As of June 2024, more than half a million people remained without permanent homes in the region, many living in displacement camps. That number is likely to rise significantly after Chido.
Compounding the crisis, Chido’s landfall so early in the cyclone season meant that the usual technical and financial preparations were not yet fully ramped up, with low stock levels delaying the timely delivery of aid. Unrest following elections in November hampered preparations further, cutting the flow of resources and personnel needed for anticipatory action and early response.
Tropical cyclones in a warmer world
Warmer sea surface temperatures not only provide more fuel for stronger storms, but may also expand the regions at risk of tropical cyclones.
Climate simulations predict that storms will continue getting stronger as we further warm our world, and could even lead to an unprecedented landfall as far south as the Mozambican capital, Maputo.
Scientists carry out attribution studies to determine how climate change contributed to specific events. Scientists undertaking rapid attribution studies of Chido have found that the ocean surface temperatures along the path of the storm were 1.1°C warmer than they would have been without climate change. So, temperatures this warm were made more than 50 times more likely by climate change. Another study focusing on Chido itself concluded that the cyclone’s winds were 5% faster due to global heating caused by burning fossil fuels, enough to bump it from a category 3 to a category 4 storm.
Intense winds are not the only hazard. Scientists are confident that tropical cyclones will dump more rain as a result of climate change. A trend towards slower-moving storms has been observed, causing more of that rain to accumulate in a single location, resulting in floods.
Cyclone Freddy delivered a year’s worth of rain to southern Malawi in just four days in March 2023. Storm surges, exacerbated by sea level rise, also raise the scale of flooding, as in the devastating Cyclone Idai in March 2019. An increase in the number of storms that rapidly intensify, as Chido did before landfall in Mayotte has also been linked to climate change, which makes it harder to provide early warnings.
To improve resilience to future cyclones, conflict, migration and social dynamics must be considered alongside climate change, without this, displaced and migrant communities will continue to be the most affected by the risks that climate change poses.
The headline goal of the UK’s peatland strategy – a framework published by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) that sets out how to improve UK peatlands – is simple, yet ambitious. The aim is for 20,000km² (2 million hectares) of UK peatland to be kept in good condition, restored or sustainably managed by 2040.
Yet, with approximately 30,000km² (3 million hectares) of these soggy ecosystems forming a complex mosaic across the UK’s four nations, 80% of it in poor condition, this is a monumental task. Five years after its launch in 2018, the experts behind the IUCN’s UK peatland programme have been reflecting on the progress.
Peat forms where wet and oxygen-limited soil conditions slow the decay of dead vegetation. This builds up over thousands of years leading to thick accumulations of organic matter, or peat. Given the continuing climate emergency, it is imperative that the carbon this contains is kept in the ground and out of the atmosphere where it will contribute to climate change.
However, land use practices over the last century have deeply drained the UK’s peatlands, destroying the waterlogged and oxygen-free conditions that preserve them and releasing the equivalent of 20 million tonnes of CO₂ each year.
Peat restoration is an important nature-based solution that can mitigate climate change and will be an essential part of reaching the UK’s legally binding emissions targets.
By restoring the UK’s peatlands, we avoid further emissions and, in time, convert them back into carbon sinks. Not only that, peatland restoration restores important functions of the ecosystem that help to reduce flood risk, clean water and improve biodiversity.
There are some reasons for optimism. Peat restoration began in the 1990s but has been rapidly accelerating in the last decade, largely focusing on raising water tables to restore low-oxygen conditions.
Around 2,550km² (255,000 hectares) of restoration have been completed. Despite problems in collating reliable data, a preliminary milestone of “1 million hectares in good condition by 2020” has probably been achieved. However, this number includes the best peatlands, which had never been extremely degraded and required little intervention.
Peatlands are finally being recognised in policy. Scotland, England and Wales all now have national peatland strategies that drive restoration of each unique landscape. And progress has been made in legislating against the effect of peat burning, with all burning on deep peat banned in England since 2021 and unlicensed burning on Scottish peatlands set to be implemented from 2025.
The peatlands of Scotland’s Flow Country, the world’s largest and most intact expanse of blanket bog, was recently designated a Unesco world heritage site.
Peat turf cut and left to dry on a wetland in the Scottish Highlands. DrimaFilm/Shutterstock
The way that peatland landscapes are being managed is advancing too. Paludiculture, a way of farming that allows groundwater to remain near the surface, has been a success in Europe and recent trials have shown promise in the UK.
This wetter farming could produce sustainable construction materials and biofuels with crops like bulrushes or reeds and wetland food crops like cranberry, celery and watercress. It could help convert intensive grasslands to wet meadows that can be grazed by carefully chosen breeds of cows or even water buffalo.
Although not ready to be widely implemented, recent trials suggest that this could be key to UK land management in the future.
Despite all this attention, there has been limited progress towards most key areas of the peatland strategy, with both conservation of the best peatlands and restoration of the others falling well below target levels. Indeed, the UK government’s climate change committee consider progress to be “significantly off-track”.
In this latest report, the IUCN UK peatland team says: “The progress we talk about in our report has been made across the whole of the UK since the 1990s.” Scotland, for example, needs to complete as much restoration in only ten years as they have in the last 30. They have scaled up – just nowhere near enough.
Shortfalls and long-term goals
So why, with all this effort and goodwill, are we still falling short? Funding is a problem.
It is widely accepted that public funding will not deliver the estimated £8-22 billion needed to restore all peatlands, but private financing schemes like carbon credits are in their infancy.
There are still no universally agreed definitions of either “peatland” or “restoration”, so eligibility for the various environmental schemes that allow landowners to fund restoration is confusing and off-putting.
Even where restoration can overcome these limitations, there is no centralised way to record the progress in transforming peatlands and very little capacity for the long-term monitoring needed to show whether particular projects are being successful. So tracking progress is near impossible.
Most frustratingly, despite collectively investing £318 million in peat restoration projects, no government has banned the extraction of peat and the long-promised ban on peat sales for horticulture has not materialised anywhere in the UK.
Although progress has been slow, the capacity and knowledge built over these last five years is huge. There has never been such awareness of a need to protect and restore our peatlands, so many people available with the right skills to do it and so much political will and public or private funding to carry it out.
There are many reasons progress has been slow but, with the right funding and legislation, the progress made in the last five years can be accelerated and two million hectares of healthy UK peat may still be possible by 2040.
Now that the UN’s climate summit, Cop29 in Azerbaijan, is over, it is clearer than ever that almost every peat-containing nation in the world is grappling with the same trade-offs. Just as we are debating how to raise water tables in Somerset without ending hundreds of years of dairy farming, south-east Asian countries struggle to reduce emissions from their vast regions of degraded agricultural peatland while still sustaining populations with enormous requirements for rice.
Keeping peat in wet ground, from Scottish peat bogs to the rice paddies of China, is one of the most cost-effective ways of keeping greenhouse gas emissions down, and we need to preserve and restore as much of it as possible.
This is a sad record for Africa’s only penguin, and means it is now just one step away from extinction.
How did this happen? African penguins (Spheniscus demersus) are found only in Namibia and South Africa. Their numbers have been declining since the 1800s. At that time, they were burnt in ships’ boilers, their eggs were harvested and consumed as a delicacy, and their nests were destroyed by guano-harvesters seeking a rich source of fertiliser.
These laws and regulations ban the capture of penguins or their eggs, and any intentional harm done to them. Fertilisers no longer use guano (penguin excrement). After egg and guano harvesting stopped, the lack of prey (small fish like sardines and anchovies) became the main issue for penguins from the early 2000s.
The impacts of climate change on the distribution and abundance of their food, and competition with industrial fisheries, have contributed to a 70% reduction in this penguin’s population between 2000 and 2024.
We are a group of scientists from universities and non-governmental organisations that have, for years, focused on solutions to save the African penguin. Today, unless the South African government takes urgent steps to protect the African penguin, it will likely become extinct in the wild by 2035. At present there are fewer than 20,000 birds left in the wild.
Penguins are like the canaries in the coal mine. They are disappearing because the ecosystem they rely on, together with many other species, including fish targeted by commercial fisheries, is in dire straits. By saving them, we protect their ecosystem and the other species that rely on it.
The destruction of African penguins’ nesting habitat over the centuries has been partly repaired by setting up artificial nests in penguin colonies. New research has found that these improve the number of penguin eggs that hatch by 16.5% compared to natural surface or bush nests which remain vulnerable to the elements.
Steps to protect the African penguins’ food supply also worked. One step was the experimental “no-take zones”, where the South African government prohibited fishing around the penguins’ breeding areas between 2008 and 2019.
The government closed commercial fishing of sardines and anchovies in a 20km radius around Robben Island on the west coast and St Croix Island in Algoa Bay for three years. During this time, commercial fishing around the neighbouring penguin colonies of Dassen Island and Bird Island was still permitted. The closure was alternated every three years until 2019 to see if it affected the penguin populations.
The results were positive. Penguins were able to catch fish with less effort and their chicks’ health and survival rates improved. The population increased by about 1% – a small increase, but very important, considering they were already endangered.
In parallel, the African Penguin Biodiversity Management Plan was published in 2013. The plan focused on managing predators, such as Cape fur seals and kelp gulls, and rescuing abandoned eggs and chicks. Thousands of individual penguins were saved and released into the wild over the years.
What has gone wrong for the penguin
Despite these efforts, the African penguin population fell faster from the mid-2010s. This was mostly due to the sudden collapse of the colony at St Croix Island, then the world’s largest African penguin colony.
This collapse coincided with the establishment of ship-to-ship bunkering activities (refuelling ships at sea rather than in ports) in Algoa Bay in 2016. While the ships were refuelling, four oil spills occurred.
Our previous research has revealed that African penguins are highly sensitive to underwater noise. Noise from ships or drilling equipment chases penguins away from their feeding grounds.
This also uses up the African penguins’ energy, often at a time when they have none to spare. Penguins need energy reserves before starting their annual moult, when they stay ashore for three weeks without eating to replace all their feathers. If they don’t find enough food before or after that stressful period, they die.
Can the African penguin be saved?
The experimental use of no-take zones in penguin breeding areas ended in 2019. A panel of international experts was then appointed by the South African government to review the experiment and suggest a way forward.
The panel said no-take zones should be put in place around all colonies. They recommended ways to balance the benefit to penguins against the cost to fisheries.
Meanwhile, bunkering in Algoa Bay has stopped temporarily after the South African Revenue Service detained five ships in September 2023 on allegations of breaching customs laws.
Subsequently, small increases in the St Croix Island penguin population have been seen for the first time in nearly ten years.
African penguins can bounce back when environmental conditions are good. Government and non-governmental organisations have worked hard to prevent various threats to penguins. But critical work remains to be done to protect their foraging habitat (the ocean around their colonies) from polluting activities.
Penguins also need protection from competition with industrial fisheries for fish supplies.
Global temperature records are expected to exceed the 1.5 °C threshold for the first time this year. This has happened much sooner than predicted. So can life on the planet adapt quickly enough?
In our new research, published today in Nature, we explored the ability of tiny marine organisms called plankton to adapt to global warming. Our conclusion: some plankton are less able to adapt now than they were in the past.
Plankton live in the top few metres of ocean. These algae (phytoplankton) and animals (zooplankton) are transported by ocean currents as they do not actively swim.
Some data suggest that current climate change have already altered the marine plankton dramatically. Models project a shift of plankton towards both poles (where ocean temperatures are cooler), and losses to zooplankton in the tropics but might not predict the patterns we see in data. Satellite data for plankton biomass are still too short term to determine trends through time.
To overcome these problems, we have compared how plankton responded to past environmental change and modelled how they could respond to future climate changes. As the scientist Charles Lyell said, “the past is the key to the present”.
We explored one of the best fossil records from a group of marine plankton with hard shells called Foraminifera. This comprehensive database of current and past distributions, compiled by researchers at the University of Bremen, has been collected by hundreds of scientists from the seafloor across the globe since the 1960s. We compared data from the last ice age, around 21,000 years ago, and modern records to see what happened when the world has previously warmed.
We used computational models, which combine climate trends with traits of marine plankton and their effect on marine plankton, to simulate the oceanic ecosystems from the last ice age to the pre-industrial age. Comparing the model with the data from the fossil record is giving us support that the model simulated the rules determining plankton growth and distribution.
We found that some subtropical and tropical species’ optimum temperature for peak growth and reproduction could deal with seawater warming in the past, supported by both fossil data and model. Colder water species of plankton managed to drift to flourish under more favourable water temperatures.
Our analysis shows that Foraminifera could handle the natural climate change, even without the need to adapt via evolution. But could they deal with the current warming and future changes in ocean conditions, such as temperature?
Future of the food chain
We used this model to predict the future under four different degrees of warming from 1.5 to 4 °C. Unfortunately, this type of plankton’s ability to deal with climate change is much more limited than it was during past warming. Our study highlights the difference between faster human-induced and slower-paced geological warming for marine plankton. Current climate change is too rapid and is reducing food supply due to ocean stratification, both making plankton difficult to adapt to this time.
Phytoplankton produce around 50% of the world’s oxygen. So every second breath we take comes from marine algae, while the rest comes from plants on land. Some plankton eat other plankton. That in turn gets eaten by fish and then marine mammals, so energy transfers further up the food chain. As it photosynthesises, phytoplankton is also a natural carbon fixation machine, storing 45 times more carbon than the atmosphere.
Around the world, many people depend heavily on food from the ocean as their primary protein sources. When climate change threatens marine plankton, this has huge knock-on effects throughout the rest of the marine food web. Plankton-eating marine mammals like whales won’t have enough food to prey on and there’ll be fewer fish to eat for predators (and people). Reducing warming magnitude and slowing down the warming rate are necessary to protect ocean health.
The pilot of a community kitchen in Portee-Rokupa, Freetown, Sierra Leone
There is political controversary around the total population of Freetown, Sierra Leone. The 2021 mid-term Population and Housing census noted a significant decrease in Freetown’s population which has subsequently been challenged by the mayor and other leading stakeholders. Statistics vary from 600,000 to 1.35million. Regardless, it is estimated that 36% of the city’s population live within densely populated informal settlements scattered across Freetown’s eastern peninsula. These communities, not too dissimilar to other low-income settlements across the city, and indeed other densely populated urban centres, are often located in geographically vulnerable areas and prone to increased hazards, risks and disasters.
It is in the informal settlement of Portee Rokupa where researchers from the University of Bristol have been working since 2021 (Figure 1). The ESRC funded ‘Beyond the Networked City’ project (grant number: ES/T007656/1) is a collaboration between the University of Bristol, Loughborough University, Sierra Leone Urban Research Centre (SLURC), Makerere University, and the University of Cape Town that seeks to further understand urban service delivery of key infrastructure such as water, sanitation and energy in Freetown and Kampala. In close partnership with SLURC, over 360 households in Portee Rokupa were surveyed on their energy services such as electricity and cooking.
Figure 1: Map of Portee Rokupa, Freetown
In Portee Rokupa, like most of these communities, their residents, mainly women and young girls, carry out the daily task of cooking. Cooking, whether for personal consumption or income generating purposes, is usually prepared using traditional biomass fuels such as charcoal with basic, inefficient metal stoves called coal pots (Figure 2). The use of traditional coal pot stoves are contributors to air pollution and environmental degradation affecting health of users and local forest cover.
Figure 2: A stereotypical charcoal coal pot used in Freetown
Working closely with the residents and community actors in Portee Rokupa, there is an overwhelming desire to transition to cleaner cooking solutions, but there are challenges around accessibility, availability, finance, and imposed knowledge that hinders the sustainable uptake of ‘clean’ cookstoves. Whilst trying to further understand what could be done to improve their cooking service delivery, the idea for a communal cooking space, which offers a range of cooking technologies, to be used on a pay-as-you basis, was both desirable and aspirational for the community.
SLURC project managed the community kitchen project whilst also facilitating community dialogue to ensure that residents themselves were part of the design and construction, and management of the kitchen. They also fostered new and existing partnerships with key stakeholders including the Government Technical Institute (GTI), the Electricity Generation and Transmission Company (EGTC), and Afrigas, a national LPG supplier. What started as ad-hoc discussions around the need to improve cooking service delivery within informal settlements, turned into the creation of the Platform for Energy Safety, innovation, and Access Consortium (PESIA), a call to action for stakeholders to further understand the cooking needs of residents living in informal settlements.
To ensure long-term sustainability of the kitchen, community members were selected to become community Energy Champions and were trained by the above stakeholders on the use, maintenance, finance and safety of different cooking technologies that would enable them to provide tailored support in the community kitchen as well as broader advice around energy choices within the community. The community were involved at every stage of the project from kitchen design, choice of location, selection of preferred stoves and fuels as well as overall kitchen management. For example, because Portee Rokupa is predominantly a fishing community, the desire for larger stoves and ovens that would help smoke, preserve and process fish was something residents regularly communicated. The community kitchen does not only provide access to improved cooking facilities, but also serves as a hub for broader community interaction, something that is of importance to the community.
Figure 3: Training of Energy Champions
So, what has the Community Kitchen achieved? Since it’s official launch in May 2024 (Figure 4), the pilot has received significant attention within Freetown, especially on social media channels and within local news outlets. Management of the kitchen has been fully handed over to the community and energy champions who have elected a chairwoman and a chairman who will oversee the use of the kitchen and be responsible for financial accountability. Residents of Portee Rokupa are now regularly using the kitchen facilities, not only for their mealtime cooking, but for community events such as parties and weddings, and local entrepreneurs are using the kitchen for productive uses such as food preparation, fish smoking and soap making.
The broader impact of this initiative extends beyond the immediate benefits of access to cleaner, more efficient cooking solutions. The kitchen is now an official vendor of Afrigas bottles, bringing a consistent supply of LPG to the community for the first time. Community buy-in, consistent dialogue, co-creation of kitchen design and the training of energy champions has fostered a sense of ownership and responsibility, encouraging them to advocate for and implement sustainable practices within their communities. This grassroots approach has also extended into other informal communities such as Susan’s Bay and Dwazark where energy champions are spreading their knowledge to ensure households are more aware of different cooking options available rather than solely relying on traditional ways of cooking. The Portee-Rokupa community kitchen was a pilot initiative driven by a community desire to have access to alternative cooking services. It is now forging its way as a beacon of knowledge, empowerment and sustainability. It demonstrates how targeted training and community engagement can drive significant changes, paving the way for a more sustainable and resilient future for all. As these Energy Champions continue their work, they are not just transforming kitchens; they are transforming lives and building a brighter, greener future for their communities.
Figure 4: Cooking in the community kitchen on launch day, May 2024
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This blog is written by Amadu Kamara Labor and Dora Vangahun from Sierra Leone Urban Research Centre, Freetown, Sierra Leone; and Charlotte Ray and Sam Williamson from the School of Electrical, Electronic and Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Energy Management Research Group, University of Bristol.
The background research behind this work was funded by the ESRC through grant ES/T007656/1, Beyond the Networked City: Building innovative delivery systems for water, sanitation and energy in urban Africa. The Community Kitchen was funded by a joint EPSRC/ESRC Impact Acceleration Account Award, grant numbers EP/X525674/1 ES/X004392/1.
In recent years, plant-based diets have spiked across the UK. These trends are accompanied by increased discussions about consumption choices, in which vegans and livestock farmers are often depicted as rivals in a highly polarised public debate. Debates often centre on the modern meat industry, predominately criticised for its exploitative animal husbandry and/or its unsustainable farming practices. As livestock farmers’ activities are placed under the microscope, are their reputations falling in respectability?
Attempts have been made to improve communication between farmers and consumers, addressing a so called urban-rural ‘disconnect’. The thought goes that when communication is poor between these parties, polarization and stereotypes are given greater space to thrive. This issue became the springboard for my project. As veganism’s objections to animal farming are well-documented, I wanted to hear more from UK farmers’ themselves about their relatively unheard views on veganism.
Research realities
The nature of this study called for qualitative research: semi-structured interviews aiming to gain detailed, ‘close-up’ information on farmers’ lived experiences. With resources limited, my participants comprised of 12 British meat and dairy farmers, allowing me to explore sheep, cattle and pig farms of different shapes-and-sizes.
Although UK farming communities are recognised as an especially hard-to-reach demographic for research engagement, I was able to utilize my ‘insider’ status to secure a high response rate. Whilst I am from a farming background, I am also a vegetarian: an ‘outsider’ dietary choice that is frequently met with negativity in the agricultural world.
Spatial distribution of interviewees across the UK
Farmers’ ‘issues’
The livestock farmers I interviewed expressed two broad issues with veganism. The first issue spoke of the ‘urban disconnect’ from everyday, rural cultures and lifestyles on the farm. Farmers cast vegans as estranged ‘city people’ who therefore create misconceptions about farming practices. Speaking of artificial insemination, one farmer with a micro-dairy explained that animal rights activists are “just totally wrong” by commonly naming AI as “raping a cow”. He named these claims as an “anthropocentrism […] [The cows are] not in any distress with it […] The idea that it goes against the will of the cow is just incorrect” (Farmer J).
Farmers also saw veganism’s disconnection from the realities of livestock farming as leaving no scope for there to be any positive kind of relationships between farmer and animal. Things like
sheep running through the field […] the farmer helping a ewe give birth […] The kind of joyful sides of it […] If a farmer says: ‘but no, there’s a relationship and it’s like a symbiotic thing’, it’s like ‘fuck off is it symbiotic, it’s the most exploitative relationship possible’ (Mixed livestock farmer).
In general, farmers spoke of complicated and intimate farmer-animal relationships. Whilst acknowledging that livestock are kept for economic purposes, they felt that animals can equallyshape ways of being in the world for farmers. They believed that most vegans failed to recognise this, only having the scope to consider the worst bits of livestock farming. In other words, they see “the end product, and the end product is death”.
Secondly, many farmers problematised veganism as an unsuitable paradigm for UK agriculture to holistically follow:
I think that veganism is still just as dependent on the worst bits of our food system, as in the agro chemistries […] I think it’s just as dependent on all of these, but it has falsely blamed animals as the consequence of the environmental degradation (Sheep farmer).
Situated in the no-meat/pro-meat debate, many farmers I spoke with joined the rising number of people championing small-scale, naturalistic animal farming. Contrary to veganism, they saw livestock — extensively managed — as necessary for any healthy, farmed ecosystem. This mirrors one micro-dairy farmers’ discussion on the reintegration of livestock onto degraded arable land:
There could be a really important role for livestock on repairing arable lands that could also help with transitioning away from artificial fertilizers and heavy use of fossil fuels in arable.
Overall, farmers critiqued veganism for failing to recognise the damage that conventional farming practices elicit, whilst promoting a singularly negative view of animal farming. They named the movement responsible for the successful “demonizing of cows”, claiming instead that it’s not the cow, it’s the how.
A less politically charged takeaway, however, is the idea that the UK’s fundamentally unsustainable food system is not being challenged by veganism. Farmers spoke about the need to reform the UK’s import-culture, in which only 55% of our food is home-grown. One believed that an ethical diet can’t be based on “unjust global structures either” as, for example, “problems [are] being caused for Mexican people by [the UK] importing so many avocados”.
Farmers felt that veganism falsely implies that ‘the food system is fine, just as long as customers do the correct thing and don’t eat animal produce’. Instead, many prefer to aspire towards a system that they felt does address deeper food system issues, such as a ‘farm-gate to plate’ model of local, agroecologically produced food.
Livestock farmers praise veganism
However, to focus solely on livestock farmers’ issues with veganism would paint a false image of what was said. Most farmers interviewed defended certain aspects of veganism, with a minority actively praising the movement:
So, where I think they do [understand the realities of livestock farming] is the […] refusal to look away from the bad aspects, from the dirtier aspects or the bloodier aspects of livestock farming […] I think a lot of meat-eaters just totally disavow that as if it doesn’t exist […] So I think vegans understand sometimes the realities of eating meat more than meat-eaters (Sheep farmer).
Here, this farmer approved of veganism for encouraging animal welfare debates. This reveals veganism’s potentially positive role in farmers’ eyes, overcoming some of the romantic ignorance about primary food production that persists in the UK. These welfare discussions often led to farmers passionately claiming that, as a nation, we need to drastically reduce our meat consumption, naming it “quite frightening” that meat consumption continues to rise “even with the vegan movement”.
Unlike existing narratives — casting vegans and livestock farmers as opposites — many farmers in my study sympathised with veganism’s goals. When discussing vegans’ decisions to eschew animal produce, one sheep farmer even said: “I totally get it and I certainly get the point where I don’t want to kill it because it’s beautiful”. These results reveal novel connections between two seemingly polarised groups. One mixed-livestock farmer even claimed that “for people to make a stance and make a decision, I applaud that”.
Farmers’ perspectives will always be diverse and complex. Nonetheless, there was a strong sense that many farmers are feeling that, within the realm of consumption, ignorance may just lie in focusing too much on what we eat, and not enough on the environment in which our food is from.
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This blog was written by Sophie Wise, a postgraduate student in Sociology (with a study abroad) at the University of Bristol.
Although exploring the synergies between these three COPs is of great importance and their close temporal proximity this year facilitates such discussion, I will focus solely on the CBD COP 16 as I had the opportunity to attend it in person as a University of Bristol academic observer.
CBD COP 16, held in Cali, Colombia started on the 21st of October and was due to end on the 1st of November. Negotiations overrun until the morning of the 2nd of November but they were suspended as the quorum was lost, leaving discussions on some key issues such as the strategy for resource mobilization to be resumed at a later date.
As biodiversity COPs are held biannually, COP 16 was the first COP since the adoption of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) at COP 15 in 2022. No one was expecting the negotiation of another major agreement at COP 16, with the key issue being the implementation of the GBF framework.
An introduction to the GBF
Differently from the Paris Agreement under the UNFCCC, the GBF is not legally binding. Nevertheless, given that the boundary between binding and non-binding instruments in international environmental law is not always so clear-cut, the GBF has a central role in directing biodiversity law and policy. The GBF is a largely aspirational goal and target-oriented instrument. It contains four Goals to ‘live in harmony with nature’ by 2050 and 23 global Targets for 2030, split into three categories, namely ‘reducing threats to biodiversity’, ‘meeting people’s needs through sustainable use and benefit-sharing’ and ‘tools and solutions for implementation and mainstreaming’. The Targets have different degrees of ‘quantifiability’, impacting also on Parties’ strategies and methodologies of implementation.
For example, the well- known ‘30 by 30’ target (Target 3) sets the threshold of 30% of the coverage of protected areas and other effective area-based conservation measures (OECMs) in terrestrial and inland water areas as well as marine and coastal areas to be reached by 2030. In contrast, Target 5, which still falls within the first category of ‘reducing threats to biodiversity’, is framed using a more general language: ‘ensure that the use, harvesting and trade of wild species is sustainable, safe and legal, preventing overexploitation, minimizing impacts on non-target species and ecosystems, and reducing the risk of pathogen spillover, applying the ecosystem approach, while respecting and protecting customary sustainable use by indigenous peoples and local communities.’
There are not only differences between Targets but the wordings of individual Targets themselves is sometimes contradictory, making for complex implementation as conflicting directions are suggested. For example, Target 19 pushes for the marketisation of nature, encouraging the private sector to invest in biodiversity and employing uncritically the language of green bonds and payments for ecosystem services, whilst, at the same, promoting the role of ‘Mother Earth centric action and non-market approaches’. Even if not all targets are rife with internal contradictions, other internal differences may exist, with some objectives expressed in a qualitative rather than a quantitative manner or by reference to concepts that lack unified legal definitions. This makes it more difficult to devise specific indicators, with the consequence that Parties will likely concentrate on the objectives requiring easier interpretative skills. For example, going back to the ‘30 by 30’ Target 3, the quantitative component is followed by references to ‘equitably governed systems’, which could mean very different things to different regulatory actors and there is still much work to be done on the identification of OECMs.
It should be recalled that this is not the first time the CBD employs the language of Targets and Goals. Notably, the CBD Strategic Plan for Biodiversity 2011-2020 included the Aichi Biodiversity Targets structured around 5 strategic goals, though most were not achieved and few partially achieved, as reported in the Global Biodiversity Outlook 5. COP 16’s focus on implementation was therefore crucial to avoid historical failures repeating themselves in 2030.
The spaces and voices of COP 16
COPs are notoriously busy and chaotic events. COP 16 of the CBD did indeed feel busy, with many side events happening simultaneously and in parallel to the formal negotiations of the two Working Groups and plenaries, as well as press conferences and Pavilion events. It was also the largest-ever CBD COP with some 23,000 registered delegates. Yet, the Conference Centre that hosted COP 16 in Cali was very capacious and the horizontal disposition of the spaces facilitated inter-ethnic, inter-generational, inter-disciplinary and of course inter-jurisdictional discussions under a Colombian sky often veiled by clouds.
It was a pleasant surprise to witness the high representation of youth, as well as indigenous peoples and local communities advocating for their rights and the rights of nature, though one may wonder if this was primarily due to the fact that COP 16 was organised in South America where the question of who is indigenous and who is not is not as contested as in other continents (such as Africa) and where youth environmental activism is thriving.
Side events also saw the participation of a plurality of voices, hosting delegates from a myriad of Inter-governmental organisations (IGOs) and Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs), as well as researchers, Secretariat members and sometimes Parties. Thus, cross-fertilisation of ideas dominated the Conference with the hope that points made in side events by activists, academics, and others could filter through Parties to the negotiation tables. Indeed, many times in side events speakers addressed the audience as if it were an audience entirely made up by Parties’ delegates (seldom the case in practice), encouraging it to report back to the contact groups, which are closed working groups attended by Parties discussing draft texts of decisions.
Human rights as a framing device for different world-makings
The language of human rights pervaded the whole COP 16. This is a recent turn for the CBD, considering that the CBD itself and its instruments pre-GBF do not explicitly refer to human rights. In contrast, the GBF lists among the considerations for the implementation of the Framework a ‘human rights-based approach’. Section C 7(g) states in full that ‘the implementation of the Framework should follow a human rights-based approach, respecting, protecting, promoting and fulfilling human rights. The Framework acknowledges the human right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment’. There are a few other references to human rights language scattered in the text. For example, in Target 22, reference is made to the ‘full protection of environmental human rights defenders’. The GBF’s explicit inclusion of human rights language and also the acknowledgement of a substantive human right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment—which cross references the UN General Assembly Resolution of 28 July 2022—has solidified the link between human rights and biodiversity protection. Thus, it is not surprising that delegates at COP 16 used human rights language extensively.
In this context, it was interesting to observe that different groups internalised and strategically deployed human rights language to advance different, sometimes, but not always complementary, world-makings. Youth representatives referred to human rights as a tool for achieving inter-generational equity in biodiversity conservation; many indigenous peoples’ representatives employed human rights language to advance substantive claims such as rights to land and resources as well as procedural ones such as participatory rights in conservation decision-making; women representatives employed human rights language to address gender inequalities in conservation; some UN representatives strongly supported a human rights-based approach to area-based conservation as a means to avoid the tragedies brought about by ‘fortress conservation’; others used human rights language to reiterate key objectives of existing international law instruments.
The concept of human rights returned over and over in COP discussions intersecting with other reflections that unwrap the many lines around which biodiversity is framed and practiced by different communities and actors.
Outcomes and beyond
As mentioned above, COP 16 was suspended leaving for a later date, decisions on some critical issues, such as finance mechanisms and monitoring mechanism to measure Parties’ progress in achieving GBF Targets and Goals. Considering the slow implementation of the GBF- only 44 Parties have submitted revised National Biodiversity Strategies and Action Plans (NBSAPs), which are the main national implementation tools under Article 6 of the CBD- it is disappointing that decisions on budget and monitoring mechanisms have been left pending. However, there were also many achievements at COP 16, including:
the launch of the ‘Cali fund’ to operationalise the sharing of benefits from uses of digital sequence information (DSI);
a number of sectoral decisions, including one on the mechanism for identifying ecologically or biologically significant marine areas (EBSAs), which had been the subject of legal and political discussion for eight years.
The decisions related to Article 8(j) stand out considering the central role indigenous peoples and local communities play in the protection of biodiversity and the importance of including different epistemologies in biodiversity decision-making. During COP itself, there were arguments in favour and against the creation of such subsidiary body. Concerns revolved around questions such as ‘Why fixating on only one article of the CBD? Why a subsidiary body on this specific article and not others?’, ‘Would the subsidiary body silo indigenous peoples and local communities concerns?’, ‘Should indigenous peoples and local communities still be clustered together?’ Many counter-arguments were raised promoting the establishment of the subsidiary body as a way to legitimise and render more visible indigenous peoples and local communities’ practices turning these actors as policy makers instead of policy takers included in NBSAPs. The new subsidiary body’s modus operandi will be developed over the next two years, and it will be interesting to follow such development.
Outcomes are important, and in a goal and target-oriented environmental law world such as the one the CBD governance infrastructure presents, it is natural and logical to focus on what is achieved and what is not. However, the success of COP 16, like all COPs, should not solely be determined by its outcomes. It is essential to remember the spaces and the conversations that unfolded in between, the sharing of knowledge by a global community coming together for a few days from very different paths of life and with different agendas, a multitude unified by the shared concern of biodiversity loss, which continues at unprecedented rates and deserves everyone attention in COPs and beyond.
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This blog is written by Cabot Institute for the Environment member, Professor Margherita Pieraccini, Professor of Law at the University of Bristol Law School.
Every autumn, the UN holds its international climate summit or “Cop” (Conference of the Parties). Between each Cop, a smaller, lower-profile gathering takes place. Called the SB – short for “subsidary bodies” of the UN’s Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) – these smaller meetings matter but don’t draw as much public attention.
The SB meetings are a world apart from Cops. Held in the same small venue in the German city of Bonn every year, the latest, SB60, had 8,606 participants whereas last year’s Cop28 in Dubai had around 100,000. Observers make up about half of the SB participants, and the atmosphere is less about being there to show you care and more focused on the matter at hand – global negotiations.
In contrast to Cops, there are no pavilions and exhibition spaces. The focus is on negotiations and side events. In June 2024, our team of climate law and policy experts from the Cabot Institute at the University of Bristol attended SB60 as observers. We prioritised going to Bonn instead of the upcoming Cop29 in Baku, Azerbaijan, because SBs offer a chance to see negotiations in flux.
In Bonn, there’s more chance to speak directly to negotiators including diplomats, heads of state, and UNFCCC staff (who are less pressed for time) – and to have an influence on policy outcomes (because positions are not yet as cemented as they are at Cops).
SB60 revealed some important sticking points and challenges for delegates going to Cop29 in Baku, which starts on November 11. The negotiations proved to be particularly difficult in three key areas.
1. A stalled transition
The first is “just transition” – the idea of making society fairer for everyone as we respond to climate change. Negotiations collapsed before the end of SB60 due to disagreements on scope, timelines and implementation planning.
The term just transition was only defined and planned for at a global governance level for the first time at last year’s Cop28. There was a real push and pull between developing and developed countries when it came to setting out the aims and scope of this plan.
Developed countries, including Norway, the US and the EU, pushed to focus on jobs and technology. Developing countries, including the UN’s coalition of 77 developing countries known as the G-77, China, small island developing states, and 54 states of the UN’s Africa Group, wanted costs to be shared fairly in a way that recognises existing inequalities between countries, and with compensation for past harms.
There was a sense that developing countries wanted to see broader system changes within the UNFCCC. One of us (Alix Dietzel) noted down how the G-77 plus China stressed that getting just transition right was “key for the future of the Cops and the regime of the UNFCCC”.
Eventually, the developed countries’ version won out at Cop28. But at SB60, it became clear there were still deep disagreements over what a just transition means and how this will play out. Negotiations over how to achieve the targets for a just transition collapsed when states could not agree whether to include wider discussions of systemic inequality and new finance goals, and whether the UNFCCC’s five-yearly global stocktake required a scaling up of ambition.
The outcome document produced on the final day of SB60 stated that parties met and negotiated – but frustratingly, did not capture any views that can be used as a basis for further negotiations.
Co-authors Alice Venn and Alix Dietzel at SB60. Alix Dietzel, CC BY-NC-ND
2. Responding to climate loss and damage
There is increasing urgency to deliver meaningful support to developing countries experiencing the worst economic and non-economic losses from climate impacts. These range from extreme weather and sea level rise to damage to ecosystems and communities. A key priority is funding to support the recovery and preparedness of the most at-risk countries and communities.
A new loss and damage fund, currently hosted by the World Bank, was established at Cop28. So far, it has received more than US$702 million (£540 million) in pledges. At SB60, the debate focused on how best to urgently scale up this funding and make it more easily available to the communities most in need of it.
Many countries and observers called for a more inclusive approach based on human rights, and stressed the need for technical support in less developed countries.
3. Finance is key
Cop29 is all about money. Billed as “the finance Cop”, leaders in Baku must agree on a new climate finance goal. Known as the “new collective quantified goal” (NCQG), this aims to support developing countries with climate action. Industrialised nations have only met the current annual target of US$100 billion once, in 2022. SB60 was meant to lay the groundwork for a finance deal at Cop29. The outcome in Bonn, however, was disappointing.
We observed that developing countries felt frustrated at the dithering of developed nations over who should pay and how much. The Colombian government, for example, is committed to decarbonisation, but in Bonn expressed dismay at the lack of concessionary climate finance to support this process.
Developing countries seemed angry that finance flows prioritise private infrastructure investment over key sectors that are considered non-profitable, such as education, health, coastal flooding defences or landslide prevention. This makes climate adaptation harder, especially in the context of high debt burdens.
The road to Baku
The intimate setting of the SB negotiation space might look like it could deliver better climate outcomes compared to huge Cops. Negotiators at Cop28 were crowded out by lobbyists and industry representatives. In Bonn this year, smaller numbers meant delegates could more easily meet for informal huddles outside the negotiation rooms.
Finance negotiations will be centre stage at Cop29. Alix Dietzel, CC BY-NC-ND
At the Cop climate summits, observers like us normally don’t have a significant voice. But at SB60, interactive workshops and contact groups gave observers opportunities to speak. We held a side event with the global mayors network, C40 Cities, and Earthshot prize winners, the environmental and youth empowerment group Green Africa Youth Organization. Discussions focused on how to make urban climate policy more inclusive, and we later introduced ourselves to the UK negotiation team.
Contributions from civil society observers were recorded by the UNFCCC and incorporated into official SB reports on finance and loss and damage. Nevertheless, big decisions on just transition, loss and damage, and climate finance are constrained by competing geopolitical and economic interests, regardless of the size of the negotiating space.
SB60 set the scene for two weeks of fractious negotiations in Baku. Climate change-induced extreme weather events and changing weather patterns are accelerating. Key climate tipping points could be breached soon.
Developing countries will require trillions of dollars a year to adapt to and mitigate these extreme scenarios. Based on what we experienced in Bonn, a finance deal at Baku that delivers climate action for developing countries seems a long way off.
This article is republished from 
