"Palm oil-diesel. Extinction and climate disaster."It’s been a bad few weeks for biofuels produced from food crops: first, the US Environmental Protection Agency said that biodiesel made from palm oil will not count towards the country’s renewable fuels mandate because they are damaging to the climate. Rainforest is destroyed and carbon-rich peatland drained in the production of palm oil and this destruction is a large source of greenhouse gas emissions which cause climate change. In the same week, figures from the EU were leaked showing that greenhouse gas emissions from biofuels produced from palm oil, soybean and rapeseed are higher than those for conventional fossil fuels, like oil, when their indirect effects are taken into account.

(This post is by Christine McCann)Here’s the latest of our news bulletins from the ongoing crisis at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.State of Nuclear Politics in Japan

It took seven years, teams of young campaigners and hordes of devoted supporters, but September 2011 the Chinese government finally said it was suspending the commercialisation of genetically-engineer

(This post is by Christine McCann)Here’s the latest of our news bulletins from the ongoing crisis at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.State of Nuclear Politics in Japan

“This is Campbell Plowden, Whale Campaign Coordinator for Greenpeace.  I’d like to let you know that the Soviet Union is going to send two icebreakers to help clear a path for the whales trapped in Alaska.”  

To mark the launch of new movie, Big Miracle starring Drew Barrymore, about the 1988 rescue of grey whales in Alaska, we're publishing this fascinating story by Campbell Plowden who was a Greenpeace w

European tinned-tuna giant Bolton has started 2012 with a press release full of highly ambiguous language about its environmental commitments. The release appears designed to both get Greenpeace off the company’s back and to convince customers that it is working to achieve maximum sustainability in its tuna supply chain. In the press release, Bolton claim to be aiming for ‘100% sustainable tuna by 2017’. But what does this mean?  On closer inspection, it seems that Bolton is failing to make a clear commitment to adopt responsible fishing methods, such as pole and line and fishing without the use of destructive Fish Aggregation Devices (FADs).

If I bump into Professor Klaus Schwab, who started and still runs the World Economic Forum here in Davos, I will challenge him on the purpose of the event. Schwab has described the WEF as “a platform for collaborative thinking and searching for solutions, not for making decisions”.

It is no secret that Europe’s seas, once teeming with life, are now unable to provide fish for all its citizens. EU governments and the fishing industry have known for decades that they catch more than their seas can provide, so much so that the European Commission itself has acknowledged that close to 90% of all fish stocks in Europe are being overfished. It is also no secret that, as stocks has declined, fishing fleets have increasingly ventured further away to keep up the seemingly endless supply of fish that we enjoy in Europe.  Today, almost half of all fish sold in the EU is caught outside EU waters.

In nature, any successful species can overshoot a habitat, consuming resources faster than Earth’s ecosystems can replenish them. On Earth today, indicators such as species extinctions, soil loss, and global warming – tell us that humans have reached this state of overshoot on a global scale. In seeking solutions, we may benefit from some historical perspective.