miscellaneous

What we learned this week

Featuring China's climate targets, a marine treaty, a bonus book review, and solar panels from Aldi.

COP 30 has prompted the usual rush of project launches and report publications. This one jumped out though, and not just for the late 90s textspeak vibes of its name: Adapt2Win is a campaign for climate adaptation fronted by a host of global sports persons, including Arsenal’s Beth Mead. Having grumbled just this week that adaptation is still a sideshow in climate conversations, it’s good to see a higher profile campaign around it.

Norway has opened its first national plastic recycling centre. This single high-tech facility can sort plastic packaging into ten different kinds of recycling, and will process 80% of the country’s waste plastic.

The Environment Agency and Cornwall Council have collaborated with Minecraft to create Coastcraft, a curriculum-integrated game that recreates processes of coastal erosion and challenges users to fix them.

Whether or not his cakes are exceedingly good is a matter of debate, but I was pleased to see that the Mr Kipling bakery will soon be solar powered, thanks to a £2.1 million solar farm near it’s site outside Barnsley.

In case you missed it, my occasional Substack newsletter Zero Carbon Luton went out this week with more local stories. Subscribe if you’re interested…

Latest articles

What we learned this week

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How Frontier Markets empowers women traders

Among the most important questions to ask of a new technology are these: who controls it? And who does it serve? With many leading AI applications, the answer to both is simple – the richest. But that’s not inevitable, and so I enjoyed hearing about Ashden Award winner Frontier Markets. Frontier Markets is a social…

Book review: Heatwave, by John L Williams

It’s fifty years since the famous 1976 heatwave which broke records as the driest and hottest British summer of the 20th century. From a weather perspective it was a true freak occurrence, and it’s left a lasting legacy. Some of that is benign – lots of people have very happy memories of an ‘endless summer’.…

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