Look to the helpers

Upcoming events

Scaling up Early Action beyond 2025

The understanding and use of early warning and early action to reduce the impacts of climate-related hazards has progressed significantly. However, there is still a long way to go to embed them as normative approaches.

The Risk-informed Early Action Partnership (‘REAP’) was launched at the United Nations Climate Action Summit in 2019 to help address the lack of coherence and complementarity across early warning and early action efforts, and to enable impact at scale through a multi-stakeholder approach that connects the humanitarian, development, and climate communities.

Next month Wilton Park will convene a dialogue where participants will reflect on the future trajectory of early warning and early action, balancing the progress of recent years with the urgent need to do more to reduce the impacts of climate-related disasters.

Thought leaders from governments, INGOs, UN agencies, the private sector, and related initiatives, networks and partnerships will come together to lay the groundwork for a shared long-term vision for collaboration and cooperation on early warning and early action, and establish a roadmap to success.

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British-Spanish Tertulias

We’re pleased to be supporting the British-Spanish Tertulias 2024;  the most important event in the bilateral calendar. Tertulias  is hosted alternately in the UK and Spain and meets annually.

Tertulias convenes British and Spanish leaders and experts from government, industry, academia and civil society to share perspectives and consider collaborative ways forward on topical issues of interest to both countries, and of particular relevance to the bilateral relationship. It is independently run, with most of the funding coming from private sponsorship, but with close support from the British and Spanish governments.

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Recent events

Through the KALEIDOSCOPE: new facets of biosecurity

Biosecurity has changed, requiring governments and society to tackle complex intersectional issues.

A new initiative, KALEIDOSCOPE, will build an interdisciplinary community to meet the challenge. This August workshop looked at developing UK expertise and explored capability gaps, opening the door for collaborative research under the new US-UK Strategic Dialogue on biosecurity.

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Transformative change for global biodiversity: the role of gender equality and social inclusion

How to ensure that that women, girls, and marginalised groups are at the heart of efforts to tackle the global biodiversity crisis was the theme of this event in early September.

Held in partnership with the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, it gathered participants from 14 countries ahead of the UN Biodiversity conference, COP 16, next month in Colombia.

It heard how there’s strong evidence that biodiversity conservation initiatives are more likely to produce positive, sustainable outcome for the environment and for society if they are planned, designed and implemented with the participation of people from all segments of society who may be affected or involved.

A set of principles to promote inclusion was agreed – look out for these in the conference report, due in October.

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Wilton Park@LSE: The future of UK soft power

A new government presents an important opportunity for the UK to assess its standing in the international soft power arena and plan strategically to achieve foreign policy aims within an increasingly volatile global context.

This Wilton Park panel discussion at LSE brought together key soft power actors and experts to examine the current state of play, visions of future UK soft power and key enablers for the UK to maintain and strengthen its position as a significant player in this space.

Listen to Evie Aspinall, Director, British Foreign Policy Group discussing the importance of UK soft power in a turbulent geopolitical landscape.