“We were shocked and surprised by the degree of damage we found in the Channel,” said Greg Stemm, chief executive of Odyssey Marine Exploration.

“When we got into this business, like everyone else we thought that beyond 50 or 60 metres, below the reach of divers, we’d find pristine shipwrecks. We thought we’d be finding rainforest, but instead found an industrial site criss-crossed by bulldozers and trucks.”

Odyssey - the world’s only publicly-listed shipwreck exploration company - surveyed 4,725 sq miles (12,300 sq km) of the western Channel during its search for high-value shipwrecks. It discovered 267 wrecks, of which 112, or 41 per cent, show evidence of damage from a type of fishing known as bottom trawling.

The site of HMS Victory shows nets and cables snagged around cannon and ballast blocks. Three bronze cannon were displaced. One, a 42-pounder weighing 4 tonnes, was dragged 55 metres and flipped upside down. Two other cannon recovered by the company last year show fresh scratches from trawls and damage caused by friction from nets or cables.

“It turns out that Victory is right in the middle of the heaviest trawling area in the Western Channel,” Mr Stemm said.

Out of 34 survey boxes, each measuring 74 miles x 55 miles, more vessels were sighted in the area surrounding Victory than in any other. More than 66 per cent were beam trawlers, the most destructive.

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It is not often that the Benedictine nuns of the Conventus of Our Lady of Consolation leave their monastery. It is even rarer for them to move monasteries entirely.

But today, the nuns left their Worcestershire home of 171 years to take possession of their new residence in the North York Moors national park - a new building that they insisted must remain as environmentally-friendly as possible as they lead their quiet life of prayer.

Among the £4.7 million building’s green features are solar panels to provide hot water, a woodchip boiler that will be fuelled by locally-sourced trees and a roof covered in sedum grass to better insulate the buildings and attract local wildlife.

Rainwater from some of the roofs will be collected and used to flush the toilets and, instead of an electrically-driven waste water treatment plant, the architects have installed a reedbed sewage system. The effluent from the monastery will filter through the reedbed and, after it is processed through natural anaerobic digestion, the resulting water will trickle out onto the surrounding land.

And the basic materials for the building - everything from timber to stone - have been sourced as locally as possible.

“A lot of building projects start out with all these environmental features and, by the value engineering stage, usually you’ve lost quite a few of them,” said project architect Gill Smith of Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios, winners of the 2008 Stirling Prize. “The nuns have been remarkably good at sticking with their principles and not letting them drift as other clients tend to do. The list they’ve ended up with is quite impressive.”

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Following a trip to the Arctic with Cape Farewell to witness the effects of climate change, Marcus explains why he agreed to work with the Energy Saving Trust. He explained, ‘Climate change can be a difficult subject for comedy, but like anything else it can be made funny and in the face of too much earnestness it’s important that it is.  There’s a lot of apathy around personal responsibility; we need to talk about climate change but not for too long, the important thing is to take action and the easiest and best place to start is in the home.’

‘Over the years I have gradually made green improvements to my home, and I genuinely feel proud of what I have achieved. There are lots of things that you can do that can help your home be more energy efficient and cost effective. Insulation and lining the backs of radiators is easy and cheap. I did the a lot of the garden and water harvesting arrangements myself and the simple thing of changing over light bulbs to eco ones then leaving them off when they are not needed…  Having made the changes I’ve noticed a difference to the household bills and although they’re only small steps, I feel that it’s making a difference.  I would recommend that everyone should look into and start improving their homes by making them more energy efficient, a great way to start is to contact the Energy Saving Trust for free and impartial advice.’

Marcus takes viewers on a tour of his ‘Eco Pad’, discussing the alterations he has made to his own home to save money and energy, where he:

• Reveals his ‘big butt’, also known as his water butt
• Demonstrates ‘where the magic happens’, in his composter
• Boasts his energy saving light bulbs
• Brags about his insulation made from recycled plastic bottles
• Explains a ‘water saving device called a plug’
• Shows off his two bicycles, with ‘fourteen inch rims’

Philip Sellwood, chief executive of the Energy Saving Trust, added, ‘Everyone’s purse strings are tighter nowadays and bank holidays are the perfect time to take stock and check which DIY jobs will save you cash on the household bills. Our research shows many Brits are shying away from easy cash savings by ignoring simple, energy saving tasks which need to be done around the home. This is a real shame. This bank holiday weekend we urge householders to call their local Energy Saving Trust advice centre on 0800 512 012 to find out which simple things - from draught-proofing to bleeding the radiators - they could do this bank holiday. I am sure they will be shocked at the savings they’re missing.’

The EST carried out a UK-wide survey of more than 2000 consumers and found the top four home improvement jobs most dreaded by the DIY-shy were:

1. Top-up existing loft insulation - 63% would never attempt this job but if they did it would save them £60 a year on energy bills.
2. Put jacket on hot-water cylinder - 44% avoided this despite a £40 annual saving.
3. Draught proof doors & windows - 43% weren’t keen, yet there’s £30 to be had.
4. Insulate or “lag” hot water pipes - 56% didn’t want to know, £10 could be saved here.

‘Eco Pads’ is the first in a series of short celebrity films to kick off the Energy Saving Trusts Celebrity Green Ambassador campaign.

Further star-studded videos will be released throughout the summer.

For details and to view the video, please visit http://www.EnergySavingTrust.org.uk/MarcusBrigstocke

As an investment tip it is unlikely to inspire a rush: put your money in rubbish. Nevertheless, new figures reveal that the price of recyclable waste has doubled in the past six months.

The news will provide a boost to Britain’s flagging recycling movement, and go some way towards reversing the gloom over mountains of glass bottles and newspapers piling up across Britain after the drop last year in the value of recyclables.

It will also be a welcome change for UK waste collection companies and councils, hit hard by a drop in demand last autumn for paper, bottles and cans from countries such as China and India. There had been calls for warehouses and disused airfields to be made available for storing rubbish that could not be sold.

A huge global drop in the volume of waste being produced, partly due to the economic downturn, is thought to have sparked the recent sharp rise. The price of cardboard has trebled to £59 per ton since November, while PET - the plastic used in drinks bottles - has also more than doubled from £75 per ton to £195. During the same time period, the price of gold has risen by just 14 per cent, and crude oil by 16 per cent.

“The main reason for this is that the quantity of recycled material available around the world is lower than it was six months ago. It is a question of supply and demand,” said George Broom, the owner of the commercial recycling company Environmental Support Services. “Also, the international demand that had dropped off is coming back.”

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The Climate Camp went to the European Climate Exchange in Bishopsgate on 1 April to highlight the failure of carbon trading as a solution to climate change. We were met by the same kind of heavy-handed policing as at previous Climate Camps - but for once, the outrageous behaviour of the police has been reported widely in the mainstream media. This gives us a welcome opportunity to challenge and debate the way protest is now being policed in the UK.

After the Kingsnorth Climate Camp, the legal team were so frustrated at the pre-emptive policing - involving blanket searches and seizures of people’s possessions - and the lack of ways to effectively hold the police to account for their actions, that we produced a report and film to document what had happened.

After the G20 Climate Camp, we did the same.

Last week as the author of this report I appeared as a witness before the joint parliamentary select committee on human rights and the home affairs select committee. While it is positive that there is parliamentary interest, we are worried that the only detailed inquiry being undertaken into the policing of the G20 protests is being carried out by HM inspectorate of constabulary.

This is hardly independent, but rather the police reviewing their own performance against their own standards; an exercise in damage limitation at best.

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The Dalai Lama, Daniel Craig, Harrison Ford and Pele form an unlikely line-up alongside The Prince of Wales in the 90-second clip to boost awareness of the Prince’s Rainforest Project.

They all appear with a digitally-created amphibian in the film which will be broadcast on several websites, including MySpace, tonight.

In the clip, William and Harry, sitting side by side, say they are trying to save the environment “for all of us”.

Royal spokesman Paddy Harverson said the video was an “unprecedented” move by The Prince.

The video - which also features comedian Robin Williams and singer Joss Stone - is the latest mission in his ongoing bid to save the world’s rainforests.

The Prince said the internet provided the opportunity for “global determination for change on a vitally important issue”.

He added: “Our aim, with your help, is to build an online community to call, from the bottom up, for urgent action to protect the rainforests, without which we will most certainly lose the battle against catastrophic climate change.

“One of the internet’s strengths is that it can enable diverse communities to come together to ensure that everybody’s views and actions can really be made to count.”

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Clean energy forever. That, in a glorious theoretical nutshell, is what nuclear fusion - the reaction that gives stars and hydrogen bombs their immense power - could deliver. The urgency of the climate-change debate and the renewed impetus to tackle the 21st century’s glaring energy problems have put fusion back on the agenda… and, thanks to key contributions from the British-trained scientist Dr Brian MacGowan, the highly volatile process may be harnessed to provide us with a viable source of green electricity sooner than previously expected.

Staff at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) in central California are confident that some time in 2010, they will create a fusion reaction by focusing 192 intense ultra-violet lasers on to a tiny golden pellet, recreating the energy of the sun for a fraction of a second, thereby paving the way to a carbon-neutral future without global warming or nuclear waste. If all goes to plan, the implications would fairly reflect California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s recent description of the project as “monumental”. Fusion, we’re told, could be mankind’s salvation - but what are the chances of translating theory into practice?

From the outside, NIF - based within the grounds of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory - doesn’t look much: a big aircraft hanger, you might presume, or an oversized warehouse. Surrounded by the bucolic Tri-Valley region hills, half-an-hour due east from San Francisco Bay, it sits unassumingly between the high-street wine bistros of Pleasanton (once labelled “The Most Desperate Town in the West”) and Altamont Raceway Park, where the Rolling Stones played their infamous free concert in 1969. NIF’s exterior offers little clue to what goes on there - but inside, it’s a different story.

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Extra nutrients allow fast growing plants to dominate a habitat, blocking smaller species’ access to vital sunlight, researchers have found.

As a result, many species are disappearing from affected areas.

A team from the University of Zurich, writing in Science, warned that tighter controls were needed in order to prevent widespread biodiversity loss.

Estimates suggest that the global level of nitrogen and phosphorous available to plants has doubled in the past 50 years.

Looking at grasslands, the researchers said it was widely recognised that an increase of chemical nutrients in an ecosystem led to a loss of diversity, but the mechanism of how it was occurring had been difficult to determine.

“You would think that more [nutrients] would lead to more biodiversity,” said co-author Andrew Hector, a researcher at the University of Zurich’s Institute of Environmental Sciences.

“Yet it is considered to be one of the main threats to biodiversity this century.”

‘Winner takes all’

Professor Hector explained that there were two main hypotheses: “One is that the presence of more resources led to a general increase in the strength of competition among plants.

“The other is a little bit more mechanistic,” he told BBC News.

“When you get an increase in fertilisation, you get an increase in productivity, leading to increased plant biomass and increased shading.
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In a grave blow to the government’s ambitions to create a “green” export industry, Vestas, the world’s biggest maker of wind turbines, will axe about 600 of its 1,100 UK employees, probably closing its factory in the Isle of Wight and cutting jobs elsewhere in the UK.

Ditlev Engel, chief executive of Vestas, told the Financial Times: “We had been planning additional investment in the UK [because of government targets to increase renewables]. But the UK is probably one of the most difficult places in the world to get permission [for wind projects]. We can’t afford to keep on this capacity.”

The blow comes less than a week after Alistair Darling trumpeted the role of low-carbon industries in job creation, announcing new funding for renewables in his Budget.

Mr Engel said the cuts were not the result of the recession - the company’s order book had recovered and he predicted 20 per cent growth in 2009. The reason was rather the inability of the government to deliver the conditions needed for renewables growth.

“There are two sets of politicians, Whitehall politicians and local politicians,” Mr Engel said. While the former group encourages renewables, which bring new jobs, local politicians tend to oppose wind farms, meaning few are built.

Exchange rates, which have made imports of wind turbine components from Europe more expensive, also played a part in Vestas’ decision, Mr Engel said. “The UK currency has dropped significantly against the euro, which has made things difficult.”
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