image: dezz

This week began with some fantastic news as we read in the Guardian about the sharp rise in the sale of sustainable seafood products in the UK throughout 2011. This shows that people really do care about where their food is coming from and what effect that has.

Consumers have the power to help avoid an ecological disaster by choosing to buy sustainably caught or sustainably farmed fish. This seems relatively simple, but it’s not always clear which fish really have been sustainably caught, or responsibly farmed, or otherwise. Harmonised labelling for these kinds of terms, which are often used but are not regulated, is crucial to help consumers take action.

image: Flickr/CIFOR

Forests are key to ensuring that the climate remains stable enough so that life on Earth can continue as we know it. The ability of a forest to hold (or sequester) carbon is one of the key functions it provides globally. This function is undermined by increasing temperatures in tropical forests as well as by forest degradation and deforestation. The Amazon forest has already started to emit increasing amounts of carbon dioxide as the region becomes drier, thus contributing further to climate change. A resilient forest has a greater adaptability to changes in climatic conditions, e.g precipitation, temperature etc.

image: NS Newsflash

This blog originally appeared on Huffington Post on 25 December 2011

Why aren't we seeing more coverage of climate change in the media? The issue is hardly going away. And now that world governments after Durban are not planning to take action 'til 2020, we need more coverage, not less.

Yet environmentalists reported a drop off in climate change reporting in 2009 and 2010, and we may well see this again when we look back at 2011.

image: nick hobgood

In the Republic of Congo, the civil society platform for the sustainable management of forests has just held a three day workshop, (from 19-21 January 2012). It was facilitated by Client Earth (Nathalie Faure), Well-Grounded (Cath Long), FERN (Indra van Gisbergen) and international forest legislation expert Robinson Djeukam, financed by the European Forest Institute and co-organised by FERN and the Observatoire Congolais des Droits de l’Homme (OCDH).

image: indiana public media

Yesterday saw the end of the consultation on the new levels of support for different renewable electricity technologies proposed by the UK Government under the Renewables Obligation scheme. According to the proposal, more than £850m per year will be handed out to new large-scale biomass plants as well as to coal plants that convert to biomass or to co-fire it with coal, with the aim of achieving 30 to 40% of large-scale electricity generation from biomass in 2020.

image: heathbrandon

Access to information is a human right. It is also a great lever for the implementation of other rights and underlies any other activities civil society aspire to conduct. Without access to information there is nothing the NGO community may achieve. That is why the current review of  the laws on access to documents held by EU institutions is so important.

A few weeks from now, the European Parliament’s Committee for Industry, Research and Energy (ITRE) will vote on the Commission's proposal for an Energy Efficiency Directive (EED). The proposal is based on a review of two overlapping pieces of legislation: the Cogeneration Directive (2004/8) and the Energy Services Directive (2006/32).