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Exclusive: Whistleblower figures show large rise in ‘serious’ to ‘minor’ downgrades based on water company evidence
Environment Agency (EA) staff have downgraded thousands of serious pollution incidents by water companies in England without visiting to investigate, data unearthed by freedom of information (FoI) requests suggests.
The figures were obtained by Robert Forrester, a whistleblower who left the agency in January and has spent nine years shining a light on the state of the water industry. His identity was revealed in the Channel 4 docudrama Dirty Business this week, and he has vowed to carry on fighting to expose the truth.
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There is no end in sight to the pollution caused by a ‘broken’ system. Experts say it could even be getting worse
Sarah Lambert took her usual morning swim for 40 minutes off Exmouth town beach before her volunteer shift helping disabled people get access to the water.
A wheelchair user herself, Lambert’s regular sea swims twice a week between the lifeboat station and HeyDays restaurant were the perfect form of exercise for her disability.
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Hood hill, North Yorkshire: It’s a huge sycamore on top of a hill with amazing views of the Dales. Now we just have to get to it
A crisp clear day and welcome relief from a soggy winter – we’re off on my favourite walk, to Sammy’s Tree. There’s nothing to beat a hill climb on a winter’s day – frost and ice underfoot, the odd patch of snow on the hills above. We start on a track through mature conifers and ancient cherry trees, passing some hazel trees, their catkins already fully extended. A fallow deer, all legs and mottles, scurries away through the trees (much better than seeing a dead one on the roadside) and a flock of finches races through the treetops.
Then we burst out on to the open hillside which is covered in dormant heather and bilberry. A pair of grey squirrels chase each other round a stunted scrub oak, the green and grey lichen on the branches letting us know how clean the air is up here. At last, we’re on the ridge, with a sharp drop on either side and views stretching more than 30 miles over the Vale of York to the Yorkshire Dales. The sharp nose of Penhill, the gateway to Wensleydale, sparkles in the sunlight. We pass a crater showing where a bomber crashed in the second world war. Then, finally, we reach the top and the best bit of all – Sammy’s tree! It’s a huge sycamore that crowns the hill on the remains of a Norman motte-and-bailey fortress – and it just has to be climbed.
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Understanding biodiversity within species is key to our understanding of why nature works the way it does, say researchers
Twelve miles from the heart of Rome, Dr Javier Ábalos pauses his walk, lifts his sunglasses and points. To his right, perched on a rocky wall, sits a beautiful lizard. Its body is coated in charcoal-black tones speckled with striking yellow across a green dorsum, and its head, with a prominent jaw, is splashed with fluorescent blue spots. The reptile basks in the sun, unconcerned by our presence.
About 80 miles (130km) drive farther along the road that connects the capital with the small village of Poggio di Roio, the researcher from the University of Valencia has barely stepped out of the car when he spots another lizard. This one is smaller, with a brownish body and a narrower head crisscrossed by a network of dark stripes.
Researchers fear the common wall lizard of the white morph could be driven to extinction by the arrival of a new variation
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Ice Memory Foundation’s specially dug ‘sanctuary’ offers storage for cores, which hold thousands of years of history
Last month the Ice Memory Foundation opened the first ever sanctuary for mountain ice cores in Antarctica, where samples will be stored for centuries to come.
The cores, typically 10cm in diameter and a metre or more long, are stored in a specially excavated ice cave. The first to be laid down came from two Alpine glaciers that are rapidly shrinking.
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The annual competition draws thousands of entries from across the world and brings together images from below the water’s surface that show the diversity and challenges of subaquatic life
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Local river defenders force U-turn by occupying grain terminal operated by one of US powerhouses of world trade
“A victory for life.” That was the triumphal message from Indigenous campaigners in the Brazilian Amazon this week after they staved off a threat to the Tapajós River by occupying a grain terminal operated by Cargill, the biggest privately owned company in the United States.
“The river won, the forest won, the memory of our ancestors won,” said the campaigners in Santarém when it was clear their actions had forced the Brazilian government into a U-turn on plans to privatise one of the world’s most beautiful waterways and expand its role as a soy canal.
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Insect taxonomist Art Borkent has described and named more than 300 species of midges but fears his field of science is dying out, despite millions of insects, fungi and other organisms waiting to be discovered
Once Art Borkent starts speaking about biting midges, he rarely pauses for breath. Holding up a picture of a gnat trapped in amber from the time of the dinosaurs, the 72-year-old taxonomist explains that there are more than 6,000 ceratopogonidae species known to science. He has described and named more than 300 midges, mostly from his favourite family of flies. Some specialise in sucking blood from mammals, reptiles, other insects and even fish, often using the CO2 from their host’s breath to locate their target, he says. Tens of thousands remain a mystery to science, waiting to be discovered.
But to Borkent’s knowledge, nobody will continue his life’s work of identifying and studying this group of flies once he has gone.
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For months it has been adding to my mother’s distress when all she wanted was feed-in tariff payments go into her account
When my father died last year, nearly all thecompanies we had to notify were kind and empathetic, but notScottishPower.
It had been paying feed-in tariff (Fit) payments for electricity produced from my parents’ solar panels into his account. My parents hadbought the panels jointly in 2011, and my mother is named on the certification and was ScottishPower’s main point of contact, so she thought it would be a simple matter for the payments to be switched to her bank account. It was not.
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Litter picking groups struggle to stem tide of rubbish after reported incidents rose 10% in last year
Last Wednesday, in a layby outside Brackley, Northamptonshire, Trish Savill and her band of self-styled Wombles proudly took photos of their morning’s work: 28 bags stacked neatly against the verge.
It had taken them an hour, but they had barely made a dent in the sprawl of unrecognisable, rotting refuse already working its way into the soil, mixed with dumped white goods and some more dubious finds.
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