The end of the festival.

Birmingham will follow Guildford, and its pavements made of Aberdeen granite, on hosting the festival next year.

My last day ended with watching the movie ‘The End of the Line’. The movie, based on the book with the same name written by Charles Clover, focuses on the depletion of fish resources in the sea. It outlines how bluefin tuna is been fished far over the capacity of the population to recover and the sustainable levels recommended by scientists. It highlights the decline of cod fish in the North Sea and of hammer head shark, the natural predator of ray which is, in the other hand, increasing. It relates the high quantities of jelly fish and Portuguese man o’ war to the disappearing of the fish and turtles that used to eat them. The movie also reveals that less than 1% of the ocean is classified as a marine reserve and that more than 99% is “fishable”. But if we think that eating fish from fish farms is the solution we are wrong. Fish in fish farms are fed with wild fish like anchovies or mackerel and to produce 1 kg of a farmed fish another 5 kg of wild fish are needed. The movie encourages people to start consuming fish fished sustainably, to start asking in the supermarkets where the fish they want to buy comes from and to avoid the consumption of endangered species.

Earlier in the day I attended ‘Beyond Live Aid – the science of providing clean drinking water and safe sanitation’ and here I found out that on average, a person living in the Thames water region uses about 159 litres of water per day and that the embedded water in an average hamburger is 2,400 litres. A very different scenario to the Western society we live in is the life of about 2 billion people worldwide who do not have access to clean water and who suffer from diseases caused by drinking contaminated water.

I also attended the session ‘Too hot to handle’ where two psychologists presented ‘The Hot Topic: Perceiving and communicating climate change’ and ‘Fuelling protest: local opposition to biomass developments’. The first presentation showed that scepticism is a barrier to public engagement and that it has slightly increased in the UK in the last 5 years. Men, older people, rural dwellers, high earners and Conservative voters are the most sceptical about climate change. The second presentation was on a study made on the perceptions of people to the implementation of a biomass plant in Port Talbot, Wales. According to a survey carried out on 805 residents of Port Talbot, 54.3% were neutral to the project, 21% agreed with it and about the same disagreed. The study concluded that developers and Local Authorities must signal that they have listened to local people and have taken their concerns on board.

After this and just before ‘The End of the Line’ I joined an interactive talk and discussion on ‘Choosing our food: how much choice do we have?’ led by the food expert professor Tim Lang. Here I learnt that fish symbolises the 21st century food challenge, that cotton is one of the worse crops in terms of pesticide inputs, that food consumption accounts for 31% of all consumption related to GHG emissions and that food commodity prices have been decreasing over the years (with exceptions to the 1st and 2nd world wars and the oil crisis) but the tendency is to increase again in a near future. Choosing our food should take into account the sustainability of food production, nutrition value and safety.

I hope these blogs have given readers an insight into my time at the British Science Festival and perhaps small amount of the knowledge I have absorbed has been passed on.

Diana