Environmental Issues Team the U.K. (Tam, Tomomi, and Maya)

What environmental issues is the country facing?

 * Air pollution
 * Declining fresh water supply
 * Marine and coastal habitat destruction
 * Soil contamination

What are they doing to improve?

 * The UK demands all listed companies to report their carbon emissions in their annual report.


 * Higher penalty policy for environmental offences came into effect.
 * Encouraging the use of environment-friendly technologies.

How does your nation get its energy?
The UK imports almost 60% of fuel for electricity from abroad. Our main import sources are Russia for coal, Norway for gas and Kazakhstan for uranium. The rest of electricity supply comes from domestic sources and almost 50% of this are generated by clean energy sources.
 * Natural gas provides 30% of the UK’s electricity and coal provides 22%.


 * Nuclear reactors make up for 21% of our electricity.


 * Fuel sources, including wind, wave, marine, hydro, biomass and solar, made up 25% of electricity generated in 2015.

What has your nation been doing to reduce greenhouse gases?
In order to achieve the adopted targets that will require a 57 per cent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, the UK has been prioritising building a secure, affordable and clean energy infrastructure system. A lot of coal power plants has been closed and the last one will be forced to shut down by 2025. The government is progressively taking the coal power out of the UK’s energy mix and replacing it with more environment-friendly energy. This movement accounts for the significant drop in CO2 emissions in the UK. In total, CO2 emissions in 2015 were an estimated 4.3% lower than a year earlier, and 31.5% below 1990 levels.

How can the speed of global warming be reduced?
We are able to solving global warming by shifting to renewable energy. Global wind energy capacity increased more than a thousand times between 2000 and 2014. Moreover, it was projected that the solar energy would grow by one gigawatt per year by 2010 but the goal was exceeded 58 times in 2015.
 * Turn away from fossil fuels and resort to renewable sources to generate power.