A Bristol startup is turning festival urine into fertiliser for 4,500 native trees in Wales — and it could reshape how Britain sources nutri
From the article:
Only seven percent of Britain’s native woodlands are in good condition. Pests, pathogens, and invasive species have worked through the rest. And rising fertilizer costs, driven by ongoing conflict, have not helped. A Bristol-based startup thinks part of the answer has been sitting in festival portable toilets all along.
NPK Recovery, based at the University of the West of England, collects urine at large events such as the London Marathon and Boomtown Festival, and processes it into plant fertilizer on-site. The company removes contaminants from raw urine and concentrates the nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium that plants need. Field trials show the product performs comparably to synthetic alternatives. Researchers are also quick to note that it doesn’t smell.
The company is now taking on its biggest test: a three-year trial to grow 4,500 native British trees using urine-derived fertilizer, funded by a £435,627 (approximately $553,000) Forestry Commission grant.
If we used the Ethiopian church forests as reference, we might have a way to save american forests. Because why would far right Christian nationalists take out a forest of God? What excuse would they have?
Hundreds of part-time forest watchers across India risk their lives every day for a front-line job that is vital for preserving the country’s forests but often pays less than minimum wage. They battle poachers, criminal gangs, and fires and other disasters, and in this part of the country, where forests mingle with villages, they are the de facto peacekeepers between humans and wildlife. It’s a broad mission that involves deterring wildlife from eating crops and livestock near protected areas, while also guarding the lives and livelihoods of local residents and the wildlife that could face reprisal attacks by communities.
Shalini Venugopal Bhagat, ‘Risking their lives, for little pay, to guard India’s forests’, New York Times
The hunger for these offsets is blinding us to the mounting pile of evidence that they haven't — and won't — deliver the climate benefit they promise.
Excerpt from this ProPublica story:
If the world were graded on the historic reliability of carbon offsets, the result would be a solid F.
The largest program, the Clean Development Mechanism, came out of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, when dozens of nations made a pact to cut greenhouse gases. European leaders wanted to force industry to emit less. Americans wanted flexibility. Developing nations like Brazil wanted money to deal with climate change. One approach they could agree to was carbon offsets.
The idea worked marvelously on paper. If a power plant in Canada needed to shave 10% off of its emissions but didn’t want to pay for technology upgrades, it could buy offsets from projects in the developing world. Investors planning to build a coal plant in India could instead decide to build a solar plant, using the money from the anticipated sale of carbon credits to cover the higher costs of developing solar power. The gap in emissions between the hypothetical coal plant and the actual solar farm would be converted to offsets. (Each credit is equal to the global warming caused by a metric ton of CO₂.)
The program subsidized thousands of projects, including hydropower, wind and, infamously, coal plants that claimed credits for being more efficient than they would have been. CDM became mired in technical and human rights scandals, and the European Union stopped accepting most credits. A 2016 report found that 85% of offsets had a “low likelihood” of creating real impacts.
Another global program, Joint Implementation, has a similar track record. A 2015 paperfound that 75% of the credits issued were unlikely to represent real reductions, and that if countries had cut pollution on-site instead of relying on offsets, global CO₂ emissions would have been 600 million tons lower.
Almost all of the projects failed to meet a standard required for any true carbon offset called additionality. What it means is that the environmental gains are only real if the solar farms or windmills would never have been built without the credits.The programs largely avoided credits for forest preservation, in which a polluter pays a landowner to reduce deforestation. The science was too complicated. How are we to know which trees were saved because of such projects, and which would have survived without them?
Colombia’s deforestation dropped 33% in early 2025 compared to last year, with significant reductions in Amazon national parks.
From the article:
Colombia saw a 33% drop in deforestation in the first quarter of 2025 compared to the same period last year, the environment ministry said Thursday, citing stronger community coordination and a crackdown on environmental crime.
Speaking at a press conference, Environment Minister Lena Estrada Añokazi said deforestation fell from 40,219 hectares in early 2024 to 27,000 hectares this year. The government identified 18 active deforestation hot spots, including 13 in the Amazon and others in regions like Catatumbo, Arauca and the Pacific north.
“In the Amazon’s national parks, deforestation dropped by 54% ... which is a very good result,” Estrada said, highlighting gains in Amazonian parks Tinigua, Chiribiquete and La Macarena.
