What on Earth?

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change this week published its latest report pulling together all the latest data on global warming and its impacts and it makes for particularly harrowing reading.

In this edition, EIA Climate Campaigner Sophie Geoghegan unpacks the main findings of the report and explains why, despite a grim outlook, it’s not a future we have to be locked into.

In just a few days, the United Nations Environment Assembly is due to start work on the creation of a global plastics treaty to tackle the very real planetary emergency of plastic pollution.

In this edition, Christina Dixon, EIA Ocean Campaigns Deputy Leader, talks about why the world so urgently needs an international agreement to tackle the plastics crisis and how close we may be to achieving one.

The UN CoP26 climate change summit threw an international focus on global warming and what needs to be done to mitigate its worst potential impacts – but was the conference a success or a failure? And what needs to happen next to avert catastrophe?

Climate campaigners Sophie Geoghegan and Kim O’Dowd join Paul Newman to reflect on the outcomes of CoP26 and discuss what needs to happen next.

Following the launch of the new EIA report The Truth Behind Trash, Ocean campaigners Tom Gammage and Lauren Weir talk about the scale and impact of the problem and what EIA is doing to help address it.

EIA’s Elephant Campaign Team has called for the Selous to be stripped of its World Heritage status due to the damage caused by construction of a massive hydropower project, but the World Heritage Committee stopped far short of taking such a step.

Wildlife Campaigner Rachel Mackenna explains why we were pressing for delisting and talks about what actually happened at the meeting and what might be next for the Selous.

As another major bust of 17 tonnes of illegal HFC gases is made in Europe just days after the release of our new report Europe’s Most Chilling Crime, Climate Campaigner Sophie Geoghegan discusses the findings of our undercover investigations and looks at what needs to be done to tackle the illegal trade.

Read and download the report and watch our shocking short film.

Plundering the world’s precious natural resources is a multi-billion dollar business and, as such, keeping on top of the facts, statistics, seizures and trends of environmental crime means understanding huge amounts of raw data – data which can now be much more easily managed with EIA’s new Global Environmental Crime Tracker.

This week, Mel Butler, our Senior Intelligence Analyst, talks about this innovative, first-of-its-kind tool, who will be able to use it and plans to expand it in the near future.

But don’t just take our word for the benefits of the Tracker – come and see for yourself when we host a live, free online public demonstration of its capabilities at 1.30pm BST on Tuesday, 15 June!

Sign up now to participate in the demo, which will feature a Q&A session after Mel has introduced the Tracker.

Just a few short years ago, pangolins were said to be the most trafficked species you’ve never heard of, poached for their meat and scales, but they became much more famous after they were potentially connected to the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic and, most recently, EIA’s investigations revealed that West and Central Africa have become the epicentre for pangolin scale trafficking to Asia.

Chris Hamley, EIA’s Senior Pangolin Campaigner, takes a look at the issues with two of our in-country partners, Adams Cassinga, the Founding Director of Conserv Congo, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Vincent Opyene, the CEO and Founder of the Natural Resource Conservation Network, in Uganda.

EIA’s Forests team has been working on the ground in Myanmar since the country began to emerge from under the shadow of brutal military dictatorship in 2011, exposing illegal timber trade and helping to provide the tools for meaningful reform of its natural resources sector – but all that changed with the coup on 1 February.

Faith Doherty, our Forests Campaigns Leader, and Alec Dawson, Forests Campaigner, give an overview of the situation and look at the implications for those seeking to import precious teak from the country.

As part of our special Investigator Week to celebrate the team’s work, in this episode we get to talk with Mel, our Senior Intelligence Analyst, and her two colleagues, intelligence analysts Martina and Denitsa, about what they do and why it’s key to our success.