BBC Inside Science

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A weekly programme looking at the science that's changing our world.

A weekly programme that illuminates the mysteries and challenges the controversies behind the science that's changing our world.

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BBC Inside Science: Good COP Bad COP, Shotgun Lead Persistence, and Featherdown Adaptation

18/02/2021

Good COP Bad COP, Shotgun Lead Persistence, and Featherdown Adaptation

BBC Radio 4 - BBC Inside Science, Good COP Bad COP, Shotgun Lead Persistence, and Featherdown Adaptation

UN Environment Programme publishes Making Peace With Nature report ahead of COP 26.

Victoria Gill speaks with authors of the UNEP Making Peace With Nature report that sets out strategies to combine biodiversity preservation with climate mitigation.

On Thursday, The UN Environmental Programme published a report called Making Peace With Nature.  It attempts to synthesise vast amounts of scientific knowledge and communicate “how climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution can be tackled jointly within the framework of the Sustainable Development Goals”. But it also offers clear and digestible messages that governments, institutions, businesses and individuals can act upon. Concluding BBC Inside Science’s month-long look at some of the challenges ahead of COP26 in Glasgow later this year, and its sister biodiversity meeting in China, Vic speaks with the report’s co-lead Prof Sir Robert Watson FRS and the Tyndall Centre’s Prof Rachel Warren, also a contributing author. Can all the ills of the natural world really be tackled at once?

Game-shooting, for sport and food, has traditionally used the toxic metal lead for ammunition. In other parts of the world its use has been banned for the dangers to the human food chain and to the pollution in natural environments, and even deaths of wildfowl from poisoning. But not so in the UK. A year ago, as reported on Inside Science at the time, the shooting community announced a voluntary five year transition period to alternative shot materials. But researchers including profs Rhys Green and Debbie Pain from Cambridge University have discovered that a year on, little seems to have changed. Gathering game sold for food across the UK, they found that all but one bird in their sample of 180 contained lead shot. 

Meanwhile, up in the Himalayas, Smithsonian scientist Dr Sahas Barva was enjoying the scenery on a cold day off in 2014 when he saw and heard a tiny Goldcrest, thriving in temperatures of -10C. Wondering how such a tiny thing could keep its body insulated, he decided to investigate feathers, and utilizing the huge numbers of specimens in the Smithsonian’s collection he found some striking commonalities in the thermal properties and adaptations of birds everywhere. The higher up they live, the fluffier their coats.

Presented by Victoria Gill

Produced by Alex Mansfield

Made in association with The Open University.

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Good COP Bad COP, Shotgun Lead Persistence, and Featherdown Adaptation

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