Should we be debating paying loss and damage for climate change impacts at COP27? – Good Morning Britain

People are being wound up by a storm in the headlines. There is no call, or discussion going on at COP27 about reparations. There is a discussion going on about loss and damage. As the secretary general said yesterday, we are on a “highway to hell” on climate change, and […]

Why we should help countries already suffering climate change impacts – LBC

I think that there are three dimensions to the issue of helping developing countries who are already suffering the impacts of climate change. The first is a moral dimension. Clearly, we are partly responsible, along with other rich countries, for creating the problem. We clearly have some moral responsibility not […]

Unpresidented tornados hit America – Al Jazeera

These tornados that we are seeing are not completely unprecedented, but the scale of the impacts that we are seeing is quite unusual. Part of the reason for that is that there seems to be a structural shift going on with the tornados, they seem to be moving further east, […]

Beyond COP26. The EU and the UK join forces to reach net zero – EEAS

COP26 certainly wasn’t a flop. It didn’t take us to where we need to get to, but it did take us a step forward into the really hard work of delivering on the Paris Agreement. So, I think that it took us somewhere. I think what surprised people was the […]

Climate change threatens food, energy and water security – LBC

Climate Policy failure is what David Attenborough was talking about. If we fail to keep the increase in temperature below 2 degrees centigrade, then what we are threatening is food, energy and water security, and if you can’t maintain food, energy and water security then you can’t maintain internal stability, […]

Covid-19, Climate, Civilization

Civilisation is the thin film of order we build around the chaos of events. Courtesy of a coronavirus we are now getting a chilling reminder of just how thin that film is. It would have been inconceivable a few weeks ago that a microscopic assemblage of lipids, proteins and ribonucleic […]

A million species are being driven to the verge of extinction by the impact of humans on the planet – LBC

. This is an excerpt from an interview I did for LBC about a United Nations report that has just been released. It states that a million species are being driven to the verge of extinction by the impact of humans on the planet. The full interview can be listened […]

Speaking at the UN Economic Commission for Europe meeting on Sustainable Development Goals

. On 22 March, I spoke at the United Nation’s Economic Commission for Europe’s meeting on the Sustainable Development Goals in Geneva, Switzerland. ‘ Thank you for the invitation to share our experience on financing disaster risk reduction in relation to climate change. E3G is a European climate change think […]

A CLIMATE OF TRUST

The core argument of this lecture is that failure of climate change policy represents an existential threat to civilisation that will destroy the foundations of trust on which democracy depends. Climate change is a unique problem in human history. Climate policy success demands the local, national and geo-political cooperation that […]

Climate justice and development – The Oxford Forum on International Development

There are three key points I want to make about climate justice and development. The first is that climate change presents humanity with a unique challenge. We have never before faced a problem like this. There is no other problem that will impact on the security and prosperity of literally […]