The year of 2010 for environment

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Review of green highlights in 2010

Temperatures2010 was, provisionally, the hottest year recorded worldwide but it also saw some of the coldest temperatures and heaviest snow ever witnessed in Britain. while overall sea and land temperatures climbed to their highest levels in places where people mostly did not live, the more heavily populated temperate zones, including much of Britain, Europe and the US, experienced below average temperatures. The year ended with CO2 levels at their highest level ever recorded.


Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) came under pressure to resign this year following two mistakes in a 2007 IPCC report and false allegations that he had made millions of dollars from advisory roles. The false assertion that the Himalayan glaciers would disappear by 2035 damaged his reputation and provided further fuel to the controversy.


Biodiversity2010 was UN's year of biodiversity and it culminated in 193 countries and 18,000 people meeting in Nagoya, Japan for a summit to address the alarming losses seen in forests, plant and animal species. Meanwhile satellite imagery showed countries like China planting hundreds of millions of trees in 2010 but natural forests continuing to decline worldwide. Other research showed both the US and Canada with higher percentages of forest loss than Brazil, which in 2010 dropped its clearance rate almost 75%.


Professor Phil Jones, accused for theft and subsequent leaking online of hundreds of private emails and documents exchanged between many of the world's leading climate scientists led to claims that they showed scientists manipulating and suppressing data to back up a theory of man-made climate change. However, officials cleared Jones and his colleagues of the most serious charges. Instead, questions were levelled at the way in which they responded to requests for information


A replica of the Statue of Liberty, called 'Freedom to pollute' on a hill near the Bella Centre in Copenhagen. The year started on a downer after the UN climate summit in Copenhagen in December 2009 failed to produce a deal. The talks were seen as the best chance to agree on a successor to the Kyoto protocol, but ended acrimoniously after several countries rejected the Copenhagen accord, a non-binding agreement


February: Yvo de Boer announced his intention to step down as UN climate chief to work for accountants KPMG. The UN official who oversaw four years of climate talks claimed the disappointing Copenhagen outcome was unrelated to his decision


March: A peasant farmer walks on a dusty track with spares for his broken-down tractor in Qixingcun in drought-stricken Yunnan province in south-west China. The lack of significant rainfall since September 2009 turned the normally temperate region into a parched environmental disaster zone. Some 310 reservoirs, 580 rivers and 3,600 pools were baked dry by a once-in-a-century drought that evaporated drinking supplies, devastated crops and stirred up political tensions over dam construction, monoculture plantations and cross-border water management in south-east Asia


April: Rocks are reflected in a lake muddied by volcanic ash from Iceland. The eruption caused enormous disruption to air travel across western and northern Europe over an initial period of six days. Additional localised disruption continued into May 2010. The eruption was declared officially over in October 2010, when snow on the glacier did not melt


April: The Deepwater Horizon oil rig burns after an explosion on the 20th which killed 11 workers, injured 17, and became the largest accidental marine oil spill in history. The blast was triggered by a bubble of methane gas, an investigation by owners BP later revealed. For the next three months a ruptured sea floor 'gusher' spilt an estimated 4.9m barrels of oil, or around 200m US gallons of crude, into the Gulf of Mexico


Nesting pelicans fly over an oil-coated shoreline in Barataria Bay, just inside the the coast of Louisiana. The jury is still out on the ecological damage done to the already polluted, and over-fished sea, but estimates range from long-term catastrophe to relatively minor harm


May: The Greens won a historic first Westminster seat as the party's leader, Caroline Lucas, overturned a 5,000-strong Labour majority to take the Brighton Pavilion constituency


May: Liberal Democrat Chris Huhne became the secretary of state for energy and climate change. They proceeded to cut the budget of the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs by 30%, prepared to sell off 635,000 acres of English woodland and forest, pressed ahead with new nuclear power and abandoned 'Warm front' grants for the fuel-poor to insulate their homes


May: Christiana Figueres of Costa Rica was appointed as new UN climate chief. Figueres, who has been a member of Costa Rica's negotiating team on climate change since 1995, replaced Yvo de Boer as executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change


July: Dry grass burning near the village of Mokhovoe which was destroyed by a forest fire near the town of Lukhovitsy, Russia. The death toll from hundreds of wildfires across Russia reached 34 in August as more than 2,200 people were left homeless. Whole settlements were engulfed by the flames, caused by an unprecedented heatwave in which temperatures reached 42C in central and western parts of the country.


May: The Obama adminstration reinstated a ban on offshore drilling in the eastern Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic coast


July: Carol Browner, director of the White House Office of Energy and Climate Change Policy and Senator John Kerry leave a news conference. Democrats have been trying to pass a plan that charges power plants, manufacturers and other large polluters for their carbon dioxide emissions, the leading contributor to global warming, for more than a year. But it ran into opposition from Republican senators, as well as Democrats eager not to jeopardise their chances in November's midterm elections


July: A family rescued by army soldiers sail past a truck heavy with passengers taking shelter from heavy floods in Nowshera, north-west Pakistan. Devastating flooding was estimated to have affected at least 14 million people across the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Punjab and Sindh provinces, officials said


Floods seen from a Pakistan Army helicopter on 14 August


Gaagaa Gidom, a 60-year-old fisherman and father of eight, looks at the spilled crude oil floating in the waters of the Niger Delta. In August, a three-year investigation by the United Nations almost entirely exonerated Royal Dutch Shell for 40 years of oil pollution in the delta, causing outrage among communities who have long campaigned to force the multinational to clean up its spills and pay compensation.


September: Stockpiles of rare earth ore at the Mount Weld mine in Western Australia. The hugely unpopular planned 40% 'super tax' on the mining sector was partly blamed for the downfall of the former PM Kevin Rudd. His successor, Julia Gillard, revised the tax down to 30% after talks with BHP Billiton, Rio Tinto and Xstrata. Environmentalists want Australia to end its dependency on mining, commodity exports and coal power by moving more emphatically towards renewable energy


October: Hungary declared a state of emergency after flooding from a ruptured red sludge reservoir at an alumina plant. At least seven people died after what officials said was an ecological disaster


October: Ministers gathered in Nagoya, Japan for talks on biodiversity. The summit set targets to at least halve the loss of natural habitats and expand nature reserves to 17% of the world's land area by 2020 - up from less than 10% today


October: Hermann Scheer, German politician and tireless champion of renewable energy, died unexpectedly aged 66. Scheer, who campaigned for the promotion of renewable energies - in particular solar power - long before it was fashionable to do so, is credited with boosting the status of alternative energy, both at home and abroad, thanks to his visionary zeal


November: An international conservation conference in Paris did nothing to save the Atlantic bluefin tuna, which has been severely overfished to feed the market for sushi in Japan, environmental groups said


November: The UK government considered plans sell of 635,000 acres of English woodland and forest


December: The year ended in Cancun, Mexico, the venue for the COP16 UN climate talks. Once again the talks failed to produce a legally binding deal to cut global emissions, with critics saying the agreements that were reached did little more than restore faith in the United Nation negotiating process. The deal, which took four years of negotiations to reach, should lead to less deforestation, the transfer of technology to developing countries and the establishment of a yearly fund, potentially worth up to $100bn (£64bn), to help countries adapt to climate change


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The year of 2010 for environment

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