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Survey finds three-quarters of adults in Britain concerned about the impact of next health emergency

Major changes are needed to protect the most vulnerable people from the next global emergency, according to a report from the Red Cross that says three-quarters of people in the UK are worried about the next potential pandemic.

A survey for the charity found that 75% of people were concerned about the global impact of a future health emergency such as a pandemic, 71% about the impact of a personal health crisis, and 61% that climate change would have an impact on their lives. Three-quarters (76%) said the UK must address underlying inequalities exposed by Covid.

Gaps in health and social care to be eliminated

Key humanitarian needs to be met in emergencies.

Local welfare assistance schemes to use a cash-first approach to help ensure people facing serious financial hardship can afford essentials such as food, toiletries and warm clothes.

The provision of safe and legal routes for people seeking asylum and the right for all to a safe home and freedom from destitution.

International law to be upheld, and principled humanitarian action. It says the UK should ensure that those most in need are put first.

Opinium carried out the research for the report, interviewing 2,003 UK adults aged 18 and over between 27 and 29 April 2021.

A new film rejects the popular narrative and recasts the former president, 96, as hugely prescient thinker, particularly on climate change

When I reach Jimmy Carter’s grandson by Zoom, he answers wearing a Raphael Warnock campaign T-shirt. Jason Carter is a lawyer and politician himself, mid-40s, animated and well-read, with blue eyes reminiscent of his grandfather’s. He’s just got off the phone with his 93-year-old grandmother, Rosalynn. It’s a special day; Joe Biden is on his way to the Carter house in Plains, Georgia.

“My grandfather has met nearly everyone in the world he might want to,” Jason Carter says. “Right now, he’s meeting with the president of the United States. But the person he’d say he learned the most from was Rachel Clark, an illiterate sharecropper who lived on his family’s farm.

The climate emergency should not be used to make poorer countries dependent on private finance

On the campaign trail, Joe Biden made it clear that the environment would be at the heart of his economic agenda. In office, he has been true to his word by proposing fiscal and regulatory action to limit the damage from the climate emergency, while simultaneously addressing the inequalities that distort the US economy. No president has so fully embraced tackling the climate emergency. Republicans think it’s too hard a hug, while some Democrats think Mr Biden ought to hug harder. But the world should breathe a sigh of relief, especially after the climate denialism of the Trump administration.

President Biden’s green shift is both welcome and in tune with US public opinion. What is disappointing is that while he wants to deploy the power of the state at home, his administration wants markets to do the heavy lifting abroad. The climate emergency should not be used to make poorer countries dependent on private finance. Richer countries ought to provide enough no-strings cash to allow developing nations to gain the institutional capacity to sustain their own patterns of carbon-neutral consumption and investment. The US will double public climate finance to developing countries to $6bn a year. This is just a sliver of Mr Biden’s $2.25tn green jobs plan. Developing countries have no votes in the US Congress. But it is morally wrong for them to be collateral damage.

The latest survey of the UK’s top emerging practices reveals plenty of style and wit alongside a desire to prioritise diversity, the climate crisis and housing shortages over wealthy clients…

“I am a poster child,” says David Ogunmuyiwa, “for what you get if you invest in people’s education, healthcare and homes.” The son of immigrants, he grew up on the Aylesbury estate in south London, the often-vilified place that Tony Blair visited on the morning after his first election as prime minister, as the exemplar of the kind of blighted Britain that he was going to fix. But Ogunmuyiwa, inspired by seeing Richard Rogers’s Lloyd’s building across the river from his school, knew that he wanted to be an architect. Which, as the founder of the practice Architecture Doing Place, he now is.

“There are hundreds of me,” he continues, so he questions why he sees so few people like himself in his profession. He criticises the London borough of Hackney, which has a well-respected programme of building housing, but which in one of the most diverse areas of the country “has not employed anyone who looks like Stephen Lawrence” to design them (the particular significance of the murdered black teenager is that he was planning to become an architect at the time of his death in 1993).

New Architects 4, £30, is available from the Architecture Foundation