19th March 2014 Vancouver, Canada
A few weeks ago I found myself in a bar in Houston, Texas. Old Colt 45 pistols for door handles, animal skulls for wall hangings, a single guitarist playing a mournful country song – I’d walked into a cliché movie set (awesome)…
11th March 2014 Havana, Cuba
I spent much of last week in Isla de la Juventud, one of the many hundreds of islands that make up Cuba. It’s called Juventud because thousands of youths – Cuban and foreign – studied there in boarding schools in the 1980s. Out of the 100 schools that were planned to be built sixty-two were […]
6th March 2014 Brasilia, Brazil
Globalisation means more than having Facebook friends from different countries or receiving real-time news from across the world on Twitter. A globalised world means we share a lot of our problems and the responsibility to find solutions. That is what brought me into the Foreign Policy and International Cooperation world: if we work together as […]
6th March 2014
by guest blogger Baroness Verma This blogpost follows Baroness Verma’s official visit to Bulgaria, 3-5 March. It was also published in Standart newspaper. I am delighted that I had the chance to visit Bulgaria this week. As European partners, Bulgaria and the UK need to share ideas on the big challenges of our generation: ensuring energy security, tackling […]
17th February 2014 New Delhi, India
In elementary Geography we are taught that there are two poles on Earth – one in the Arctic and the other in the Antarctic, but that’s not true! Did you know that there is also a Third Pole? The Hindu Kush-Himalayan region is the Earth’s third Pole as it’s the storehouse of the third largest […]
Read more on North Pole, South Pole and the Third Pole! | Reply
2nd December 2013 Havana, Cuba
As I travel around Cuba talking to people about the United Kingdom, I am constantly surprised by how little many Cubans really know about my country. This blog is an attempt to put that right. Here are nine things you probably don’t know about the UK: 1. There is free education in the UK. The large […]
22nd November 2013 Brasilia, Brazil
This week Ministers and other authorities joined the nineteenth Conference of the Parties (COP-19) here in Warsaw. During the High-Level Segment, opened by the Secretary-General of the United Nations Ban-Ki Moon, Ministers and representatives from member countries made their statements which set out their expectations for Warsaw, Lima and Paris. In his speech, the Secretary […]
Read more on COP-19: nearly the end but running into overtime | Reply
19th November 2013 Brasilia, Brazil
The nineteenth Conference of the Parties has just seen its first week in Warsaw, Poland. Since Monday (11), representatives from 195 member states, as well as civil society, business, academia, media, and the UN secretariat have been submerged in the complex web of the UN climate change negotiations. Warsaw is an important stepping stone on the road […]
Read more on COP-19: Half-time, but not quite there yet | Reply
12th November 2013 Houston, USA
I recently had the opportunity to join Sir Mark Walport, the UK Government’s Chief Scientific Adviser, on his trip through Texas before he headed on to Canada. Our Science and Innovation teams coordinated his visit, which focused on the potential for building UK-North America links in energy and sharing best practices in policy and regulation. […]
Read more on UK Chief Scientific Adviser explores energy in Texas | Reply
21st October 2013 Brasilia, Brazil
Part of my role is dedicated to international negotiations on climate change, and the science used to feed the policy discussions has equal importance. That said, I have spent quite a lot of time over the past fortnight going through the findings of the first volume of the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report, published on 27 […]
Read more on Climate Change: no more room for scepticism | Reply