Latest news with #environmentallaw
BBC News
a day ago
- General
- BBC News
Wild birds: Daera 'possibly failed' to comply with environmental law
The Department of Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs (Daera) may have failed to comply with environmental law, according to a new is in relation to special protection areas for at-risk wild birds, such as puffins, whooper swans and light-bellied Brent investigation from the Office for Environmental Protection (OEP) had been previously launched in March 2024, following potential failures to implement recommendations given by a conservation body. Daera said it welcomes the OEP's work and will be "considering the investigation findings", whilst recognising "that there is much more to do to protect our natural environment and the habitats that wild birds and other wildlife need to survive and thrive". The OEP has issued Daera with a notice, which they must respond to within two months. A full response will be delivered by the deadline of 5 August Helen Venn, the OEP chief regulatory officer has said that the government has a legal obligation to maintain populations of wild birds and ensure they have enough suitable Venn said "our investigation has found what we believe to be possible failures to comply with environmental law by DAERA relating to the protection of wild birds".She noted the decline in wild birds across Northern Ireland, adding that recent studies have placed "a quarter of birds found on the island of Ireland on the Birds of Conservation Concern Red List". The investigation in March 2024 looked into failures to implement recommendations given by the Joint Nature Conservation Committee (JNCC) and other conservation public bodies on the classification and adaptation of Special Protection Areas (SPAs) A parallel investigation is looking at the same issues relating to England, and information notices have also been issued to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) Secretary of State (SoS) and Natural England. What is the OEP? The Office for Environmental Protection, external is a new environmental governance body, which holds the government and other public authorities in England and Northern Ireland to account on their environmental protection and also covers reserved UK-wide advises the government and Northern Ireland Assembly on any changes to environmental has statutory powers to investigate and enforces compliance with environmental law where enforcement can include legal action if unresolved through compliance with recommendations.
The Guardian
a day ago
- General
- The Guardian
UK may have failed to protect wild birds with environmental laws, watchdog finds
The government may have failed to protect critical wild bird populations by neglecting to implement environmental law properly, the environmental watchdog has found. Wild bird populations are declining across the UK. Under the EU certain parts of Britain's landscape were designated specially protected conservation zones when the UK was still a member state. They include estuaries, coastal areas and peatlands, as well as wetland areas where wading birds live, and places birds of prey prefer to nest. However, according to the Office for Environmental Protection (OEP), the government has failed to ensure adequate protections for these areas and as a result, wild bird populations are declining. Concerningly, ministers are currently passing the planning and infrastructure bill, which would deregulate these specially protected areas and would put more than 5,000 of England's most sensitive, rare and protected natural habitats at high risk of development, according to a Guardian analysis. The OEP was set up after Brexit to hold the government to account under the Environment Act 2021, which was passed to replace EU law. It has sent information notices to the government laying out the issues and giving it two months to respond. Helen Venn, chief regulatory officer for the OEP, said: 'Government has a legal obligation to maintain populations of wild birds and ensure they have enough suitable habitat. One way in which they do this is through special protection areas, which are legally designated sites that protect rare and threatened wild birds.' She added that the government appeared not to be meeting its legally binding plans and targets to halt and reverse the decline of species abundance. Recent government data shows that overall, bird species have declined in number UK-wide by 2% and in England by 7% in the five years since 2018. Faring the worst are farmland birds, which have declined in number severely – by about 61% over the long term (since 1970) and 9% in the short term (the five years between 2018 and 2023) – and woodland birds, whose numbers have fallen by about 35% over the long term and 10% in the short term. 'However, wild bird populations continue to decline across England … Our investigation has found what we believe to be possible failures to comply with environmental law relating to the protection of wild birds and we have therefore decided to move to the next step in our enforcement process, which is to issue information notices setting out our findings.' Sign up to Down to Earth The planet's most important stories. Get all the week's environment news - the good, the bad and the essential after newsletter promotion A Defra spokesperson said: 'Britain is a proud nation of nature lovers, and we are taking bold action to reverse decades of decline. This includes £13m to improve our protected sites and better strategic approaches to restore native species and habitats. 'We will continue to work constructively with the OEP as they take forward this investigation.'
RNZ News
5 days ago
- Business
- RNZ News
Environmental legal fund fighting Trump fishing order
Photo: Supplied/ the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre An environmental legal fund have sued US President Donald Trump in response to an executive order rolling back commercial fishing protections in the Western Pacific. The April 17th order, "Unleashing American commerical fishing in the Pacific", expands fishing rights within the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument, a protected area which surrounds various American-owned islands. The monument was established by President Bush in 2009. President Obama in 2014 expanded the size of the monument to around 1,270,000 square kilometers of ocean space - or about twice the size of the state of Texas. Obama also completely banned commercial fishing activity from that space. Trump's order reverses those bans, which Earthjustice claimed leaves more than 80 percent of the monument's total area open to fishing. David Henkin, lead attorney for the case, told RNZ Pacific that is illegal. "The Antiquities Act gives American presidents the power to create national monuments and to reserve those lands to protect the resources, but it's one way ratchet. "It doesn't give a president the ability to destroy a monument by stripping from it the essential protections that are necessary to preserve the the objects of historic and scientific interests within the monument." Trump's side argues that the presence of commercial fishing vessels doesn't pose a significant threat to marine life. "A host of federal protections exist under current laws and agency management designations to protect the area's natural resources, vulnerable marine species, and unique habitats, such as coral and seamount ecosystems." Henkin's suit contends that vessels would actually pose a massive risk, directly contradicting Trump's justification for bypassing the Antiquities Act. Species of critically endangered sea turtles in transit, as well as coral species and various other marine animals would be made vulnerable to fishing, Henkin said. "There is a lot of interaction with all of these species which are supposed to be protected under the US Endangered Species Act. Yet the Fishery Service, which is charged with implementing the Act, failed to do any analysis about the effects of opening these protected areas to activities that they know kill and injure endangered and threatened sea turtles. "It's that web of life that President Trump's proclamation and the Fisheries Service opening it to commercial fishing is tearing apart." US Exclusive Economic Zones of the US Western Pacific region. Photo: Western Pacific Regional Fishery Management Council At the same time, nearly half of US-owned territory in the Pacific Ocean had been made unavailable for fishing, Trump stated in the order. "This has driven American fishermen to fish further offshore in international waters to compete against poorly regulated and highly subsidized foreign fleets. "This disadvantages honest United States commercial fishermen and is detrimental for United States territories like American Samoa, whose private sector economy is over 80 percent dependent on the fishing industry." One of Trump's supporters in the Pacific, Congresswoman Uifa'atali Aumua Amata of American Samoa, said that the food security that extra fishing provides for is vital for her community. "Neither Presidents Bush, Obama or Biden ever asked American Samoa what they wanted before they took away our indigenous fishing rights without any science... President Trump asked and acted." Henkin said it reflects Trump's "complete ignorance" about the Pacific. "You need to go for days and days to get to Johnston Atoll, or to get to Jarvis Island and certainly Wake Island. There are fishing grounds much closer to the main Hawaiian Islands or to American Samoa that are and always have been available to fishers there." Ensuring a space for fish stocks to replenish is vital for sustainability, Henkin argued. "This is a concept that I think Polynesians long understood by putting areas to off limits to exploitation, you create more abundance. You create spillover effects. And so by protecting the species within the monument, there are more pelagic species, including tuna to catch outside of the monument." In a separate executive order, 'Restoring American seafood competitiveness', Trump ordered the Secretaries of Commerce and the Interior to "review all existing marine national monuments and provide recommendations to the President of any that should be opened to commercial fishing".
Sky News
02-06-2025
- General
- Sky News
New law to tackle 'nature emergency' in Wales - where 'one in six species at risk of extinction'
A new independent body could be created to oversee how environmental law is implemented in Wales, bringing the country in line with the rest of the UK. The Office of Environmental Governance Wales will be tasked with making sure public authorities, such as the Welsh government, Natural Resources Wales and councils are complying with the law. But campaigners say the legislation, which must first be approved by the Senedd, doesn't go far enough. England and Northern Ireland have been covered by the Office for Environmental Protection since 2021. The Scottish government set up Environmental Standards Scotland in the same year, leaving Wales as the only UK nation without a similar body. The Environment (Principles, Governance and Biodiversity Targets) (Wales) Bill has been laid before the Senedd on Monday. The bill is also set to enable Welsh government ministers to set "ambitious biodiversity targets". 2:50 Deputy first minister Huw Irranca-Davies said the bill was "crucial legislation that will empower us to address climate and nature emergencies". "With one in six species now at risk of extinction in Wales, it has never been more important to restore nature and preserve the natural environment for future generations," he added. The RSPB has said the bill is a "good start" but that it would like to see the government "go even further". Annie Smith, RSPB Cymru's head of nature policy and casework, said the bill "must drive the urgent actions needed to clean up the environment and restore nature in Wales". "Having declared a nature emergency, this Senedd must ensure its legacy includes a strong response for nature," she added.
Globe and Mail
29-05-2025
- Business
- Globe and Mail
U.S. Supreme Court approves oil railroad expansion in Utah despite outcry from environmental groups
The U.S. Supreme Court backed a multibillion-dollar oil railroad expansion in Utah Thursday in a ruling that scales back a key environmental law and could accelerate development projects around the country. The 8-0 decision comes after an appeal to the high court from backers of the project, which is aimed at quadrupling oil production in the remote area of sandstone and sagebrush. Environmental groups said the decision would have sweeping impacts on National Environmental Policy Act reviews. U.S. President Donald Trump's administration has already said it's speeding up that process after the president in January declared a 'national energy emergency' and vowed to boost U.S. oil and gas development. Justice Brett Kavanaugh referred to the decision as a 'course correction' in an opinion fully joined by four conservative colleagues. 'Congress did not design NEPA for judges to hamstring new infrastructure and construction projects,' he wrote. The three liberal justices agreed the Utah project should get its approval, but they would have taken a narrower path. The case centres on the Uinta Basin Railway, a proposed 88-mile (142-kilometer) expansion that would connect the oil-rich region of northeast Utah to the national rail network, allowing oil and gas producers to access larger markets. The state's crude oil production was valued at $4.1 billion in 2024, according to a Utah Geological Survey report, and could increase substantially under the expansion project. The justices reversed a lower court decision and restored a critical approval from federal regulators on the Surface Transportation Board. Construction, though, does not appear to be imminent. Project leaders must obtain several permits and secure necessary financing with private-sector partners before they can break ground, said Uinta Basin Railway spokesperson Melissa Cano. Environmental groups and a Colorado county had argued that regulators must consider a broad range of potential impacts when they consider new development, such as increased wildfire risk, the effect of additional crude oil production from the area and increased refining in Gulf Coast states. The justices, though, found that regulators were right to consider the direct effects of the project, rather than the wider upstream and downstream impact. Kavanaugh wrote that courts should defer to regulators on 'where to draw the line' on what factors to take into account. 'The goal of the law is to inform agency decision making, not to paralyze it,' he said. The court's conservative majority court has taken steps to curtail the power of federal regulators in other cases, however, including striking down the decades-old Chevron doctrine that made it easier for the federal government to set a wide range of regulations. Justice Sonia Sotomayor said in a concurrence that the court could have simply cleared the way for the railway approval by saying that regulators did not need to consider increased fossil fuel production tied to the project. Justice Neil Gorsuch did not participate in the case after facing calls to step aside over ties to Philip Anschutz, a Colorado billionaire whose ownership of oil wells in the area means he could benefit if the project goes through. Gorsuch, as a lawyer in private practice, had represented Anschutz. The ruling comes after Trump's vow to boost U.S. oil and gas drilling and move away from former President Joe Biden's focus on climate change. The administration announced last month it's speeding up environmental reviews of projects required under the same law at the centre of the Utah case, compressing a process that typically takes a year or more into just weeks. 'The court's decision gives agencies a green light to ignore the reasonably foreseeable consequences of their decisions and avoid confronting them,' said Sambhav Sankar, senior vice president of programs at Earthjustice. Wendy Park, a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, said opponents would continue to fight the Utah project. 'This disastrous decision to undermine our nation's bedrock environmental law means our air and water will be more polluted, the climate and extinction crises will intensify, and people will be less healthy,' she said. Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, a Republican, said the ruling affirms a 'balanced approach' to environmental oversight. He praised the railroad expansion as a critical infrastructure project that will help 'restore America's energy independence' and bolster the state's rural economy. James Coleman, a professor at University of Minnesota Law School, said the ruling is an 'important corrective' that would have judges deferring to federal regulators rather than requiring them to consider upstream and downstream effects of energy transportation projects. The project's public partner also applauded the ruling. 'It represents a turning point for rural Utah – bringing safer, sustainable, more efficient transportation options, and opening new doors for investment and economic stability,' said Keith Heaton, director of the Seven County Infrastructure Coalition.
