Our weather extremes are signs of a human population overshooting its planetary home, writes Prof Bill McGuire, what will it take to make us change course? How long can we go on prevaricating? How long can we hedge our bets when deciding if a particular natural...
In the middle of a heatwave and drought, it’s not just the leakage allowed by private water companies (as much as people actually use), but the money they drain from a vital piece of our national infrastructure that’s the problem, writes Miriam Stewart, from the...
So the NHS is 70 years old, and – perhaps it is because it is currently under threat from serious underfunding – the coverage has been self-congratulatory. There is a lot to be congratulatory about, of course: free at the point of use and the egalitarian ethos. It...
A record-breaking heatwave hints at a lethal new climate normal, writes Prof Bill McGuire, but you wouldn’t know as the obsession with Brexit drowns out real news Nostalgia is gripping the political agenda and not in a good way, with Brexit harking back to an imagined...
This week is the 70th anniversary of the NHS. It was an extraordinary promise by a society to care for all its members, free at the point of use. It went rapidly from plan to reality in just three years and, decades later, as a mark of its success, the NHS still comes...
Everything we make includes an element of design. But design isn't limited to household objects, clothes or buildings, it influences whole systems that shape the way we live. The climate crisis and corrosive inequality tell us that the systems we have need a redesign,...
This pamphlet looks at how the UK is unprepared for a new era of crises and disasters. To illuminate the national predicament we look at lessons from recent history, and what we can learn, often from countries in the Global South, about the kind of local planning required and resources needed to be ready for when storms and other disasters strike near where we live.
