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As COP30 comes to an end, we’ve pulled together a selection of open access books and journals tackling the big questions on climate change, environmental justice and sustainable futures. From practical solutions for greener cities to global perspectives on policy and activism, these titles bring fresh thinking to urgent challenges.
We are delighted to share that UCL Open Environment has been accepted for indexing in Scopus, one of the world’s leading abstract and citation databases. This milestone follows a rigorous evaluation process and marks a significant step in the journal’s development.
Inclusion in Scopus enhances the visibility and discoverability of research published in UCL Open Environment, and reflects the journal’s growing reputation for quality and impact. It joins a growing list of indexers, including PubMed Central (PMC), that recognise the journal’s contribution to open, accessible scholarship.
Led by Editor-in-Chief Professor Dan Osborn, UCL Open Environment is committed to publishing high-quality, peer-reviewed research that addresses the environmental challenges of today—and tomorrow. The journal is grounded in the principles of open science and fully open access publishing, ensuring that knowledge is freely available to all who seek it.
We extend our thanks to our editorial board, authors, reviewers, and readers for their continued support. This achievement would not have been possible without your contributions.
We look forward to welcoming new submissions from researchers around the world. To learn more about the journal or to submit your work, visit: https://journals.uclpress.co.uk/ucloe/
About the journal
UCL Open Environment is a unique, fully non-commercial, Open Science journal, dedicated to publishing for the benefit of humanity, across all environment-related subjects. It is the home to broad thinking, inter and multi-disciplinary research across all aspects of environment-related subjects. Find out more at https://journals.uclpress.co.uk/ucloe/
UCL Press is inviting applications for the role of Editor-in-Chief of UCL Open Environment, an open access journal dedicated to publishing high-quality, peer-reviewed research that addresses the world’s most pressing environmental challenges. This is a voluntary role open only to UCL academic staff. Read the role description and specification.
The journal provides a platform for interdisciplinary and cross-sectoral research across all environment-related subjects, from climate science and ecology to environmental law, policy, and the humanities. It is grounded in the principles of open science and equity, with a mission to make knowledge freely accessible and impactful.
As Editor-in-Chief, the successful candidate will lead the journal’s editorial strategy, working closely with UCL Press and an international editorial board to shape its future direction. The role includes overseeing the peer review process, maintaining editorial standards, and supporting the journal’s growth and visibility within the global research community.
UCL Open Environment is fully open access and non-commercial, with all content freely available from the point of publication. The journal is indexed in major databases including Scopus and PubMed Central, ensuring wide discoverability and reach.
We are seeking an individual with:
A strong academic background in an environment-related discipline
Experience in scholarly publishing or editorial roles
A commitment to open access, interdisciplinary collaboration, and research integrity
This is an exciting opportunity to contribute to the development of a journal that reflects UCL’s values of excellence, innovation, and public benefit.
UCL Open Environment is a unique, fully non-commercial, Open Science journal, dedicated to publishing for the benefit of humanity, across all environment-related subjects. It is the home to broad thinking, inter and multi-disciplinary research across all aspects of environment-related subjects. Find out more at https://journals.uclpress.co.uk/ucloe/
Celebrated in 20th February each year, the World Day of Social Justice is an international day recognising the need to promote social justice, which includes efforts to tackle issues such as poverty, exclusion, gender inequality, unemployment, human rights, and social protections.
We asked our journals team to share a selection of articles on 2025’s theme: ‘Strengthening a Just Transition for a Sustainable Future’.
This important article outlines the five entrenched narratives regarding the relationship between protected areas and human wellbeing in the Global South, the and where the first three narratives being conservation being pro-poor, poverty reduction benefiting conservation, and compensation neutralising conservation costs, are problematic. The authors highlight the need to integrate social equity into conservation efforts, especially in light of the proposed expansion of protected areas.
This paper in London Review of Education explores how university campuses can serve as intercultural spaces that promote inclusivity and social justice, particularly in the context of increasing diversity among students. It highlights the need for both top-down and bottom-up strategies to address the challenges of social and academic exclusion, emphasizing the importance of integrating support for home and international students to foster intercultural connections.
A discussion of the integration of culturally responsive teaching in primary science education in Aotearoa New Zealand, highlighting the lack of support for teachers amidst curriculum changes. It emphasizes the partnership between mainstream science and Mātauranga Māori (Indigenous traditional knowledge) through cultural narratives, demonstrating how this approach can enhance learning and cultural competence for all students.
An exploration of a pedagogical approach aimed at promoting justice-oriented teaching in school science education in England, addressing the need for more equitable engagement with STEM subjects. It highlights the importance of supporting teachers in adopting critical pedagogical practices that challenge social inequalities related to race, gender, and class, while emphasizing the value of learners’ cultural and social assets.
This fascinating article explores the intersection of racism, intersubjectivity, and transgression within Brazil’s socio-educational services, drawing on the theories of Paulo Freire and bell hooks. It presents a theoretical model to address ethnic-racial issues in educational contexts, aiming to enhance social education and inform public policies that promote social justice and anti-racism.
As January comes to a close, the UCL Press journals team is delighted to highlight a collection of popular and highly cited articles from journals including London Review of Education, International Journal of Social Pedagogy, History Education Research Journal and UCL Open Environment.
As a mission oriented not-for-profit university press that publishes across the academic spectrum, we uphold our commitment to open science and scholarship by making all of our journals’ high-quality research as freely available. Our journals do not levy any publication fees; we believe that global access to knowledge should be shared, read and cited by all. In addition, the journals use a diamond Open Access publication model that removes the financial barriers for both readers and authors, further broadening the promotion of research, knowledge sharing, and dissemination of impactful articles.
This post celebrates some of our journals programme’s most popular and highly cited publications and is testament to the rigorous efforts of our editors’, reviewers’, and authors’ contribution to their fields.
London Review of Education
Decolonisation of curriculum: the case of language education policy in Nepal While decolonisation is usually discussed in relation to countries that were formally colonised, countries that have not been formally colonised have also faced challenges related to colonialism. In this case, it is worth considering whether decolonial theory has more widespread applicability to respond to global challenges faced in the postcolonial era. This article documents the historical trajectories of colonisation and decolonisation of the school curriculum in Nepal.
Research-informed teacher education, teacher autonomy and teacher agency: the example of Finland This article highlights how Finland’s rigorous, research-based teacher education system fosters autonomous and agentic teachers, contributing to the country’s strong performance in international assessments like PISA. This article argues that the rigorous research focus of Finnish teacher education cultivates autonomous and agentic teachers.
Education, decolonisation and international development at the Institute of Education (London): a historical analysis This article reviews the process of building relationships around education and international development at the IOE, UCL’s Faculty of Education and Society. Looking at how hierarchies linked to colonialism were inscribed in initial structures and unevenly and disparately contested by students, staff and a range of interlocutors around the world over one hundred years, authors ask, how does this history shape practice in the present and perspectives on the future?
Citizenship to (counter)terrorism: the need to de-securitise the Norwegian education system and create space for democratic resilience Education for citizenship has been the subject of growing policy and research attention since the beginning of the twenty-first century. Yet, alongside conventional assumptions that school can help young learners develop socio-political attitudes that support democratic attitudes and behaviours, there are growing political expectations that educators will actively prevent terrorism. This article examines how precautionary counterterrorism logic can cause harmful and exclusionary pedagogical practices.
Collaboration between doctoral researchers and patient research partners: reflections and considerations A key principle of working in collaboration with patient research partners (patients contributing to research projects as team members, rather than as participants) is that they should be equal partners with researchers and health professionals. This presents a challenge in doctoral research, where students are expected to own their research decisions. This paper provides practical suggestions for working effectively with patient partners throughout the doctoral process and offers suggestions for formalising the process to support both parties to ensure that patient partners’ involvements are not tokenistic.
How can impact strategies be developed that better support universities to address twenty-first-century challenges? To better address twenty-first-century challenges, research institutions often develop and publish research impact strategies but, as a tool, impact strategies are poorly understood. This study provides the first formal analysis of impact strategies from the UK, Canada, Australia, Denmark, New Zealand and Hong Kong, China, and from independent research institutes.
Teaching and learning the legacy of residential schools for remembering and reconciliation in Canada In 2015, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) of Canada released a Final Report containing 94 Calls to Action. Operating in parallel to these reforms, social studies curricula across Canada have undergone substantial revisions. As a result, historical thinking is now firmly embedded within the curricula of most provinces and territories. This article represents an exploration of an emerging field of debate around whether historical thinking and Reconciliation are compatible.
Why is ‘powerful knowledge’ failing to forge a path to the future of history education? The concept of ‘powerful knowledge’ has become extremely influential in discussions about curriculum in England over the last ten years. However, the concept seems to have done little to revolutionise curriculum design and, in some cases, it has led to curricular narrowing and a focus on an increasingly nationalistic narrative in history. This paper explores these claims and finds that key voices in education in England and history education, specifically, have misunderstood and misapplied the concept of powerful knowledge.
A short history of the successes and failures of the international climate change negotiations Over the last 35 years, international negotiations have sought to address climate change, leading to notable successes, including the 2015 Paris Agreement to limit global temperature rise to well below 2°C and pursue efforts to stay below 1.5°C. This article reviews past progress and future goals for the UNFCCC/COP meetings.
Rethinking entrenched narratives about protected areas and human wellbeing in the Global South Attempts to link human development and biodiversity conservation goals remain a constant feature of policy and practice related to protected areas. Underlying these approaches are narratives that simplify assumptions, shaping how interventions are designed and implemented. This paper examines evidence for five key narratives.
From 11-22 November 2024, nearly 200 world leaders and 30,000 delegates will come together in Azerbaijan’s capital, Baku, to coordinate global climate action for the year ahead at the latest UN Climate Change Convention Conference of the Parties (COP). We asked the UCL Open Environment team reflect on some of the articles that have published in the journal’s UNFCCC/COP collection.
This collection provides researchers, academics and professionals the opportunity to publish open access scholarly and research articles, for free, about key topics covered at COP. Whether focused on The Paris Agreement, Glasgow Climate Pact or the UN led Early Warnings for All Initiative, all are welcome. In this blog we highlight a series of articles from the UCL (University College London, UK) delegation team that attended COP and whom are playing a critical role to providing evidence based research to decision-makers to implement effective climate change policies.
In ‘A short history of the successes and failures of the international climate change negotiations’ the authors helpfully remind us in their review of the timeline and major events of the past COP meetings, tracing key achievements but also setbacks. Here, they analyse major agreements, including the Kyoto Protocol and Paris Agreement, assessing how political, economic, and social challenges have influenced progress and emphasise the importance of collaboration and accountability for future climate policy to effectively address a warming world due to an increasing amount of anthropogenic carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
Addressing the large carbon footprint of a warming world is a major focus and one which takes centre stage at many scientific and scholarly conferences across world. COP29 in Baku is no different. Since 2022, UCL’s delegation have each year provided articles focusing on UCL’s own carbon footprint to calculate and weigh up the benefits of certain modes of transport. In the first of these articles titled ‘Location, location, location: A carbon footprint calculator for transparent travel to COP27’, the research group from UCL discuss how they calculate carbon emissions associated with travel to the COP27 in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, climate conference, emphasising the need for transparency in environmental impact assessments for event-related travel and aims to inform sustainable travel choices by highlighting carbon footprints linked to various transportation options.
Now, in their latest update, for COP29, ‘The Road to Baku: The Carbon Cost of Getting to COP29 in Azerbaijan’ provides updated data and analysis on the travel options from the United Kingdom to Baku, highlighting the carbon cost of such travel. Ultimately, the research in these series of articles aims to encourage greater levels of transparency on travel choices and emissions to inform positive and sustainable travel policies.
UCL Open Environment is a fully non-commercial, Open Science scholarly journal, publishing high impact, multi-disciplinary research, on real world environmental issues, with the overall aim of benefitting humanity. Published by UCL Press, submission is open to anyone at any institution and from anywhere in the world. Unlike typical, single disciplinary journals,UCL Open Environmentis the only dedicated multi-disciplinary environmental Open Science journal that publishes broadly across all environment-related subjects.
When discussing peer review, generally, I find it helpful to remind myself of some of the values as to perhaps why researchers publish in scholarly journals. In essence, it usually comes down to these 4 headings.
Knowledge and discovery
Evaluation and validation
Credit
Access to research
Within this environment, peer review is arguably the fundamental gold standard aspect of scholarly and academic publishing and is, at least in its most fundamental use of it, the facilitator for publishers to sell journals and its content.
So then, what is the role for peer review precisely, and what does it serve to accomplish?
An easy question to answer, right? In the book Editorial peer review: It’s strengths and weaknesses, the author writes the role of what peer review serves is, as ‘the goal of the process is to ensure that the valid article is accepted, the messy article cleaned up, and the invalid article rejected,’ thereby ensuring that the article made available to the reader is quality controlled.
In another book titled Peer review: A critical inquiry, the author here writes that the process of peer review also benefits the author, as they are later certified by the process if published proceeding peer review: “Careers are often made or destroyed by the process.”
In scholarly publishing, peer review acts to validate and assess work and is the current system used to assess the quality of a manuscript before it is published. Other experts in the relevant field assesses the research or article for things like fact, validity, and significance, that aid the assessors (i.e. Editors) to determine whether the manuscript should be published in the journal or not. I think it is pertinent to remember here that journals do play a vital role in the scientific and scholarly process, by refining research through peer review and disseminating it to appropriate communities by publication, and it is this role of review by peers that has been a part of scholarly communication since the appearance of the first journal in the 17th Century (see the brilliant book by Professor Aileen Fyfe et al, A History of Scientific Journals: Publishing at the Royal Society, 1665-2015.)
“Although alternative forms of peer review have evolved to tackle issues of bias, it is less clear what effect, if any, they will have upon fraud. High‐profile cases of fraud and plagiarism have brought the debate about the efficacy of peer review to a wider audience, attracting greater public attention. Such incidences include [certain individuals], tipped to be a Nobel Prize winner, who published a series of fraudulent papers that were withdrawn from Nature, Science, Physical Review, and Applied Physics Letters.”
Journals typically tackle these types of concerns by anonymising authors and reviewers from each other to ‘enable a fairer and just review system’. In this article Mulligan et al surveyed around 40,000 published researchers that were randomly selected from the Web of Science (then known as the Thomson Reuters ISI list) and concluded that the majority of respondents were happy with the current system, but noted the system is imperfect and more can be done to ensure a higher level of efficacy and efficiency.
Now, being led by open science principles, it is largely seen that being more open and transparent with research publication and assessment can we increase scholarly rigour, accountability and trust.
In April 2017, a systematic review of what open peer review is was published online in F1000Research (itself an innovative model of open peer review). It concluded: “Open peer review has neither a standardized definition, nor an agreed schema of its features and implementations. The literature reflects this, with a myriad of overlapping and often contradictory definitions.”
What this review very accurately depicts, is that there are a number of definitions of open peer review that can be collated together into themes and it purports there are 7 open traits to what open peer review concerns itself with, and that open peer review can take either a single aspect, or a multitude or mix of any of these traits, to operate as an open peer review model. Briefly, these are:
Open identities, where authors and reviewers are aware of each other’s identity.
Open reports, where the review reports are published alongside the relevant article
Open participation, where the wider community are able to contribute to the review process
Open interaction, where direct reciprocal discussion between author(s) and reviewers, and between the reviewers themselves, is allowed and encouraged
Open pre-review manuscripts, essentially, a pre-print server, where manuscripts are made immediately available (e.g., BiorXiv) in advance of any formal peer review procedures
Open final-version commenting, where the review or commenting on the final “version of record” is published
Open platforms (or “decoupled review”), where review is facilitated by a different organizational entity than the venue of publication
What is UCL Press doing?
At UCL Press, we launched our very own open peer review and open science journal called UCL Open Environment: a fully non-commercial, Open Science journal, publishing high impact, multi-disciplinary research, on real world environmental issues, with the overall aim of benefitting humanity. The journal is for any researcher or professional at knowledge-based universities, institutions, and organisations (including Non-Government Organisations, Think Tanks, Inter-Government Organisations, and the United Nations) and submissions are invited from those at all career stages, including early career researchers, mid-career professionals, and senior scholars. There are also no barriers to the Open Peer Review Process (whereby the identity of the reviewer and the report are made publicly visibly at all times); engagement from all will advance the greatest leaps and discoveries.
Reviewers are firstly asked to sign in to the system using their ORCID account and when they submit their review report, the report is posted up online in the preprint server alongside the article, under the CC-BY licence and assigned a unique DOI. You can find out more information about this at https://journals.uclpress.co.uk/ucloe/site/how-it-works/
Reviewers can therefore attain credit of their report and readers are able to follow the process openly online. We hope this will also aid the development for others (especially earlier career researchers and students) with examples on how a review is written and how an article is revised accordingly, aiming to improve the way we should engage critically and beneficially with research.
Readers of this blog can see for themselves how the journal works (you can see here the list of the latest submissions and open peer reviews, as well as here for publications accepted after peer review). It is my hope that readers will be encouraged to provide more open peer reviews or open comments, adding to the corpus of open debate around research, and consider contributing to UCL Open Environment, as we believe that by removing barriers and innovatively working openly and together will we accelerate finding solutions to the world’s most significant challenges.
How does the media read climate science and present it to the public and consequently to decision-makers? In this guest post, UCL Open: Environment Editor-in-Chief, Prof. Dan Osborn highlights the way scientific climate research is disseminated for public consumption through the media.
Why 1.5°C matters
The BBC recently issued a climate-related story and other media have done likewise. The BBC article is important as it tells readers that, in what looks like a strong El Niño period, humanity might well fail in its ambition, set out in the Paris Agreement on climate change, to keep the global average temperature below 1.5°C above the pre-industrial average. This is serious. Something that decision-makers and the public need to know about if they are to gather the will to make the necessary lifestyle and economic choices to tackle climate change and avoid its worst impacts such as the fatal heatwaves experienced recently all over the world.
Having initially made strong points in the article, the message is diluted by explaining that exceeding 1.5°C may be only temporary. Many scientists might be pleased to see this caution by the BBC providing a balance. But, readers may dismiss the 1.5°C as just another “blip” in the climate, showing again that the climate has always varied and as such there is not too much to be concerned about and, certainly nothing that requires any radical action or changes to lifestyle now. This is not the kind of outcome needed if climate action is to succeed.
Why is 1.5°C important? What’s the context? This means looking at another kind of article: Article 2 of the Paris Agreement. Paragraph 1(a) is clear about what the aim is. It involves:
“Holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2 °C above pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels, recognizing that this would significantly reduce the risks and impacts of climate change”.
There is nothing temporary or transitory in Article 2, a major international agreement ratified by almost every government on the planet. There is no time frame to this Article and yet the UNFCC website says that subsequent discussions suggest this is something to aim for by the end of the century, 2100. It is now mid-2023 and we are talking about passing 1.5°C by the end of 2027. It seems to me that 1.5°C might be thought to be the really important figure in the Paris Agreement as it can be argued to be “well below 2°C”. And we might see that threshold passed in just a few years.
The great biogeochemical cycles of the planet in the shape of an El Niño are giving us all a wake-up call. Maybe the IPCC (the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) and the UNFCC COPs need to take more note of these massive physical and biological systems than is already done? People’s behaviour and economic activity is now great enough to change these great cycles in major ways, with serious negative consequences and these cycles, some that play out over geological timescales, some with much shorter time cycles, are the source of our health and wealth (for example, at the extreme, there is no AI without silicon and maybe not enough renewables without certain perovskites).
A Global average may be the wrong kind of figure to focus on
One problem the media and the scientific community face in delivering impactful messages on climate change is that the figures in the Paris Agreement are for the global average. A key issue for an ever-increasing number of populations – often living in poorer countries or environments that are fragile or marginal in different ways – is that their world, their environment, is already warmer than 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. We can see this happening progressively with data up to 2019 with a static map for 2022 here and in a 30 second video on YouTube with the latest data, freely accessible here.
These areas of warming are spread and are spreading across the globe. The Arctic is warming about three and a half times as fast as the average. 1.5°C in such places is becoming a memory – especially for the Inuit but also for the peoples of the Middle East and parts of Asia. For those living in these areas, 1.5°C already looks like a permanent issue and not a blip that will come and then go around the late 2020s (as per the way the first BBC article I speak about here, tends to imply).
Instead, we should be braver in the way climate change is being covered in the media. There is an audience that wants to know the facts and what needs to change and how to go about it. There is an enthusiasm for “doing your bit” that is not at all difficult to engage with. So, let’s take the international agreements seriously and take 1.5°C as the value not to be exceeded at any time not just by the end of the century. Let’s make it clear that 1.5°C keeps being exceeded in parts of the world where people are struggling to cope already with adverse environmental conditions. The time to act is now.
More radically but usefully perhaps, let’s abandon the focus on the global average and focus instead on what is happening at much more local scales and what the best of the models tell us is likely to happen in the future. For all we know an average of 1.5°C might lead to unacceptable change in one region or even for one population/people. What if the Inuit culture disappeared entirely because of this? Is that not a bad thing? A lot of people get focused on perhaps aspects like polar bears, but what about the people in the environment in which they live? What matters, as Georgina Mace once pointed out, is nature and people, together (Georgina Mace, 2014 https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.1254704).
When it comes to it, no part of the world is immune from climate change and its variables. We all, media and academics alike, need to say clearly that for many people 1.5°C is already here and give the examples. Point out that liveability is becoming an issue for people in some places on Earth and point out that there is no need to continue on the current path (see Peter Schlosser’s piece on that here). Point out that a cleaner world – and climate change essentially is just another form of pollution – is a better world; healthier because there is less pollution and wealthier because of the new technologies that will be deployed; and more sustainable as we are not putting the biogeochemical cycles under so much strain that the planet might start to really “complain”. Maybe we should be keeping an even closer eye on that seasonal pattern of atmospheric carbon dioxide changes at the key observing stations than we already do? In some ways that pattern is the planet “breathing”. Do we want that to stop?
Some people still argue that we don’t need to act now for a whole complex of reasons. Some feel that if climate change were really serious then politicians would change their lifestyles more noticeably and be driving home measures that will help everyone make the necessary adjustments. Others in this camp have vested interests at heart or argue that measures to improve the environment in some ways are some kind of plot to limit freedoms. These kinds of reactions are best tackled by pointing up what the evidence shows and what actions can be taken by people, and that the more we invest in the future, the faster and more positive the payback will be. It is, of course, better to act now rather than delaying and panicking later when much of the damage will have been done and the world may have moved passed Lenton’s Tipping points (e.g. https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781003331384-17/climate-change-tipping-points-historical-collapse-timothy-lenton) or the limits identified by Rockstrom and colleagues as pointed up in a recent editorial (which, interestingly, with regards to our open review journal UCL Open: Environment, points readers to the many benefits of an open peer review process to improve knowledge exchange and debate).
In all that its worth remembering that climate change, left untackled, will not only be causing its own problems but will be making almost all other problems worse as well. With impacts of climate change all pervasive, for all our sakes, and that of biodiversity and our food chain, we need to stick to temperatures that are “well-below 2°C” and that means as, Johan Rockstrom has said, not treating 1.5°C as if it is some kind of acceptable target. It may well be the functional limit we really cannot cross and to avoid that we need to up our game and up the pace of our response. There may be no better place to start than by visiting www.fivetimesfaster.org with Simon Sharpe’s recent book Five Times Faster, a must read for scientists, media, and decision-makers of every kind. The message? Act now; act differently; act much faster.
About the author
Dan Osborn is Emeritus Professor of Earth Sciences at UCL and Editor-in-chief of UCL Open: Environment
UCL Open: Environment is a fully non-commercial, Open Access and Open Science scholarly journal, publishing high impact, multi-disciplinary research, on real world environmental issues, with the overall aim of benefitting humanity. Read more at journals.uclpress.co.uk/ucloe
UCL Open: Environment is seeking submissions from any researcher or professional at knowledge-based universities, institutions, and organisations (including Non-Government Organisations, Think Tanks, Inter-Government Organisations, and the United Nations) broadly across environment-related research, covering climate change, the character and functioning of the environment, Planetary Health (its resources and limits), public health grounded in environmental factors, and the environment in which people live.
Today’s guest post is by Professor Dan Osborn, who is Chair of Human Ecology, Earth Sciences, at UCL (University College London, UK) and Editor-in-Chief of the UCL Press journal UCL Open: Environment
In June 2021, when the evidence report for the 3rd UK climate risk assessment (CCRA3) was released, talk was of southern England summer temperatures over 40°C being experienced sometime “before 2050” (Baroness Brown in launching the evidence report) and in the detail the message of the Technical Report seemed to be that the chances of 40°C before 2040 was small.
Events have now overtaken these projections. 40°C came to the UK in mid-July 2022, just a year after the launch of the CCRA3 work and 2 years after the UK heatwave of 2020 was linked to over 2,000 excess deaths. Is there some readily available consistent context for this that people can look at so they can have some evidence on which to base their views and decisions? The BBC runs a service for the public to discover how hot it could get in their area of the UK under climate change. It is based on climate modelling. Some of the temperatures recorded in the last few days in the UK don’t feature in the results from the BBC tool even for a world where 4 degrees of warming occurs. The results for Coningsby in Lincolnshire where the new UK record temperature (40.3°C) was provisionally recorded are interesting: warmest summer of past 30 years: 34.9°C; projected figures for the future under 2 degrees of global warming: 37.1°C; and only under 4 degrees of global warming do we get close to what happened a few days ago: 40.2°C. Now, the BBC has a tool for extreme heat vulnerability, and even though this is based on 3 years’ worth of data analysed by a consultancy, it represents an interesting development in public information provision. And so far – on average – the world has warmed a little more than 1°C.
Right now, the UK is reflecting on an event where the previous high temperature record was simply busted by over 1.5 degrees and record temperatures were recorded not just in one place in southern England but in places as far north as North Yorkshire and, in the provisional data, at 39 separate locations. On top of this, night-time temperature records were also broken along with records for Scotland and Wales for both day and night. This was a really very exceptional event. Of course, the UK is not alone in experiencing these high temperatures as the data and mapping from many agencies, including that of the ECMWF (https://www.ecmwf.int). Wildfires across Europe, including in the UK, have led to deaths, injuries and destruction of property and are the most obvious dramatic impact of a European wide heatwave.
The climate model results all point in the right direction – they just did not, it seems as far as readily available public evidence has been concerned, reached the exceptional heights of the temperatures experienced although the weather modelling for the public was remarkably accurate. This is not particularly surprising as near-term projections will almost inevitably be more accurate than ones in the mid to far future. Quite possibly, the high temperatures were in the model outputs but just residing in the extreme tails of the distribution of the results.
So, maybe, more attention is needed to the tails of model projections so that potential extremes can be built into emergency planning, engineering designs, homes and lifestyles and, maybe, even the best climate models need to be improved in the challenging area of the extremes or the way their outputs are communicated. Other improvements to the processes of climate change work might also be needed.
There is, it seems, also a tendency towards conservativism in some climate change work in international and national fora driven by the need to strike that delicate balance between what the science might indicate and what is possible in both the policy and the political arenas. This issue came to the fore most recently when the COP26 agreement included that infamous ill-defined phrase about phasing down unabated coal – which really gets a lot of people off the hook in terms of cutting fossil fuel emissions anytime soon.
Perhaps the balance needs to shift towards the extremes the science points to as well as the long-term trends. Maybe also, the language of average global temperature rises has been in play too long and now is the time to be more local and make clear that people’s local experiences are going to be very different and sometimes very far from the average. Our language, our behaviour and our legal frameworks need to take account of what evidence is on real temperatures, real rainfall (and the lack of), and real-world problems such as new buildings that are just not ‘climate ready’.
Some will say it would be wrong to base actions on just one set of extremes, but the point is that the UK’s recent experience is just one set of extremes amongst many. There is a point at which what was extreme starts to look like an unpleasant norm. The world simply cannot afford the consequences of our changing climate. They are simply not sustainable in social, economic or environmental terms. Some 16 years after the Stern Report these facts must be faced by everyone. Finding a way through the challenges means acting fast and with the urgency evident in much of the CCRA3 reporting on risks that needed to be immediately addressed.
About the author
Professor Dan Osborn is Chair of Human Ecology, Earth Sciences, at UCL (University College London, UK) and Editor-in-Chief of the journal UCL Open: Environment (https://journals.uclpress.co.uk/ucloe), published by UCL Press.
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