Eu

This female Caribbean Reef Shark in Roatan apparently survived a finning - most do not © CC yukikokubo

Tesco have just announced that they're going to stop selling shark fins in their stores in Thailand.

This follows some bad press on the issue and subsequent lobbying by the Shark Trust to clean up their act.

Sharks are a dividing issue with people – some people love them and are fascinated by them, others are terrified of them. Whilst sharks have an ferocious and fearsome reputation, and any shark attack or alleged sightings of man-eating great whites off Cornwall make the news, we rarely hear of the impact we humans are having on sharks. And we are having an enormous impact.

Bailing out the planet in Brussels © Eric de Mildt/Greenpeace

Hundreds of Greenpeace volunteers from 16 countries arrived in Brussels today and set up a barricade around the conference centre where EU finance ministers are meeting to discuss funding options to tackle climate change. Linking arms to block the exits, the volunteers were determined not to let the politicians out until they agreed a proposal to bail out the planet.

(Twitter was a-buzz with regular updates from the scene - look back over the #climateaction tag.)

Despite the gloom coming out of the EU climate talks at the end of last week (and the non-event that UN discussions on the same topic in Poznan appear to have been), there is one ray of hope shining from Brussels in the form of the Renewable Energy Target which will set binding goals for EU governments on sourcing energy from renewable sources.

It's been a tough road, not least because of ex-business secretary John Hutton's attempts to weaken the deal. Then it looked like some countries - Italy and Poland were the ringleaders - were going to knobble the agreement by demanding it be reviewed in 2014 but a compromise was put forward and a deal has been reached.

If you've been wondering what's been happening on the light bulb front since our Woolworths campaign last year (and much as they were in our bad books, it's sorry to see them go), there's been some developments on the European stage where politicians have been voting on plans to improve their efficiency and so reduce greenhouse gas emissions across the EU.

The good news is that, on Tuesday, the EU has at long last agreed on a ban of inefficient incandescent light bulbs; the somewhat worse news is that we'll have to wait several years for it to come into full effect. In the meantime, inefficient bulbs will still be on sale and given the desperate need to reduce emissions, it's not enough and it's not soon enough.