I attended a two hour seminar on Future Climate organised by the North West Climate Change Partnership It was a rather depressing affair since it seems quite clear that we are rushing headlong towards a climate catastrophe and all the speakers could really do was map the dimensions of our collective global failure to avert it, with an excess of giant powerpoint data slides.

Perhaps the most coherent of the presentations was from Jon Lovell who (rather surprisingly?) works for Deloitte, one of the big accountancy/consultancy firms. I’m going to pick up from his last point which was thata “new paradigm” is needed for the “urban-globalisation nexus”.

What Jon was referring to was the well documented urban trend towards living in cities, and the growth of the population of those cities, many of them truly enormous. The map of the growth to come (much of it in Asia)…