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A CLIMATE change expert from Aberaeron has published a book which a leading academic says he hopes will be ‘a turning of the tide’. In ‘Great Adaptions’, Dr Morgan Phillips recounts stories of adaptation from the air-conditioned pavements of Doha and the feral camels of Australia, to the ‘cool rooms’ of Paris and the ‘fog catchers’ of Morocco. The book – which ‘presses home the need for adaptations that are ecologically restorative and socially just’ - has been described as ‘a call to action’. Prof Rupert Read, of the University of East Anglia, said: “My ea...

Senior transport planners and climate experts have urged transport secretary Grant Shapps and London Mayor Sadiq Khan to put an immediate stop to work on the Silvertown Tunnel to re-evaluate the scheme’s environmental impact. In a letter to Shapps and Khan, the group of 52 academics and campaigners have called for an “emergency review” to be carried out to determine if the East London project is in line with the UK’s climate change objectives. (See below for full list of signatories.) The group of objectors cite the government’s recent decision to intervene in the Cumbria coal mine ...

TO MARK the one year anniversary of the first national lockdown last month, the Guardian published profiles of Chief Scientific Adviser Sir Patrick Vallance and Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty. “The wealthy civil servant’s year of speaking truth to power” was the title of the fawning article on Vallance. Discussing the early days of the pandemic, the Guardian’s Rupert Neate asserted “Vallance may have been one of the few people in Whitehall who understood what was coming.” Echoing the title, he noted “Vallance’s friends and colleagues say that he is not afraid to speak scie...

Rupert Read, a professor at the University of East Anglia, offers his take on how, together, we might be able to prevent climate collapse. Reader, I want to propose a new way to address the great issue of our time: how - even now, at the twelfth hour - we might turn ourselves away from our current path of self-destruction. Even as I mount this attempt, I am daunted by the scale of the task. Perhaps it daunts you too. And I am unnerved by the seeming inadequacy of the means at our disposal. Haven’t we - and by ‘we’ I mean now our society itself - already shown ourselves terminally incapa...

‘It’s better than worrying about the state of the world’: how to get politically active this year Zoe Williams There has been a lot of research on the “double-benefit” of civic activism, the economic rewards it can store up for the people who do it as much as those it’s done for. But I’m not really interested in the economy; I’m interested in what makes a person feel alive. And getting involved with a campaign, no matter how big, can make you feel much better, much more engaged – even energised – than just sitting and worrying about the state of the world.