Rebecca Costa’s The Watchman’s Rattle: Thinking Our Way Out of Extinction  explores why societies struggle to solve complex problems even when the evidence is clear and the stakes are high. The title refers to the wooden rattle carried by medieval night watchmen, shaken to warn the town of approaching danger — a metaphor for the early warning signs that societies often ignore until it is too late. Costa argues that complexity can exceed our cognitive limits, leading to paraly

As Thorpeness contends with storms causing sudden erosion of the coastline and the loss of homes to the sea, it can be helpful to be reminded of the long view. Coastal change reshapes not just shorelines but entire communities — their economies, their social fabric, their sense of who they are. The story of Walberswick, just a few miles down our coast, shows us how profound that reshaping can be. Walberswick, at the mouth of the Blyth estuary, offers a clear example. Its seve

There are places where the land seems to hesitate, as though unsure whether to continue or to give itself up to the sea. The Suffolk coast is one of them. It is a coastline that lives with its own impermanence — a place where the horizon is both a comfort and a warning. Juliet Blaxland sensitively captured this tension in The Easternmost House  and The Easternmost Sky , books that have become quiet companions to many who live along this shifting edge. Her reflections offer m

How Communities Around the World Are Using Evidence to Regain a Sense of Control When the sea begins to creep closer each winter, when familiar dunes flatten after a single storm, when cliffs retreat by metres instead of centimetres, it’s easy to feel that nothing can be done. Across the world, coastal communities have been finding a quiet, practical way to steady themselves: they start gathering evidence about what’s happening . This does not to replace experts and the agenc

Could Humanitarian Innovations Offer Solutions to Communities Threatened by Coastal Erosion? Where This Began The starting point was work using drone-based systems to understand glacial retreat in the Alps and rockfall risk on Scottish Highland roads. Watching how relatively simple aerial surveys could reveal patterns in ice movement or identify unstable rock faces raised a question: if these methods could track environmental change in mountains, what else might they document

In February, a series of the storms on the East Coast of Britain changed the shoreline revealing large fragments of wrecks. What story might they tell? High resolutions images taken with a smart phone, 360 imaging taken with a compact camera and drone based photogrammetry have enabled the site and the woodwork to be shared with local historians and leading specialists from around the world. This has been done in high resolution 2D as an 'orthomosaic image' created from indiv

Half of Aldeburgh has already been lost to the sea, and more may be lost to storms, floods and changing fortunes. The Moot hall, once in the centre of the town, now overlooks the sea. But the sea also gave Aldeburgh its raison d'être, its prosperity and its identity. Aldeburgh’s fortunes have always been shaped by its river and coastline. The estuary provided a place for early settlements from Romans to Vikings. The sea not only was the source of its early wealth, but also it