Placemaking is an under-appreciated philosophy in planning and design, and could play a much bigger role in an emerging wellbeing economy. So I’m pleased to see that the government is instituting a new Office of Place, and I hope its remit and powers prove effective and useful.
More details are emerging of the deal that will see Liberia cede 10% of its land to the UAE, that I wrote about a few weeks back. It’s not looking any better.
I wrote about the Climate Majority Project recently, and here Rupert Read and Jadzia Tedeschi discuss their project. “There will be no sufficient change without most people on board,” and that’s why we need to reach beyond activism.
Public sector support could be the game-changer for the four-day week campaign, so harken unto South Cambridgeshire Council, who are extending a three month trial into a year long pilot “to test whether a four-day week could positively impact on the Council’s recruitment and retention issues.”
This week I’ve been working on some schools resources for Zero Carbon Luton, part of a wider project I’m involved in. They’re useful well beyond Luton if you’re in the market for ideas, links and resources for environmental action in schools.
Highlights from this week
The planetary boundaries in 2023
The planetary boundaries were first formulated by the Stockholm Resilience Centre in 2009, as an answer to the question of whether or not nature had any identifiable limits that we couldn’t exceed. The idea of ‘limits to growth’ has been both influential and controversial, and the planetary boundaries attempted to draw up a definitive list…
What is emissions based parking?
Drivers in the English city of Bath may have noticed new parking charges this week. The cost of parking a car in one of the council’s car parks now varies depending on what you drive. That’s a snapshot of what is quite a complicated set of variable prices, depending on grams of CO2 per kilometre.…
The global fight to end fossil fuels
You and I both know that fossil fuels are the main cause of climate change, right? It’s a very basic fact, and yet to look at the global response to the crisis, you wouldn’t know it. The Paris Agreement doesn’t mention fossil fuels. Year after year, international negotiations fail to agree to phase them out.…
The Earthbound Report 