The UK’s largest freshwater lake experienced its worst-ever levels of a harmful bacteria this summer.
Lough Neagh – a lake in Northern Ireland that is larger than the country of Malta – has been plagued by blue-green algae that can negatively impact humans, plants and animals.
A group of environmentalists recently held a “wake” to protest the scale of the situation.
Scientists tell Carbon Brief that agricultural nutrient runoff and climate change are the main roots of the problem – and that there is no “silver-bullet” solution.
In this article, Carbon Brief explains what happened on Lough Neagh this summer, how climate change made the situation worse and how it is being tackled without a functioning devolved government in place.
- What happened on Lough Neagh?
- What role does climate change have in the algal blooms?
- What is being done to improve the situation?
What happened on Lough Neagh?
Lough Neagh is the largest freshwater lake in the UK and Ireland, spanning around 380 square kilometres (km2). It holds more than 800bn gallons of water and stretches across five of the six counties in Northern Ireland.
The lake hosts a range of plant and animal species, including whooper swans, tufted ducks and the rare Irish Lady’s Tresses orchid. The wider 5,400km2 basin around the lake holds wildlife-rich wetlands.
The map below shows the scale of Lough Neagh compared to the rest of Northern Ireland.
Since May, high levels of a type of bacteria called blue-green algae have been identified in a number of rivers, lakes and coastlines in Northern Ireland. Lough Neagh has been particularly impacted.
These cyanobacteria – a type of bacteria that can photosynthesise – naturally inhabit freshwater ecosystems.
But if they get plenty of sunlight, CO2 and nutrients – such as nitrogen and phosphorus – they can grow in big numbers and begin to form visible algal “blooms”. The blooms negatively impact the appearance, quality and use of the water.
The recent blooms have affected swimmers and fisheries in Lough Neagh, which contains Europe’s largest commercial wild eel fishery.
It can cause rashes and illnesses in humans and can “potentially kill wild animals, livestock and pets if ingested”, according to the Northern Ireland Department of Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs (Daera).
The blooms also block sunlight from reaching other plants and use up oxygen in the water, which can suffocate fish and other creatures.
The image below shows the blooms visible from Copernicus satellite imagery on 4 September. The green swirls of algae are particularly noticeable on the eastern side of the lake.
Lough Neagh supplies around 40% of all drinking water in Northern Ireland. NI Water says that drinking water drawn from the lake remains “safe to drink and use as normal”.
The issue has had a political impact in Northern Ireland, where the devolved government has been at a standstill since last year due to Brexit-related issues.
The climate-sceptic former Northern Ireland environment and agriculture minister, Edwin Poots, said the blooms are a “very significant issue”.
What role does climate change have in the algal blooms?
There are a number of drivers behind the increase in algal blooms on Lough Neagh this summer.
This includes excess nutrient runoff from agricultural and wastewater systems, “combined with climate change and the associated weather patterns, such as the exceptionally warm June, followed by the wet July and August”, Daera says in a statement to Carbon Brief. The department adds:
“This is a complex, multi-factorial issue that will take years, if not decades, to solve.”
Studies say that excessive nutrients are the main cause of blue-green algal blooms in freshwater lakes around the world. Nitrogen and phosphorus occur naturally in water, but agricultural fertilisers, sewage run-off, household products and storm water flows can cause an overabundance of these nutrients
Algal blooms appear as a result of eutrophication – a process arising from too many nutrients in the water boosting the growth of plants and algae.
Lough Neagh is “hypereutrophic”, meaning it is especially rich in nutrients coming from a range of sources.
Prof Mark Emmerson, a professor of biodiversity at Queen’s University Belfast, says the nutrient issue is heightened further by climate change. He tells Carbon Brief:
“We’ve had the wettest July on record. The consequence of that is that when we have farmers who are managing their slurry [mixture of animal waste and water used as fertiliser]…climate events are leading to that being washed out into our river courses and down into the Lough.
“You get this combination of multiple stressors that erode the capacity of an ecosystem like Lough Neagh to absorb and recover from these sorts of events.”
The UK and Ireland have experienced more rainfall on average in recent decades. This trend is predicted to continue as global temperatures rise further, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
The map below shows rainfall levels across the UK in July this year compared to the 30-year average. The dark purple areas experienced the highest above-average rainfall levels. Northern Ireland (left) saw more than double its average rainfall for the month.
Rising temperatures also play a role in the growth of blue-green algae, according to Prof Christopher Gobler, endowed chair of coastal ecology and conservation at Stony Brook University in New York. He tells Carbon Brief that the climate impact on blooms is a “no-doubter”:
“If you go back even to the 20th century, the summers just weren’t as warm as they are today. The warming sets up a whole multitude of effects. These blue-green algae, they grow best at really high temperatures. The warmer it gets in general, the better they do.”
A 2011 study found that nutrient levels and climate change “synergistically enhance” cyanobacteria blooms in bodies of water.
However, other research published earlier this year found that nutrients were the main reason behind cyanobacteria growth in lakes in the Americas.
The researchers found “no clear trends” in the links between algal blooms and latitude. Water temperature is “only weakly” related to bloom growth, the study said, saying this aspect has been “overemphasised” previously.
A greater focus on reducing nutrients would improve the situation for lakes such as Lough Neagh, Gobler tells Carbon Brief:
“If you can address the nutrient issue, what that says is that you can actually overcome the temperature issue…In the 20th century, [the] nutrients may have been there, but because the window of opportunity of temperature was short, you didn’t get the blooms.
“But now, since the window is open for most of the summer and the nutrient levels are high – now you’re getting the blooms.”
Other issues have affected this year’s blooms on Lough Neagh. The lake has a high population of zebra mussels, an invasive species, which Daera says upset the “ecological balance” in the Lough.
The filter feeding of the zebra mussels may have contributed to making the water clearer, allowing more sunlight to pass through and boost bloom growth – as well as removing food for native species.
A 2008 study found that harmful blooms in freshwater ecosystems “may lead to mass mortalities of fish and birds” and pose a health threat to cattle, pets and humans. The study, based on modelling, found that high temperatures cause increased growth rates of cyanobacteria and that summer heatwaves “boost the development” of toxic blooms.
The wider impacts on Lough Neagh specifically “remain very much unknown”, Emmerson tells Carbon Brief. He adds:
“We don’t know what the impact on the fish communities that are commercially harvested will have been. We also don’t know what the impacts [are] on the invertebrates that live on the rocks on the bottom of the lake…which are also important food for the fish communities that live there.”
What is being done to improve the situation?
The situation on Lough Neagh is ongoing, but the blooms have started to decline. Daera tells Carbon Brief in a statement:
“Whilst the reporting of visible blooms has decreased and there is evidence that the blue-green algae is starting to break down, the situation of the blooms in Lough Neagh are still being closely monitored, but it is anticipated that as temperatures drop and daylight shortens, the blooms will subside.”
Algal blooms can occur at any time of year and often do on Lough Neagh, but they are most commonly found between May and September.
Daera says it “recognises the seriousness of the situation” this summer and the department continues to assess water quality on the lake.
A team was set up to focus on the immediate response to the situation and a panel of experts will develop recommendations to improve water quality in Northern Ireland, the department says.
Daera adds that any reviews and recommendations for action will be considered in the context of other public-sector demands and also within the “priorities of a returning executive”, referring to the Northern Ireland government which collapsed in May 2022.
The situation on Lough Neagh “vividly illustrates years of political failure – no legislation to protect the environment and no government to address the crisis”, Sky News senior Ireland correspondent David Blevins wrote last month.
The executive has been in a state of collapse for more than 40% of its existence. Northern Ireland’s lawmaking assembly also collapsed in October 2022 over disagreements on post-Brexit trade rules.
Since last year, civil servants have managed government responsibilities. But they are not able to develop new policies or make political decisions, leaving Northern Ireland at a political standstill.
In the past, the UK government has imposed “direct rule” where they took over responsibility for Northern Ireland government decisions during times of collapse. But this has not been implemented since 2007.
The Social Democratic and Labour party last month launched a motion to recall the Northern Ireland assembly to discuss the “ecological crisis” on Lough Neagh, according to BBC News.
Emmerson believes that “nothing is going to happen” in the absence of a functioning devolved government. He tells Carbon Brief:
“I’m confident that we have the technologies, the engineering solutions, the nature-based solutions [and] the capacity to develop social solutions that could work, but whether the political will is there or not, I’m not quite sure – even if we had a functioning government.”
There’s no “silver-bullet” solution to the situation, Emmerson adds, but actions such as planting trees on upland areas to reduce seepage from land to water and reducing fertiliser use on farms would have multiple benefits. He says:
“Many of the solutions which are aimed at improving water quality and addressing the solution in somewhere like Lough Neagh have indirect co-benefits for climate-related action and for nature recovery all at the same time.
“There’s this lack of recognition that the climate and biodiversity and water-quality crises are all interlinked. If you put in place mitigating measures for one, then you are likely to have beneficial effects – what we call co-benefits – for many of the other large-scale crises that we are facing at the moment.”
James Orr, director of Friends of the Earth Northern Ireland, says that although the blooms have receded, the lack of concrete action is “condemning Lough Neagh to more ecological catastrophe in the future”. He tells Carbon Brief:
“That’s the most depressing issue, that we’ve basically condemned these problems to happen repeatedly in the future with much greater severity because they [the government] will do anything other than tackle the sources of pollution – be it human sewage or animal waste.”
Orr says that taking Lough Neagh into public ownership would be one good step to tackle the situation. The bed and soil of Lough Neagh is currently owned by the Earl of Shaftesbury’s estate.
A petition to bring the lough into public ownership and manage it under a single body was submitted to the UK parliament last month. This was rejected.
Nicholas Ashley-Cooper, who currently holds the title of Earl of Shaftesbury, told BBC News that he is willing to sell the lake to the public – “but won’t give it away for free”.
Orr says that if a functioning devolved government had been in place in recent months, there could have been closer scrutiny of politicians, civil servants and the bodies responsible for protecting the environment. But, he adds:
“The system has just got its hands over its ears…[This is] going to happen again and again and again, and it’s going to happen for decades unless we do the obvious thing – reduce the pollution and invest in sewage infrastructure.”
The post Lough Neagh: How climate change intensified toxic algae on the UK’s largest lake appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Lough Neagh: How climate change intensified toxic algae on the UK’s largest lake
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The Trump administration has abandoned its effort to halt wind energy projects across the United States and dropped its challenge to the court ruling that tossed President Donald Trump’s order freezing federal permitting and leasing for wind projects. States that challenged the order hailed the development as one of the most significant legal victories against the Trump White House’s campaign against the energy transition.
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Amid reports that the government could weaken the UK’s electric vehicle (EV) targets, Carbon Brief analysis reveals the nation’s EV drivers are saving more than £1,100 a year in fuel costs, compared with running a petrol car.
Battery EVs (BEVs) are roughly four times more efficient than combustion-engine cars, making them far cheaper to run – particularly since the Iran crisis caused a spike in fossil-fuel prices.
The savings from driving BEVs are also more than three times higher than for “plug-in” hybrids (PHEVs), which evidence shows are mostly driven with their combustion engines.
In total, the more than 2m BEVs, 1m PHEVs and 100,000 electric vans on UK roads are saving drivers around £3bn a year, Carbon Brief’s analysis shows, as illustrated in the figure below.
In addition, these EVs are avoiding the need for nearly 2.5bn litres of fuel and cutting carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by nearly 7m tonnes each year.
Despite recent news that EVs are now cheaper to buy than petrol cars, as well as having far lower running costs, BBC News says the government is “set to water down” its EV sales targets.
The broadcaster explains that the current goal, under the UK’s “zero-emissions vehicle” (ZEV) mandate, is for 80% of new car sales to be BEVs by 2030.
It says that the government is set to consult on weakening this to between 50% and 70%, following “lobbying” by carmakers and trade unions.
According to the Sunday Times, prime minister Keir Starmer “is understood to have overruled the energy secretary [Ed Miliband] after sustained pressure from industry, the Unite union and Peter Kyle, the business secretary”.
The car industry has consistently claimed there is insufficient demand for BEVs to meet the targets under the ZEV mandate, yet the government says manufacturers have “over-complied” to date. Independent analysts say the industry is on track to continue beating the ZEV mandate goals.
The industry has been able to beat its targets by using a wide range of “flexibilities”, which were introduced after a previous round of lobbying. These allow carmarkers to meet part of their EV targets by selling more efficient combustion cars, such as hybrids and plug-in hybrids.
The ZEV mandate is the single-largest part of the government’s plans to meet its legally binding climate goals over the next decade.
The advisory Climate Change Committee (CCC) previously warned that the extra flexibilities would result in a larger number of hybrids being sold, at the expense of battery EVs.
When it consulted on the ZEV mandate in 2023, the then-Conservative government noted that PHEVs do not deliver the cost and CO2 savings they are advertised with.
It pointed to “dramatic” differences between the performance of PHEVs in test cycles and what they deliver under real-world conditions.
In practice, less than a third of miles driven in PHEVs are fuelled by electricity, with petrol making up the rest. As a result, cost and CO2 savings from BEVs are three times larger than for PHEVs.
The post Analysis: UK’s EV drivers are now saving £1,100 each a year – and £3bn in total appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Analysis: UK’s EV drivers are now saving £1,100 each a year – and £3bn in total
Civil society groups have called for an investigation into the first carbon credits approved under a new UN mechanism, alleging the project is linked to Myanmar’s military junta – which the UN says is guilty of human rights abuses – and has “massively” overstated its climate impact.
The programme, which aims to cut emissions by distributing efficient cookstoves across Myanmar, received approval to issue around 650,000 carbon credits from the Article 6.4 Supervisory Body in February, in a landmark moment for the Paris Agreement’s carbon market. Only two projects have been given the green light by the mechanism’s regulator so far.
But two reports published last week, led by the Global Forest Coalition and Brussels-based NGO Carbon Market Watch, raised serious concerns about the project’s implementation in conflict zones where civilians have faced airstrikes and mass displacement as well as its emission-reduction calculations.
Project continued after military coup
Myanmar has been ravaged by a brutal civil war since the country’s military overthrew the democratically elected government in a coup d’état in February 2021. The military regime has attacked civilian populations, persecuted ethnic minorities and committed widespread sexual violence, among other serious human rights violations, the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Myanmar said in April.
The cookstove programme started in 2018 under the previous UN-run carbon offsetting scheme – the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) – as a partnership between Myanmar’s Ministry of Natural Resources and Environmental Conservation (MONREC) and the Climate Change Center (CCC), a South Korean NGO, with investment from private South Korean firms.
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The project continued operating after the coup. For most of the period between 2021 and 2022 in which the issued credits were generated, MONREC was led by Colonel Khin Maung Yi, who was sanctioned by the European Union in 2021 for supporting the military regime, the Global Forest Coalition report said.
CCC acknowledged engaging with government authorities after the coup but said this “should not be interpreted as political endorsement” of the junta. The South Korean NGO added that abandoning the programme when political circumstances changed “would not necessarily have been the most responsible outcome for the households involved”.
Conflict prevents on the ground verification
The Global Forest Coalition report raised particular concerns about the project’s implementation in Myanmar’s central Dry Zone, including Sagaing Region, an anti-junta resistance stronghold that has been most heavily affected by the conflict and routinely targeted by airstrikes and violent attacks. The region accounts for more than a third of Myanmar’s 3.8 million internally displaced people.
The NGOs said that, in addition to ethical concerns about carbon credits being produced by the military government in an area actively affected by its attacks, this raises questions over the ability to effectively verify the climate integrity of the projects.
Before carbon credits are issued, external auditors need to validate the claims made by project developers and confirm that the emission reductions claimed are correct. This process usually includes site visits to a representative sample of households to check how the improved cookstoves are being used.
But, because of the “volatile political situation” in Myanmar, the auditing team was not able to leave the capital Yangon and could only speak to project participants remotely via Zoom, project documents show.
“Due to ongoing armed conflict on the ground, the data currently used to justify carbon credit issuance in Sagaing by the Burmese military junta is unverifiable and highly likely fraudulent,” said Zaw Tuseng, founder and president of the Myanmar Policy Institute, which contributed to the report, in a written statement. “This demands an immediate suspension of credit transfers until a neutral, conflict-sensitive audit can be conducted.”
“Exceptional circumstances”
CCC told Climate Home News that, although it recognises that on-site verification is “generally preferable, particularly in complex operating environments”, the decision to opt for remote controls was not taken “as a discretionary shortcut, but as an approved alternative under exceptional circumstances”.
The South Korean NGO added that it reviewed the feasibility of the project at community level “on an ongoing basis” and it “did not identify conflict-related incidents that directly affected project implementation activities in participating communities during the monitoring period”.
A spokesperson for the UN climate change body told Climate Home News that, when site access is not possible, the UN carbon credit mechanism allows for “alternative verification approaches while still maintaining conservative assumptions and environmental integrity safeguards”. “These provisions ensure that crediting can only proceed where evidence is reliable,” they added.
Contested methodology
Carbon markets are seen as an important channel to raise money to help low-income communities in developing countries switch to less polluting cooking methods, both reducing CO2 emissions and improving air quality. But several cookstove offsetting projects have faced criticism from researchers and campaigners who argue that climate benefits are often exaggerated and weak monitoring can undermine claims of real emission reductions.
The project in Myanmar uses a contested methodology developed under the earlier Kyoto Protocol that was rejected last year by The Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market (ICVCM), a watchdog that issues quality labels to carbon credit types, because it found it “insufficiently rigorous”.
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After transitioning from the CDM to the new mechanism, the project was required to apply “more conservative” assumptions to calculate emission reductions, which resulted in 40% fewer credits being issued, according to the UN climate change body.
“The result is consistent with environmental integrity requirements and ensures that each credited tonne genuinely represents a tonne reduced and contributes to the goals of the Paris Agreement,” Mkhuthazi Steleki, the South African chair of the Article 6.4 Supervisory Body, which oversees the mechanism, said in February.
Too many credits issued
But Carbon Market Watch claimed in a second report last week that, despite the adjustment, the project is still likely to issue seven times more credits than its real climate impact justifies, comparing its calculations with values from peer-reviewed scientific literature.
The biggest driver of the credit inflation, the group said, is the failure to account for “stacking” – the widespread practice of households using multiple stoves at the same time, including more polluting ones the project does not monitor.
Peer-reviewed science considers a stacking rate of 68% a conservative assumption, but the methodology used by the Myanmar programme makes no allowance for it at all, the report said.
CCC disputed those findings. In a written response to Climate Home News, it said the project was developed under methodologies approved within the UN climate framework and that external recalculations by researchers are not “determinative of the level of crediting achieved”.
The credits are expected to be used primarily by major South Korean polluters to meet obligations under the country’s emissions trading system – a move that will also enable the government to count those units toward emissions reduction targets in its nationally determined contribution (NDC), the UN climate body told Climate Home News.
Myanmar will use the remaining credits to achieve in part the goals of its own national climate plan under the Paris Agreement.
“Over-crediting, at any magnitude, cannot be compatible with the climate ambition of a world striving to limit global warming to 1.5ºC,” said Isa Mulder, an expert at Carbon Market Watch.
The post UN’s first Paris Agreement carbon credits face human rights and climate concerns appeared first on Climate Home News.
UN’s first Paris Agreement carbon credits face human rights and climate concerns
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