Shaken Not Burned

Plastic is embedded in almost every everyday consumer product. It packages our cosmetics, holds our cleaning sprays, and lines our personal care items. It is light, waterproof, and cheap, making it the default choice for fast-moving consumer goods.  However, the vast majority of these plastic-wrapped products are designed to be used for just minutes, leaving behind a legacy of waste and microplast...

A summer of extreme heat and drought cut forecast European grain production by 16.7 million tonnes — worth around €3.2 billion at current prices. It is a stark reminder of how quickly climate shocks can expose vulnerabilities in food supply. But when crops fail or farmers struggle, the question often becomes: how can farmers do things differently? The answer from our agriculture series is: they ca...

We know that agriculture needs to change. But what if changing what happens on individual farms doesn’t change the food system around them? This week, Felicia talks to Ivo Degn , co-founder of Climate Farmers and founder of Re:Source , about why agricultural change depends on more than farming practice alone, and what a regenerative food system actually looks like. They discuss measurement, place,...

We often talk about changing farming as though the main question is what farmers should do differently. But a farm sits inside a much bigger system. In this week’s episode, Shaken Not Burned co-host Felicia talks to Richard Zaltzman , chief executive of Europe's food innovation community EIT Food , about the impact of that system. It starts with the idea of a landscape : not just a collection...

Food security is back on the agenda. In recent years, disrupted supply chains, war, extreme weather and volatile energy and fertiliser prices have all shown how quickly problems elsewhere can affect what food is available, where it comes from and what it costs. At the same time, there are growing concerns about the condition of the system producing that food: climate risk, declining soil health, w...

Insurance is supposed to protect us from risk. But what happens when the risks themselves are changing? Risk doesn't disappear because we fail to recognise or price it . Decisions that make sense individually — pumping more groundwater during a drought, building another housing development, keeping water prices low — can accumulate until environmental change becomes economic loss. Insurance i...

What makes something insurable — and what happens when the risks change? This week on Shaken Not Burned , Felicia talks to Rachel Delhaise , group head of sustainability at Convex Insurance , about how insurers deal with a changing and uncertain climate. As climate risks grow, insurance can become more expensive or harder to find. But that doesn’t necessarily mean the risk has simply become uninsu...

When disaster strikes, insurance may pay some of the bill. But who pays the rest? This week on Shaken Not Burned , Felicia Jackson talks to Regula Hess , deputy head of WWF Switzerland , about the growing insurance protection gap — and why it matters far beyond the insurance industry. When losses aren't insured, they don't disappear. They fall on households, businesses and governments, a...

We rely on water for pretty much everything: growing food, manufacturing goods, building cities and sustaining everyday life. But what happens when the systems we've built around it start to reach their limits? Felicia Jackson talks to economist Dr Robert Johnston , director of the George Perkins Marsh Institute at Clark University, about why he sees today's water challenge as a systems...

As extreme heat and wildfires sweep across Europe, the gap between recognising climate risk and responding to it is becoming harder to ignore. The good news is that the evidence, expertise and many of the solutions we need already exist. Why, then, is meaningful action still so difficult? That was the question at the centre of this special live edition of Shaken Not Burned, recorded at SOAS during...

Describing infrastructure as boring was a compliment. A building used to have a relatively straightforward job: keep the weather out and the people inside reasonably comfortable. Roads moved traffic, power systems supplied electricity and factories made things. Once infrastructure had been built, the task was largely to maintain it until it needed replacing. Sure, politicians like to throw themsel...

For years, sustainability has been associated with targets, reporting and disclosure . While those remain essential, they're starting to take a smaller part of the picture. As organisations operate under growing pressure from ageing infrastructure, volatile energy systems, climate disruption and more complex supply chains, sustainability is becoming part of day-to-day operational decision-mak...

For decades we've largely thought about buildings as fixed assets : we build them, maintain them, and expect them to provide the spaces where everyday life happens. But what if that's only part of the story ?  The built environment accounts for around 40% of global emissions; much of it was designed for a different climate , and replacing it simply isn't an option. As cities become...

Modern cities appear to function effortlessly. We switch on the lights, turn on the tap, catch a train, connect to the internet or walk into a hospital without giving much thought to the systems that make it all possible. Beneath that apparent simplicity sits a network of interconnected infrastructure that keeps everyday life moving. In this episode of Shaken Not Burned , Felicia speaks to Rodrigo...

Welcome to the final episode in our arc on the fashion industry, where we ask an uncomfortable question: are we trying to make fashion more sustainable, or are we mostly trying to manage the side effects of a system that produces more clothing than the world actually needs? Over the past few weeks we've explored the industry from several different angles. We interviewed Kristina Elinder Lilja...

Fashion is often described as one of the world's most polluting industries. The scale can be difficult to grasp as it feels so personal, but every year, billions of garments are produced, sold, worn briefly and discarded, with consequences that reach far beyond our wardrobes. The industry is worth around $2.4 trillion and is estimated to account for up to 8% of global carbon emissions. It con...

The clothes you're wearing have travelled a remarkable distance before reaching your wardrobe. A typical garment may spend months moving through a global network of farms, mills, factories, suppliers, logistics providers and retailers. Raw materials are sourced in one country, processed in another, assembled somewhere else and shipped across continents before arriving in stores. What begins a...

For years, sustainability in fashion has often been discussed almost as a parallel conversation to the business itself. Some brands publish reports, set targets and talk about responsibility, while others turn their sustainability credentials into a marketing tool.  Yet, at the corporate level, many of the real decisions are still being driven by the old metrics of margins, supply chains and growt...

AI is no longer just a technology issue, it’s starting to reshape how whole systems operate.  Yet we’re not paying enough attention to that yet: most of the focus on AI is on what it can do, with individuals and organisations alike rushing to implement this new technology. But AI capability is advancing extremely quickly, while the systems around it —  governance and regulation, infrastructure, or...

As AI systems become more autonomous, the conversation is shifting from capability toward something much bigger: trust, legitimacy, identity and participation in digital systems. In this episode of Shaken Not Burned , Felicia speaks to Erika Maslauskaite , co-founder and CEO of alongID , about the rapidly evolving world of digital identity, interoperability and cross-border trust infrastructure —...

Generative AI promised to transform how we work, while Agentic AI is beginning to transform how businesses themselves are built.   In this week’s episode of Shaken Not Burned , Felicia Jackson talks to Ethan Ouyang , who is AI ATOMS Spokesperson and responsible for North America Market & Partnerships. ATOMS is the venture building platform developed by DeepWisdom ,  one of China’s leading arti...

AI is becoming one of those topics where the scale of the claims can make it surprisingly difficult to work out what is actually happening. We are told it will transform business, unlock extraordinary productivity gains, reshape jobs, and even help solve major global challenges like climate change. At the same time, there are growing concerns about energy demand, governance failures, bias, job los...

This is the final episode in our mining arc. Rather than revisiting what we’ve already covered, we step back to ask a different question: what does mining actually teach us about how change happens in complex systems? Across the series, one tension kept coming up. The transition to a cleaner economy depends on scaling one of the most environmentally intensive industries on earth. We need more mine...

Welcome to the latest episode in our mining arc! In the previous two episodes, we covered the geopolitics of critical minerals and whether deep sea mining is the innovation we need to meet growing demand for critical clean tech raw materials. This week, we turn to one of the most important lessons emerging from the mining sector: modern projects succeed when trust is built before the digging begin...

Welcome to the second instalment of our mining arc. After covering the geopolitics of critical minerals (check out the episode here ), this week we ask a harder question: is deep sea mining a necessary innovation, or a risk we don’t yet understand well enough to take? Deep sea mining means extracting minerals from the bottom of the ocean, at depths of 200 metres and beyond, no easy feat. It’s ofte...