By Land and Climate Review
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The podcast currently has 88 episodes available.
This year, Land and Climate Review’s first investigative series has documented more than 11,000 breaches of environmental law at North American wood pellet mills.
Alasdair MacEwen speaks to Camille Corcoran, whose recent reporting was published with The Times in the UK, and Bertie Harrison-Broninski, who normally co-hosts with Alasdair, but here discusses Land and Climate Review’s Canadian investigations, which were featured on BBC Newsnight.
They discuss the process of uncovering environmental violations at wood pellet mills owned by Drax Group, which operates the UK’s largest power station, and how residents in Mississippi and British Columbia say they have been affected by the pollution from the mills.
Audio engineering by Vasko Kostovski and Podcast House.
Read the investigations:
Related episodes:
Click here to read our investigation into the UK biomass supply chain, or watch a clip from the BBC Newsnight documentary.
As the UN Biodiversity Conference draws to a close Bertie speaks to María Arango, a lawyer at the international human rights organization Forest People’s Programme, about the impacts of the sugar cane industry on Black communities in the Cauca River Valley region of western Colombia.
A new report titled The Green Illusion finds that more than 80% of the region’s wetlands have been drained in order to plant sugar cane, resulting in Afro-descendant peoples being displaced from their ancestral lands and stripped of vital resources.
Bertie and María discuss the report’s findings and how international summits such as COP16 present key opportunities to protect the rights of Indigenous people that live in biodiversity hotspots.
Further reading:
Click here to read our investigation into the UK biomass supply chain, or watch a clip from the BBC Newsnight documentary.
“In 2022, Indonesia only consumed about 70,000 tonnes of wood for electricity. In 2023, we consumed almost half a million.”
Alasdair speaks to Timer Manurung, Chairman of the Indonesian NGO Auriga Nusantara, about a new report he worked on with five other environmental charities.
Titled Unheeded Warnings, the report warns that the Indonesian government’s plans for biomass power risk harming 10 million hectares of untouched primary forest, and "the deforestation of an area roughly 35 times the size of Jakarta — resulting in CO2 emissions almost five hundred times higher than current levels.”
Alasdair and Timer discuss the investigation process, the scale of these potential impacts, and the Indonesian Government.
To see photos from Timer's investigation, click here.
Further reading:
Click here to read our investigation into the UK biomass supply chain, or watch a clip from the BBC Newsnight documentary.
Bertie speaks to Sherri Goodman about her new book, Threat Multiplier:
Climate, Military Leadership, and the Fight for Global Security.
From 1993-2001, Sherri Goodman served as the first US Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Environmental Security, making her the Pentagon's Chief Environmental Officer. She then went on to help deliver influential reports that helped to establish climate change as a national security threat in the US.
Threat Multiplier documents key environmental and climatic challenges during her career, such as negotiations around the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, and managing geopolitical risk in the Arctic as melting permafrost changes the ocean landscape.
Goodman is now Secretary General of the International Military Council on Climate & Security, and a Senior Fellow at the Wilson Center.
Further reading:
Click here to read our investigation into the UK biomass supply chain, or watch a clip from the BBC Newsnight documentary.
Last week, Greenpeace Africa published their new report “Fast Fashion, Slow Poison: The Toxic Textile Crisis in Ghana”. The report outlines the shocking environmental and public health impact of the second-hand clothing industry in Ghana - revealing that every week, up to half a million items of clothing from the Kantamanto Market in Accra end up discarded in open spaces and informal dumpsites.
Bertie speaks to the report's author, Sam Quashie-Idun, about his findings, who is responsible for the harmful textile imports and what can be done to alleviate the problem.
Sam Quashie-Idun is Head of Investigations at Greenpeace Africa and a member of Land and Climate Review's investigations unit.
You can read the report here and watch Sam’s Instagram video summarising its findings here.
Further reading:
Click here to read our investigation into the UK biomass supply chain, or watch a clip from the BBC Newsnight documentary.
In 2015, 196 countries signed the Paris Agreement, a legally binding treaty with the goal of limiting global heating to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.
Since then, climate planning has increasingly revolved around overshooting this target, with the hope that temperature levels can be brought back down in later decades. Temperature overshoot models are now the default, but also a cause of scientific concern, as the devastating impacts of crossing this threshold may not be reversible.
In their new book Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown, Andreas Malm and Wim Carton study this risky approach to policy, and the economic interests that they theorise have led to it. Alasdair spoke to them both about the new book.
Andreas Malm is Associate Professor of Human Ecology at Lund University, and the celebrated author of How to Blow Up a Pipeline, among other works. Wim Carton is Associate Professor of Sustainability Science at Lund University, and the author of over 20 academic articles and book chapters on climate politics.
Further reading:
Click here to read our investigation into the UK biomass supply chain, or watch a clip from the BBC Newsnight documentary.
Many governments are wary of providing transparency around their militaries' emissions, and campaigners can be hesitant to focus on the carbon footprint of conflicts, rather than more obviously humanitarian issues.
But Ukraine has helped to shift opinion this year, after pushing for more accountability for wartime environmental harm. Recent estimates put the CO2e cost of Russia's invasion of Ukraine at 175 million tonnes, and day to day military operations - not including conflicts - at a staggering 5.5% of global emissions.
Bertie spoke to Lindsey Cottrell, Environmental Policy Officer at the Conflict and Environment Observatory, about the military emissions gap in carbon accounting, and the campaign for UNFCCC rules to be changed to acknowledge it.
Further reading:
Click here to read our investigation into the UK biomass supply chain, or watch a clip from the BBC Newsnight documentary.
Alasdair speaks to Jonas Algers about steel decarbonisation; what the options are, where there are challenges, and what is happening so far.
Jonas Algers is a PhD candidate at Lund University, Sweden, researching steel decarbonisation policy.
Further reading:
Click here to read our investigation into the UK biomass supply chain, or watch a clip from the BBC Newsnight documentary.
Bertie speaks to fashion expert and journalist Alden Wicker about her book To Dye For: How Toxic Fashion Is Making Us Sick - and How We Can Fight Back.
Drawing from case studies in Alden's book, they discuss the health risks with chemicals modern clothing is often treated with, and whether there has been enough research and regulation on the issue.
Further reading:
Click here to read our investigation into the UK biomass supply chain, or watch a clip from the BBC Newsnight documentary.
Alasdair speaks to former politician and French investigating magistrate Eva Joly about corporate corruption, tax evasion, and how these issues relate to the climate crisis.
They reflect on her investigation into financial corruption at the French oil giant Elf Aquitaine, and her current campaign work with the International Commission for the Reform of International Corporate Taxation (ICRICT).
Further reading:
Click here to read our investigation into the UK biomass supply chain, or watch a clip from the BBC Newsnight documentary.
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