environment – Page 7 – Cabot Institute for the Environment blog

Engaging with visions of mobilities within the landscape of risk

Posted on July 19, 2022April 16, 2023 by janet.crompton

When describing the commercial port land of Felixstowe (fig. I) as a ‘nerve ganglion of capitalism’ in 2006, a proto-nostalgic horizon ‘blighted by cargo ships’, Mark Fisher was describing a vision of the natural’s collision course with the monetary in words that ooze forth from the ascetic expanse he walked us through, right up to the journey’s reposeful end point, the burial ground at Sutton Hoo (fig. II). Here, in this space, palpable is the sense that the increasingly unseen in today’s world is seen so lucidly that upon listening closer, Beowulf’s verses may come rushing forth upon the Deben mists to play amongst the ancient mounds and time-worn grasses.

Figures I (top) & II (bottom): Felixstowe container port (top) the largest of its kind in the United Kingdom, a point of arrival and nerve ganglion of capitalism responsible for the distribution of material commodities across the land along established networks of commerce. By contrast, the ‘sunlit planetary quality of serenity’ offered at Sutton Hoo (bottom) engages with a vision of departure, two different points within a geography that speaks to themes of migration, mobility, and the conflict of boundary in space and time. (sources: Institution of Civil Engineers (top) & thesuffolkcoast.co.uk (bottom)).

In a space as innately human as this, the purpose of the city, the urban, and what it means to exist in it becomes overwritten in the victorious verse and rhythm of nature and the environment, yet there is an eeriness inherent in this vision. A sense of disconnection and immobility that is increasingly disassociated with the ever-expanding urban centres across the world. This is a sense that many might argue is, itself, becoming increasingly overwritten through development and, possibly more directly, through proliferating networks of digital visualisation and communication.

More of us are living in urban settings and more of us are moving to them, what drives this flight to the city, the deeper motivations can only be described as, much like the conditions of the British weather, myriad. What this mobilisation and migration looks like is relatively more straight forward to describe: a need for access to resources through labour, coupled with a space in which to live and be at home, to rest. Mirrored perfectly in Fisher’s visions from Felixstowe to Sutton Hoo, a seamless cross section of the Anthropocene. Capturing the stillness afforded by a space so radically different to the city, where the scale of achievement, to simply occupy a space with as much concrete matter as is condensed into the wondrous square miles of London, Birmingham, and Manchester, amongst many others, by comparison to that which does not occupy the vastness of Suffolk is astonishing. Historically, progress for those who have settled in these cityscapes has, in many senses, been assured, simply through an increased likelihood of encountering streams of revenue and capital, or so goes the utopian visions of the upwardly mobile Mondeo Men and Worcester Women.

Loosely this might be described as the enabling of capital progress, however these connections, patterns and trends underpinning, however loosely, such stereotypical visions of city living have become much more distant for most within the current global climate. A crude utilisation of Tobler’s first law of geography would, when coupled with Mark Fisher’s nerve ganglion metaphor, lead us to deduce that those closest to capital, to the contemporary capital markets of the city, are not as readily likely to benefit from this proximity as they might once have. This sense of capital mobility associated with the city is now fundamentally more precarious and is visually very different from that seen in the past, offering the first glimpse of the landscape of risk.

Of course, this form of mobility is not completely linear as the city has long also been associated with a flux of capital mobility represented by a great, and growing, disparity between those operating at the top of the metropolitan hierarchy, in gleaming beglassed monoliths, and those looking up at them from the mosaic of avenues and streets below. This structural and spatial inequality of the cityscape is as symbolic of the urban as it is of the human condition it embodies, where products of value are exchanged for labour and where, as David Harvey explained in Social Justice and The City, ‘capitalism annihilates space to ensure its own reproduction.’ Historically facilitated by barbaric internal mechanisms in the West, from blockbusting and redlining amongst a spectrum of variable living standards that extend from unthinkable to the decadent, urbanisation and urban expansion reassembling the natural spaces in the pursuit of capital will naturally enhance and further facilitate the growth of inequity and thus, further strengthen the boundaries of the risk landscape.

This does come down to a fundamental connection between capital and risk, where risk is largely framed in the context of ‘asset loss’ but the landscape in which it is most acutely observed, where capital value is most apparent, the city, is where it is, and will continue to be, predominant. Harvey concludes his vision on the engagement with political process as fundamental to traversing the forms of inequality and injustice generated and facilitated through ties to this form of ‘development’. Consequent of the unprecedented recent times we have lived in, and now continue to live through, together, the public inquisitions regarding the moral constitution of those responsible for overseeing political processes challenges any desire for engagement. Age old theoretical undercoats of societal constitution and modernity begin to peel away under the searing heat of growing public discontent whilst those at the very zenith continue to profit financially.

The risk landscape is one fraught with conflict and is perpetually in crisis. However, were this crisis to be wholly one of capital, it would affect everyone. Capital and inequity are one facet of the greater conflict the risk landscape has with the environment at large, as even when this crisis is framed in the context of equity, it finds equilibrium in the continuation of the trend that, depending on where you are categorised within the social hierarchy of the city, you will continue to be worse off from here on out and no amount of ‘levelling up’ will bring about a truly positive change to this course. We are beginning to feel this at home, on a personal scale now through a volatile geopolitical landscape, but that doesn’t mean that labour is any less abundant. The boundaries of the risk landscape will continue to expand beyond this and find a continuing but ultimately existential conflict with the natural environment, generating an accelerated form of risk that is much more linear in outcome. The general message related to this is clear: ‘Adaptation of current modes and systems to emergent environmental risk is needed, with further mitigation required to prevent the acceleration of this risk’

The modern human age is liquid, where change and continuity are seen to different degrees and operate at various tempos across time. Were I to define which of the processes discussed throughout this missive are representative of change and continuity, I would posit that the ultimate defining factor of both lie in the hands of nature and not my own. Whilst social categories become redefined through mechanisms closely tied to the city, overwriting of old landscape structures through the proliferation of the urban over time generates a legacy of risk through reparation and over expansion. In appropriating space that is not in the interest of that which inhabits that space, be it the development of floodplains to accommodate homes, the utilisation, or lack, of land due to pollution from past industry, processes of land reclamation, we are clutching at straws. Yet, capital is generated and claimed with little interest for the longevity or safety of those inhabiting these new spaces, asserting a dynamic of equitability for whom exactly?

It is in this dissection of value, it’s definition and by whom (or what), that the vision of the risk landscape becomes truly material. How these values shift, and to what benefit, must continue to be explored if we are to make a sustainable vision of the city into a liveable environment, equitable for all who will call it home. If our mobility within this exploration could be versed in the cognitive, as Mark Fisher did for us, then we are becoming more aware of the trends that connect the naturally seen and unseen with the landscape of risk. Supporting us in the delineation of what is really of and for us against that which appears to be, revealing what it is to be truly of and for the natural.

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This blog is written by Cabot Institute for the Environment member, Dr. Thomas O’Shea. Dr O’Shea is a postdoctoral research associate with the University of Bristol School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies. The primary focus of his research is on developing understanding of the human-water interface with specific interests in the application of social theory, urban and hybrid geographies towards shaping narratives and strategies of sustainability.

This blog is the final blog in the Migration, Mobilities and the Environment blog series, in conjunction with Migration Mobilities Bristol.

Migrants and miners: gender, age and precarious labour in a Tajik resource extractive landscape

Posted on July 5, 2022April 16, 2023 by janet.crompton

Migration is both gendered and aged. It is also deeply tied to the emergence of new extractive landscapes around the world, marked by extractive frontiers pushing into already stressed and fragile environments. The story of the village of Kante in Tajikistan, of its male migrants and its coal miners – men, women and children – illustrates the ways in which multiple forms of precarious labour appear alongside these new landscapes.

The village of Kante, Tajikistan, 2014 (Negar E. Behzadi)

In Tajikistan, a landlocked country in post-Soviet Muslim Central Asia, men started migrating seasonally for work following the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. In Kante, a village of 1,500 inhabitants on the slopes of the Fann Mountains, 2,000m above sea level, the men gradually began leaving a derelict landscape and a run-down collective tobacco farm. Like most Tajik male seasonal migrants, they left for Russia to find new livelihoods and to escape a country torn by civil war. During the seven years of conflict, which followed the collapse of the Soviet Union, men who did not fight travelled as far as the Kamchatka peninsula in search of work. Some Kantegui mountaineers became fishermen. Others went to Moscow, Sverlovsk, Irskuk and other big Russian cities to do ‘mardikor’ (the work of men) on construction sites.

When the war ended, some men came back to Kante, only to find destroyed infrastructure, abandoned fields and an uncertain future. So most returned to Russia. In Kante, as in the rest of Tajikistan, migration became a way of life and a rite of passage – every real man in Tajikistan has migrated, provided for his family back home, drunk alcohol in overcrowded compounds, travelled illegally through borders. Some have slept with Russian women, fallen in love, even taken a second Russian wife, leaving a Tajik wife back home (Behzadi, 2019). Life has also changed for those referred to as ‘the left-behind’. Women, children and the elderly live without husbands, fathers or sons for most of the year. Men become absences, photos, voices down the phone, heroic stories, the amount of remittances arriving at the Western Union in the local town.

Unlike villages in the rest of the country, however, Kantegui men have an alternative to migration. The village lies on one of the largest coal reserves in the country. After the fall of the Soviet Union, families started digging up the mountain with pickaxes to extract coal, using donkeys to haul their load. At first, families extracted the coal for subsistence, but later they started selling it on a growing informal market. This coincided with a broader turn to coal as a major source of energy across the country. Following Uzbek/Tajik resource conflicts, Uzbekistan shut off the pipeline providing Tajikistan with gas in 2012/13, leading to a new Tajikistani coal development strategy (Behzadi, 2019). The same year, a formal Sino-Tajik mine was established in the village, which blew up the Southern slope of the mountain with dynamite. The rolling stones and big machinery crushed some of the donkeys of the informal miners and damaged their houses. The company brought in engineers and managers from China and pushed informal miners away.

Young boys coming back from the mines with coal bags on donkeys, 2014 (Negar E. Behzadi)

In 2014, around 300 men from Kante and neighbouring villages worked in the formal Sino-Tajik mine. Most Kantegui miners in the ‘Chinese’ mine were men who had retired from migration, tired of the back and forth between Russia and the village. In their 30s and 40s, these men had nothing to prove anymore – they were the ‘djahon didir’ (those who have seen the world) who had come back to a quieter life (Behzadi, 2019). But the formal mine does not offer jobs to all. Those who do not work for the Chinese carry on splitting their year between labour migration to Russia in spring and summer and informal coal mining in autumn and winter. In 2014, around 500 men were working in the informal mines. The hardship of their labour and the simplicity of their tools contrasted with the relative ease of labour in the Chinese mine. Although less arduous, however, work for the Chinese project is a mixed blessing: precarious contracts, unpaid salaries and difficult relationships with Chinese managers take their toll in other ways. And the trade-off is significant: men who accept work for the Chinese mine know it is threatening the very existence of their village. The Chinese are ‘taking all our coal’, many villagers say, in particular the informal miners. Part of the informal mines have already been destroyed, and they fear that the whole village might follow.

Map of informal and formal mining areas in Kante, 2018 (Negar E. Behzadi)

Like migration, extractive labour in mines is gendered and aged. Women and children cannot work in the Sino-Tajik mine, but they do work in informal mines. In the past decade about 20 women have been going mining every day high above the village, and sometimes at night when they know they can go unseen. Some of their husbands, like Nadirah’s (a female miner in her 30s), left the country straight after their wedding and took a second wife in Russia. Now he sends only sporadic remittances. Nadirah goes mining with a friend and her daughter who is 13. Her work is considered ‘ayb’ (shameful) in the village and, as a result, Nadirah is stigmatised and excluded from social networks. But while it is considered unacceptable for women to work underground, it is tolerated for children. Most children start at the age of five, leading the donkey in and out of the coal galleries to the market while their parents extract the mineral on the coalface. ‘Coal,’ says Gulnissar, a mother of a 10-year-old child coal miner, ‘there is only coal in children’s heads today.’

Sino-Tajik mine containers in Kante, 2014 (Negar E. Behzadi)

Male seasonal labour migration, the ‘shameful’ work of female miners and the spread of child mining comprise a few of the many precarious forms of labour that emerge in new extractive landscapes around the world. The story of Kante illustrates the fragmentation of societies along gendered and aged lines that occurs in such extractive landscapes. These new extractive frontiers also often emerge in places that are already socio-ecologically stressed, such as in the countries that emerged following the fall of the Soviet Union.

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This blog is written by Dr Negar Elodie Behzadi is a Lecturer in Human Geography at the School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol. She is a feminist political geographer and political ecologist who explores questions of resource extraction and migration in Tajikistan and France. She has also co-directed two ethnographic films on resource extraction in Tajikistan: Komor: Journeys through the Tajik Underground and Nadirah: Coal Woman.

Negar Elodie Behzadi

Stockholm+50: No way to have a conversation about climate change

Posted on June 13, 2022April 16, 2023 by janet.crompton

I’m just back from Stockholm+50, the summit convened to mark 50 years since the first UN conference on ‘the human environment’ that led to the founding of the UN Environment Programme. Could the participants then have imagined that half a century later we would be living through mass extinctions and still be trying to work out how to stop (some) humans creating a hothouse world?

Perhaps they would, if they’d seen what these conferences have become. While ‘jaw jaw’ remains better than ‘war war’, there is no doubt that these climate conferences have become a parody performance of international negotiations. Children sang and presented flowers; the UN Secretary General Antonio Gutierrez restated the ‘code red’ call he’s been making for a while now; John Kerry stated publicly that world leaders were on a ‘collective suicide mission’, which, given that he’s the United States Ambassador on Climate Change, should have made more headlines, but was instead greeted with a collective ‘meh’. ‘Interactive’ dialogue sessions promised to open up the agenda, but invited only pre-selected agencies all of whom said, again, what they’d been saying for years.

This is no way to have a conversation.

Over two days, ministers and civil servants from every UN country and associated organisations make five minute speeches on the main stage designed to appeal to the media back home rather than make any breakthroughs in the room. There are the usual obligatory selfie walls and hordes of professional sustainability experts in suits taking advantage of them to burnish their green international network credentials. Civil society groups have to fight discriminatory visa systems and lack of funds to even get to the summit, only to find out that there is no access to the processes by which the summit decisions and texts are being made. The youth delegations express their now familiar (and understandable) frustration with the older generation and demand of tired, under-funded UN representatives that they ‘use their privilege’ and power to make the changes needed. It resembles nothing so much as a pyramid selling scheme, with everyone fighting to get closer and closer to a centre of power which, in the end, turns out to be illusory.

As an outsider, watching this process in Stockholm, just as I watched COP last year in Glasgow, was like watching an old world dying. You could see old institutions struggle and fail to deal with state capture by fossil fuel interests, observe exponential natural changes meet incremental policy negotiations, feel the chaotic speed of ecosystem transformations meet lock-in and predatory delay of social systems.

And yet, where there is death there is also, always, life.

All around the official event were people using the summit as an excuse to gather, as a way of using the old systems to create something new. A new generation of policy actors, youth movements, academics, unions and civil society, energised by lessons learned from COP26, gathered in informal associated events and activities. This is where the energy was, where dialogue was taking place, where people were learning from each other and naming the obstacles that needed to be overcome.

You could feel the energy in the work of the Fossil Fuel Non Proliferation Treaty movement which is creating serious alliances across countries and interests and is beginning to exert enough pressure to get commitments to fossil fuel phase-out on the formal agenda; you could see it in the brilliant legal escapades of the ‘Stop Ecocide’ movement making the case for the rights of nature and getting faith leaders around the world signed up to protecting nature. And more than energy, you could see serious, feasible new ideas emerging in the hard economic thinking mobilised by the Stockholm Resilience Centre in their new Earth4all report, which outlines concrete steps towards non-ecocidal and non-suicidal economic arrangements; and in the principled and practical work of the Rainforest Coalition demonstrating what real carbon capture actually looks like and tracing routes towards sustaining it.

What characterises many of these activities is a commitment to a different sort of conversation – to processes of unlearning, of listening, of deep attention to others in the room, of naming the hard problems and working together on them. They point the way to a new sort of conversation – one from which the organisers of future UN conferences might learn. And one which we can all begin to model and practice in each country, network or community that we are part of back home.

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This blog is written by Cabot Institute for the Environment member Keri Facer, Professor of Social and Educational Futures at the University of Bristol.

Eurofisch: hyper-mobility, cosmopolitanism and the European eel’s appeal

Posted on June 7, 2022April 16, 2023 by janet.crompton

Unlike the Atlantic salmon, the snake-like European eel (Anguilla anguilla) is widely perceived as devoid of charisma. An epic reproductive journey is integral to the salmon’s appeal. But an equally spectacular migration, if in reverse, defines the European eel. The sea-dwelling salmon returns to its freshwater origins. The freshwater-inhabiting eel goes back to its oceanic birthplace. Natural distribution represents another key point of similarity and difference. The salmon spans the North Atlantic, its European breeding grounds confined to more northerly freshwaters. The European eel, with its broader temperature tolerance, populates a wider latitude. Its habitat ranges from southern Iceland and Russia’s Kola Peninsula to the southern Mediterranean – despite the name, North Africa’s rivers and lagoons contain this eel species – and, on the Atlantic coast, as far down as the Canaries. From west to east, they are distributed from the Azores to Georgia.

Figure 1: ‘Artisanal’ dipnet fishing for elvers from the bank of the River Severn at Wainlode, Gloucestershire, on a spring evening in 2017 (Image: Environment Agency. Reproduced by permission of the Sustainable Eel Group).

The eel’s Europeanness is most vividly demonstrated by its genes. Whereas the salmon displays high genetic diversity and reproductively discrete local populations, European eels all belong to the same breeding population. This singular, panmictic identity is rooted in a shared birthplace: the West Central Atlantic’s Sargasso Sea is a melting pot where every eel of the opposite sex is a potential breeding partner. And the place the next generation calls home could be anywhere within the species’ European range. Lacking the salmon’s homing instinct, the offspring of eel parents that spent their adult lives in Norwegian and Tunisian waterbodies respectively might settle in Wales. Alternatively, this progeny could end up in Portuguese freshwaters, or wherever the currents carry the tiny larvae (leptocephali) during their up-to-three-year odyssey. The European eel is the only truly pan-European fish: a paragon of cosmopolitanism I call ‘Eurofisch’.

On reaching western Europe, leptocephali metamorphose into glass eels. Shoals of these transparent mini-eels – also known as elvers in the UK – start entering southern Europe’s estuaries in December. But in 2012, fisheries scientists reported that ‘recruitment’ had fallen by up to 95 per cent since 1970. An Extinction Rebellion event in Yeovil, Somerset, in the summer of 2019, underscored the species’ critically endangered status. Protestors dressed as eels participated in a ‘drown in’ and a ‘European eel’ addressed South Somerset District Council.

I’ve recently examined the reasons for this drastic decline; tracked the emergence of concern; considered the remedies; looked at trafficking in glass eels for East Asia’s ‘grow-out’ farms that a Plymouth University project has characterized as an ‘unnatural migration’; and reflected on the prospects of eel appeal spreading. Mobilising popular support for eels is more difficult than drumming up enthusiasm for mammals, either terrestrial and marine (for example, ‘T-shirt’ animals such as pandas, polar bears, whales and dolphins). Few who have seen the 1979 movie version of Günter Grass’ novel, The Tin Drum (1959), will forget the stomach-churning scene on the Baltic beach near Danzig (Gdansk) where a fisherman hauls in a horse’s head writhing with eels that he pulls from ears, nostrils and throat.

Figure 2: Elvers wriggling upstream at Bradford on Tone, Somerset Levels, UK in April 2014. (Image: Andrew Kerr. Reproduced by permission of the Sustainable Eel Group).

What I’d like to convey here is the richness of Europe’s eel heritage and how Eurofisch illuminates what it means to be European. The silver eel (the final, Sargasso-ready life stage) has the highest calorific value of any European fish. A venerable and varied culture of consumption unites Europe, from Spain to Sweden and from Ireland to Italy. Since early Christianity, roast eel has been the dish customarily served at midnight on Christmas Eve in Rome and Naples. The epicentre of Italian eel gastronomy, though, is Comacchio. Since the 1300s, this town in the Po Delta has hosted a silver eel fishery based on lagoons stocked with glass eels entering from the Adriatic. Eels are skewered and roasted, marinated in barrels, then canned. La Donna del Fiume (1955) starred Sophia Loren as an impossibly glamorous worker in a Comacchio cannery that’s now a museum.

In the early 1900s, glass eels were swept up hyper-tidal estuaries such as the Severn, Loire, Gironde, Minho and Tagus in tremendous quantities: surpluses were fed to pigs, fertilised vegetable plots and made into glue. In France, glass eels were boiled and served cold (‘spaghetti with eyes’). Meanwhile, in Severn estuary villages, super-abundant elvers were fried in butter or bacon fat, scrambled with eggs, or boiled and pressed into gelatinous, fried cakes. In Victorian London’s East End, whose labouring population could not afford salmon or meat, itinerant vendors of stewed and jellied eel and the ‘eel and pie’ shop were odoriferous fixtures of the cityscape. Dutch traders were supplying London by 1400 and in the late 1600s schuyts – ships fitted with wells for live export – established a mooring near Billingsgate fish market. Squirming cargos arrived almost daily until the early 1900s; the last schuyt docked in 1938.

In Frampton-on-Severn, the Easter Monday elver eating competition was woven deeply into village life. Male contestants gobbled down a pound of fried elvers. A contest for women (only required to consume half a pound) was founded in 1973. With steeply declining numbers and sharply rising prices, the contest was cancelled in 1990. Revival followed in 2015 – with ersatz elvers known as gulas, produced in Spain’s Basque country. Dubbed ‘elvers’ locally, gulas consist of surimi, blocks of fish paste from Alaskan pollack and Pacific whiting.

In June 2019, the Sustainable Eel Group, a science-led, Europe-wide campaign organisation, marked its tenth anniversary with a two-day meeting at the Natural History Museum and a week-long eel celebration. A highlight was the arrival at ‘Dutch Mooring’ of a reconstructed schuyt, absent from London’s riverscape for over 80 years. My visit coincided with that of Pieter Hak, proprietor of the Noted Eel & Pie House, Leytonstone. Hak told the Dutch crew that his great grandfather, a schuyt captain, sent his youngest son to London to learn the eel pie business in the 1890s. After he met and married the daughter of an English eel and pie shop owner, they opened their own place in Bow in 1926. Hak gave the crew a copy of Stuart Freedman’s paean to this hallowed Cockney institution, The Englishman and the Eel (2017); Hak appears on the cover, grasping a live eel. (Note, however, that an Italian immigrant established London’s oldest surviving eel and pie shops in 1902.)

Two years after leaving the EU, this sort of fishy connection can help, in a small way, to conserve a sense of Britain’s Europeanness. Britain’s eels belong to a wider European family, biologically and culturally. Our migratory eel also has a resounding message in an age of mass trans-border movements, reminding us that where we call home is not always where we, or our parents, were born.

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This blog is written by Cabot Institute for the Environment member Peter Coates, an Emeritus Professor of Environmental History at the University of Bristol as part of a joint Migration, Mobility and the Environment blog series with Migration, Mobilities Bristol. Some of the material in this post appeared in ‘Protecting Eurofisch: An Environmental History of the European Eel and its Europeanness’ in Greening Europe: Environmental Protection in the Long Twentieth Century – A Handbook (2022). Peter wrote a book on Salmon (2006) in Reaktion’s ‘Animal’ series and is currently writing a squirrel history of the UK.

Hydrological hazards across timescales

Posted on June 6, 2022March 29, 2023 by janet.crompton

University of Bristol – Met Office Academic Partnership Meeting

From droughts and floods to water quality and water resource management, researchers at the University of Bristol and the Met Office are world-leaders in climate and hydrological research. Building on the new academic partnership between Bristol and the Met Office, the goal of this meeting was to foster new collaborations and strengthen existing partnerships between Bristol and the Met Office on the topic of weather, climate and hydrology.

In total, we had 29 attendees attend the workshop, with 10 from the Met Office, 17 from the University of Bristol and 2 from Fathom including weather and climate scientists, catchment hydrologists and flood modellers at a wide range of career stages.

The meeting explored two key themes, the first half of the meeting focused on ‘Exploiting convection permitting weather and climate models for flood and drought prediction’, while the second half focused on ‘Quantifying uncertainty in hydrological projections’. For each theme, there were two short plenary talks that highlighted existing research across the Met Office and University of Bristol and then a presentation focused on an exciting piece of research covering topics on exploiting convection permitting models for flood and drought prediction (Lizzie Kendon) and towards large ensembles of km-scale precipitation simulations using AI (Peter Watson and Henry Addison). We also had eight lighting talks on topics ranging from tropical cyclones to pan-tropics convection-permitting climate simulations to compound wind and flood risk.

Alongside the talks, there was time for attendees to discuss ideas and opportunities focused around five key discussion topics; uncertainty estimation, compound events and multi-hazard coupling, evaluation of weather and climate driving information for hydrology, exploiting higher resolution capabilities for hydrology and from hydrological predictions to ‘services’.

Overall, the meeting was a success and we appreciated an in person meeting fuelled by coffee, cake and cheese! Tangible outputs from the day included contributions on a NERC proposal, making new connections, ideas for future collaborations, sharing of data and methodologies and the foundations for a collaborative climate and hydrology community.

Further details from the meeting can be requested from Gemma Coxon (gemma.coxon@bristol.ac.uk).

Digital home working and its sustainability potential: human immobility and the mobilities of stuff

Posted on May 24, 2022April 16, 2023 by janet.crompton

Despite the huge human and economic costs of the COVID pandemic, many commentators have observed that this disruption – or shock – to our resource-intensive daily lives could offer a catalyst for the great societal transformations necessary to meet the climate emergency.

Radical growth of home working is an oft-cited example. According to Office for National Statistics (ONS) figures 50% of those in employment did some work from home in April 2020. This mainstreaming of home working has been facilitated by the rapid appropriation of digital devices and services into our everyday lives. It has been accompanied by equally rapid development of cultural skills and competencies required to (collectively) use those devices and services in a satisfactory way. And has led to major adjustments in how we work but also how we shop, interact, use our homes, engage with our local communities, learn, care for others and so on.

Home working during the pandemic, March 2020 (image: Simon Evans on Flickr)

The question is whether these shifts could lead to systemic environmental gains. Is it an environmental ‘good’ or ‘bad’? As ever with academics, our answer is ‘it’s not straightforward…’, but when viewed from a systemic perspective it does offer an opportunity to re-imagine sustainable ways of life.

When considering the environmental impacts of any technology or practice, understanding will be shaped by the scope of the analysis: what is considered inside the system being studied and what is ignored. A narrow scope, focused only on the technological parts of the system, makes it more straightforward to quantify the results (such as a ‘carbon footprint’ of something) but means missing out the broader implications – such as how any technology interacts with diverse social practices. One approach to this problem is to consider different scopes for analysis that address the direct, indirect and systemic impacts of a technology. We apply this framing to home working to consider some possibilities.

Direct impacts are the environmental costs of constructing, using and disposing of a technology. Engineering methods, such as life cycle assessment (LCA) (or more colloquially, ‘carbon footprinting’) can be used to model the technology’s life cycle, systematically collect the relevant data and then apportion the ‘environmental burden’ to the different applications of that technology. In the case of digital home working, this will include the impacts of manufacturing the equipment used and providing the electricity to keep it operational: both the home laptops and Wi-Fi, but also a share of the networking equipment used to connect workers with their offices and each other, and the data centres used to power the applications they use. Accounting for this ‘hidden materiality’, and the large consumption of energy used by data centres, has led to some fearing that the impacts of digital home working are substantial. Applying University of Bristol models developed for digital services to video conferencing suggests that the truth is somewhere between the two. A ballpark estimate for the climate impact of a one-hour video conference, for example, would be about 50-100g CO2e depending on the setup used – roughly equivalent to driving 400-800m in a typical family car. This suggests that we should not let concerns about the direct environmental impact of digital services put us off a move to home working.

Indirect impacts are the environmental costs of changing social practices related to the digital service. What do people stop doing? What do they start doing? Again, LCA can be used to quantify these – but only if one understands the nature of these changes. Social science insights are essential here, both to identify what changes to practice might occur, and to collect the data to quantify the extent to which they change across diverse populations.

In the case of home working, the most obvious changes to practice are reduction in travel to work and decreases in energy use within workplaces. These two factors will potentially be substantially larger than the direct impacts of technology use – but will be more variable and harder to predict across the population. Reductions in heating and lighting in the workplace were, it would appear, largely offset by rises of domestic energy use (Hook et al., 2020). The most dramatic potential environmental savings are from the sharp reduction in commuting, with the Department for Transport reporting a 60% reduction in private car usage during 2020 and a 90% decline in the use of public transport. But even here we must consider a range of related indirect effects of the apparent immobility of people. During the same period, we witnessed a huge increase in online shopping as people ordered their goods for home delivery. The ONS shows that online retail sales increased from just under 19% of total retail sales in November 2019 to almost 40% within a year. Groceries, clothing, household products and takeaway foods saw the largest growth.

The digital devices and services that allowed us to adapt so quickly to conditions of apparent human immobility also offered the technological affordances and cultural skills necessary for a commensurate growth in the circulation of goods, ordered online and delivered (often as individual items) to the homes of the immobile. Measuring these effects – especially if trying to capture the relative weighting of a trip to the shopping mall to purchase multiple items versus delivery of multiple individual items purchased online – would be necessary to estimate indirect impacts.

Systemic impacts consist of a huge range of elements that shape, and are shaped by, technologies and social practices. In the case of home working, we pick out three core elements: infrastructures, cultures, and modes of provision. To consider the impact and potential of home working we need to recognise the changing home to include the re-purposing of space for home offices and the technologies required, from the high tech (digital devices and networks) to the low tech (desks and storage). Local communities are also changing, and development of local service infrastructures to support mass home working (for example, the re-invention of the local high street) together with a corresponding decline of city-based office infrastructures will be required if home working is to be viable over the longer term. Each of these changes come with their own direct and indirect environmental impacts.

Cultural shifts must also be considered. Workplace cultures of presenteeism, long working hours, the status of private offices, and daily meetings are all challenged by home-working regimes. In addition, the rising use of digital platforms shows signs of fostering modes of provision through informal networks (such as familial and community based) that have, in recent history, been marginalised by the dominance of market modes of provision. Community sharing initiatives (such as food box schemes, local delivery hubs, community stores) coupled with the accumulating practical challenges of privately owned goods (as symbolised by the increasing percentage of domestic space devoted to storing seldomly used consumer goods and the decreasing use of expensive private cars) have been argued to indicate a shift towards collaborative consumption: the rejection of privately owned goods in favour of sharing (Southerton and Warde, forthcoming). While the direct and indirect environmental impacts of such systemic shifts are unknown, the potential to reduce the material flows of goods and reduce the impacts of human mobility are clear.

Thinking in terms of the systemic implications of home working – symbolised by the immobility of people and rising mobility of goods during COVID – is more important than only measuring direct and indirect impacts. As things stand, we are moving in the direction of ‘hybrid’ working, presumably on the grounds of a ‘best of both worlds’ assumption. From a systems level perspective there is a huge risk that we end up with two systems: workplaces and home working. Whether this ends up being the worst of both worlds, layering new resource-efficient systems over old resource-intensive systems, will largely depend on whether debates regarding the post-COVID world takes the opportunity to re-imagine and re-configure the systemic impacts of technology and human practice on the environment (Geels et al., 2015).

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This blog is written by Chris Preist, Professor of Sustainability and Computer Systems at the University of Bristol. His research focuses on the environmental impact of digital technology and consumer electronic goods; and Dale Southerton, Professor in Sociology of Consumption and Organisation at the University of Bristol. He studies consumption, its role in organising everyday lives and its significance in processes of societal change.

Teaching sustainability in computer science?

Posted on May 19, 2022April 16, 2023 by janet.crompton

The Faculty of Engineering at the University of Bristol ran a discussion panel on if and how should (environmental) sustainability be taught to the Engineering students. Here are my 2 pence on teaching sustainability to Computer Science students.

Why should our students engage with Environmental Sustainability in their formal education?

Well because the ICT/Software impacts and drives every activity in the present society – from the day to day business to entertainment, education, and policy. This impact is felt in two ways:

through production and use of ICT equipment and software, and
through changing the way that the society itself operates.

I will only mention some brief points about the impact of production and use of ICT:

Energy Consumption of the ICT systems seems to be growing unstoppably, e.g.,
- In 2018 the data centres were accountable for about 1 % of the global electricity use
- The energy consumption of the ICT is projected (in worst case) to account for 20% of the world electricity consumption in 2030 [1].
Materials, including rare earth metals are also increasingly depleted for use of ICT hardware production. Even worth, as much of the hardware is quickly outdates and distracted, it creates the problem of e-waste.
Waste form ICT hardware is either put into landfill or damped at the developing countries.

So yes, to point out a few issues that we, as computer scientists and engineers we need to learn to think about: how about teaching and learning about how to minimise energy and material consumption, how to design modular and long-living hardware and software solutions, how to make our software maintainable and hardware bio-degradable?

But, even more importantly, Software Engineers must learn about the impact that their software solutions have within their situated environments.

Let’s look at the problem of traffic congestion: we all know that when too many vehicles are trying to get through a given road, they create a traffic jam; as the vehicles use (fossil) fuels while sitting in a traffic jam, they ends up generating excessive CO2. So what can a software engineer do to help? How about we some ride sharing software solutions, like Uber or Lyft?

Figure 1: Ride sharing software to reduce CO2 emissions.

We know that, as shown in Figure 1, this software will reduce the need for car ownership and as lesser number of people own and drive their cars, it will also reduce traffic congestion problem!

We already teach our students how to develop such applications. They already learn about platform development for data collection, and data analytics, distributed systems development and could computing and user interface design: all that they need to develop a ride sharing application is well covered in the current Computer Science curriculum.

But what happens once this application goes out to be used by people? It turns out that car ownership does decrease, so great. But, as studies into ride sharing show, these also increase the distance travelled by the shared cars. Even worse, as ride sharers become accustomed to the Uber/Lyft services, which are convenient and cheap compared to “normal” taxies, they start to substitute the journeys previously taken by public transport (i.e., bus or train) for ride sharing services.

In short, traffic congestion and respective CO2 emissions do not improve at all, as shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2: Longer term environmental impact from use of ride sharing.

I suggest this is because, while the software developers for the ride sharing solutions may have wished to reduce environmental impact, they did not know how to account for such an impact. As and education providers, we do not teach our Software Engineering students about:

Systems Thinking,
Environmental Life Cycle Assessment,
Responsible Innovation and Software Impact Assessment, about
Human Behaviour and Rationality, or
Sustainable Living.

What should be offered to students within our faculty with regards to Environmental Sustainability?

Well, all of the above. Unless we teach our students to account for the human behaviour and longer term software use, software impact assessment and responsible decision making in what, how, and why is integrated into software solutions, we are not likely to see such solutions having any positive impact in addressing the challenges of the environmental degradation and climate change.

So how can we integrate Sustainability into our programs?

I suggest that each module taught to our students must cover content of how it relates to sustainability and sustainable development. So each module needs to be reviewed. As stated in the Karlskrona Manifesto for Sustainability Design [2,3]:

There is a perception that sustainability is a distinct discipline of research and practice with a few defined connections to software.

Whereas sustainability is a pervasive concern that translates into discipline- specific questions in each area.

So, we really do need to teach students about which questions does sustainability translate in each of our modules, and how to address these questions, some examples of these are shown in Fig 3.

Figure 3: Additional issues to consider in Computer Science Curricula.

References

[1] https://ictfootprint.eu/en/news/decreasing-ict-energy-consumption-%E2%80%93-power-data-centres-and-people%E2%80%99s-will-ictfootprinteu-webinar

[2] The Karlskrona Manifesto for Sustainability Design, url: https://www.sustainabilitydesign.org/karlskrona-manifesto/

[3] Becker, C., Chitchyan, R., Duboc, L., Easterbrook, S., Penzenstadler, B., Seyff, N., Venters, C. C. (2015). Sustainability design and software: The Karlskrona manifesto. ICSE’15: 37th International Conference on Software Engineering. http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/ICSE.2015.179

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This blog is written by Cabot Institute for the Environment member Dr Ruzanna Chitchyan, from the Department of Computer Science at the University of Bristol.

India heatwave: why the region should prepare for even more extreme heat in the near future

Posted on May 13, 2022March 29, 2023 by janet.crompton

An extreme heatwave in India and Pakistan has left more than a billion people in one of the most densely populated parts of the world facing temperatures well above 40℃. Although this has not broken all-time records for the regions, the hottest part of the year is yet to come.

Though the heatwave is already testing people’s ability to survive, and has led to crop failures and power blackouts, the really scary thing is that it could be worse: based on what has happened elsewhere at some point India is “due” an even more intense heatwave.

Together with a few other climate scientists, we recently looked for the most extreme heatwaves globally over the past 60 years – based on the greatest difference from expected temperature variability in that area, rather than by maximum heat alone. India and Pakistan do not feature in our results, now published in the journal Science Advances. Despite regularly having extremely high temperatures and levels of heat stress in absolute terms, when defined in terms of deviation from the local normal, heatwaves in India and Pakistan to date have not been all that extreme.

In fact, we highlighted India as a region with a particularly low greatest historical extreme. In the data we assessed, we didn’t find any heatwaves in India or Pakistan outside three standard deviations from the mean, when statistically such an event would be expected once every 30 or so years. The most severe heatwave we identified, in southeast Asia in 1998, was five standard deviations from the mean. An equivalent outlier heatwave in India today would mean temperatures of over 50℃ across large swaths of the country – such temperatures have only been seen at localised points so far.

Our work therefore suggests India may experience even more extreme heat. Assuming the statistical distribution of daily maximum temperatures is broadly the same across the world, statistically a record-breaking heatwave is likely to occur in India at some point. The region has not yet had reason to adapt to such temperatures, so may be particularly vulnerable.

Harvests and health

Although the current heatwave has not broken any all-time records, it is still exceptional. Many parts of India have experienced their hottest April on record. Such heat this early in the year will have devastating impacts on crops in a region where many rely on the wheat harvest both to eat and to earn a living. Usually, extreme heat in this area is closely followed by cooling monsoons – but these are still months away.

It is not just crop harvests that will bear the brunt, as heatwaves affect infrastructure, ecosystems and human health. The impacts on human health are complex as both meteorological factors (how hot and humid it is) and socioeconomic factors (how people live and how they are able to adapt) come into play. We do know that heat stress can lead to long-term health issues such as cardiovascular diseases, kidney failure, respiratory distress and liver failure, though we will be unable to know exactly how many people will die in this heatwave due to the lack of necessary health data from India and Pakistan.

What the future holds

To consider the impact of extreme heat over the next few decades, we have to look at both climate change and population growth, since it is a combination of the two that will amplify the human-health impacts of heat extremes in the Indian subcontinent.

world map with some countries shaded yellow — Hotspots of population increases over the next 50 years (red circles), all coincide with locations where no daily mortality data exists (yellow).
Mitchell, Nature Climate Change (2021), CC BY-SA

In our new study, we investigated how extremes are projected to increase in the future. We used a large ensemble of climate model simulations, which gave us many times more data than is available for the real world. We found that the statistical distribution of extremes, relative to a shift in the underlying climate as it generally gets warmer, does not change. In the climate models the daily temperature extremes increase at the same rate as the shift in the mean climate. The IPCC’s latest report stated that heat waves will become more intense and more frequent in south Asia this century. Our results support this.

The current heatwave is affecting over 1.5 billion people and over the next 50 years the population of the Indian subcontinent is projected to increase by a further 30%. That means hundreds of millions more people will be born into a region that is likely to experience more frequent and more severe heatwaves. With even larger numbers of people being affected by even greater heat extremes in the future, measures to adapt to climate change must be accelerated – urgently.

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This blog is written by Cabot Institute for the Environment members Dr Vikki Thompson, Senior Research Associate in Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol and Dr Alan Thomas Kennedy-Asser, Research Associate in Climate Science, University of Bristol.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Climate change isn’t just making cyclones worse, it’s making the floods they cause worse too – new research

Posted on May 13, 2022March 29, 2023 by janet.crompton

People take refuge on a sports ground following flooding caused by Cyclone Idai in Mozambique.
DFID/Flickr, CC BY-SA

Laurence Hawker, University of Bristol; Dann Mitchell, University of Bristol, and Natalie Lord, University of Bristol

Super cyclones, known as hurricanes or typhoons in different parts of the world, are among the most destructive weather events on our planet.

Although wind speeds within these storms can reach 270 km/h, the largest loss of life comes from the flooding they cause – known as a “storm surge” – when sea water is pushed onto the coast. Climate change is predicted to worsen these floods, swelling cyclone clouds with more water and driving rising sea levels that allow storm surges to be blown further inland.

In May 2020, Super Cyclone Amphan hit the India-Bangladesh border, bringing heavy rainfall and strong winds and affecting more than 13 million citizens. The cyclone also caused storm surges of 2-4 metres, flooding coastal regions in the Bay of Bengal.

While over the ocean, this category five storm – that’s a storm’s highest possible rating – became the strongest cyclone to have formed in the Bay of Bengal since 1999, reaching wind speeds of up to 260 km/h. Although it weakened to a category two storm following landfall, it remained the strongest cyclone to hit the Ganges Delta since 2007.

Amphan had severe consequences for people, agriculture, the local economy and the environment. It tragically resulted in more than 120 deaths, as well as damaging or destroying homes and power grids: leaving millions without electricity or communication in the midst of an ongoing pandemic.

Relief and aid efforts were hampered by flood damage to roads and bridges, as well as by coronavirus restrictions. Large areas of crops including rice, sesame and mangos were damaged, and fertile soils were either washed away or contaminated by saline sea water. Overall, Super Cyclone Amphan was the costliest event ever recorded in the North Indian Ocean, resulting in over $13 billion (£10 billion) of damage.

Two people assess a tree that has fallen across a road — In Kolkata, India, Super Cyclone Amphan caused widespread damage.
Indrajit Das/Wikimedia

In a recent study led by the University of Bristol and drawing on research from Bangladesh and France, we’ve investigated how the effects of storm surges like that caused by Amphan on the populations of India and Bangladesh might change under different future climate and population scenarios.

Amphan: Mark II

Rising sea levels – thanks largely to melting glaciers and ice sheets – appear to be behind the greatest uptick in future risk from cyclone flooding, since they allow storm surges to reach further inland. It’s therefore key to understand and predict how higher sea levels might exacerbate storm-driven flooding, in order to minimise loss and damage in coastal regions.

Our research used climate models from CMIP6, the latest in a series of projects aiming to improve our understanding of climate by comparing simulations produced by different modelling groups around the world. First we modelled future sea-level rise according to different future emissions scenarios, then we added that data to storm surge estimates taken from a model of Super Cyclone Amphan.

We ran three scenarios: a low emission scenario, a business-as-usual scenario and a high emission scenario. And in addition to modelling sea-level rise, we also estimated future populations across India and Bangladesh to assess how many more people storm surges could affect. In most cases, we found that populations are likely to rise: especially in urban areas.

Our findings were clear: exposure to flooding from cyclone storm surges is extremely likely to increase. In India, exposure increase ranged from 50-90% for the lowest emission scenario, to a 250% increase for the highest emission scenario. In Bangladesh, we found a 0-20% exposure increase for the lowest emission scenario and a 60-70% increase for the highest emission scenario. The difference in exposure between the two countries is mostly due to declining coastal populations as a result of urban migration inland.

Imagine we’re now in 2100. Even in a scenario where we’ve managed to keep global emissions relatively low, the local population exposed to storm surge flooding from an event like Amphan will have jumped by ~350,000. Compare this to a high emission scenario, where an extra 1.35 million people will now be exposed to flooding. And for flood depths of over one metre – a depth that poses immediate danger to life – almost half a million more people will be exposed to storm surge flooding in a high emission scenario, compared to a low emission scenario.

A composite satellite image of a large white cyclone — A satellite image shows Amphan approaching the coasts of India and Bangladesh.
Pierre Markuse/Wikimedia

This research provides yet more support for rapidly and permanently reducing our greenhouse gas emissions to keep global warming at 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.

Although we’ve focused on storm surge flooding, other cyclone-related hazards are also projected to worsen, including deadly heatwaves following cyclones hitting land. And in the case of Amphan, interplay between climate change and coronavirus likely made the situation for people on the ground far worse. As the world warms, we mustn’t avoid the reality that pandemics and other climate-related crises are only forecast to increase.

Urgent action on emissions is vital to protect highly climate-vulnerable countries from the fatal effects of extreme weather. Amphan Mark II need not be as destructive as we’ve projected if the world’s governments act now to meet Paris agreement climate goals.

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This blog is written by Cabot Institute for the Environment members Dr Laurence Hawker, Senior Research Associate in Geography, University of Bristol; Professor Dann Mitchell, Professor of Climate Science, University of Bristol, and Dr Natalie Lord, Honorary Research Associate in Climate Science, University of Bristol

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Migration, mobilities and the ecological context

Posted on May 10, 2022April 16, 2023 by janet.crompton

In this special blog series, Migration Mobilities Bristol (MMB) and the Cabot Institute for the Environment bring together researchers from across the University of Bristol to explore connections between movement and the environment from a multi-disciplinary perspective. Their diverse approaches highlight the importance of developing frames that incorporate both migration and environment, and in so doing benefit our understandings of both.

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Migration can make you happy. When I see the first swifts arrive in the spring, I stop in my tracks and smile broadly at all and everyone. I have to restrain myself from telling people walking down the street that ‘they’ are back. Swifts are one of the wonders of the world – they make Concorde look clunky, they hurtle down streets in towns screaming wildly at dusk seemingly just for the fun of it, and scientists have calculated that the distance they fly over their lifetime is equivalent to flying to the moon and back seven times!

Dahlia (Bishop of Llandaff). Image credit: Jane Memmott

Migratory species like swifts have two homes and they are generally well regarded in both places. It’s a bit more touch and go whether alien species are welcome or not, and highly context dependent. For example, we deliberately introduce species from all around the world into our gardens without qualm – looking out the window onto my front garden, I’ve got honey bush and pineapple lilies from South Africa, Dahlias from Mexico, a Hebe from New Zealand, devil’s tobacco from Chile and foxgloves from seed collected down the road! In contrast, my local nature reserves are doing their best to remove Rhododendron, Cotoneaster and Himalayan balsam.

Context really is key here. Thus, gardens are grown for colour, relaxation, fruit, vegetables, and art (and I consider gardening as much of an art as a science) and they are highly managed and artificial habitats. In fact, they are increasingly considered as outdoor rooms in the media, and no one worries what countries their botanical furniture is from. In contrast, nature reserves are usually more natural settings where we want to capture natural patterns and processes, so there is an expectation that the species present should be native. And there is good evidence that while most alien species are harmless, some species (approximately 1%) can be very damaging to the environment and the economy.

Honey bush leaves (Melianthus major). Image credit: Jane Memmott

Migration is about mobility, and mobility is a key part of the scientific process. Thus, universities are ecosystems which provide intellectual homes to academics from all over the world. My own department is home to scientists from Africa, Germany, Brazil, Switzerland, Brazil, Italy and China and those are just the people I’ve bumped into over the last few days. COVID has put a bit of a spanner in the works on the mobility front, but mobility is so key to business that academics have quickly found other ways to be mobile. For example, in my own research group, we have been running a large project in a remote part of Nepal entirely by Zoom for the last two years. But, by dint of the internet and some incredible UK staff and amazing project partners in Nepal, we have trained field staff in ten remote villages in the Himalayas to collect diet data for both bees and villagers, using protocols that would have been very new to them. The data is then uploaded by the field staff to the internet and arrives on the computers the other side of the world as if by magic.

Mobility is such a large part of a scientist’s life that when it goes wrong it can feel shocking. I’ve had two encounters with mobility of scientists being blocked, one involving myself, another a visiting scientist. Mine was, I suspect, a straightforward random immigration check, but it did leave me rather shaken. I was travelling to Canada for the first time and got taken out of the queue and then grilled for 30 minutes on the nature of my visit. I was giving a plenary talk at a conference and had fortunately remembered to print out my letter of invitation. Unfortunately, I hadn’t actually read it for six months and so I probably did sound a bit suspicious. They did eventually let me in and it was an excellent trip thereafter. The second time was when a restoration ecologist from Latin America, who was visiting my research group for six months, went to Spain with his family for a weekend and upon return his whole family was issued with deportation papers. There is something deeply shocking about seeing the hostile environment process in action, especially when mobility is simply part of normal academic interchange. After some high-level work by an international lawyer this too was fixed. Restoration ecology is much more of a long-term process, but the restoration of mobility was much faster in this instance, if a lot more stressful.

Swift (Apus apus). Image credit: Wikimedia Commons.

Migration and mobility are everyday events in the environment. They can be natural such as the return of swifts each year, or they can be assisted such as the reintroduction programmes for species that have become extinct in the UK. One of the biggest reintroduction success stories is the red kite, a bird that you are almost guaranteed to see now if you drive down the M4 motorway or look out of the train window from Didcot to London. These are big and very beautiful predatory birds – imagine a paprika coloured swallow with a 6ft wingspan! My last few Saturdays have been spent driving from Bristol to a hospital in Hampshire to visit a sick relative and one of the things that has made this less stressful is counting the red kites along the motorway. Last Saturday was a 12-kite day, my highest count yet.

To end, migration, mobility and the environment are inextricably linked. There is both natural and human assisted movement of species in the environment. Species can be both welcome and unwelcome depending on the context. It’s complicated, but it’s the everyday bread and butter of ecologists around the world. With alien plants bringing colour and bizazz to our gardens and swifts bringing happiness as they return to their second homes in the UK, there is a lot to like about migration and mobility in the environment.

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This blog is written by Cabot Institute for the Environment member, Jane Memmott, Professor of Community Ecology in the School of Biological Sciences, University of Bristol. Her research interests include pollination ecology, invasion ecology, biological control and restoration ecology. In each case she considers how ecological networks can be used as a tool to answer environmental questions.

Professor Jane Memmott