Western Europe

"Has it ever, in human history, been this hot in the British Isles? Maybe not. If you want to mark an unnatural, scary, real-world data point for climate change, it is here in Britain, right now, which saw its hottest day on record Tuesday. Temperatures in six locations reached 40 Celsius or higher, with London Heathrow and St. James Park hitting 40.2 Celsius — or 104.3 Fahrenheit. It’s an extreme-weather episode, a freak peak heat, not seen since modern record keeping began a century and a half ago. And probably not since weather observation got serious here in 1659. And maybe far longer. Hitting 40C, for British climate scientists, is a kind of a unicorn event that had appeared in their models but until recently seemed almost unbelievable and unattainable this soon."

“The UK has ‘systematically and persistently’ broken legal limits on toxic air pollution for a decade, the court of justice of the EU (CJEU) has ruled. Levels of nitrogen dioxide, mostly from diesel vehicles, remain illegally high in 75% of urban areas and on Thursday the court said the UK had failed to tackle the problem in the shortest possible time, as required by law….Dirty air causes 40,000 early deaths every year in the UK and scientists think the pollution is likely to be damaging every organ in the body.”

"In 2016 Belgium closed its last coal-fired energy plant. In April this year both Austria and Sweden followed suit.…Eight years ago more than 30% of the power generated in the UK came from coal-fired power plants. Last year only 2% of power was derived from coal….Germany says it will eliminate coal from its power mix by 2038, though government critics say this is not nearly fast enough to meet EU-wide emission reduction targets.” The use of coal for power generation among the 27 countries of the European Union fell by 24% in 2019.

“More than a quarter of mammals are facing extinction, according to a detailed and devastating report on the state of the natural world in the UK. It also said one in seven species were threatened with extinction, and 41% of species studied have experienced decline since 1970…The study cited the intensification of agriculture as a key driver of species loss….The report also underlined the ongoing impact of climate change. According to the Met Office, the UK's 10 hottest years occurred since 2002….public support for conservation continued to grow. The amount of time donated by volunteers increased by 40% since 2000, to around 7.5m hours.”

“Butterflies have declined by at least 84% in the Netherlands over the last 130 years, according to a study, confirming the crisis affecting insect populations in western Europe….The research follows warnings of catastrophic insect declines after a global review calculated that the total mass of insects was falling by 2.5% each year, and a German study found average flying insect abundance had declined by 76% over 27 years. Since the scientific monitoring of British butterflies began in 1976, there has been a 77% decline in 'habitat specialists'….the main reason for the declines in the Netherlands was modern industrial farming – as carried out across the lowlands of western Europe – which left little space for nature.”

Heavy rainfalls caused flooding in mostly Germany and France, but also Austria, Belgium, Romania, Moldova, Netherlands and the United Kingdom. "Portions of northeast France (near the border with Belgium) received six full weeks of rain in just a 24-hour period during the multi-day event." The World Weather Attribution project found that "global warming increased the probability" of the Seine River flooding in Paris by 40% .

The first global agreement to curb climate change, 195 nations agreed to keep the global temperature well below 2 degrees Celsius or even 1.5 degrees Celsius. "Although analysts say the pact has helped make progress toward its goal of preventing average global temperatures from increasing by 2°C above preindustrial levels, the effort is also shadowed by ample evidence that many countries aren’t living up to the promises they made in 2015. And even if nations had kept those promises, some researchers forecast that global temperatures would rise by 2.6°C by the end of the century, underlining the need for stronger action."

The Tweed River in Scotland has the largest salmon population in Europe. “Here the problems of salmon-friendly habitat were vigorously addressed. The hundreds of miles of miniature streams feeding the bigger branches and the hundred-mile main river were protected from trampling cattle and over-numerous sheep with fencing. Riparian zones were brought back into a condition they would not have seen since before Man started serious farming... the whole effort was vindicated not only with wonderfully recuperated young salmon densities but dizzying catches by anglers, peaking in 2011.”

“The BBC has held a high-level seminar with some of the best scientific experts, and has come to the view that the weight of evidence no longer justifies equal space being given to the opponents of the consensus. But these dissenters (or even sceptics) will still be heard, as they should, because it is not the BBC’s role to close down this debate. They cannot be simply dismissed as ‘flat-earthers’ or ‘deniers’, who ‘should not be given a platform’ by the BBC. Impartiality always requires a breadth of view: for as long as minority opinions are coherently and honestly expressed, the BBC must give them appropriate space.”

"In June 2003, a high-pressure weather system took hold over Western Europe and hovered there for weeks, bringing warm tropical air to the region and making that summer the hottest since at least 1540...Temperatures were about 2.3 degrees Celsius, or 4.1 degrees Fahrenheit, above average that summer, contributing to perhaps 70,000 additional deaths and hitting the elderly particularly hard. The heat was a factor in the outbreak of forest fires and in lower than usual crop yields. It caused Alpine glaciers to shrink at a rate double that seen in the previous record summer, five years earlier."

"In December 1989, just one month after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Friends of the Earth Germany (BUND) and other environmentalists signed the Green Belt Resolution of Hof in order to push lawmakers to create the so-called Green Belt, an environmental protection area along the former inner German border. Because of its isolation, this area had been a refuge for many endangered species, and conservationist sought to keep it as a nature reserve. While originating in Germany, the ultimate aim was to create an ecological zone of protection that would stretch along the former Iron Curtain in Europe and into Scandinavia....Stretching along 8.500 km through 22 European countries from the Barents Sea to the Black Sea and integrating 3272 conservation areas within a 25 km zone on either side, the European Green Belt is a unique example of cross-border cooperation and conservation."

Public outcry following the Rhine River chemical disaster in 1968 resulted "in the Rhine Action Programme of 1987, sometimes known as ‘Salmon 2000’ because its stated target was to see the return of salmon to the Rhine by the year 2000. The agreement achieved a 50% reduction in pollution by nitrates and phosphorus in the river, and some other types of pollution have been reduced by 80 to 100%. Salmon—known for its sensitivity to water pollution—returned in 1997, three years ahead of schedule.”

“A program to reintroduce Atlantic salmon in Belgium was launched in 1987. This involved restocking six tributaries of the Meuse with eggs, parr and presmolts obtained from foreign eggs. By 1998, nearly 1 million juvenile salmon had been released into the Meuse tributaries. Meanwhile, the restoration project saw dams and power stations equipped with effective fish ladders, and water quality was improved by a reduction in pollutants.... The first Atlantic salmon known to have returned to the Meuse was caught and kept for observation in the Netherlands in 1993. Between 1994 and 1998, 48 salmon were found in Dutch rivers.”

“There has been a catastrophic fire at a chemicals factory near Basel, Switzerland, sending tons of toxic chemicals into the nearby river Rhine and turning it red. The fire broke out early this morning in a storage building used for pesticides, mercury and other highly poisonous agricultural chemicals...About 30 tons of pesticides were discharged into the river, western Europe's most important waterway...The spillage has reversed 10 years of painstaking work to clean up the Rhine, so grossly polluted by industrial expansion in France, Germany and Switzerland that fish disappeared and it was too dangerous to swim in.”