Josef Konvitz, Chair, PASCAL International Observatory, wrote a paper on climate change, or rather how to cope with it, as a challenge to democracy, after driving across France and Belgium on July 25 2019, the hottest day of that year (42 degrees).

There is a real risk that those in favour of more and stronger measures to address climate change, and those opposed, will cancel each other out. Elections can reverse policies. Meanwhile climate change has undermined the sectoral assumptions on which national policies are based, and spatial change is outpacing the policy cycle. A broad reform of the public sector to give greater priority to spatial change is needed to cope with irreversible changes in the environment, and more frequent and costly crises.

This paper was presented on 21 November 2019 at a seminar sponsored by the Institute for Advanced Studies, University of Stirling.