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Europe cracks down on ‘direct action’ climate protests

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Insight: Europe cracks down after rise in ‘direct action’ climate protests

  • Summary
  • France, German states use wiretaps, GPS to track activists
  • Bavaria tries to stop protests with preventative detention
  • Berlin police spend more than 400,000 hours on climate cases
  • France outlaws one group, German states consider ban

BERLIN, Aug 10 (Reuters) – Simon Lachner had plans to glue himself to a German city thoroughfare in June to call public attention to climate change. Instead, he ended up in police custody before he’d even left his home.

Lachner, 28, is one of thousands of activists caught up in a European crackdown on a wave of direct action protests that gathered pace last year demanding urgent government action against climate change.

Roadblocks on major motorways in Britain have caused traffic chaos, protests at oil installations in Germany have disrupted supplies, and in France, thousands of activists and police clashed over water usage, leaving dozens injured.

Determined to prevent such protests from strengthening further, states in Germany and national authorities in France are invoking legal powers often used against organised crime and extremist groups to wiretap and track activists, Reuters found, based on conversations with four prosecutors, police in both countries and more than a dozen protesters.

In Berlin alone, police have spent hundreds of thousands of hours working on more than 4,500 incidents registered against the “The Last Generation” and “Extinction Rebellion” groups, according to previously unreported data from police.

State authorities in Germany are widely using preventative detention to stop people from protesting, including holding at least one person for as long as 30 days without charge, which is permissible under Bavarian law, the prosecutors consulted by Reuters said.

Lawmakers passed new surveillance and detention laws in France in July and in Britain in May, with Britain making it illegal to lock, or glue, yourself to property.

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Insight: Europe cracks down after rise in ‘direct action’ climate protests

Continue ReadingEurope cracks down on ‘direct action’ climate protests

UK told to prepare for possible 30% increase in uncomfortably hot days

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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jul/13/uk-told-to-prepare-for-possible-30-increase-in-uncomfortably-hot-days

Britain and Switzerland among countries that need to adapt most for heating, says research looking at impact of 2C global rise

The UK and Switzerland will see a 30% increase in the number of days of uncomfortably hot temperatures if the world heats by 2C, and are two of the countries which need to adapt the most for global heating, scientists have predicted.

The research, published in Nature Sustainability on Thursday, found that while central Africa will see the most extreme temperatures overall, it is mostly northern European countries that will experience the greatest relative increases in uncomfortably hot days.

The people and infrastructure in these countries are not prepared for periods of hot weather, the study, based on climate modelling and data from the UK Met Office, predicts. The estimates by researchers at the University of Oxford are conservative, and do not include external factors such as extreme heatwaves, which would come on top of this average increase.

Norway will also suffer one of the world’s most dramatic increases in days that require cooling interventions, the study finds, with a 28% increase in days with uncomfortably hot temperatures if the world misses the 1.5C target. Eight of the 10 countries with the greatest relative increase in uncomfortably hot days are expected to be in northern Europe.

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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jul/13/uk-told-to-prepare-for-possible-30-increase-in-uncomfortably-hot-days

Continue ReadingUK told to prepare for possible 30% increase in uncomfortably hot days