Environment

Alix Dietzel, University of Bristol COP27 has just wrapped up. Despite much excitement over a new fund to address “loss and damage” caused by climate change, there is also anger about perceived backsliding on commitments to lower emissions and phase out fossil fuels. As an academic expert in climate justice who went along this year, hoping to make a difference, …

Mark Maslin, UCL; Priti Parikh, UCL; Richard Taylor, UCL, and Simon Chin-Yee, UCL Billed as “Africa’s COP”, the 27th UN climate change summit (otherwise known as COP27) in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, was expected to promote climate justice, as this is the continent most affected but least responsible for the climate crisis. Negotiations for a fund that would compensate developing countries …

Goodluz/Shutterstock Eric Laurentius Peterson, University of Leeds Heatwaves in numerous countries during 2022 sent all-time temperature records tumbling. On the day before the UK endured a shaded air temperature of 40°C for the first time ever, the Met Office issued its first ever red alert for extreme heat, which meant that people needed to take extra care to keep cool …

Walking connects you to your city. Cerqueira | Unsplash, FAL Aled Mark Singleton, Swansea University During lockdown in 2020, governments across the world encouraged people to take short walks in their neighbourhoods. Even before COVID hit though, amid the renewal of city centres and environmental and public health concerns, walking was promoted in many places as a form of active …

Mark Zeitoun, University of East Anglia and Ghassan Abu Sitta, American University of Beirut Gaza has often been invaded for its water. Every army leaving or entering the Sinai desert, whether Babylonians, Alexander the Great, the Ottomans, or the British, has sought relief there. But today the water of Gaza highlights a toxic situation that is spiralling out of control. …

Georgina McAllister, Coventry University “Control oil, and you control nations; control food and you control people.” This aphorism, often attributed to Henry Kissinger, recently came to mind when I saw first hand how both strategies have been effectively deployed in Israel’s occupation and blockade of Gaza. As a researcher of conflict-affected food and farming systems I was in the encircled …

Tanzania, Dar es Salaam: increasing temperatures under climate change are likely to be a significant risk to human health in informal settlements. Flickr/Slum Dwellers International Lorena Pasquini, University of Cape Town In the coming decades, heat will become one of the most significant and visible impacts of climate change, particularly in Africa, where temperatures are expected to increase faster than …

Shutterstock/ALDECA studio Tom Stacey, Anglia Ruskin University The road map to replacing old fashioned carbon emitting cars with electric vehicles is well developed – at least in theory. All the major car makers (and even some of the smaller ones) are publicly committed to electric. But actually buying a new electric car? That’s another matter entirely. Volkswagen, the largest car …

As the most water-scarce region on the planet, the Middle East is particularly reliant on desalination technology. Maxim Petrichuk/Shutterstock Kiran Tota-Maharaj, Aston University Clean freshwater is critical for sustaining human life. However, 1.1 billion people lack access to it worldwide. Desalination represents an increasingly popular way of addressing this. Desalination is the process of extracting salt from saline water to …

Ben Clarke, University of Oxford; Friederike Otto, Imperial College London, and Luke Harrington, University of Waikato Pakistan is experiencing the most devastating and widespread floods in its history, with the country’s climate minister saying waters have reached across a third of the nation. The growing tally of impacts is dire. More than 1,100 people have been killed, a million homes …