When I first started working on environmental issues – what seems like a millionty years ago, it seemed like the issue was technical first and foremost. That hasn’t felt true for a long time.

All around there are stories of environmental impacts and how they bleed into and out of social, cultural and economic ones.

Yet we’ve got the technologies that might not get us all the way to net zero, or do so in the most elegant way, but can still get us a very long way towards where we need to be. Technologies that are becoming ever more efficient, with problems increasingly identified addressed, worked around or managed. From the story of solar PV continuing to defy ever greater expectations in deployment, to heat networks and heat pumps, there is an ever-growing array of options to decarbonise energy systems.

Around the world governments are making funding available to reduce or remove costs for these technologies. Cost is often cited as the next barrier, yet free measures and new forms of financing are increasingly available to reduce it. Increased take-up of measures then allows the supply chain to invest, innovate and bring costs down, further helping to widen the potential market. We still can’t give away free measures though – and huge amounts of money can be spent trying to do so.

Meanwhile, around the world more and more people are saying they believe climate change is real and that action is needed. They think that governments should take action and take the lead. Yet that isn’t what lots of people are voting for. Instead people are voting for politicians who say we need to ‘drill baby, drill’. They are voting against politicians who propose to put in place small measures which are still a long way away from what the science suggests is needed.

There are all kinds of reasons for that – and that’s what I want this to be a space to explore. Maybe it’s just a cyclical thing – a year in which there are billions of people voting, at a time when living standards are feeling relatively under pressure. Incumbents all around the world have lost votes and in many cases have lost office as people protest that the status quo isn’t working for them, however much they might or might not like who they are voting for.

Climate change and biodiversity loss are going to continue to compound societal and economic pressures in a negative feedback loop. As the impacts of those two linked global shifts continue to manifest ever more often and violently, it’s likely this is now the most stable climate system we’ll experience in our lifetime. Records continue to be broken, we see the world making and remaking itself as it adjusts to the climate impacts. Places we once knew become strange to us as the seasons shift out of kilter and different creatures and ecosystems that were so aligned become disconnected.

Waiting until things calm down and it all goes back to normal and then the old stories will feel true again doesn’t feel sustainable. The urgency of the climate imperatives, the science, suggests that we can’t wait, delay is just increasing the risk and harm, hurting ever more people and hugely increasing the numbers of people who are vulnerable.

We need to find stories that resonate with people in, because of and throughout the changing seasons. This feels like a space to explore that. About storytelling and psychology, science and sense-making. Trying to understand how thoughts and needs connect to actions and deeds.