Category Archives: Writing

In late February, the UN Security Council held a meeting to discuss how the climate crisis is a threat to international security.  As David Attenborough told the meeting, “we will face the collapse of everything that gives us our security: food production, access to fresh water, habitable ambient temperature and ocean food chains…[and] much of the rest ofContinue reading “We failed to prepare for pandemics, we cannot do the same with climate change”

What a difference a crisis makes. It wasn’t all that long ago a Tory prime minister wanted to “get rid of all the green crap”. This week, however, Boris Johnson committed to power all homes in the UK with wind by 2030, investing £160m as part of a wider drive to “build back greener” by making Britain a worldContinue reading “On climate change, the younger generations must shout even louder”

Fighting the environmental emergency is about power and politics, not just clean technologies and regulation. This presents a problem for political systems. When considering the record of our democracy in handling problems that arrest all parts of society, such as Brexit and the Covid-19 pandemic, the prospects look poor for responding to the environmental emergencyContinue reading “Politics in a time of consequences”

The coronavirus pandemic is a warning from the future. It has brought the fragility of our increasingly interconnected economic and social systems into stark relief. A health crisis became an economic crisis, a social crisis, a political crisis. The word ‘resilience’ now peppers the policy PDFs of governments, NGOs and multilateral institutions. Let us hopeContinue reading “Notes from a 1.2°C world”

The coronavirus pandemic has brutally reminded us of some home truths about risk. Catastrophic things can happen – and they can occur very quickly – overwhelming societies, particularly if they’re not well prepared. It is in this way that the Covid-19 crisis gives us a window into the future – a future in which societiesContinue reading “Our leaders weren’t prepared for coronavirus. If they make the same mistake again, the environmental crisis will destroy society”

We live in the age of environmental breakdown. Destruction of the natural world has reached a critical phase. Crucially, this isn’t isolated to climate breakdown. Vast swathes of land are being lost to soil depletion, over-fertilisation is polluting rivers and oceans, and animal populations are collapsing as the sixth mass extinction tears across the world.Continue reading “A sustainable economy act”

We’re all aware of the fact that millennials and younger generations can no longer expect to be ‘better off’ than their parents. But the situation is far worse.  As a result of the environmental crisis, these generations can expect to live in a world in which nature is critically impaired, threatening the stability of societies. Continue reading “Without a Future Generations Act, we will pass a toxic inheritance to our kids”

The spirit of international cooperation is an advanced state of decay — and last week’s G7 Summit offered the latest illustration. President Trump — preening, bullish — dismissed the environmental crisis as a ‘dream,’ and dismissed any notion of joint action on climate in the process. The remaining ‘advanced economies’ of the G7 offered to send $20Continue reading “The G7 was a joke. Three degrees warming isn’t”

There’s no better place to look for certainty of environmental breakdown than the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The IPCC’s warnings of climate catastrophe have become a kind of gospel for the end times, presenting the latest evidence as a guide to everything that has gone wrong with anthropogenic climate breakdown. Their most recent report about climateContinue reading “Why land is the next frontier in environmental breakdown”