Hum, by Helen Philips, has been awarded the Climate Fiction Award for 2026. Her novel explores “the intersection of climate, technology and AI” and is naturally available from Earthbound Books.
I’ve written about this before, but it was nice to see a proper explainer from Carbon Brief on how China uses solar power to combat desertification. It’s an important idea that could be applied elsewhere.
While I heard a fair amount of grumbling about temperatures in the 30s in Europe last week, farmers in India have been working at night to escape temperatures as high as 48C in their recent heatwave. People who work outside are among those most vulnerable to extreme heat.
With the World Cup kicking off imminently, a lot of people will be pondering the conflicted relationship they now have with the event, torn between the potential of the sport and the naked greed and corruption of its organising body. Reboot FIFA is a new campaign to investigate and reform the organisation through its ethics committee.
I’ve been away in France over half term, avoiding the news and thinking about other things, so I haven’t written much over the last couple of weeks. But here are the most recent posts:
Recent highlights
Book review: Environomics, by Dharshini David
One of the rewarding aspects of covering sustainability stories over time is watching good ideas creep towards the mainstream. Technologies and approaches that were once filed as alternative move from being theoretical to operational. They spread from pioneers and early adopters to wide scale use. This book demonstrates the transition. Not so long ago the…
Britain was built for a different climate
Last week Britain recorded its highest ever May temperature, at 34.8C – and it did so comprehensively. This is a full two degrees warmer than the previous record. That kind of heat would have been almost unheard of not so long ago in mid-summer, let alone the spring. Here’s a graph I’ve been using in…
Your role in climate finance
When I hear the term ‘climate finance’, I think of banks, governments and and big institutional funders. I think about the UN, the IMF, and international conferences where multi-billion dollar funding streams are negotiated. It turns out I might have had it upside down. Out of curiosity, I downloaded the latest Global Landscape of Climate…
The Earthbound Report 