We keep an eye out for the reports that do all the hard work for us! Telling us what the problems are, what needs to change, and what we can all do about it:

Energy And Climate Intelligence Unit – It’s the most important UN climate summit since Paris in 2015. But why exactly? Here, ECIU’s John Lang places COP26 in its wider context and provides a visual explanation of what a COP is, who attends and why this one matters.

National Food Strategy- The Plan –  Learn how our current food system affects the health of all of us, our society and our planet. Here are some of the things I learnt:

• Our food system is the second largest contributor to climate change and the biggest cause of loss of biodiversity and loss of our forests.
• 85% of our farmland is used to feed livestock
• >40% of today’s medicines are extracted from plants, microorgnaisms or animals- losing our ecosystem is going to impact our medicines.
• Farming uses 70% of all the fresh water on earth
• Since 1930 we have lost 97% of our wildflower meadows and 50% of our ancient woodland
• Report’s recommendations

Surface Against Sewage- Brand Audit Report 2021 – Find out who are the brands behind the packaging pollution in the UK

Food to Go. Good to Go? – A report prepared by City to Sea on the current state of single use plastic problem among food retail and what can be done to help

• 11 billion items of packaging waste per year in Britain from the food-to-go sector
• Several companies have signed up to the voluntary UK Plastics Pact but intentions are slow to action. After one year only 45/127 had reported on progress- 16% of those had not made progress at all.
• Far too many fast-food companies (>80%) at the time the report was researched had no policy for reducing single use plastic at the point of the consumer.
• Report calls for retailers to stop promoting bottled water in meal deals and discounted prices, fuelling the single use plastic market and many of these bottles are not recycled, end up in landfill or on beaches.
• Reusable coffee cups- introducing a charge for a single use cup seems to motivate people to bring their own more than discounting for bringing a disposable cup. (5p carrier bag charge reduced use by >80% in 3 years)
• Last year around 855 billion single use sachets were predicted- this would cover the earth’s surface!
• During the pandemic, many positive steps to reducing single use plastic were reversed with the presumption that single use items, even if eating in, would reduce COVID 19 transmission. No evidence has supported this – reusable items are still recommended provided they are properly cleaned.
• What can we encourage retailers to do?: they should have to report their plastic generation- business exists in a competitive market- making packaging more visible will encourage companies to naturally compete to reduce theirs.
• Not enough businesses prioritise preventing waste or reusing and put recycling as the goal to aim for. (please link back here to the recycling section)

Greenpeace Unpacked Report

Surfers Against Sewerage (SAS) Ocean & Climate Report January 2021 

• The vast majority of excess heat goes into our oceans
• Our heat impact on the oceans is the same as an atomic bomb explosion every second for 150 years.
• Ice loss and ocean warming both lead to sea level rises. Significant change in the ocean current can cause catastrophic changes in our climate through impacting on the Gulf Stream.
• Higher temperatures cause reduced oxygen levels in our oceans, compounded by sewerage and contamination from farm land.
• Our oceans capture a lot of CO2 that would otherwise stay in the atmosphere but this isn’t the solution! More CO2 in our oceans means more acidification.
• This acidification thins and damages the shells of sea creatures- they repair rather than reproduce, their numbers go down!
• Remember food chains?! They’re important here too- warmer oceans–>less plankton–> reduced species diversity and numbers (70% drop in some of our seabirds over last 20 years)
• Antibiotic resistant bacteria make their way into our oceans too- the report highlights a study where 9% of surfers were colonised with resistant bugs vs 3% of those who did not surf.
• We are losing our hidden forests- seagrass, mangroves and tidal marshes and guess what? The carbon they were looking after then goes back into the atmosphere, making the problem even worse!
• The report reminds us that plastic is often produced from fossil fuels, so plastic use matters to our oceans as much as it matters everywhere else.
• You may have heard of the 1.5 degrees target for global temperature rise- that’s trying to avoid a worst-case scenario and doesn’t mean we’ve avoided harm. If that were to become 2 degrees, it is estimated an additional 10million people would be displaced because of sea level rise.

Why stitching asthma inhaler could be better for you and the planet?

Have a look at this story from BBC News from February 2022 about why you might want to think about changing your inhaler to help the fight against climate change!

www.bbc.co.uk/health-59997297

Find out more information on inhalers through our Inhalers information page.

Go Green-Our Environment