Professor Ian Williams: Other countries can learn from the UK’s successful shift to fortnightly bin collections

Heat is no longer a future climate risk. It is already here. Across continents, high temperatures are being pushed higher by forces acting at once: human-caused warming, very warm oceans, dry soils, slow-moving high-pressure weather systems and El Niño conditions that have now developed in the tropical Pacific. El Niño is a natural warming of part of the […]
Professor Ian Williams: Summer’s silent killer: why the world’s heatwaves are a global health emergency

Heat is no longer a future climate risk. It is already here. Across continents, high temperatures are being pushed higher by forces acting at once: human-caused warming, very warm oceans, dry soils, slow-moving high-pressure weather systems and El Niño conditions that have now developed in the tropical Pacific. El Niño is a natural warming of part of the […]
Professor Ian Williams: 70 years on from the killer smog: what clean air laws teach us about power, pollution and profit

Seventy years ago, London choked. For five days in December 1952, a toxic smog smothered the city. Visibility collapsed. Transport failed. Thousands died. It was not a natural disaster. It was the product of policy failure. Out of that catastrophe came one of the most important environmental laws in UK history: the Clean Air Act 1956. It […]
Professor Ian Williams: Why European households throw away so much food – and how to curb the waste mountain

Europe is wasting huge amounts of food while millions of people globally experience hunger. Wars in Ukraine and the Middle East have squeezed supply chains. The cost of living crisis has pushed many families to the edge. Without strengthening environmental sustainability, supply chain resilience and household affordability, food security risks will increase significantly. Yet households still throw away huge amounts of edible […]