Geography Matters

In this episode my guest is Hannah Cloke, Regius professor of Meteorology and climate science at the University of Reading. Her title is rather special as she is one of the few professors in Britain appointed by the King or Queen. Her specialty is hydrology and flooding and she now appears regularly on TV whenever there isa major flooding issue. I started by noting the very hot summer of 2026 and Hannah noted that the global climate is now very clearly warming up quite rapidly. One consequence of this is that warmer air is able to hold much more moisture and this has been an important contributory cause of both heavy rainfall and flooding in both Britain and continental Europe. The floods in Valencia in 2025 and the major flooding in Germany in 2021 are clear examples, as are the floods in Yorkshire, Cumbria and the Severn. Beyond Europe we are seeing both more and stronger hurricanes and typhoons as warm seas and air encourage stronger storms. In addition there are now big issues with both melting ice and rising sea levels and the melting of Himalayan and Alpine glaciers. The disastrous floods in Nepal caused by glacial collapse in September 2026 highlight this as do the floods in Switzerland caused by the collapse of part of the Birch glacier on the village of Blatten. But shrinking glaciers also mean the possibility of a longer term shortage of water. This is very important in the Himalayas and the Tibean plateau which are the source of many very important rivers in South and South East Asia: the Bramaputra, the Ganges, Indus, Mekong. Irrawaddy and the Yangtze. The lives of billions of people depend on the water from these rivers. Hannah finishes by stressing that we need to be much more careful in our use of water. It is a scarce resource and it could become much scarcer, floods or not.

In this episode I am delighted to have with me Ed Conway to discuss his new book 'Trade World'. Ed is the economics editor of Sky News and in 2023 he published his first booked 'Material World' which looked at some of the key raw materials - salt, copper, iron, oil etc on which our modern world depends. In his new book he looks at the origins, the structure and organisation of the international trade system which our modern world depends on. Many of the products we consume today are not produced in our own countries but imported from overseas. we get many of our fruit and vegetables from southern Europe and our clothes from half way around the world. The T shirt I am wearing is from Nicaragua, but it could have come from Vietnam or Bangladesh or Turkey. Ed looks in his book at the history of supply chains, going back to Greek and Roman Times and the complex web of trade across the Mediterranean and the developments during the Dutch and British empires. He focuses on three key examples in his book, bread, clothing and cars. We should not be surprised by cars, as many of us are used to cars from Germany, Italy, France, Korea and Japan, but now they are also coming from China and Malaysia. Bread is more of a surprise but ,much of the wheat used in its manufacture now comes from North america. But, as he notes we are facing a big change at present. The current era of globalization which got under way in the post war era with the off shoring of production, particularly to SE Asia, is now under threat. People used to argue that we were seeing the 'end of geography'. We could get anything we wanted from anywhere. But Ed suggests we may now be seeing the Return of Geography' with countries and companies re-shoring production and looking at the risks of being dependent on key goods produced abroad. This is why the British government have just intervened to ensure the continuation of steel production in Britain. Can a modern country risk being completely dependent on steel produced overseas? What if the tap is turned off at a time of conflict? Increasingly, countries are thinking about the need to maintain the production of key items within national borders.

In this podcast Klaus Dodds and I go back to a topic we discussed in the first series - how, when and where does geography matter. We start by arguing that everything that happens in the world happens in both time and space. In that sense geography is everywhere. But we argue that the role and importance of geography varies over time and across societies. In the Age of Discovery sailors from Western countries were exploring and opening up hitherto unknown parts of the world. Then in the mid- late C19th, geography was increasingly important for Western colonial powers as new parts of the world were incorporated into the growing international system. This period was associated with a set of some western views about the links between climate and economic and social development which tended to argue that western countries had developed rapidly because of their climatic and other advantages. From mid C20th onwards these views were questioned and economic and social development was increasingly seen to be linked to a wider set of economic and political factors. We discuss th difference between North and South Korea after the end of the Korean war in 1953, of East and West Germany and the rise of both the semi-conductor industry in Taiwan from the 1970s and the rapid economic growth of Singapore: an island with very few physical advantages. We conclude by looking at what has happened in recent years, and Klaus suggests that while in the 1990s some people argued that geographical location would become less important, in the last few years climate change, wars and political instability are pointing to the resurgent importance of place

Oceans are very important. They cover 71% of the worlds's surface and, as well as their importance for fishing, trade and transport they play a major role in climatic and environmental stability. They absorb a very high proportion of the C02 we produce and without their absorbtion capacity the world would be heating up much faster. They also transport the heat received from solar radiation from the equatorial belts towards the poles by a series of major currents. This is critical, otherwise there would be a global heat imbalance with equatorial regions heating up and the polar regions getting colder. Britain is a major beneficiary of this process via the Gulf Stream which flows up from the Gulf of Mexico, along the east coast of the USA, then across the Atlantic to the British Isles. This is why the Scilly Isles and Cornwall have Palm trees and other sub-tropical plants. But the Gulf Stream is part of a much bigger system known as the Atlantic conveyor system whereby the warm waters begin to cool and sink as they reach the North Atlantic and Iceland and are transported back at depth towards the equator. There are similar systems in the Pacific and in the Southern Hemisphere including the Humbolt current off Peru which is important for fishing. The Pacific also experiences an alternation of tropical warming and cooling every few years called El Nino and El Nina which causes major changes in weather systems across South america, South Africa, and Australia. In addition to these important climatic elements, warming of the oceans and the atmosphere means that much greater qualities of moisture are being absorbed into the atmosphere and generating more frequent and stronger tropical storms and hurricanes, the tail ends of which are hitting Britain and western Europe causing heavy rainfall and flooding. In addition to all this, seas and oceans support an estimated 60-70 million fishermen and women and the 200 million tons of fish caught annually provides the major source of protein for 2-3 billion people. Last but not least we discuss transport. Some 90% of world trade by weight, though only 70% by value goes by sea - oil and gas, ironore,wheat, soya, timber, cars and container ships. Only the lightest and most valuable cargoes go by air. And when major trade routes are blocked as the Persian Gulf and the Straits of Hormus, then the global economy feels the pinch. The oceans are important.