Cabot Institute for the Environment blog

A flash flood in London in October 2019. D MacDonald/Shutterstock In July 2021, Kew in London experienced a month’s rain in just three hours . Across the city, tube lines were suspended and stations closed as London experienced its wettest day in decades and flash floods broke out. Just under two weeks later, it happened again: intense downpours led to widespread disruption, including the flooding of two London hospitals . Colleagues and I have created a new set of 100-year climate projections to more accurately assess the likelihood of heavy rain downpours like these over the coming years and decades. The short answer is climate change means these extreme downpours will happen more often in the UK – and be even more intense. To generate these projections, we used the Met Office operational weather forecast model, but run on long climate timescales. This provided very detailed climate projections – for every 2.2km grid box over the UK, for every...

Radio 4 interview with Dr Lydia Medland Following the Home Office revocation of the license of one of the seasonal agricultural worker recruitment operators, Dr Lydia Medland spoke to BBC farming today on 20th February 2023 about the scheme ( listen here ). The UK Seasonal Worker visa route allows workers to come from around the world to work for up to six months. There are (or were) seven ‘operators’ of the scheme. These are licenced by the government as the recruiters and sponsors of the workers and are responsible for both enforcement of the scheme requirements, particularly ensuring that workers go home at the end of their stay, and for worker protection. The UK has had some form of seasonal worker migration scheme since the end of World War II, but the current scheme dates from 2019, when following Brexit, EU workers no longer had access to the UK labour market, and UK fruit and vegetable growers and food producers had to look elsewhere to fill seasonal labour vacancies. At the e...

One of the privileges of being a student at the University of Bristol (UoB) is belonging to a diverse academic community comprised of students from many cultural, social and religious backgrounds. With the hosting of COP27 in Egypt this year, the Sustainability Network sought the opportunity to gain insight and perspectives first-hand from Egyptian UoB students around the significance and implications of the climate change focused conference being hosted in their country. Below is a recount of the respondents’ views and opinions.  Disclaimer: Views do not represent the University of Bristol nor the Sustainability Network. Names have been removed to protect the anonymity and privacy of the students who chose to speak.   The significance of climate change  Climate change is one of the most important issues the world is currently facing and will have wide ranging impacts that will influence our daily lives. Climate change, however, is often viewed as a future concern to be ...

Urgent action is needed to protect Madagascar’s forests. Rijasolo/AFP via Getty Images Global climate change doesn’t only cause the melting of polar ice caps, rising sea levels and extreme weather events. It also has a direct effect on many tropical habitats and the animals and plants that inhabit them. As fossil fuel emissions continue to drive climate change, large areas of land are forecast to become much hotter and drier by the end of this century. Many ecosystems, including tropical forests, wetlands, swamps and mangroves, will be unable to cope with these extreme climatic conditions. It is highly likely that the extent and condition of these ecosystems will decline. They will become more like deserts and savanna. The island nation of Madagascar is of particular concern when it comes to climate change. Of Madagascar’s animal species, 85% cannot be found elsewhere on Earth. Of its plant species, 82% are unique to the island. Although a globa...

2022 was another year of “unprecedented” weather. Provisional figures indicate that it was the warmest so far recorded, with almost every month hotter than average. Much of the country had a notably mild New Year, despite the cold snap in mid-December. This was preceded by the third warmest autumn on record , and that by a scorching summer, with the hottest day ever recorded in July. But summer’s heat waves were also accompanied by a rise in the number of daily deaths across the country. People around the world are becoming increasingly more aware of events like these, and their impact in the UK is particularly concerning amidst the ongoing cost-of-living, energy, and NHS crises. Aerial view of the Wennington wildfire, London, 19 July 2022. Source: Harrison Healey, Wikimedia Commons  (CC BY 3.0). Ahead of the Fourth UK Climate Change Risk Assessment (CCRA4), the Climate Change Committee (CCC) are asking what we know about the impact of past and present climate change on natural ...

Temperature anomaly in Europe, Jan 1. Much of the continent was 10°C or more (dark red and grey) above the long-term average. WX Charts , CC BY-NC An extreme winter heatwave meant countries across Europe experienced a record-breaking New Year’s Day . New daily temperature records for the month of January were set in at least eight countries : Belarus, Czechia, Denmark, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Netherlands and Poland. In many cases the temperatures were not just breaking the old highs, but smashing them by massive margins. On a typical January day in Warsaw, Poland, temperatures would barely go above freezing, yet the city recently experienced 19℃, breaking the previous January high by 5.1℃ . New January records were set at thousands of individual stations in many other countries such as 25.1℃ at Bilbao airport in Spain , 0.7℃ hotter than the previous record set only last year. Large areas of central and Eastern Europe experienced tempera...