What Are the Priorities for Environmental Law Following Brexit – PIEL UK 2021

It is fifty years since I joined a local group of Friends of the Earth. I started as an environmentalist. What I am going to do is step back a bit and look at both some of the failures and the tensions in a wider context of the development of […]

We cannot succeed in making the climate safe without democracy

We cannot succeed in making the climate safe without democracy. Attacks on democracy are therefore attacks on a safe climate wherever they occur. To stay in power despots must destroy the machinery nations use to learn from their mistakes. There is no mistake free path to a net zero world. […]

Financing Decarbonisation of the Global Energy System

Energy and Systemic Risk There will soon be eight billion of us sharing this planet. All of us looking to live prosperous and secure lives in which to enjoy the extraordinary benefits that knowledge and technology are already making possible and could do so even more in the future. We […]

The End of Oil? – BBC World Service – Newshour Extra – 8 Jan16

                The drop in oil price is not doing something that a lot of people thought that it would do, when it fell that low, which is to create a big stimulus to economic growth. So it’s not succeeded in doing that, and […]

COP21 Paris climate summit: Climate change is much more than an environmental problem – it threatens our financial stability

  This piece first appeared in CityAM     “Climate change is seen as much more than just another environmental problem”   Next week Paris will again be the focus of world attention. This time in the face of another global threat to us all: climate change. Over 100 world […]

TTIP: Climate Change Catastrophe? – Speech given at PIEL UK 9th Annual Conference – April 2015

  Here is a video of the speech I gave on TTIP and climate change the PIEL UK 9th Annual Conference.     Speaker: Tom Burke CBE (Chairman, E3G) 26:52 Q&A Moderator: Professor William Howarth (Professor of Environmental Law, Kent Law School)   You can watch the rest of the conference here […]

THE FRAGILE CITY AND THE RISK NEXUS

                          This is a new short book I have written with leading urbanist Charles Landry. It brings together for the first time two disconnected narratives. The first is about the future of the cities in which half the […]

NO-ONE HOME

  This piece first appeared in BusinessGreen     There is no-one at home in Britain’s political parties. Increasingly they are empty shells with ever fewer members. On a good day less than 400,000 people belong to all our political parties combined. That is about 0.5% per cent of the […]

SPEECH AT E3G TENTH ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION – THE DECK AT THE NATIONAL THEATRE – JULY 2ND 2014.

  REMARKS BY MR TOM BURKE CBE AT THE TENTH ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION FOR E3G, THE DECK AT THE NATIONAL THEATRE, JULY 2ND 2014.                         First of all, let me thank you all for coming this evening. We are celebrating […]