Could you eat a plant-based diet for seven days? You may be thinking: ugh, no way! Too much to think about / my family have to eat meat / isn’t it just chickpeas and salad…? I felt exactly the same way when my son – an inveterate carnivore - initially proposed it two years ago. The challenge was doing the [...]
Why Cycle?For several years I would regularly drive to work because it was the quickest option. That was before I became aware of air pollution and all the health and inequality problems it wreaks on our communities. Around then I also got switched on to climate change and I started getting the train and walking to work instead. And then [...]
If you were on Twitter or the BBC news website around the end of June you might have seen slightly alarming footage of cars mounting pavements in Lee Green, a council ward in the northeast of Lewisham. This was an early teething problem, quickly rectified, associated with the introduction of London’s largest low traffic neighbourhood. It is one of a [...]
A report from the International Energy Agency says that although carbon dioxide levels fell by 17% on average globally during the lockdown, emissions are already back to within 5% of last year’s, and warns that a rebound may cause dangerously high emissions as we go back to “normal”. If emissions rebound, says the executive director, Fatih Birol, “it is [...]
As a respiratory doctor, I’m really interested in air pollution, so the recent high media profile of the various relationships between Covid-19 and air pollution has caught my attention. The bulk of my work as a doctor is seeing people who come into hospital with flare ups of their chronic lung condition - mostly asthma and COPD. In fact, [...]
A lot has changed since Lewisham Council declared a climate emergency in February 2019, with a pledge to achieve carbon neutrality by 2030. More than a year has passed and we all have found ourselves in a very different reality as a result of global coronavirus outbreak. What remains unchanged is the ever increasing urgency of taking positive action [...]
The Climate Resilience team have now issued the Lewisham Climate Emergency Strategic Action Plan. It was ratified by the Mayor and Cabinet on Wednesday 11th March. The Action Plan is downloadable here
We closed our street for the first time to become a ‘play street’ on car-free day. Our street slopes steeply up from the South Circular up to Blythe Hill Fields in SE6. We’re a friendly community, linked by many close relationships, inter-dependencies and common culture. We’ve had Big Lunches and street parties, and we share babysitting, gardening tips, bulk food [...]