The director general of the National Trust, Hilary McGrady, is correct when she says that “the benefit of ensuring access to nature is plain to see but there is unequal access to it” (Three-quarters of children want more time in nature, says National Trust, 1 April). Sadly, evidence shows that this situation is also reflected in our schools.

Over the last 20 years, Ofsted reports have shown that school fieldwork has been declining. And a survey of geography teachers in 2023 indicated that since Covid, up to 40% of secondary schools may have cut their provision of fieldwork. This trend affects smaller schools and those serving disadvantaged pupils the hardest.

A combination of costs, Covid catch-up and other administrative hurdles are limiting the work of many geography teachers who want to offer their pupils high-quality fieldwork.

So as well as trips that might take place farther afield, at the Geographical Association we are supporting teachers to explore local, low-cost fieldwork – whether investigating carbon storage in a local wood, soil infiltration in the school grounds or the health of a local stream.

Regardless of the weather, it is in the field where young people encounter the messy, complicated real world and develop a deeper understanding of how our human and natural worlds interact. It will be this understanding that is essential if young people are to become the future custodians of our environment.
Steve Brace
Chief executive, Geographical Association

The “15-minute city” has become a toxic phrase in the UK, so controversial that the city of Oxford has stopped using it and the transport minister has spread discredited conspiracy theories about the urban planning scheme.

But while fake news spreads about officials enacting “climate lockdowns” to “imprison” people in their neighbourhoods, across the Channel, Parisians are enjoying their new 15-minute neighbourhoods. The French are stereotyped for their love of protest, so the lack of uproar around the redesign of their capital is in stark contrast to the frenzied response in Oxford.

Carlos Moreno, a jovial and owlish professor at the Sorbonne University, came up with the phrase “15-minute cities” and has been quietly getting on setting them up in Paris. He has a bemused air when asked about how his modest proposal for a more enjoyable urban life has caused such vile conspiracy theories, and takes it all in good humour despite the death threats and other abuse he has received.

Moreno says: “We don’t have the conspiracy mongers, because it is impossible to say in Paris that Moreno wants to create a new Paris lockdown. This is impossible to say that I am Pol Pot or that I am Stalin – because we live in Paris, I can invite guests to visit me and they see this is impossible.

“We have created a lot of new districts and they have been popular. The opposition in Paris is not the same that you have in the UK, because nobody can say in Paris we want to create an open jail – this is evident that it is not the case. We have beautiful new green spaces and areas to live.”

Moreno has been working with the Paris mayor, Anne Hidalgo, to make its arrondissements more prosperous and pleasurable to live in. He says there are 50 15-minute cities up and running, with more to come.

“We have an outstanding mayor, who is committed to tackling climate change. She said the 15-minute city will be the backbone for creating a new urban plan. The last time Paris had a new urban plan was in 2000, so this road map will be relevant for the next 10 or 15 years at least,” he explains.

“I said to Hidalgo, the 15-minute city is not an urban traffic plan. The 15-minute city is a radical change of our life.”

Moreno has written a new book, The 15-Minute City, about his theory, which is being implemented in cities from Milan to Buenos Aires. In it, he explains his theory, which is quite simple. When many modern cities were designed, they were for men to work in. Their wives and family stayed in the suburbs, while the workers drove in. So they have been designed around the car, and segmented into different districts: the financial district (think Canary Wharf), the cultural area (for example, the West End) and then the suburbs. They have also often been segmented into wealthier and poorer areas; in the less prosperous area to the north-east of Paris, Moreno says up to 40% of homes are social housing. In the wealthier west of Paris, this drops below 5%.

“My idea is to break this triple segregation,” he says.

Moreno thinks this segregation leads to a poorer quality of life, one designed around outdated “masculine desires”, so his proposal is to mix this up, creating housing developments with a mixture of social, affordable and more expensive housing so different social strata can intermingle. He also wants to bring schools and children’s areas closer to work and home, so caregivers can more easily travel around and participate in society. He also thinks office should generally be closer to homes, as well as cultural venues, doctors, shops and other amenities. Shared spaces such as parks help the people living in the areas to form communities.

An example of this is the new Îlot Saint-Germain development in one of Paris’s most chic neighbourhoods. It is situated in the old defence ministry, and flats with sweeping views of the Eiffel Tower go for a social rent of €600 (£515) a month.

Moreno says there was some “aggressive” opposition to this, not from conspiracy theorists but from wealthy Parisians who did not want lower-income people living in their district.

“It was a scandal for the richest to have the working class living here in the 7th arrondissement. They said we will have a reduction in the price of our real estate, there will be more crime. The local mayor of the arrondissement opposed it. But now, it is so, so beautiful with increased quality of life, the development has won awards, it is a desirable place to live.”

The city has also been regenerating the Clichy-Batignolles district in the less prosperous north-west of Paris to have a green, village-like feel. About a quarter of it is taken up by green space and a new park.

“As a 15-minute district, it is incredible,” says Moreno. “It is beautiful, it has proximity, social mixing, 50% of the inhabitants live in social housing, 25% in middle class and 25% own their homes.”

Many of his proposals are dear to the culture of the French. In a large, wealthy metropolis such as Paris, it is easy for small shops to be choked out by large chains. The city of Paris, in its new plan, has put measures in to stop this.

“We have a commercial subsidiary of the city of Paris which has put €200m into managing retail areas in the city with rates below the speculative real estate market. This is specifically to rent to small shops, artisans, bakeries, bookstores. This is not only a good investment because it creates a good economic model, but it keeps the culture of the city of Paris,” says Moreno. This is in keeping with the 15-minute city plan as it keeps local shops close to housing, so people can stroll down from their apartment to pick up a fresh baguette from an independent baker. “It creates a more vibrant neighbourhood,” he adds.

Hidalgo inevitably faced a large backlash from the motorist lobby. Stroll down the banks of the Seine today in the new protected parks and outdoor bars, and it is hard to imagine that it was recently a traffic-choked highway. But with the guidance of Moreno, this became a reality.

In London, there has been a furore around the expansion of the ultra-low emissions zone in London, and attempts to pedestrianise Oxford Street, the city’s busiest shopping district, have failed. So how did Hidalgo do it?

“The drivers were radically very noisy, saying that we wanted to attack their individual rights, their freedom. The motorist lobby said she cannot be elected without our support, that they are very powerful in France,” Moreno says. But Hidalgo called their bluff: “She often says ‘I was elected two times, with the opposition of the automotive lobby’. In 2024, nobody requests to open again the highway on the Seine, no one wants the Seine urban park to be open for cars.”

In his book, Moreno talks about the concept of a “giant metronome of the city” which causes people to rush around. He wants to slow this down, to allow people to reclaim their “useful time” back from commuting and travelling to shops and cultural areas.

Moreno says this is happening with or without him; after the Covid crisis many offices are selling up their large spaces in the financial district and moving closer to residential areas. People are choosing jobs they can work remotely from or that are situated closer to their homes.

“I bet for the next year, for the next decade, we will have this new transformation of corporation real estate,” he says. “Businesses are choosing multi-use areas with housing, schools, shops for their office space now. The time of the skyscrapers in the masculine design is finished.”

The 15-Minute City is out on 7 May..

Lobbyists for the world’s biggest meat companies have lauded a better than expected outcome at Cop28, which they say left them “excited” and “enthusiastic” for their industry’s prospects.

US livestock bosses reflected on the conference’s implication for their sector on a virtual panel, fresh from “sharing US agriculture’s story” at the climate summit in December.

Campaigners and climate scientists had hoped the summit, which was billed as a “Food Cop” because of its focus on farming, would result in governments agreeing to ambitious action to transform food systems in line with the goals of the Paris climate agreement.

But while more than 130 governments vowed to tackle agriculture’s carbon footprint, a slew of announcements and initiatives failed to set binding targets, or to broach the question of reducing herds of ruminant livestock such as cattle and sheep, which are agriculture’s largest driver of emissions.

In the online discussion, which was hosted by the trade publication Feedstuffs, meat lobbyist groups made it clear they felt Cop28 resulted in a positive outcome.

The three representatives all said there had been widespread recognition at the Dubai summit that agriculture was a “solution” to the climate crisis, despite livestock accounting for more than 30% of anthropogenic methane emissions.

Outcomes at the summit were characterised as “far more positive … than we anticipated” by Constance Cullman, the president of the Animal Feed Industry Association (AFIA), a US lobby group whose members include some of the world’s biggest meat and animal feed producers.

She added that this was the first time she had “felt that optimistic” after a “large international gathering like this one”.

Cullman also praised the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO)’s “Global Roadmap” to tackle the climate crisis and end hunger, which she described as “music to our ears”, saying she particularly welcomed the report’s emphasis on “production and efficiency” over “looking at reduced consumption of animal protein”.

Academics described the FAO report’s failure to recommend cuts to meat-eating as “bewildering” in a March submission to the journal Nature Food.

According to a March paper, which surveyed more than 200 environmental and agricultural scientists, meat and dairy production must be drastically reduced – and fast – to align with the Paris agreement.

The report concludes that global emissions from livestock production need to decline by 50% during the next six years, with “high-producing and consuming nations” taking the lead.

The FAO said in a statement that its roadmap took a “balanced” approach to animal agriculture, saying that its report had “acknowledged the importance of livestock for poor people in traditional agrifood systems” and referred to the need for dietary shifts.

“We believe that some comments on the change in diets and the role of animal products in them are either misinformed because people have not properly read the roadmap report, or deliberately disingenuous for the sake of feeding vested interests narratives,” it said.

Another industry panellist, Eric Mittenthal, had attended Cop28 on behalf of lobby group the Meat Institute (formerly the North American Meat Institute, or Nami). He emphasised the importance of sharing the message that animal agriculture was necessary for nutrition and sustainability.

The Meat Institute represents hundreds of corporations in the meat supply chain, including the meat sector’s three largest companies, JBS, Cargill and Tyson Foods, which together have emissions equal to a major oil company on the scale of BP or Shell.

Sophie Nodzenski, a senior campaign strategist on food and agriculture at Greenpeace International, said it was “unsurprising” that industrial meat producers felt positively about Cop28’s outcomes “given that their interests essentially took the central stage there”.

The number of lobbyists for big meat and dairy companies tripled at Cop28, as revealed by DeSmog and the Guardian, amid rising scrutiny of the food sector’s climate impact, while smallholders and family farmers at the summit said they felt “drowned out”.

“Cop28 has rightly put the spotlight on the link between food production and the climate crisis, but the sheer number of Big Ag lobbyists present gave them an outsized influence,” Nodzenski said.

Documents seen by DeSmog and the Guardian show that the meat industry was poised to “tell its story and tell it well” before and during the Dubai conference, which it described as a “notoriously challenging environment”.

Cop28 had promised to increase action on food systems transformation, but campaigners and experts said its declarations and reports fell far short of what was needed.

On the second day of the summit, the leaders’ declaration on sustainable food systems, which was signed by more than 130 countries, committed to food systems transformation.

But while it was praised for moving food up the global climate agenda, the International Panel of Experts on Food Systems co-chair Lim Li Ching criticised the declaration for its “vague language” and noted the lack of any reference to “reducing overconsumption of industrially produced meat”.

The long-awaited FAO roadmap followed. While it proposed a 25% reduction in livestock methane emissions by 2030 to put the agriculture sector on track to reach global climate goals, it again failed to explicitly recommend a cut to meat and dairy consumption.

A reduction in “excess meat eating” – which is prevalent in high-income countries such as the US and UK – is a key recommendation of major scientific bodies, and has appeared in reports from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the recommendations of the EAT-Lancet commission.

The third Cop28 agreement that failed to tackle food system emissions was the “Global Stocktake”, in which agriculture was mentioned only in the context of adaptation to climate impacts, not mitigation, despite food systems making up around a third of greenhouse gas emissions overall.

Jamie Burr, a representative of the US Pork Board who spoke on Feedstuff’s panel, said he was “excited to see” the roadmap recognise efficiency as the best pathway to emissions reduction, going on to describe US agriculture as the “most efficient in the world”.

Industrial meat companies emphasise emissions intensity and efficiency over absolute cuts to emissions, or dietary shifts that would lead to a drop in production.

This is especially true in the US, where livestock methane emissions as reported to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change have increased by about 5% since 2010 according to the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, and have increased about 20% since 1990.

Cullman also welcomed the FAO’s proposals – including its plug for the role new technologies could play in bringing down methane emissions.

Numerous assessments have found that there is a role for efficiency and innovation to cut livestock emissions, although many technologies are unproven at scale. But to be effective, they should also be accompanied by a shift away from meat in diets, and, researchers caution, should not be used to delay demand-side policy.

Scrutiny of the FAO’s relationship with industry has grown in recent years. Last autumn, former officials said their work on livestock emissions had been censored because of pressure from industry and diplomats from large producer countries. Experts have called on the FAO for greater transparency, querying the lack of authors on the roadmap.

The FAO said: “The Global Roadmap has been developed with reference to and based on existing scientific and peer-reviewed publications. In no stage of the development of the roadmap were livestock industries consulted, or any inputs received from them.”

AFIA, Nami and the US Pork Board did not respond to a request for comment.

The meat lobbyists, whose industry enjoyed many routes to influence at the summit, also celebrated the cut-through of their message that industrial animal agriculture has an important role to play in addressing global hunger.

Cullman said that she was pleased to see there had been a “strong recognition” at Cop28 that animal products “had a real role in meeting the nutritional needs of folks around the globe”.

Burr added that Cops provided an opportunity for US agriculture groups to demonstrate how they “feed the world”, while Mittenthal said the Meat Institute had showcased how agriculture can be a “solution” for “healthy people and a healthy planet”.

A spokesperson for the Global Alliance for the Future of Food said the argument that industrial agriculture is “critical to address hunger” is one of the greatest “myths” shared by the industry.

As well as helping to drive global heating, which is undermining food security worldwide, the meat industry is also the leading driver of deforestation and ecosystem loss, while the overconsumption of animal products has been linked to a greater likelihood of developing illnesses such as heart disease.