The Land & Climate Podcast – Details, episodes & analysis

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: 

• 'Russia’s war with Ukraine accelerating global climate emergency, report shows', The Guardian, June 2024
• 'Revealed: repairing Israel’s destruction of Gaza will come at huge climate cost', The Guardian, June 2024
• 'National climate action plans must include military emissions', CEOBS Blog, June 2024
• 'UNEA-6 passes resolution on environmental assistance and recovery in areas affected by armed conflict', CEOBS Blog, March 2024
• 'Does reporting military emissions data really threaten national security?', CEOBS Blog, February 2024
• 'Ticking boxes: are military climate mitigation strategies fit for purpose?', CEOBS Blog, February 2024 
• Estimating the Military’s Global Greenhouse Gas Emissions, 2022

Click here for our website to read all our most recent Land and Climate Review features and pieces.

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: 

• 'Leading with Industrial Policy: Lessons for Decarbonization from Swedish Green Steel', Roosevelt Institute, 2024
• 'Phase-in and phase-out policies in the global steel transition', Climate Policy, 2024
• 'Building a stronger steel transition: Global cooperation and procurement in construction', One Earth, 2023
• 'Paris compatible steel capacity: Contraction and replacement for zero emissions', Environmental and Energy Systems Studies, Lund university, 2023

Click here for our website to read all our most recent Land and Climate Review features and pieces.

Bertie speaks to Austin Frerick about his new book Barons: Money, Power, and the Corruption of America's Food Industry.

Austin Frerick is an agricultural and antitrust policy fellow at Yale University, and has advised on policy for senior US politicians including Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Pete Buttigieg, and Joe Biden during his presidential campaign.

Bertie and Austin discuss lobbying and state capture in the US, the history of farming deregulation, and the environmental impact of food monopolies.

Barons was published last week and is available to buy from Island Press here.

Further reading: 

• Book excerpt: ‘Barons: Money, Power, and the Corruption of America’s Food Industry’, Minnesota Reformer 
• ‘Hidden costs, public burden: The real toll of Walmart's "always low prices"’, Salon
• ‘Do You Know Where Your Strawberries Come From?’, The New Republic
• ‘Why Austin Frerick Is Taking On The Grocery Barons’, Forbes

Click here for our website to read all our most recent Land and Climate Review features and pieces.

Last month an investigation by Transport and Environment (T&E) exposed a number of challenges facing Eni's African biofuel projects.

The Italian oil giant's "second generation" biofuel crops have not met production targets in Kenya and Republic of the Congo. The investigation found that key promises have not been met around intercropping, and collected testimonies of alleged expropriation driven by Eni's business partners. T&E say farmers are now giving up on the projects.

To hear more details, Alasdair welcomed Agathe Bounfour back to the podcast, Oil Investigations Lead at T&E.

 Audio engineering by Vasko Kostovski.   

Further reading: 

• Read Agathe's op-ed about the investigation on Land and Climate Review. 
• Read T&E's full investigation.
• Read The Continent's front page cover story about the investigation. 

Click here for our website to read all our most recent Land and Climate Review features and pieces.

Following new allegations from the BBC that a UK power station is "burning wood from some of the world's most precious forests" in British Columbia, Bertie speaks to Richard Robertson about Canada's forestry sector.

Richard Robertson is a Forest Campaigner at Stand.Earth, and recently contributed to a report prepared by numerous NGOs, which accused the Canadian government's own forestry report of being “akin to an industry ad, promoting questionable and misleading claims.”

Bertie and Richard discuss these findings, the biomass industry, certification and regulation, and whether Canadian forestry deserves its leading reputation.

Further reading: 

• Read the report by Canadian environmental organisations:  The State Of The Forest In Canada: Seeing Through The Spin
• Read the Canadian government's own report, which the new publication responds to: The State of Canada’s Forests
• Read Stand.Earth's report about their old growth satellite monitoring tool: Forest Eye: An Eye on Old Growth Destruction
• 'Drax: UK power station still burning rare forest wood', BBC, 28/2/24

Click here for our website to read all our most recent Land and Climate Review features and pieces.

As the EU butts heads with the UK over fishing policy, Bertie speaks to Steve Trent, CEO of the Environmental Justice Foundation, to get a more global overview of fishing regulation and its importance to environmental and human rights.

They discuss past and future EU policy and its impact in South East Asia, and use Thailand as a case study to discuss the issue of durability with environmental reform. The Thai fishing sector's reliance on forced labour and overfishing reduced dramatically in the 2010s, but reforms may now be overturned.

Further reading:

• 'Europe already has the tools it needs to end forced labour', Land and Climate Review, 2023
• 'Civil society urges Thai government to stop deregulation of the fisheries industry', Environmental Justice Foundation, 2023
• Thailand’s progress in combatting IUU, forced labour & human trafficking, 2023
• The ever widening net: mapping the  scale, nature and corporate structures of illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing by the Chinese distant-water fleet, 2022
• A manifesto for our ocean, 2023
• 'Denmark and Sweden press Brussels to act against UK in fishing dispute', Financial Times, 2024

Click here for our website to read all our most recent Land and Climate Review features and pieces.

This week, the EU's Climate Commissioner Wopke Hoekstra warned that "You cannot magically CCS yourself out of the problem". But the new policy he was presenting that day still called for 280 million tonnes of carbon dioxide to be permanently stored underground.

The extent to which carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology should be a part of climate planning is contentious, but advocates often point to Norway's long-running CCS plants as proof that it can work.

Are Equinor's North Sea gas field facilities the gold standard for successful CCS, or have they had issues too? Last year, the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) published a report exploring that question.

Bertie spoke to the report's author and IEEFA's Strategic Energy Finance Advisor for Asia, Grant Hauber, to hear about his findings.

Further reading: 

• Norway’s Sleipner and Snøhvit CCS: Industry models or cautionary tales?, IEEFA, 2023
• Blue hydrogen: Not clean, not low carbon, not a solution, IEEFA, 2023
• 'Carbon capture key to reaching net-zero, but climate chief urges caution', Euronews, 7/2/24
• 'What is happening with Carbon Capture and Storage?', Land and Climate Review, 2022
• 'Why Carbon Capture and Storage matters: overshoot, models, and money', Land and Climate Review, 2022
• 'Capturing and storing problems', Land and Climate Review, 2022

Click here for our website to read all our most recent Land and Climate Review features and pieces.

What are the impacts  of new flying technologies? Are policymakers and the aviation industry taking the right steps to avoid global warming exceeding 1.5 degrees?

Alasdair speaks to Dr Daniel Quiggin, senior research fellow at the Chatham House Environment and Society Centre. Dr Quiggin is an expert in the analysis of how national and global energy systems will evolve to 2050 and author of recent research on Net zero and the role of the aviation industry.

Further reading:

• Net zero and the role of the aviation industry, Chatham House, November 2023
• 'First net zero flight takes off but decarbonisation remains on runway', November 2023

Link to the Chatham House webinar on the research:
3pm GMT on Wednesday 31st January 2024

Click here for our website to read all our most recent Land and Climate Review features and pieces.

Bertie speaks to Agathe Bounfour, Oil Investigations Lead at Transport and Environment, about her investigation into the fossil funded research group CONCAWE.

The investigation revealed that CONCAWE undermined the European Union's attempt to regulate human exposure to benzene, a carcinogenic pollutant. After oil industry lobbying and research, the new regulated limit from 2024 will be ten times higher than the original suggestions from scientific agencies. 

Read the full investigation here.

Podcast editing by Vasko Kostovski.

Further reading:

• 'Action to tackle air pollution failing to keep up with research', The Guardian, 2023
• 'Benzene and worker cancers: ‘An American tragedy’', The Center for Public Integrity, 2014
• Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming, Naomi Oreskes & Erik M. Conway, 2012
• Doubt is Their Product: How industry's assault on science threatens your health, David Michaels, 2008 

Click here for our website to read all our most recent Land and Climate Review features and pieces.

In this episode Alasdair caught up with Rachel Rose Jackson, director of climate research and policy at campaign organisation Corporate Accountability to discuss their new research with the Guardian which found considerable flaws in the 50 most used offset projects.  He asked about the recent research and what value offset projects might actually have.

The Land and Climate podcast is produced by Vasko Kostovski

Recommended reading:

• ‘Revealed: top carbon offset projects may not cut planet-heating’, The Guardian, September 2023 
• ‘Gas-Lit: No, the Dubai Climate Talks Did Not Save the Planet’, Newsweek, December 2023 
• '10 myths about net zero targets and carbon offsetting, busted’, Climate Home News, December 2020
• ‘Action needed to make carbon offsets from forest conservation work for climate change mitigation’, Science, August 2023 
• ‘Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) Carbon Crediting’,Berkeley Public Policy, September 2023  
• ‘The Verra Scandal Explained: why avoid deforestation credits are hazardous’ London School of Economics Blogs, January 2023
• ‘The Land Gap Report’, Various, 2023 
• 'The Taskforce on Scaling Voluntary Carbon Markets'

Click here for our website to read all our most recent Land and Climate Review features and pieces.