Breaking Waves: Ocean News

The division of responsibilities between Ofwat, the Environment Agency and Drinking Water Inspectorate hasn’t worked New regulator may ban English water companies from making a profit An independent commission into the English and Welsh water sector would have been an excellent idea about 20 years ago. It is hard to pinpoint precisely when the industry went seriously off the rails but Ofwat’s infamous price review of 2004 is one starting point. That is when the undoubted gains from higher investment in the decade after privatisation in 1989 started to evaporate and the story turned into one of financial engineering and grossly inadequate regulation. The 2004 settlement was wildly generous to the companies and kickstarted the disastrous take-private buyout boom by private equity and global infrastructure funds. Dividend extraction and “whole business securitisations” followed, tolerated by an economic regulator that, absurdly, took the view that sky-high debt levels and Cayman Islands financing vehicles were not its job to worry about. Continue reading...

In the mountainous area near Asheville, affected growers must now replenish water-logged and often tainted land Hurricane Helene took much from western North Carolina where I live, farm and raise my family. The stories are harrowing: houses obliterated by landslides, whole families washed away, corpses revealed as the waters receded. Suddenly, there’s deep climate trauma here, in a place where we mistakenly thought hurricanes happened to Floridians and coastal communities, not us. Helene stole our sense of security: we now side-eye trees, which crushed homes, power lines, cars and people. And the rain, the farmer’s frequent wish, turned our rivers maniacal. Continue reading...

Critics say eels could be smuggled eastwards towards Asia but exporter says they are for ‘restocking’ project Millions of critically endangered eels have been exported from the Severn estuary to Russia this year and conservationists fear export quotas will be increased next year. A tonne of glass eels, the young elvers that swim into European estuaries from the Sargasso Sea each spring, was flown to Kaliningrad this year, double the amount exported to the Russian port the previous year. Continue reading...

Mowi Scotland, which supplies Tesco, Asda and Sainsbury’s, blames a rise in sea temperatures for the deaths, while campaigners say expanding farms will make things worse More than a million dead fish, the biggest mass die-off of farmed salmon in Scotland in a decade, have been recorded at a farm belonging to the UK’s largest supplier. The deaths at two adjacent Mowi Scotland sites in Loch Seaforth on the Outer Hebrides – licensed as one farm by the Scottish government – rose to just over a million during the year-and-a-half production cycle that it usually takes to raise a salmon in seawater, and which in this case began in spring 2023. Mowi supplies salmon to retailers including Sainsbury’s, Tesco, Asda and Ocado. Many of its farms, including those in the Hebrides, are certified under the RSPCA Assured label, which guarantees higher animal welfare standards. Continue reading...