Children, Young People and Flooding: Recovery and Resilience | Report
The acute storms in the UK during the winter of 2013/14 and 2015/16 have revealed a problem that is now understood to be chronic: with climate change materialising more forcefully, severe flooding will become part of life for many communities across the UK....
Now is the best time to embrace the futures: SDGs and strategic foresight | Blog by Cat Tully
2016 is a unique, exciting time for the global development agenda. The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are now underway and UN country teams face the huge task of implementing them. So, who will get the best outcomes by 2030? My money is on countries that use...
Economics for Everyone | The Citizens Economic Council
‘It’s the economy, stupid’! Governments rise and fall on the back of economic success or failure. For the public, the economy is consistently ranked among the top three issues of concern. Yet, few people feel literate enough to understand economic policy, to...
A Divided Britain | Blog by Andrea Westall
Amongst many other things, the UK’s vote to leave the EU was a cry for recognition from people with very different lives and opportunities across the UK. It was also a stark reminder of ‒ or, for some, a sudden insight into ‒ different priorities and viewpoints...
Charting the course for post-Brexit Britain: Lessons from Wales
“What we need are conversations about the future we want,” says the FDSD in response to Brexit, citing the Wales We Want conversation as precedent. As a new FDSD Trustee and the former Commissioner for Sustainable Futures in charge of leading that conversation, which...
Brexit Britain and the SDGs
One month on and questions are still being asked about how we got here. The only thing that’s clear, it seems, is that Brexit suggests a deep division between inward- and outward-facing worldviews: control our borders and attempt to reduce the strain on our...
What Future Do We Want? | Blog by John Lotherington
As everyone woke up to Brexit on 24 June, there was a dawning realization that we were in uncharted territory. The campaign was focused on what we were trying to avoid, not where we wanted to head. That was true of the Remainers, with their increasingly...
The Basque Declaration
On 23rd May representatives of cities, organisations, and citizens concerned about sustainable development and the future of our urban areas have been invited to endorse The Basque Declaration. This builds on the Aalborg Charter (1994) and the Aalborg Commitments...
Greater than the sum of our parts | Briefing paper on global partnerships for Goal 16
Following a workshop earlier this year, bringing together a range of global partnerships, as well as senior governmental, multilateral and civil society representatives, Saferworld has published a briefing paper: Greater than the sum of our parts – global...
Children, youth and disasters: Listening, learning, and moving towards democratic engagement
In this provocation, Prof Lori Peek, co-director of the Center for Disaster and Risk Analysis at Colorado State University, draws on her work following Hurricane Katrina in 2005 where she interviewed disaster-affected children and youth across the United States. She...
New UK Health Alliance on Climate Change to encourage healthy action on climate change
Many of the key drivers of climate change also cause poor health through air pollution, high saturated fat intake and physical inactivity, argues the recently launched Health Alliance on Climate Change. Responding to climate change, says the group of major health...
Changing behaviour to achieve progress | Blog by FDSD Trustee Bronwyn Hayward
Bronwyn Hayward is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Head of Department of Political Science and International Relations at the University of Canterbury, Christchurch NZ. She is a trustee of the FDSD and co-investigator with the ESRC Research Centre for...
Brexit: Potential environmental policy consequences for the UK | New IEEP report
A recently published report by the Institute for European Environmental Policy (IEEP), in collaboration with The Wildlife Trusts, RSPB and WWF UK, considers the potential consequences a #Brexit could have on environmental policy in the UK. The research focuses on two...
Floods, community resilience and the “civic middle”: learning lessons from Leeds
The floods that hit wide areas of the UK at the end of last year were devastating for many communities. In many places local crisis management was found wanting. But in Leeds, the spontaneously self-organised volunteering infrastructures were exemplary in their...
Climate change action needs more than scientific evidence | Blog by Simon Burall
Simon Burall is the Director of Involve, a think tank and charity specialising in public participation. Their mission is to inspire, innovate and embed effective citizen engagement, to enable members of the public to take and influence the decisions that affect their...
Managing the Psychological Distance of Climate Change
Climate change is a notoriously ‘distant’ risk for most people. We hear about it in the news, but it rarely seems relevant to our everyday life – “it feels ‘not here’ and it feels ‘not now’”. This sense of non-urgency couldn’t be further away from the actual impact...
COP21 – the sound of the bell for system change
“Habemus consensus!” a Huffington Post article reads, summarising the sanguine diplomatic outcome of the COP21 conference in Paris. It might not be as binding as hoped by the hundreds of thousands of people engaging in the climate march; it does, however, signify a...
People’s Climate March 2015—largest mobilisation in history
On 29 November 2015, hundreds of thousands of people from around the world joined the biggest day of climate change activism in history. 785.000 citizens participated in 2,300 events in 175 countries and thousands of cities to march for a clean energy future, aiming...
Runciman on democratic politics and climate change
How to sustain democratic politics in the face of climate change? This is the central challenge raised by David Runciman, Professor of Politics at the University of Cambridge in this review essay of recent books on climate politics originally published by the London...Sign up for newsletter
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