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How much should people in Britain worry about food security?  Here’s a starter for ten, taken from a recent Guardian article by Harriet Green:
For three years, my husband has talked about taking to the hills. About buying a smallholding on Exmoor where, with our four-year-old daughter, we can safely survive the coming storm - famine, pestilence [...]

From a piece on the credit crunch in the current London Review of Books, the sort of opening that you find yourself reading more than once…
Last November, I spent several days in the skyscrapers of Canary Wharf, in banks’ headquarters in the City and in the pale wood and glass of a hedge fund’s St [...]

Before [...]

I’m over in Geneva, where I’ve just been presenting to the IASC, which is composed of the heads of the world’s largest humanitarian agencies (including UN agencies like WFP, UNICEF, UNHCR, UNDP and the WHO; NGOs like Oxfam; and the Red Cross / Red Crescent movement).  Here’s my presentation, which uses food prices as a springboard from which [...]

On the front of yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, via John Robb - a sign of things to come, perhaps:

BOULDER, Colo. — When suburbanites look out their front doors, a lot of them want to see a lush green lawn. Kipp Nash wants to see vegetables, and not all of his neighbors are thrilled. “I’d rather see [...]

Today, I gave the closing address at the RUSI conference, Protecting the Critical Infrastructure, in a session introduced by RUSI’s head of risk and resilience, Anthony McGee. From the introduction to the conference by RUSI’s head, Professor Michael Clarke:
Protecting the Critical National Infrastructure and ensuring the continuation of political, social and economic activity is vital [...]

A propos of David’s post, here’s what’s scaring me witless this weekend:
The Ug99 strain of the killer wheat fungus (stem rust), which recently infected wheat farms in western Iran, is a serious threat to global food security, agricultural scientists have warned. They have said the fungus may affect additional wheat-producing countries.
Mahmoud Solh, director-general of the [...]

It’s been a long day, so excuse the bad mood. But, really: is it possible to read an article like this without falling further into deep despair?
Ira Winkler has the delightful job title of ‘penetration-testing consultant’. Hired by a US power utility, his task was to see how hard it was to take over their [...]

Below the jump, Alex and my talk at last weekend’s Progressive Governance summit - it’s a four minute summary of our paper on multilateralism and global risks.

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On Saturday, Alex and I presented our paper on multilateralism and global risks to heads of state at the Progressive [...]

As David mentioned yesterday, Downing Street’s asked us to prepare a paper on reform of international institutions and present it to various heads of state and international agencies at tomorrow’s Progressive Governance Summit outside London. 
Our central argument is that the international system’s core challenge is to get better at managing global risks like climate change, [...]

On Saturday, Alex and I will be at the Progressive Governance Summit, where we’ll be presenting a new paper on multilateralism and global risks to twenty or so heads of state.
The summit’s website has just been launched on the Downing Street domain. Our paper will be published there on Saturday morning. Hopefully, we’ll have a [...]

A few weeks back the Guardian noted the transformation of Guinea-Bissau, a tiny, jungly and desperately poor country on the tip of West Africa, into the world’s first “narco-state.” Presumably this phrase means that its economy relies on drugs, though it has never been clearly defined and Guatemala and Afghanistan have also laid claim to [...]

Frank Furedi on Spiked earlier this year:
From global warming to obesity, bird flu to terrorism: 2007 was the year when the threat of an apocalypse became an everyday, even banal public issue. It was a year of ceaseless alarmist warnings about an ever-expanding number of calamities facing the planet…
One consequence of Western societies’ obsessive preoccupation with [...]

In a recent post on Global Dashboard, I wrote about resilience, drawing on thinking that Alex and I have been developing together for a new project we hope to launch later this year.
The post was triggered by David Miliband’s argument that one of the defining features of the era we live in is a shift [...]

Today is the 65th anniversary of the Bethnal Green Tube disaster:
On that day [in 1943], hurrying for shelter from an air raid, 173 people were killed on this staircase without a single bomb falling. In all, 62 children, 84 women and 27 men died with a terrible simplicity: at the enquiry, the magistrate said that [...]

Stephen Flynn, the Senior Fellow for national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, has an oustanding essay - America the Resilient - in the current edition of Foreign Affairs.
Right at the heart of Flynn’s argument is that resilience needs to be a bottom-up undertaking - something I’ve written about here before, as has [...]

The world is beginning to resemble a low-budget television comedy:
A Pakistan ISP that was ordered to censor YouTube accidentally managed to take down the video site around the world for several hours Sunday.
The Pakistani government ordered ISPs to censor YouTube to prevent Pakistanis from seeing a trailer to an anti-Islamic film by Dutch politician Geert Wilders. YouTube has since removed the clip for [...]

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault is situated more than one hundred metres deep inside the mountain permafrost on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen, some 620 miles south of the North Pole deep inside the Arctic circle.
It’s pretty barren.
No trees grow on the archipelago, which is home to some 2,300 people. It was selected because of [...]

Having analyzed 335 emerging diseases from 1940 to 2004, scientists have converted the results into maps correlated with human population density, population changes, latitude, rainfall and wildlife biodiversity. The data showed that disease emergences have roughly quadrupled over the past 50 years. Some 60% of the diseases traveled from animals to humans (zoonoses) and the [...]

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