Thomas Hale and Hannah Ritchie

Public policy expert Professor Thomas Hale and data scientist Dr Hannah Ritchie discuss how we can adapt to the biggest issues facing humankind such as climate change and environmental degradation.

In Long Problems: Climate Change and the Challenge of Governing across Time, Hale explains how the politics of the present dominates our efforts to tackle climate policy while the impacts of climate change will last thousands of years. He explains why we find it hard to act over ‘long problems’ and why our future interests carry little weight. Hale argues for new strategies to tilt climate policies towards better outcomes. Hale is professor in global public policy at Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government and has been a government and UN advisor on COVID and net zero policies.

In Not the End of the World: How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet, Ritchie argues that the data shows we have made progress on many environmental issues and could be on track to achieve true sustainability for the first time in human history. She says the problems are big but solvable and outlines what we can do to make an impact and what we urgently need to focus on to make the planet sustainable. Ritchie is senior researcher in the Programme for Global Development at the University of Oxford and deputy editor and lead researcher at Our World in Data. New Scientist called her ‘the woman who gave COVID-19 data to the world’.