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The signposts have been around for decades, and the territory is increasingly well mapped. So while the past may be a foreign country, the future is an increasingly familiar one – in which we continue to be alarmingly ourselves.

In this vivid and disturbing climate-change novel, Chris Beckett, winner of the Arthur C Clarke award, compellingly illustrates the consequences of our species’ fatal hard-wiring. Though a knight’s move away from his acclaimed sci-fi trilogy Dark Eden, Mother of Eden and Daughter of Eden, his new work shares a preoccupation with the survival and evolution of societies in inhospitable worlds.

Related: Chris Beckett wins Arthur C Clarke award for Dark Eden

Beckett’s focus is less on the speculative question 'what if?' than the more provocative and poignant 'what when?'

My trip to islands that bore the brunt of Hurricanes Irma and Maria proved one thing: we must think again about how to help those most at risk

• Lady Scotland is secretary general of the Commonwealth

In Pointe Michel, on the Caribbean island of Dominica, I met a woman sitting in the middle of a pile of rubble. On her right there was a fridge and on her left a ruined mattress – the only recognisable possessions among the jumble of concrete, wood, metal, glass, galvanised iron and everything else that just a few weeks ago used to be her home. She and her family had been spared but they had lost everything when the wrath of Hurricane Maria exploded there, another terrifying manifestation of climate change.

Related: 'It feels like Dominica is finished': life amid the ruins left by Hurricane Maria | Janise Elie

Related: Hurricane Maria: the slow road to rebuilding stricken Dominica – in pictures

Payment to owner of Loy Yang B – one of country’s dirtiest plants – was compensation for short-lived carbon tax

The owner of one of Australia’s dirtiest coal-fired power plants quietly moved $1bn offshore within days of pocketing $117m from taxpayers in compensation for Labor’s now-defunct carbon tax.

The revelation, contained in the Paradise Papers, has prompted renewed criticism of the “chronic failure” of Australian climate policy and warnings against future cash handouts to multinational polluters.

Within days of the $116.9m payment from taxpayers, Loy Yang B’s owner upstreamed $1bn out of its Australian operations

This government can’t square the wheel on keeping its coal generators in business and meeting the Paris agreement

Until recently the battle to avert catastrophic climate change – floods, droughts, famine, mass migrations – seemed to be lost. But with the tipping point just years away, the tide is finally turning, thanks to innovations ranging from cheap renewables to lab-grown meat and electric airplanes

‘Everybody gets paralysed by bad news because they feel helpless,” says Christiana Figueres, the former UN climate chief who delivered the landmark Paris climate change agreement. “It is so in our personal lives, in our national lives and in our planetary life.”

But it is becoming increasingly clear that it does not need to be all bad news: a series of fast-moving global megatrends, spurred by trillion-dollar investments, indicates that humanity might be able to avert the worst impacts of global warming. From trends already at full steam, including renewable energy, to those just now hitting the big time, such as mass-market electric cars, to those just emerging, such as plant-based alternatives to meat, these trends show that greenhouse gas emissions can be halted.