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The UK’s housing stock is old, energy inefficient and heavily reliant on fossil fuel heating systems – mainly gas boilers. With heating responsible for 17% of the UK’s carbon emissions, homes and their central heating must transform if the country is to achieve net zero by 2050.
While there isn’t a single solution that will suit every home, government advisers on the Climate Change Committee (CCC) estimate that 8 million heat pumps need to be installed in existing homes by 2035.
The CCC recently published a damning assessment of the UK’s progress towards its 2030 climate goals, saying annual emission reductions outside the power sector must nearly quadruple. Home heating is of particular concern, as heat pumps are being rolled out at one-ninth the rate they need to be by 2028, alongside falling rates of energy efficiency improvements.
Heat pumps extract heat either from the air, ground or nearby water and transfer it into a building, providing heating and hot water through pipes and radiators. Some heat pumps can even work in reverse to cool homes during the summer.
Heat pumps run on electricity and use energy three times more efficiently than gas boilers.
Better still, UK homeowners are becoming more comfortable with this technology. A survey of 2,500 households in May 2023 revealed that more than 80% that had installed a heat pump were satisfied.
Only 59,862 heat pumps were installed in the UK in 2022. Although this is an increase of 40% on 2021, it’s far from the government’s target of 600,000 a year by 2028. To fully replace all of its gas boilers, the UK would need to be installing 1.7 million heat pumps annually by 2036.
Heat pumps are being rolled out faster elsewhere. In Norway, 60% of buildings have heat pumps; in Sweden, over 40%. Meanwhile, less than 1% of UK buildings had a heat pump in 2021. And compare the UK’s 2022 record with other countries in Europe: France installed 462,672 heat pumps (up 20%), Germany 236,000 (up 53%) and the Netherlands 123,208 (up 80%).
European governments support heat pump installations in various ways. The Netherlands has gradually raised taxes on homes burning natural gas for heating and offered subsidies for heat pumps. France has combined a 30% tax credit on improvements to heating and home insulation costing up to €16,000 with a 0% interest loan of up to €30,000 for energy efficiency upgrades.
These measures address two things which prevent people from getting a heat pump: the upfront cost of installation and the renovations required to prepare a home. Heat pumps are becoming cheaper but they are still more expensive than gas boilers and many UK homes lack the double-glazed windows, insulated walls and lofts, and pipework and radiators that help them perform optimally.
Since 2012, government policy has failed to drastically improve home energy efficiency or encourage low-carbon heating.
The carbon emissions reduction target introduced by Gordon Brown’s Labour government in 2008 required energy suppliers to cut emissions by helping customers make their homes more energy efficient. When it closed in 2012, it had beaten its target of saving 293 million tonnes of carbon dioxide. 41% of these savings came from installing insulation, in turn making homes more suitable for a heat pump.
The green deal followed in 2013 and the renewable heat incentive in 2014 under David Cameron’s Conservative-led coalition government.
Green deal loans for energy-efficiency upgrades attracted just 14,000 applicants as homeowners baulked at the relatively high cost of borrowing and were unconvinced by the projected energy savings. The scheme was scrapped in 2015.
The renewable heat incentive paid homeowners quarterly over seven years for installing a heat pump but asked them to fund the installation upfront. In 2018, the government blamed high upfront costs, poor awareness and complex installations for the poor uptake. The incentive ended in 2022.
Launched in 2022 under Boris Johnson, the boiler upgrade scheme offers homeowners a £5,000 grant to replace their gas boiler with an air-source heat pump (£6,000 for a ground-source heat pump) and aims to lower the cost difference between the two. Installing a new combi-boiler costs between £600 and £2,150 whereas a heat pump is £5,000 to £8,000 after the government subsidy.
The government also plans to implement a clean heat market mechanism that will ask boiler manufacturers to sell four heat pumps for every 100 gas boilers in 2024/25, or pay for the equivalent in heat pump credits if they can’t (one heat pump credit is worth £5,000).
These measures may improve on earlier failures if the rules for industry are clear and the incentives are generous enough for consumers to consider investing in a heat pump, as examples with other low-carbon technologies have shown.
For instance, evidence suggests carmarkers are already selling more battery-electric vehicles in anticipation of a law requiring them to sell a rising proportion of zero-emission vehicles each year from 2024. And the feed-in-tariff scheme requiring energy suppliers to buy electricity from homeowners at an agreed price for 10 to 25 years helped nearly a million households install solar panels.
Beyond targets for boiler manufacturers, the UK government will ban natural gas boilers in new buildings from 2025. While Germany’s governing coalition is implementing a ban on installing gas boilers in existing properties from 2028.
Before such a ban is tabled in the UK, there are policies that could raise the dismal heat pump installation rate. First, like the Dutch, the UK could gradually lower taxes on residential electricity and increase them on gas.
Second, the government could ensure energy performance certificates more accurately assess the energy efficiency of homes and their readiness for heat pumps. And third, the government should dismiss opposition from boiler manufacturers and implement the clean heat market mechanism.
Decarbonising heat and encouraging heat pumps is essential for achieving net zero. Tighter rules and targets for industry must sit alongside attractive incentives for consumers if the UK is to reach 600,000 installations a year in five years’ time.
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Ned Lamb is funded by the Engineering & Physical Sciences Research Council's Low Temperature Heat Recovery and Distribution Network Technologies (LoT-NET) programme.
Thames Water is reportedly on the brink of collapse. The UK’s largest water company, well known for its high levels of water leakage, sewage spills, executive pay and dividend payments, now appears to be flooded with debts that it cannot afford to pay.
Those debts have reached more than £14 billion, leading to fears the government – or UK taxpayers to be precise – may have to bail the company out.
The news of Thames Water’s difficulties may have shocked some of its 15 million customers. But as someone who has researched the finances of water companies, I was not entirely surprised. These issues have been a long time in the making, and I raised concerns publicly over five years ago.
When the water and sewage companies of England and Wales were privatised in 1989, the intention was to bring fresh finance and innovation to create efficiency. But in the 2000s, a new kind of financial investor began to dominate the sector.
Our recent research found that by 2021, of 15 English water and sewage companies, nine were owned by “special purpose companies”. These are organisations set up for the purpose of buying water utilities, with owners consisting of a range of private equity funds, pension funds and sovereign wealth funds.
These kinds of investors were then able to use water company revenue to generate significant returns to shareholders. And one way this happens is by hiking up company debts.
Newly privatised water companies had started out with zero debt in 1989. Yet by the end of March 2022, total debt in the sector was at £60.6 billion. In part, the increased debt was used to refinance the companies so that investors could repay themselves part of the original cost of buying the water utility.
Our research shows that Thames Water was the archetype of this model. When it was taken over in 2007 by a consortium led by Macquarie, an Australian investment bank, debts increased over the next ten years from £3.2 billion to £10.7 billion. The proportion of assets funded by borrowing increased to over 80%, while the company paid out dividends of £2.5 billion. The company has previously said that it has a “strict, performance-linked dividend policy monitored by Ofwat”.
But such high debts are problematic for a water company. First there is the issue of inequality, where customers’ water bills are used to pay down debts that have increased to pay dividends to its owners. And second, as we see with Thames Water, these highly indebted companies are potentially unstable in the event of cost pressures.
What we have now is a perfect storm in which Thames Water’s finances may collapse. A key pressure is inflation, which is pushing up the value of some of the company’s debt at the same time as it pushes up costs. More than half of Thames Water’s debt is linked to inflation, contributing to the uplift in debt value.
Then there is the cost of improving performance. This has become more urgent after Ofwat, the water company regulator, was given new powers (effective from April 2025) to prevent companies paying dividends if these weaken financial resilience or are not linked to performance.
In 2022, the government set out a plan to tackle the rapidly growing issue of sewage discharge in a £56 billion investment plan. All of this adds up to intense pressure on the company’s finances.
If those finances do unravel, it is likely that the company will be underwritten by the government to keep the taps flowing while a rescue package is put together (as happened with the energy company Bulb).
However, this situation also creates the opportunity for a new public model of water supply, one that treats water not as a private commodity but as part of the wider ecosystem, providing social equity as well as environmental sustainability.
Public ownership need not be a step back to the 1970s. In fact, it would bring the UK into step with most of the modern world, including most of Europe. In Paris, where water provision was made public in 2009 after years of outsourcing, the change is widely considered a success story.
The last 34 years have revealed the fundamental problems with the current system. This crisis is a chance to direct England’s water in a new direction.
Kate Bayliss does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
The Antarctic Ice Sheet, which covers an area greater than the US and Mexico combined, holds enough water to raise global sea level by more than 57 metres if melted completely. This would flood hundreds of cities worldwide. And evidence suggests it is melting fast. Satellite observations have revealed that grounded ice (ice that is in contact with the bed beneath it) in coastal areas of West Antarctica has been lost at a rate of up to 30 metres per day in recent years.
But the satellite record of ice sheet change is relatively short as there are only 50 years’ worth of observations. This limits our understanding of how ice sheets have evolved over longer periods of time, including the maximum speed at which they can retreat and the parts that are most vulnerable to melting.
So, we set out to investigate how ice sheets responded during a previous period of climatic warming – the last “deglaciation”. This climate shift occurred between roughly 20,000 and 11,000 years ago and spanned Earth’s transition from a glacial period, when ice sheets covered large parts of Europe and North America, to the period in which we currently live (called the Holocene interglacial period).
During the last deglaciation, rates of temperature and sea-level rise were broadly comparable to today. So, studying the changes to ice sheets in this period has allowed us to estimate how Earth’s two remaining ice sheets (Greenland and Antarctica) might respond to an even warmer climate in the future.
Our recently published results show that ice sheets are capable of retreating in bursts of up to 600 metres per day. This is much faster than has been observed so far from space.
Our research used high-resolution maps of the Norwegian seafloor to identify small landforms called “corrugation ridges”. These 1–2 metre high ridges were produced when a former ice sheet retreated during the last deglaciation.
Tides lifted the ice sheet up and down. At low tide, the ice sheet rested on the seafloor, which pushed the sediment at the edge of the ice sheet upwards into ridges. Given that there are two low tides each day off Norway, two separate ridges were produced daily. Measuring the space between these ridges enabled us to calculate the pace of the ice sheet’s retreat.
During the last deglaciation, the Scandinavian Ice Sheet that we studied underwent pulses of extremely rapid retreat – at rates between 50 and 600 metres per day. These rates are up to 20 times faster than the highest rate of ice sheet retreat that has so far been measured in Antarctica from satellites.
The highest rates of ice sheet retreat occurred across the flattest areas of the ice sheet’s bed. In flat-bedded areas, only a relatively small amount of melting, of around half a metre per day, is required to instigate a pulse of rapid retreat. Ice sheets in these regions are very lightly attached to their beds and therefore require only minimal amounts of melting to become fully buoyant, which can result in almost instantaneous retreat.
However, rapid “buoyancy-driven” retreat such as this is probably only sustained over short periods of time – from days to months – before a change in the ice sheet bed or ice surface slope farther inland puts the brakes on retreat. This demonstrates how nonlinear, or “pulsed”, the nature of ice sheet retreat was in the past.
This will likely also be the case in the future.
Our findings reveal how quickly ice sheets are capable of retreating during periods of climate warming. We suggest that pulses of very rapid retreat, from tens to hundreds of metres per day, could take place across flat-bedded parts of the Antarctic Ice Sheet even under current rates of melting.
This has implications for the vast and potentially unstable Thwaites Glacier of West Antarctica. Since scientists began observing ice sheet changes via satellites, Thwaites Glacier has experienced considerable retreat and is now only 4km away from a flat area of its bed. Thwaites Glacier could therefore suffer pulses of rapid retreat in the near future.
Ice losses resulting from retreat across this flat region could accelerate the rate at which ice in the rest of the Thwaites drainage basin collapses into the ocean. The Thwaites drainage basin contains enough ice to raise global sea levels by approximately 65cm.
Our results shed new light on how ice sheets interact with their beds over different timescales. High rates of retreat can occur over decades to centuries where the bed of an ice sheet deepens inland. But we found that ice sheets on flat regions are most vulnerable to extremely rapid retreat over much shorter timescales.
Together with data about the shape of ice sheet beds, incorporating this short-term mechanism of retreat into computer simulations will be critical for accurately predicting rates of ice sheet change and sea-level rise in the future.
Frazer Christie receives funding from the Prince Albert II of Monaco Foundation.
Christine Batchelor does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
The heirs to two of the most violent revolutions in modern history shook hands and took stock of their “comprehensive strategic partnership of coordination for a new era”, at a recent meeting in Moscow.
Many in the west have puzzled over this relationship between Chinese Communist Party chairman Xi Jinping and Russia’s Vladimir Putin. Some have imagined, for example, that Xi would be a neutral party in Putin’s war in Ukraine, or that he could even be a peacemaker.
But rather than imagining a troubling new partnership has emerged unpredictably after decades of peacetime globalisation, we should look to a longer arc of history to understand Russia and China’s shared confrontation with the world.
Putin’s invasion of Ukraine – backed openly by China’s economic power – is just the first geopolitical product of a restored Russia-China axis and the return of two states whose ambitions were never sated by the post-cold war peace. Once again, the world’s democracies are faced with the challenge of organising their defences against these two dictatorships in both Europe and Asia.
Writing in 1950, as American grand strategy began to cohere around the cold war challenge presented by the Soviet Union, US state department official Paul Nitze explained the period of upheaval that defined his generation’s experience of international affairs:
Within the past thirty-five years the world has experienced two global wars of tremendous violence. It has witnessed two revolutions – the Russian and Chinese – of extreme scope and intensity. It has also seen the collapse of five empires – the Ottoman, the Austro-Hungarian, German, Italian, and Japanese – and the drastic decline of two major imperial systems, the British and the French.
Nitze, the architect of one of the cold war’s primary strategy documents, NSC-68, observed a world in which “the international distribution of power has been fundamentally altered”. Among the reasons for that alteration and upheaval were the two revolutions he wisely acknowledged, the Russian and Chinese. Two revolutions whose consequences, we should now recognise, have not fully ended.
We should remind ourselves that 21st-century Russia and China – and the leaders that run them – are products of the original Russian and Chinese revolutions that Nitze understood would shape the history and geopolitics of his lifetime. Xi and Putin, as products of these revolutions, are also heirs to their anti-western ideas and strategies of confrontation.
As American spymaster Jack Devine points out, Putin’s career took shape in Dresden, East Germany, ensconced in the Warsaw Pact world and he has called the Soviet empire’s collapse “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century”. Now, as chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, Xi is heir to what the party calls “the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation”, a project of national revival that originated with Mao’s “New China” and has continued on in various forms since the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949.
Xi’s China seeks confrontation with the US and the establishment of a new order with China to “take center stage in the world”. In this endeavour, Putin’s Russia is Xi’s chief collaborator and “strategic partner”.
As totalitarian communist states in the 20th century, Russia and China challenged the world’s democracies and sought to establish an order of their own. The decade-long Sino-Soviet alliance spanned the Korean War and multiple Taiwan crises, producing a two-theatre strategic challenge for the US and its allies spanning both Europe and Asia. The US, having just fought the second world war in both the Atlantic and Pacific, was perhaps more prepared to manage a two-theatre strategic contest.
Read more: Putin and the ICC: history shows just how hard it is to bring a head of state to justice
Simultaneous containment of both communist China and the Soviet Union provided a check against their ambitions. The Sino-Soviet alliance eventually became unsustainable and broke apart largely because Mao aspired to return China to a position of power and centrality in world affairs; he would not tolerate a role as junior partner to Moscow.
Today these roles have reversed, and these ambitions have been restored, not in the name of communist ideology, but in light of an aggressive, militarist nationalism that animates both regimes.
Xi and Putin showed the world the philosophical depth and contours of their relationship in their joint declaration of partnership at the Beijing Olympics in 2022 just weeks before Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. But the strategic partnership goes back even earlier.
Throughout the 2010s, both nations worked to expand their military, economic and diplomatic ties. In the statement at the Beijing Olympics, China and Russia pledged mutual support for the other’s “core interests”. Moscow pledged its support for Beijing’s claims over Taiwan, which it called “an inalienable part of China”, and Beijing pledged that “both sides oppose further enlargement of Nato and call on the North Atlantic Alliance to abandon its ideologised cold war approaches”.
Joint nuclear-capable bomber exercises, land and naval exercises, increasing trade in energy, technology, China’s propaganda support for Moscow, and new reports of Chinese assault rifles and body armour for Russia, are just some elements of what has taken shape since Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
The shared China-Russia division of Europe and Asia is reminiscent of the original geography of the Sino-Soviet Alliance. As Stalin told his counterparts in communist China: “There should be some division of labour between us … you may take more responsibility in working in the East … and we will take more responsibility in the West.”
Putin’s war in Ukraine is not the only conflict, of course, that this axis may produce. China’s economic engagement with the democracies in the post-cold war supercharged a modern-day People’s Republic of China that now contests the world’s democracies in critical technologies and strategic industries and has built a military of unmatched scope in Asia that is meant to settle scores of its own in the Pacific.
This is the return of 20th-century antagonists whose ambitions never truly went away.
Jonathan D T Ward is the Founder and President of Atlas Organization, a strategy consultancy focused on US-China global competition. He has maintained affiliations with various think tanks and research institutes in Washington DC and London over the years, including Center for Strategic and International Studies, International Institute of Strategic Studies, Center for a New American Security, and the Council on Foreign Relations.
Pressure on working parents has been building for a long time, with daycare costs increasing as places become more scarce. Two recent reports clearly illustrate the dysfunctional nature of England’s system of Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC).
The reports from children’s charity Coram and thinktank Nesta highlight the declining availability and affordability of childcare places across England. This creates “poverty traps” for both parents and early years workers who are struggling to get by as the cost of living keeps climbing.
We are conducting ongoing research into what decent work looks like in different parts of the world, and what policy measures make labour markets more inclusive and sustainable. Since 2020 we have spoken with a number of policy makers, early years care providers and working parents. All agree that more sustained investment would support parents who want to work, while also helping create decent jobs within the ECEC industry.
High costs and patchy coverage have created a childcare crisis – and these problems are more acute in deprived areas. The average cost of a full-time place for pre-school children across the UK is £14,836, according to Coram’s report. This is more than 80% of the 2022 full-time annual minimum wage of £18,500. Unsurprisingly, the UK often comes near the bottom of international league tables for childcare affordability. And within England, Manchester has some of the least affordable childcare compared to average earnings.
Despite significant financial and social pressures on unemployed and inactive workers to move back into the labour market, evidence gathered by the BBC suggests that parents are effectively being priced out of full-time work by this childcare affordability crisis.
The free 30 hours per week provision for 3- and 4-year-old children (and some 2-year-olds from low-income families) is welcome. But free hours are only available during term time (38 weeks per year) and parents in England (but not Scotland) must both be working at least 16 hours per week to qualify. Our focus groups with working mothers have highlighted that in order to keep a job and build a career, there is also a need for affordable wraparound and holiday care.
The perverse outcomes of this expensive model are made worse by the fact that many providers cannot pay their staff enough to live on. Our ongoing research suggests that ECEC workers are often mothers themselves (also in need of affordable childcare), and many earn at or just above the adult minimum wage of £9.50 per hour (due to rise to £10.42 in April 2023) regardless of their experience and skills.
While the overall early years workforce is ageing, new entrants to the sector may be paid at the “youth rates” of £9.18 (21- and 22-year-olds) or £6.83 (18- to 20-year-olds). This meant the average wage within the sector was £7.43 in 2020, well below the adult minimum wage at the time (£8.21).
Workers clearly do not join the early years sector for the money, but amid an unprecedented cost of living crisis these wages fall far short of what is needed to survive.
Many ECEC providers have told us that they cannot compete for staff with other essential services such as schools and the NHS, where starting salaries, career progression and pensions are often better. Since COVID-19, providers also struggle to compete with supermarkets, many of whom pay at least the real living wage and offer part-time, flexible work that has fewer physical and emotional demands. Our research also indicates that some potential early years educators estimate that they would be financially better off staying on Universal Credit.
All of this leaves providers running at less than full capacity, which further reduces the number of places on offer to parents. This only makes it harder for early years providers to keep their heads above water.
But providers are unable to move towards paying staff the real living wage (currently £10.90 per hour outside of London) because the funding they receive from the government for 3- and 4-year-old Nursery Education Fund (NEF) places leaves many struggling to break even. This requires providers to cross-subsidise from other parts of the business or to charge additional ‘top-up’ fees for meals, nappies and activities.
While some local authorities have increased funding and added living wage clauses to contracts for home care, rates for NEF places across local authority areas typically do not cover the costs of higher wages.
Research shows that the subsidised model of childcare in Quebec, Canada, has steadily increased the labour market participation of mothers, while also strengthening the professional status of early years educators. Calls are growing for a similar scheme in the UK to expand subsidised childcare beyond the current 3- and 4-year-old offer, while at the same time improving working conditions within the industry.
Roles in ECEC can be highly rewarding and socially valuable but making the sector more attractive as an industry to work in is crucial if the UK is to better support working parents. For women in particular, this could help address the gender pay gap and the motherhood pay and career penalty.
While some additional support is expected to be announced in the Spring budget, the key role of childcare in tackling gender equality has also been set out in policy proposals by the Labour party.
Until ECEC is seen as an essential public good in the UK, and is properly funded and adapted to parent’s needs, the unequal burden of high costs and low wages is likely to continue. A revaluation of jobs within ECEC would benefit both the hard-pressed parents and the low-paid workers who have a mutual interest in high-quality and sustainable childcare provision.
Mathew Johnson receives funding from the UKRI/Medical Research Council; Grant number MR/T019433/1.
Eva Herman receives funding from UKRI/Medical Research Council; Grant number MR/T019433/1.
A 19-year-old man from China, who has been having memory problems since the age of 17, was diagnosed with dementia, according to a recent case study published in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease.
After conducting a barrage of tests, researchers at the Capital Medical University in Beijing diagnosed the teenager with “probable” Alzheimer’s disease. If the diagnosis is correct, he will be the youngest person ever to be recorded with the mind-robbing disease.
The main risk factor for the disease is getting old, which makes this latest case so unusual.
The exact causes of Alzheimer’s are still largely unknown, but a classical feature of the disease is the build-up of two proteins in the brain: beta-amyloid and tau. In people with Alzheimer’s, beta-amyloid is usually found in large quantities outside of neurons (brain cells), and tau “tangles” are found inside axons, the long, slender projection of neurons.
However, scans failed to show any signs of these features in the 19-year-old’s brain. But the researchers did find abnormally high levels of a protein called p-tau181 in the patient’s cerebrospinal fluid. This typically happens before the formation of tau tangles in the brain.
Nearly all cases of Alzheimer’s disease in people younger than 30 are due to inherited faulty genes. Indeed, the previous youngest case – a 21-year-old – had a genetic cause.
Three genes have been linked to Alzheimer’s disease in the young: amyloid precursor protein (APP), presenilin 1 (PSEN1) and presenilin 2 (PSEN2).
These genes are involved in producing a protein fragment called beta-amyloid peptide, a precursor to the previously mentioned beta-amyloid. If the gene is faulty, it can lead to an abnormal build-up (plaques) of beta-amyloid in the brain – a hallmark of Alzheimer’s disease and a target for treatments such as the recently approved drug lecanemab.
People only need one of APP, PSEN1 or PSEN2 to be faulty to develop Alzheimer’s disease, and their children have a 50:50 chance of inheriting the gene from them and developing the disease, too.
However, a genetic cause was ruled out in this latest case as the researchers performed a whole-genome sequence of the patient and failed to find any known genetic mutations. And nobody in the teenager’s family has a history of Alzheimer’s disease or dementia.
The young man also had no other diseases, infections or head trauma that might explain his condition. It is clear that whatever form of Alzheimer’s he has, it is extremely rare.
At the age of 17, the patient started having problems concentrating on his school studies. This was followed a year later by the loss of his short-term memory. He couldn’t recall if he’d eaten or done his homework. His memory loss became so severe that he had to drop out of high school (he was in his final year).
A probable diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease was confirmed by standard cognitive tests used to detect memory loss. The results suggested his memory was severely impaired. The brain scans also showed that his hippocampus – a part of the brain involved in memory – had shrunk. This is a typical early sign of dementia.
A brain biopsy would be too risky, so understanding the biological mechanisms of his dementia is difficult – and this case remains a medical mystery at this point.
Cases of early-onset Alzheimer’s disease are on the rise in younger patients. Sadly, this is unlikely to be the last such rare case that we hear about.
Osman Shabir does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
It was an unusually warm and sunny morning when the people of Fishguard in north Pembrokeshire, Wales, arose on February 22 1797. Little could they have realised that over the next three days, their local area would play host to what is now described as the “last invasion of Britain”.
The story began during the summer before. French military leader General Louis Lazare Hoche and Irish revolutionary Theobald Wolfe Tone had planned a French expedition to Ireland. They wanted to assist the Society of United Irishmen, an organisation seeking Irish independence, in driving the British out of Ireland. But plans were abandoned due to stormy weather.
Hoche was undeterred, however, and put together another expedition. This time though, he wanted to rouse the British into rebellion against the crown. One of the French armies, the Légion Noire, was led by an Irish-American, Captain William Tate, who had gained military experience during the American War of Independence.
Tate was sent with four ships to Bristol, then Britain’s main port in the transatlantic slave trade. While there, his soldiers were supposed to goad Bristolian sailors into mutiny before spreading insurrection and chaos to London.
For several days in February 1797, blustery winds prevented Tate’s fleet from sailing up the Bristol Channel. Eventually, they gave up and searched for an alternative landing place. Heading west, they reached Pembrokeshire on Wednesday, February 22.
Tate’s army of 1,400 men, which consisted of 600 soldiers and 800 prison inmates, disembarked below Carreg Wastad Point near Fishguard. Overnight, he set up headquarters in a nearby vacated farm and, as planned, his ships departed. Next, Tate sent his soldiers out to collect supplies and announce the arrival of the French liberators from English oppression. It was from that point that everything fell apart.
Tate’s starving soldiers assaulted local people, ransacking their houses. Legend has it that some cooked geese in butter which is said to have resulted in serious food poisoning and may have contributed to subsequent French casualties.
Throughout the night, locals whose houses had been raided sought shelter with neighbours and word of the French invasion spread. Thomas Knox, a local commander, was attending a party nearby when he heard what had happened. He was slow to gather his men due to a lack of military experience. By Thursday, he had assembled the Fishguard Fencibles, but lacking resources and feeling overwhelmed, he retreated south towards Haverfordwest to wait for reinforcements.
Much more decisive was John Campbell, Lord Cawdor, who was at his country estate 60 miles away. He marched two local militias to Fishguard and on the way picked up Knox and the Fencibles. They finally reached the town late on Thursday. Their combined strength never amounted to more than 700 men. But there were several factors that eventually tipped the scales in favour of the Welsh defence force.
Against French expectations, the people of Pembrokeshire did not welcome the invaders. Several civilians armed themselves with pitchforks and scythes and small skirmishes occurred between individual farmers and soldiers across the area. Plundering cottages, some of the French soldiers happened upon barrels of wine salvaged from a Portuguese shipwreck. They got uproariously drunk and became incapacitated as a result.
Local legend has it that Jemima Nicholas, a cobbler, singlehandedly rounded up 12 drunk soldiers and locked them up in St Mary’s church in Fishguard. Unfortunately, it is impossible to verify this story due to a lack of contemporary sources.
Meanwhile, morale collapsed among the French soldiers as they found themselves marooned on hostile territory. Cut off from reinforcements or rescue, Tate saw no other choice but to send two officers to Fishguard seeking conditions of surrender.
It is said the treaty was signed in the building that is now the Royal Oak pub. Lord Cawdor bluffed his way through negotiations, not letting on that the Welsh troops were outnumbered.
To ensure a successful surrender the next morning, Cawdor encouraged the townspeople to witness the French assemble on nearby Goodwick beach from the hill above. He wanted the distant crowd to appear to the invading French like thousands of soldiers to discourage them from attempting one last desperate fight. According to legend, it was mostly the women’s traditional red flannel shawls that gave the civilians their military appearance.
Over the next century, Jemima became known as Jemima Fawr (Jemima the Great) and was part of the folk culture around the invasion. During the centenary celebrations, enough money was collected for a stone to be placed in her memory at St Mary’s churchyard.
For the bicentenary in 1997, Fishguard held a full-blown reenactment. Yvonne Fox, a local woman, played the role of heroic Jemima and did so until her death in 2010. Fishguard continues to commemorate the invasion to this day.
Another lasting legacy was the creation of the Last Invasion Tapestry by local women, which tells the entire tale in Welsh and English. It is 30 metres long, took four years to complete and is housed at Fishguard town hall.
Naturally, Jemima the Great and the red-cloaked women of Pembrokeshire take pride of place in the design.
Rita Singer receives funding from the European Regional Development Fund through the Ireland Wales Cooperation Programme as part of the Ports, Past and Present project team. She has also received funding from the DAAD, AHRC and NLHF.
Limiting how much coal countries can burn is considered an urgent priority for restraining global heating. After all, coal is the most carbon-rich of all fossil fuels and its combustion has contributed the most to planetary warming. For the first time in international talks, negotiators agreed to “phase down” coal use to prevent global temperature rise exceeding 1.5°C in the 2021 Glasgow Climate Pact.
Coal’s primacy in climate negotiations is partly because of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which has devised pathways to halting warming at 1.5°C. These scientific assessments prioritise the rapid phasing out of coal burning not only for the fuel’s carbon intensity and the need to head off CO₂ accumulation in the atmosphere, but also because cost-competitive alternatives are available in the form of solar and wind farms.
Researchers also stress the importance of decarbonising the power sector early in the green transition to enable other sectors, such as transport and industry, to run on clean electricity from the grid.
This puts the onus on certain nations to reduce emissions faster than others. The majority of global coal use can be found in emerging and developing countries, such as China and India. Here, large fleets of power stations and factories rely on coal which is cheap and abundant compared to other fossil fuels. By framing the solution to climate change as one in which coal is removed first, it is these countries that must commit to rapidly decarbonising in the next decade.
In our new paper, we highlight two problems with most published pathways to avoiding catastrophic climate change. First, it is unlikely that coal-dependent countries will be able to ditch the fuel as rapidly as these pathways set out.
And second, as this is the case, other fossil fuels, namely oil and gas, must be phased out more rapidly to compensate for coal’s slower exit. This would shift responsibility for mitigating climate change towards developed countries.
We compared how much coal use is expected to fall in modelled pathways to 1.5°C with the fastest power transitions that have taken place over the last 50 years, with all fuels and in all countries.
These transitions are shown in the figure below, and reflect a range of drivers, such as policy responses to the 1970s oil price crisis and political events such as wars, sanctions and the collapse of the Soviet Union. The red line labelled “world record” indicates the fastest pace that could be feasible with the political will to enact ambitious policies.
Based on modelled pathways from the IPCC, we estimate that coal power will have to be phased out in India, China and South Africa more than twice as fast as any historical power transition for electricity systems of comparable size. This is unlikely to be achievable or acceptable in any major coal-dependent developing country.
A more feasible pathway to eliminating coal might use the targets set out by the Powering Past Coal Alliance (PPCA), an international coalition of countries established in 2017. The PPCA favour a differentiated timeline for exiting coal power, with rich countries going first by 2030 and the rest of the world by 2050.
These targets reflect how developing countries are more dependent on coal and have less money to invest in the green transition, but bear less historical responsibility for causing climate change.
This differentiated pace would put several countries, including China, at the speed limit of historical transitions. In other words, it would offer them a pathway to decarbonisation that is difficult, but possible. This trajectory would see developed countries reducing carbon emissions roughly 50% faster compared to pathways without the fairer distribution of efforts proposed by the PPCA.
This inverts the narrative from successive climate summits: developed, not developing, countries are the ones that must do more in the short-term to limit warming.
It also has important consequences for oil and gas. In all countries, oil and gas production must fall even in published pathways to 1.5°C, rather than increasing as most countries plan.
But when the world phases out coal at the PPCA pace, oil and gas must be phased out correspondingly faster. This has a different impact on different countries. For example, cumulative oil production by the US from 2020 to 2050 is 20% lower than in a 1.5°C pathway without the differentiated efforts proposed by the PPCA.
Limiting climate change requires phasing out all three fossil fuels: coal, oil and gas. Our research finds that climate models and policy debates rely too much on winding down coal, especially in coal-dependent developing countries.
Instead, a fairer and more realistic balance of mitigation efforts is needed, which means more emphasis on eliminating oil and gas. It also means greater effort by the global north, even while all countries, including those in the global south, end coal power as quickly as possible.
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James Price receives funding from the UK Energy Research Centre (UKERC). He is a member of the Labour party.
Steve Pye has received funding from the UK Energy Research Centre (UKERC). He is a member of the Green Party of England and Wales.
You might know that physical activity can help lower your risk of getting many common types of cancer. But what many of us don’t realise is just how important physical activity is if you’ve been diagnosed with cancer.
While patients were previously told to rest during cancer treatment, the overwhelming body of evidence now shows that physical activity is safe and beneficial throughout cancer treatment and beyond. The World Health Organization also endorses physical activity for those with chronic conditions, including cancer.
Here are five ways physical activity could be beneficial to patients during and after cancer treatment.
A cancer diagnosis can be extremely emotional, and patients may feel uncertainty and fear regarding their diagnosis and treatment. Research shows that many patients experience increased feelings of anxiety and depression, alongside reduced quality of life. This may occur just after diagnosis, during treatment and in some cases is experienced for years after the completion of treatment.
But many studies have shown that physical activity during and after cancer treatment can help manage these mental health struggles, alongside improving patients’ self-esteem and overall mood.
Moderate-intensity aerobic exercise (such as brisk walking) two to three times a week combined with muscle strengthening (such as pilates or weight lifting) has been shown to significantly reduce anxiety and depression in people suffering with many different types of cancer, including breast, prostate, colorectal, gynaecological and lung cancer.
Fatigue is one of the most frequently reported side effects associated with cancer and its treatment, which can have a serious affect on a cancer patient’s daily life and their physical, emotional and mental wellbeing.
Research shows regular physical activity can help reduce feelings of fatigue. Evidence suggests that moderate to vigorous-intensity activity which combines both aerobic and muscle strengthening activities two to three times a week is beneficial for reducing fatigue in those diagnosed with breast and prostate cancer.
Many studies have shown that patients who are able to tolerate their prescribed dose of chemotherapy have a better prognosis. However, the dose of chemotherapy patients receive is often reduced due to a range of treatment-related side-effects and complications they experience.
Encouragingly, some studies suggest that breast cancer patients who completed muscle-strengthening or a combination of both aerobic and muscle-strengthening activities during treatment were less likely to need chemotherapy dose reductions. The evidence for a link between physical activity and chemotherapy is still emerging and research is ongoing.
Treatment for cancer, including surgery and chemotherapy, can lead to complications for some people, which may require hospitalisation. But research suggests that for patients with breast cancer physical activity can lower the risk of hospitalisation.
Researchers asked participants to take part in a 16-week programme of combined muscle strengthening and interval training which was performed twice a week during chemotherapy. They found that the group which performed a combination of strength and interval training had a 3% lower incidence of hospitalisation compared to those who were inactive.
A large review of 18 reviews of physical activity among those with cancer found that higher physical activity levels was associated with a reduced risk of cancer returning, and improved survival by up to 40%-50%.
Many patients with cancer avoid physical activity as they’re unsure of what it safe for them to do. But the World Health Organization recommends that all patients with cancer should avoid being inactive both during and after treatment.
Instead, it says adult cancer patients should aim to complete at least 150 minutes of moderate intensity physical activity each week that raises the heart beat (such as brisk walking, cycling and dancing). It also recommendeds that patients aim to do muscle strengthening exercises (such as weight lifting or yoga) at least twice a week.
While it can often be difficult to schedule in time to be physically active – especially during treatment – even small amounts of physical activity interspersed during the day are important for health. Some easy ways to include more activity into your day include getting off the bus a stop early or squatting while waiting for the kettle to boil. This form of activity may also be useful for cancer patients who are feeling fatigued, as it only requires a few minutes at a time throughout the day.
For those having cancer treatment, it’s important to remember that some days will be better than others. Take it easy on the days you feel unwell. On the days you’re feeling a bit better, try to increase the amount of exercise you do just a little.
It’s important to stay hydrated, not to overdo it and listen to your body. You may find being active more enjoyable if you involve friends and family.
Amanda Daley receives funding from National Institute of Health Research (NIHR). The views expressed are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the NHS, the NIHR or the Department of Health and Social Care.
Kajal Gokal does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
It’s one thing to know what makes people happy, but quite another to live a happy life oneself. I didn’t get a true taste of happiness until I quit my decade-long career as a happiness academic, packed all I’d need for many months onto a bicycle, and began meandering my way around the world to Bhutan.
For those unfamiliar with Bhutan, it’s a small Himalayan kingdom, famed for basing all its national policy decisions on happiness.
Quite the destination, quite the journey.
And I would learn more about happiness than I did as an academic. That’s not to dismiss knowledge acquired through books and letters. Yet there’s a lot to be said for actually getting direct experience in life.
Below are some of the important things I learned on a journey for happiness.
When people talk about happiness some dismiss it as a viable societal goal because happiness policy can be misconstrued as being about people smiling and laughing all the time.
Yet pleasant as smiling and laughing are, doing them all the time is neither realistic nor desirable. Difficult emotions are a natural part of life. These days I love a cry – it’s an important release. And anxiety, which I’m prone to, is something I’ll be open and curious about rather than hide from.
This article is part of Quarter Life, a series about issues affecting those of us in our twenties and thirties. From the challenges of beginning a career and taking care of our mental health, to the excitement of starting a family, adopting a pet or just making friends as an adult. The articles in this series explore the questions and bring answers as we navigate this turbulent period of life.
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The kind of happiness I value is deeper – grounded in connection, purpose and hope, yet has room for sadness and anxiety too. Indeed, it’s this kind of happiness that a country like Bhutan aspires to, and I think more countries (and people) should, too.
Goals can be helpful. They give direction in our day-to-day lives. But it’s easy to get wrapped up in attaining an outcome, believing our happiness depends on it.
Rather than being in what psychologists call flow – an immersive, in-the-moment state of being – we might doggedly push on towards a goal. Even though achieving our goals won’t always bring us happiness.
When I was cycling to Bhutan, I let go of the idea of ever reaching Bhutan many times, and through doing so I ensured my journey remained purposeful and enjoyable. And, when I did arrive, beautiful as Bhutan was, exhaustion and homesickness dominated. If we’re not happy along the way, then we ought to question whether it’s worth going at all.
There are many stories about what a happy life entails, but they’re not always backed up by reliable evidence. An example would be the “when I achieve this, I will be happy” story described above. Another popular story is that money buys happiness. I spent much of my research career examining this (and travelling humbly for 18 months).
What is clear is that having more money (beyond the point of meeting basic needs) is inconsequential when compared with having good quality relationships, looking after our mental and physical health, and living meaningfully in line with our beliefs and values. Yet, sadly, these things often get sacrificed in pursuit of more.
These stories persist because they support an economic system that is designed to increase GDP rather than improve the wellbeing of people and the planet.
Warm and loving relationships are essential for living a happy life. Yet that doesn’t mean these are easy to come by.
As an academic, I saw how important relationships were for happiness in the data. But like many, I had a difficult time realising them in my own life. We’re not taught that way and often think people will only love us when we meet certain criteria, rather than unconditionally for who we are.
What shocked me most on my cycle journey was people’s kindness and generosity. People would invite me into their lives, offering me food or a place to stay, even when they owned little. When I set off, I was either suspicious of this generosity or racing too quickly onwards to consider stopping. But with time, I learned to let people in, and this led to deeper connections and more happiness.
I wouldn’t have been able to reach Bhutan on a bicycle without facing a crisis or two. We will all face a crisis at some point. We might lick our wounds and get back in the saddle, but to find our way through a crisis psychologically, we need support from others. We also need to give ourselves time to make sense of what has happened and to ensure we move forward purposefully. These are all essential for resilience, and what helped me on my journey.
Nothing beats lying under the stars after a full day’s cycle through the mountains. Humans are of nature, yet we spend so much of our time indoors in built-up, often contrived, social spaces that do not meet fundamental needs. Nature is essential for our wellbeing – not just to feel calm and peaceful in the moment, but to sustain human life for generations to come.
Christopher Boyce is affiliated with BiGGAR Economics, an independent economics consultancy, and Health in Mind, a mental health charity.
More than 1,000km southwest of Mahé, the main inhabited island in Seychelles, lies a ring of coral islands called the Aldabra Atoll. The islands are a Unesco world heritage site and support a huge diversity of marine species including manta rays and tiger sharks. The atoll is also a breeding site for endangered green turtles.
Aldabra has long been protected from threats to its biodiversity by its remoteness. But now plastic debris is strewn across Aldabra’s coastlines, threatening nearby marine ecosystems. Research finds the likelihood of coral disease increases from 4% to 89% when coral are in contact with plastic.
The Seychelles Islands Foundation, who are responsible for managing Aldabra, conducted a plastic clean-up operation in partnership with Oxford University in 2019. Roughly 25 tonnes of plastic waste were removed from the islands.
A new study that we co-authored modelled the flow of plastic debris in the Indian Ocean between 1993 and 2019 and traced it to its source. We found that none of the plastic that washes up on Aldabra comes from the islands themselves.
Using data on plastic waste generation and fishing activity, we generated hundreds of billions of virtual plastic particles entering the Indian ocean. We then simulated their movement based on ocean currents, waves and winds.
Bottle caps and other low-buoyancy items sink fast and plastic loses buoyancy as it fragments or becomes covered in waterborne organisms. Items that remain buoyant for longer are transported further distances. To reach Aldabra from the eastern Indian Ocean, our model estimates that debris must be floating for at least six months.
We determined the likelihood that this debris would wash up on the coast by analysing the rate at which scientific “drifters” (instruments that record ocean currents) and GPS-tracked floating fishing devices become “beached”. Free-floating instruments such as these behave well as proxies for floating plastic. These observations indicate that around 3% of the debris that is within 10km of a coast beaches each day.
Our model predicts that Indonesia is responsible for most of the plastic debris, including as flip-flops and plastic packaging, that beaches across Seychelles. Various other countries including India, Sri Lanka and the Philippines are also major sources.
But Seychelles is also contaminated with plastic waste from other places.
Almost half of the plastic bottles found on Aldabra during the initial clean-up had been manufactured in China. But ocean currents do not flow directly between China and the western Indian Ocean. It is thus unlikely that a large number of bottles could float from China to Seychelles.
But Seychelles is close to a major shipping lane that connects southeast Asia to the Atlantic. If bottles were discarded from ships crossing the Indian Ocean then they would likely beach across Seychelles.
Research that we conducted in 2020 estimated that the fishing industry was responsible for 83% of the plastic waste on Aldabra. Most of the fishing gear abandoned by “purse seine” fisheries (a method of fishing that employs large nets to catch tuna) likely relates to regional fishing activity around Seychelles. But abandoned gear from longline fisheries may have drifted in from as far afield as western Australia.
Perhaps most importantly, our modelling also suggests that the rates at which plastic debris will beach in the Indian Ocean will follow strong seasonal cycles.
Winds tend to have a southerly (northward) component during the Indian Ocean’s summer monsoon season. But major debris sources such as Indonesia and India share similar, or more northerly, latitudes with Seychelles. During this period, debris from these sources tends to miss Seychelles and is transported further north.
By contrast, the winds reverse during the winter monsoons and transport debris directly towards Seychelles. We expect plastic debris accumulation to peak in Seychelles shortly after the winter monsoons (February to April). In the southernmost islands, almost all of the debris that beaches will do so at this point.
Seychelles is not responsible for generating this waste but face mounting environmental and economic costs. For example, 500 tonnes of litter remained following the initial clean-up of Aldabra’s coasts, which may cost up to US$5 million (£4 million) to remove.
The United Nations last year agreed to establish a global plastic treaty that will tackle plastic pollution at its roots. But negotiations only began recently and it may be a long time before the treaty has any meaningful impact.
Until then our modelling may help to establish other strategies to reduce the accumulation of plastic debris in Seychelles.
We identified fishing gear and shipping as being responsible for the majority of plastic pollution on Seychelles. Better enforcement of existing laws such as the 1983 ban on the disposal of plastic into the sea under the Marpol Convention should reduce the amount of plastic entering the Indian Ocean.
Predicting the peak of plastic accumulation in Seychelles will also maximise the effectiveness of beach clean-ups. Removing litter shortly after its arrival will minimise the time debris spends being broken down into unmanageable fragments.
Remote Indian Ocean islands are increasingly affected by plastic waste generated overseas. But by modelling the flow of plastic debris, we now have the chance to develop more effective strategies to reduce plastic accumulation and strengthen demands for stronger commitments under the global plastic treaty.
Don’t have time to read about climate change as much as you’d like?
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Noam Vogt-Vincent receives funding from the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC).
April Burt works with Seychelles Islands Foundation, who manage Aldabra Atoll
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