Author Archives: Laurie

Xi Jinping started 2019 with a series of major speeches on risk. Hundreds of senior officials from across China were summoned to Beijing to hear his message: destabilisation and turbulence are on the horizon. Officials were warned to watch out for “black swans”—events that are unforeseen and take us by surprise—and “grey rhinos”—events that are highly likelyContinue reading “Will millennials be ready to lead the world in 2040?”

A central lesson of the Covid-19 pandemic for environmentalism is that it needs get more serious about risk. The pandemic has proven a classic example of a systemic shock: a health crisis graduated into a financial crisis, an economic crisis, a social crisis, a political crisis and so on. Last year, worsening environmental shocks metContinue reading “Covid has shown us the consequences of not taking systemic risk seriously”

The editorial on climate change and biodiversity published in over 220 health journals in September had two main demands: keep global temperature increases below 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels to avoid catastrophic damage to health; and accept that this can be achieved only by rich countries making bigger cuts in greenhouse gas emissions and transferring substantialContinue reading “COP26 and Health: Some Progress, But Too Slow and Not Enough”

World leaders will be glad to see the back of another year of complex problems. The pandemic and its impact on health, the knock-on effects on labour markets and the recent surges in demand for goods as restrictions have eased are huge problems that together have disrupted the delicate choreography of global trade. Meanwhile, a summer ofContinue reading “How can future leaders prepare for an environmentally-destabilized world?”