By Stephanie Brittain

Food insecurity and malnutrition can be ended sustainably within a generation, it is said. However, with one in eight people in the world today still undernourished and approximately two billion suffering from micronutrient deficiencies, the challenge is immense.

Further, the world’s population is expected to reach 9 billion by 2050 and at the current rate of development, the number of people at risk of hunger in the developing world will grow from 881 million in 2005 to more than a billion people by 2050.

78 percent of the world’s poor live in rural areas, and agriculture remains fundamental for their economic growth and for food security for our expanding global population. Further, agricultural development is found to be about two to four times more effective in raising incomes among the poorest than growth in other sectors.

Conflict impedes agricultural development

Credit: UN/Tobin Jones…

The alleged English antipathy to multi-storey living (the Scots are different) is well attested but Liverpool – in this and much else – is an exception.  Its Corporation embraced tenements for practical reasons, as we shall see, but also as a conscious mark of the city’s urbanity and global status.  In so doing, it created some of the most striking council housing of the interwar period though sadly very little of it remains.

Gerard Gardens

The immediate context for the drive to inner-city multi-storey accommodation was a scale of slum housing unparalleled in the country.  In 1919, 11,000 Liverpool families were living in one room – over 6 per cent of the city’s population.  The Medical Officer of Health estimated 8000 new homes were needed and Liverpool – a pioneer in municipal housing – acted quickly to build the new cottage estates that the Tudor Walters Report recommended and Christopher…

Tim Bushe is well known and very much admired in our our neighbourhood as he created this fantastic herd of elephants from a troublesome corner hedge a few years ago. No longer can unwholesome acts be carried out behind dense cover of privet and the area now boasts a wonderful piece of much-loved public art.

Now such artistry (and good deeds) have not gone unnoticed and Tim has been espied on The Great British Garden Revival on the BBC as well as The One Show and has featured in various articles in the local and national press.

Photo by Andrew Meredith

Currently, his work is on display in a window at Selfridges in Oxford Street as part of their ‘Bright Old Things’ exhibition featuring 16 ‘individuals who’ve embraced a new vocation later in life’. Tim is still working full time as an architect, but having studied sculpture earlier in his career, creates marvellous pieces of…

Leading masonry products manufacturer, Lignacite, has launched the world’s first carbon negative building block. Named ‘The Carbon Buster’, the new building block from Lignacite is a British innovation, which has been developed by the company in partnership with Carbon8 Aggregates, using their award winning Accelerated Carbonation Technology.

The Carbon Buster incorporates more than 50% recycled aggregates and combines this with Carbon8’s carbonated aggregates derived from by-products from waste to energy plants. The result is a high performing masonry product, and the first ever building block, which has captured more carbon dioxide than is emitted during its manufacture; 14kg CO₂ per tonne to be exact.

Carbon8’s Technical Director, Dr Paula Carey, explains: “On the back of research carried out at The University of Greenwich’s School of Science, Carbon8 identified an end use for thermal residues from waste to energy plants. By mixing the residue…