Environment review of 2010

The year started badly after the failure of the Copenhagen climate summit and got worse with the ‘climategate’ scandal and the largest oil spill in US history. But it was a good year for tigers and wildlife.
Louise Gray, The Telegraph 21 Dec 10;

• The Copenhagen fall-out: The failure of world leaders to agree a deal on climate change during a fraught United Nations meeting in Copenhagen at the end of 2009 left the environmental movement in a state of confusion. Much of 2010 was spent reassessing better ways to limit carbon emissions if it is not going to be through a global agreement. Non-governmental agencies started targeting businesses and individuals to reduce emissions instead, irrespective of what government is doing.

• Climategate: Emails stolen from the University of East Anglia (UEA) led to accusations scientists had exaggerated the evidence for global warming. Professor Phil Jones, head of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU), claimed to have done nothing wrong. But it took three reviews for him to clear his name of any scientific wrong doing. However UEA was criticised for failing to share information correctly.

• Deepwater Horizon: The massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico was described as one of the worst environmental disasters in history. Eleven workers were killed after an explosion sank the rig in late April and for three months gallons of oil poured in the ocean. BP, the British company in charge of the rig and its chief executive Tony Hayward, became figures of hate in the US. The company has been forced to pay out billions in compensation and no one knows what the lasting damage will be on the ecology of the area.

• The Greenest Government ever? In May the Tory/Lib Dem Coalition was sworn in promising to be the ‘greenest government ever’. However one of the first moves was to cut the budget for the Department of Environment Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) by a massive 30 per cent. Various quangoes were lost and funding for flooding and wildlife was slashed.

• Year of the Tiger: The world's first tiger summit ended with a pledge for £200 million and the goal of doubling the number of wild tigers by 2022. A meeting of the UN on biodiversity in Nagoya, Japan managed to be more successful than climate change talks. Governments agreed to at least halve the loss of natural habitats for wildlife by 2020. The Convention on Biological Diversity also agreed to expand nature reserves to 17 per cent of the world's land area by 2020, up from less than 10 per cent today