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

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