The UK Landscape Award seeks to find the best landscape project in the UK, whether it’s a new town square, restored coastal path or a regeneration scheme with public space at its heart.

The Award helps to implement the European Landscape Convention in the UK, the first international convention to specifically focus on landscape, being dedicated exclusively to the protection, management and planning of all landscapes in Europe.

The convention highlights the need to recognise landscape in law, to develop landscape policies dedicated to the protection, management and creation of landscapes, and to establish procedures for the participation of the general public and other stakeholders in the creation and implementation of landscape policies. It also encourages the integration of landscape into all relevant areas of policy, including cultural, economic and social policies.

Entries for the Award opened on 6 April and close on 27 August 2010, and the winner will be announced on 8 November 2010 at the European Landscape Convention Conference in Liverpool. The UK winner will then be submitted to the Council of Europe’s European Landscape Award which will be announced in March 2011.

The BES is pleased to become an affiliate of the of the UKLA, and we would like to use this opportunity to encourage you to submit entrants for the Award. Further details can be found here.

Details of the US bill on climate change are set to be announced later today, whilst Europe’s climate commissioner Connie Hedegaard is to set the case for raising cuts in CO2 emissions across the EU.

Both however face opposition. The American bill, proposing a cut of 17% by 2010, contains several measures to allay opposition, including the possibility of easing restrictions on offshore drilling and a boost for the nuclear power sector. The bill will propose setting a price on carbon emissions for large polluters, and provide monetary incentives for firms to develop so-called clean coal technologies.

However, it is possible that the bill will not be discussed until after elections later this year, where the Democrats may lose their stranglehold on Congress, making it much more difficult to pass comprehensive climate and energy legislation.

An increase in emission cuts may suffer less concerted opposition in the EU. However, a consortium of major European industries issued a statement last week opposing plans to increase cuts to 30% without a reciprocal agreement from the US.

Although this is also the current EU position, Ms Hedegaard said that achieving the current target of 20% is now a third cheaper due to the economic recession, and increasing cuts to 30% may only cost a further 11 bin Euros. Her paper, set to be published later this month, will analyse the costs and benefits of such cuts.

Original articles: “Europe to examine case for bigger CO2 cuts” by Roger Harrabin (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/science_and_environment/10109088.stm) and “US senators Kerry and Lieberman to unveil climate bill” (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/8676581.stm).

A major UN report has warned that ongoing nature losses may push key ecosystems beyond “tipping points”, leading to drastic losses in biodiversity and accompanying ecosystem services.

The third Global Biodiversity Outlook (GBO-3) states that the poor will suffer the first and most severe impacts of change, but ultimately all societies and communities will suffer.

Such tipping points could include the rapid dieback of the Amazon forest, where deforestation, fire and climate change may interact to cause an ongoing cycle of forest loss and a shift to savanna-like vegetation. Whilst reductions in regional rainfall may only affect local agriculture, increased carbon emmisions will hit the global community.

The report continues to state that whilst ecosystem restoration will increasingly be needed, biodiversity and associated services of restored ecosystems remains below that of natural ecosystems, and some systems may be impossible to restore to the original states that economies or communities depended upon (as seen in the Grand Banks cod fishery). Preserving biodiversity and investing in resilient and diverse ecosystems may well present the best-value insurance policy yet devised.

Source: Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity (2010) Global Biodiversity Outlook 3.
Montréal, 94 pages. (http://gbo3.cbd.int/media/2721/gbo_en_web.pdf).

Ecosystem services are one of the BES’s policy priorities. You can read more about our activity on the issue here – http://www.britishecologicalsociety.org/policy/ecosystem_services.php