COP 27 – Surviving the Apocalypse: From ‘me’ to ‘we’.

Ultimately, it comes down to political will, when confronting the climate crisis. Instead of indulging in Elon Musk’s fantasies about life on Mars, we need to focus on solutions in the here and now on earth, argued Alan Simpson in his final TED talk on how to confront the climate crisis. What is required is a visionary space for nature and the necessary political will to enact it. Money is not the issue.

 

COP 27 – Greening Everything: Putting back more than we take out.

If we want to confront the climate crisis successfully, greening everything and here especially our cities is key, argued Alan Simpson in the fifth talk of his COP 27 series. Rather than paving over everything in our cities, which is often the cause of flooding, we need to enlarge our green spaces. 

Watch out Benjamin Zephaniah! International Relations Theory poetry.

With a view to engaging students through different teaching methods, Andreas Bieler and Adam David Morton launched a poetry competition in 2011 on their core MA module "Theories and Concepts in International Relations". After all, Roland Bleiker has himself emphasised the role of the poetic image in challenging dominant modes of thinking and practice within International Relations. With that aim in mind and the permission by the author, I am happy to publish this winning poem by Zubeda Mir that may surely rival the social criticism of Benjamin Zephaniah!

COP 27 – ‘The 15-minute city’: connectivity as driver of carbon reduction.

We do have the necessary alternatives. What is missing are politicians with the necessary radical vision to put these alternatives into practice, declared Alan Simpson at the opening of his fourth talk on how to confront the climate crisis. At the heart of this talk was the question of how can we rethink transport and mobility to overcome our addiction to cars? Ultimately, improved local transport combined in a joined-up system with local energy generation and food production is the way forward.