This is my take on what's happening to our shared environment as the human population grows and our use of nature's resources increases
12:16 UK time, Friday, 31 August 2012
This is my last entry for this page - I'm leaving the BBC to work, initially, on ocean conservation issues.
While this page will no longer be updated, it will stay here for reference.
18:15 UK time, Friday, 24 August 2012
Few issues arouse as much controversy in environmental circles these days as geoengineering - "technical fixes" to tackle climate change, by sucking carbon dioxide from the air or by reducing the amount of sunlight hitting the Earth.
And here's why.
16:40 UK time, Thursday, 9 August 2012
Comments by the US climate envoy last week discussing the value of the 2C target in international climate change negotiations have provoked quite a response.
Todd Stern, who leads the US negotiating team in the UN climate convention (UNFCCC) and performed the same role at the recent Rio+20 summit, told an audience at Dartmouth College that insisting on the target in negotiations would lead to "deadlock".
16:34 UK time, Monday, 6 August 2012
The role of formal scientific processes in climate science appear to be under threat as never before.
Last year, physicist Prof Richard Muller and colleagues published - in the sense of posting material on their website - results from a new project analysing the Earth's temperature record.
17:07 UK time, Tuesday, 24 July 2012
A couple of weeks back I chaired a debate at Chatham House, the London-based think tank, on a question that I'd been asking myself for a while.
Rio+20: Green Growth or Greenwash? was the title.
17:18 UK time, Thursday, 19 July 2012
Will we ever know who hacked the "ClimateGate" files, and why?
Probably not, judging by the insights gained by the Norfolk police force during their two-and-a-half-year investigation, which they've just closed.
17:51 UK time, Tuesday, 17 July 2012
What claims to be (and indeed appears to be) the first formal attempt to calculate numbers of cancer cases and deaths resulting from the Fukushima nuclear accident has just been published.
The Energy and Environmental Science journal paper calculates that total deaths will lie in the range 15-1,300, while cases will number 24-2,500.
16:29 UK time, Saturday, 7 July 2012
The most common question I get asked after International Whaling Commission (IWC) meetings is simple: "What did it do for whales?"
Often, the answer has been: "very little". But at this year's meeting in Panama City, things were a little different.
11:33 UK time, Friday, 6 July 2012
How many whales are snared and killed by fishing gear and ocean debris each year? No-one knows for sure - but the number entangled is probably huge, and the number dying significant.
Over the past few years, the International Whaling Commission (IWC) has been starting to address this issue more seriously than before.
09:05 UK time, Thursday, 5 July 2012
This is the eighth meeting of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) that I've covered; so I'm always a bit chary of the possibility that over time I've become a more grumpy, wizened, curmudgeonly old cynic than the organisation's politics might merit.
So it's been refreshing to chat with a few first-timers this year - and confirmatory that some of them, after just three days of what's been a functional meeting by recent standards, already find the waters of hypocrisy and selective memory running deep and strong.
16:55 UK time, Tuesday, 3 July 2012
Gray whales are confusing animals.
Go back just three years, and the accepted wisdom was that there were two populations in existence.
17:55 UK time, Monday, 2 July 2012
If you have a thought to spare this week, spare it for Tony Burke.
The Australian minister for sustainability, environment, water, population and communities is due in Panama City for a couple of days to bang the drum for what has been his country's favourite environmental cause - whaling.
18:21 UK time, Friday, 22 June 2012
All the environment groups here have been going around saying that from a green perspective, Rio has been a failure. I'm not sure why, seeing as governments have promised to stop carbon dioxide emissions immediately.
You didn't know? I'm not sure government negotiators know either. Certainly US chief negotiator Todd Stern, who usually purveys a smooth brand of spin, waffled more than I've ever heard him when I raised the issue at a news conference.
07:46 UK time, Friday, 22 June 2012
On the final day of the UN sustainable development summit in Rio, UN chief Ban Ki-moon has urged governments to eliminate hunger from the world.
The secretary-general said in a world of plenty, no-one should go hungry.
17:42 UK time, Thursday, 21 June 2012
It's not every day you get to buy a poem for the price of a cup of coffee. If you like the idea, Nelio Fernando is your man.
Choosing a word that I hope will work in Portuguese, I ask him for something "ambientale" - environmental - and he begins to declaim.
15:46 UK time, Monday, 18 June 2012
Should nations receive ratings on their environmental performance?
In some ways, they already do; carbon emissions are assessed on in toto and per capita bases, deforestation rates are calculated.
12:51 UK time, Sunday, 17 June 2012
The first European visitors to what are now Brazilian shores 500 years ago encountered not an impenetrable forest of jargon, as do visitors to Rio+20 today, but a physical forest of vast scale.
It's hard to credit now, in the age of Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, superhighways and cattle ranching, but the Atlantic Forest once covered more than 1m sq km (385,000 sq miles).
16:22 UK time, Friday, 15 June 2012
At the heart of its official negotiations, the Rio+20 summit is all about looking for political agreements that will improve the lot of society, particularly the poorest, and of nature.
Politics isn't necessarily the best course, nor politicians the best people to plot such a course, to judge by the glacial, boulder-strewn pace of talks here in Rio.
09:31 UK time, Thursday, 14 June 2012
In recent years the Technology, Education and Design (TED) gatherings have attempted to position themselves as the modern world's imaginarium, giving people a view of what's possible when you unleash creativity.
So given the huge issues facing humanity in terms of sustainability, I was interested to see what thoughts the TEDx event on the fringes of the Rio+20 summit might provide.
08:45 UK time, Wednesday, 13 June 2012
In 1968, with the war in Vietnam at its height and the US psyche in consequent turmoil, senator and presidential hopeful Robert F Kennedy mounted a coruscating attack on one of the sacred cows of economics.
"It counts napalm and the cost of a nuclear warhead, and armoured cars for police who fight riots in our streets," he told an audience at the University of Kansas.
Richard produced and presented science and environment programmes for BBC World Service prior to becoming a news correspondent.
He regularly covers major environment conferences such as the UN climate summits in Copenhagen and Cancun and the UN biodiversity summit in Nagoya in 2010, and recently made radio documentary series on forests, whaling and fisheries.
He has led environment news coverage on the BBC News website for six years.
Richard relaxes with music, sport and reading.
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