Fundamentals of climate change action

Hello and welcome to another edition of Transform magazine.

The lessons and progress from COP27 have been well and truly digested, and in this issue we have a fascinating collection of comment and articles that speak to the fundamentals of climate change action.

At every COP there are passionate and articulate delegates from island states, challenging other countries to mitigate before these fragile places disappear. Climate change scientists say they are right to be so concerned and, according to Dr Parag Khanna, the futurologist and founder of FutureMap, these islands will disappear in the future, and moreover there will be other nations that will be unable to function as countries. This will have devastating consequences. Dr Khanna argues that there will be another wave of mass migration – but this must be seen in the context of human movement that has taken place for millennia, since well before the advent of the nation state.

The three pillars on which much of the COP process is based are adaptation, mitigation and more equitable financial distribution. However, a major parliamentary inquiry in the UK has highlighted how little attention, relatively speaking, policymakers give to adaptation, and how urgent the situation is becoming, given that climate change is making the conditions in which we expect infrastructure to operate successfully all the more uncertain. Huw Morris has been investigating.

"A major parliamentary inquiry in the UK has highlighted how little attention, relatively speaking, policymakers give to adaptation, and how urgent the situation is becoming"

As we emerge from several weeks of over-indulgence, the amount of waste that the festivities bring starts to hit home, and never more so than on food waste. Reducing food waste has been something that I have considered in almost every stage of my career, from presenting Farming Today to sitting on the advisory panel of the National Food Strategy. Being able to derive maximum nutrition from the food we buy is all the more important with a cost-of-living crisis in Europe; David Burrows looks at what the UK is doing to reduce the amount of food that ends up in the bin.

We hope you enjoy this issue and we welcome your feedback and suggestions. Please do get in touch if there is anything that you would like to see featured in the magazine.

Sarah Mukherjee MBE, CEO, IEMA