Cabot Institute for the Environment blog

Cabot Institute Director Prof Rich Pancost has been nominated by fellow colleague Prof Steve Lewandowsky to do the Arctic Sea Ice Bucket challenge to raise awareness of the impacts of climate change on Arctic sea ice and to help raise funds for climate research. Watch Prof Steve Lewandowsky's Arctic Sea Ice Bucket Challenge Watch Prof Rich Pancost do the Arctic Sea Ice Bucket Challenge with a special audience ... Like this?  Check out our blogs and content on sea ice, glacier melt, sea level rise and climate change: The controversy of the Greenland Ice Sheet Climate lessons from the past: Are we already committed to a warmer and wetter planet? Chasing Ice with the All Party Parliamentary Climate Change Group Unprecedented melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet Jonathan Bamber talks sea level rise on Emmy Award winning show Jonathan Bamber talk on Radio New Zealand - Melting Ice, Rising Sea

The University of Bristol has signed a UNESCO Global Action Programme commitment, in advance of there launch of the next UNESCO strategy for Education for Sustainable Development (ESD). As the UNESCO decade for ESD draws to an end, UNESCO has reviewed progress, and will this November launch a new Global Action Programme focussed on four key areas which most urgently need more attention. My own journey, and Bristol's very much reflects the picture UNESCO has found. A decade ago ESD was largely below the radar in Higher Education (HE).  Lots of great things were going on, but as local initiatives by keen academics. Typical of the time, we won our first Times Higher Award and Green Gown Award for what was then a very innovative interdisciplinary open unit on Sustainable Development, available to any student, whatever their degree. Nearly a decade later, UNESCO has set us all the challenge of moving from hot spots of excellence to whole institution approaches. Bristol has commit

J.G Ballard's The Drowned World taken from fantasticalandrewfox.com Over the next 18 months, in collaboration with Bristol Green Capital 2015 artists, civic leaders and innovative thinkers, the Cabot Institute will be participating in  a series of activities in which we examine how human actions are making our planet a much more uncertain place to live. Fifty years ago, between 1962 and 1966, J. G. Ballard wrote a trio of seminal environmental disaster novels: The Drowned World, The Burning World and The Crystal World.  These novels remain signposts to our future, the challenges we might face and the way people respond to rapid and unexpected change to their environment. In that spirit and coinciding with the Bristol Green Capital 2015, we introduce The Uncertain World, a world in which profound uncertainty becomes as much of a challenge to society as warming and rising sea levels. For the past twenty years, the University of Bristol has been exploring how to better und