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 e...

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 ancest...

“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 ...

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 cl...

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 t...

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...

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 sta...

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 ...

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: Buy To Dye For from Penguin Random House. Visit Alden's website, EcoCult, for more reporting on these issues. 'Hitt...

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: Tax Wars, ICRICT'Global minimum tax on multinationals goes live to raise up t...

Ed speaks to Brett Christophers about his new book The Price is Wrong: Why Capitalism Won’t Save the Planet.Brett Christophers is a professor of human geography at Uppsala University’s Institute for Housing and Urban Research and the author of four books on economic geography and political economy.Brett and Ed discuss the commodification of electricity, the role of the state in renewable energy projects and why markets can’t be relied on to decarbonise the energy sector. The Price is...

Few countries have specific targets about converting to organic farming, and when they have, it's often failed - Sri Lanka dropped its national organic policy within months in 2021, and only three weeks ago, France scrapped its relatively conservative ambition for 15% of farmland.Bhutan may be small, but on this issue it's a global outlier. Motivated by its policy to measure development in Gross National Happiness rather than GDP, the South Asian nation has been slowly working towards becomin...

Alasdair speaks to Peter Wohlleben about his new book How Trees Can Save the World.Peter Wohlleben is a forester and author who has written over 30 books on ecology and forest management. Peter and Alasdair discuss the problems with plantation forests, the power of trees to influence their local ecosystems and what modern forestry gets wrong.How Trees Can Save the World was published in March and is available to buy from Harper Collins here. Audio engineering by Vasko Kostovski.Further readin...

Alasdair speaks to Faustine Bas-Defossez about the relationship between sustainable farming policy and the European farmers' protests.Faustine Bas-Defossez is Director for Nature, Health and Environment at the European Environmental Bureau, a Europe-wide network of environmental citizens' organisations.Alasdair and Faustine discuss the Nature Restoration Law, reforms to the Common Agricultural Policy and what the upcoming European elections might mean for the future of EU agriculture.Audio en...

Alasdair speaks to environmental attorney Peter Lehner about US agriculture's contribution to global emissions.Peter Lehner is the managing attorney of Earthjustice's Sustainable Food and Farming Programme and former executive director of the National Resources Defence Council.Alasdair and Peter discuss the future of the US farm bill, the adverse climate effects of crop insurance and the influence agrochemical lobbies have on agriculture across America. Audio engineering by Vasko Kostovs...

Does our society have an addiction to short term thinking and planning? Is our failure to mitigate climate change a result of this? Vincent Ialenti spent three years doing fieldwork in Finland, interviewing experts working on Posiva's Safety Case for the world's first long term nuclear repository, Onkalo. His book about that fieldwork, Deep Time Reckoning: How Future Thinking Can Help Earth Now, explores the idea of "shallow" and "deep" time thinking. Dr. Ialenti uses Onkalo as a case study f...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...