Boston and the politics of denial

 

The Lincolnshire market town of Boston lies at the heart of the Fens, within striking distance of the North Sea. Its church – St Botolph’s, known locally as Boston Stump – dominates the surrounding flatness.

The area, famous as the starting point for the Pilgrim Fathers’ journey to the New World, is today defined by industrial-scale monoculture farming and food processing factories, employing a large immigrant workforce.

Perhaps not surprisingly, its once staunch Conservative political leanings have recently been swayed by the rhetoric of Reform UK Ltd.

This week, a report in The Guardian adds a third dimension, describing a town increasingly defined by flood risk, rising insurance costs and the slow erosion of confidence in the sea and river defences meant to protect it.

The article, ‘Seriously wrong’: flood-hit Lincolnshire residents at odds with Reform MP over climate, by Priya Bharadia and Matthew Taylor, notes that flooding is becoming a regular expectation for residents rather than an exceptional event, something already reshaping daily life.

From The Guardian article:

"Boston, nestled at the northern end of the Fens, is on the frontline of the UK’s flooding crisis, which experts say could lead to some towns being abandoned as climate breakdown makes many areas uninsurable."

"According to the Environment Agency, 91 percent of buildings in the Boston and Skegness constituency are at some level of flood risk – more than in any other English constituency. And the science is clear that winters are getting wetter in the UK due to climate breakdown, with warmer air holding more water vapour, meaning heavier downpours."

This is not some future prophecy. It's present tense. And yet, into this reality steps a populist political narrative that seeks to deny, deflect and diminish the underlying cause.

Mainstream challenge 

Richard Tice, MP for Boston & Skegness and a leading figure in Reform UK, has questioned the extent to which climate change is driving increased flood risk – reflecting a broader stance within the party that challenges mainstream climate science and policy responses.

There is something revealing about this disconnect. Flooding is not abstract. It is not ideological. It is not a matter of opinion. It is water, moving through landscapes according to physical laws – shaped by rainfall, sea level, drainage and, increasingly, by a warming atmosphere.

Boston is already experiencing the compounded pressures of tidal flooding, heavier rainfall and – despite increased spending in recent years – the physical limitations of existing defences. “Flooding is now part of life here,” one resident told The Guardian bluntly.

In practice, climate-driven change rarely arrives as a single catastrophic event. More often, it manifests as a gradual redefinition of what is considered safe, viable or sustainable. It is precisely this gradualism that makes denial politically convenient.

If catastrophe were instantaneous, the response would be immediate and unavoidable. But when change arrives incrementally – another flood, another insurance refusal, another breach of a raised embankment – it can be framed as coincidence, mismanagement or simply bad luck. Anything but systemic transformation.

That framing matters. Because if flooding is treated as an isolated problem, it will be addressed with isolated solutions: higher walls, bigger pumps, more funding for local defences. All necessary – but ultimately limited.

Political narratives 

In contrast, when it is understood as part of a broader climatic shift, the implications become more profound. Who gets protected? At what cost? And for how long?

The Guardian article makes clear that these questions are already pressing in Boston, where concerns about affordability, insurance and long-term viability are no longer theoretical but lived realities. The sense of permanence that once underpinned the town’s housing and infrastructure is beginning to erode.

What is striking – and troubling – in a town like Boston, and elsewhere, is how often political narratives lag behind lived experience.

Residents dealing with repeated flooding and uncertain futures are not engaging in abstract debate. They are responding to material change.

To suggest that the underlying drivers are exaggerated or irrelevant – in the face of mounting local evidence – is not simply misleading. It risks creating a widening gap between political language and physical reality.

There is also a deeper cultural dimension at work. For decades, climate change has been positioned as something distant – geographically, temporally and psychologically. Something that happens elsewhere, or in the future. Reality is eroding that.

The story of Boston is part of a wider national and global shift. Climate impacts are becoming local, immediate and difficult to ignore. They intersect with housing, insurance, infrastructure and identity. They reshape not just landscapes, but expectations.

Understanding the future 

And this is where storytelling – whether journalistic or fictional – becomes important. It's because we are dealing not just with data, but with meaning: how people understand what is happening to them, and what it implies for their communities and their lives.

In my own climate fiction novel, FloodWaters Down, I explore a near-future version of the Fens shaped by many of these pressures – rising water, strained systems, self-interested behaviour and fragmented responses. Increasingly, it feels less like speculation and more like extrapolation.

What Boston illustrates, with uncomfortable clarity, is that the key tension is no longer between alarm and complacency, but between experience and interpretation.

The water is rising, whether we acknowledge it or not. The question is not whether we can stop that entirely – we cannot – but how we respond to it. Whether we align our politics, planning and language with the realities emerging around us – or continue to argue with the tide.

Water does not negotiate. It does not respond to rhetoric. And, in the end, it does not care whether we believe in it.

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Flood Waters Down is released by Cliftop Publishing on 9 April 2026 and is available now on pre-order from bookshops and online. 

It will also be published as an ebook. 

Always support your local independent bookshop where possible! 

For interviews, review copies, book signings, etc, email: books(at)cliftop.co.uk

Global space sector realignment

 

The grand narratives that carried the global space industry through the past decade – Moon to Mars, permanent settlement, trillion-dollar economies in orbit – are no longer moving in a straight line. They are being revised in public, reshaped by politics, constrained by budgets and recalibrated by the very actors who once championed them most loudly.

Consider recent developments in the United States where SpaceX has pivoted toward the Moon rather than Mars as a nearer-term priority. A “self-growing lunar city” within a decade sounds visionary. It is also pragmatic. The Moon is closer, politically urgent, commercially defensible and geopolitically contested.

At the same time, respected voices within the NewSpace movement are questioning whether NASA’s Artemis programme represents strategic progress or political inertia. When industry pioneers describe the architecture as unsustainable or misaligned with long-term economic logic, it signals a fractured consensus.

The destination debate – Moon or Mars – is less important than what it reveals because the sector is wrestling not with capability but with purpose.

For years, growth masked ambiguity. More launches. More capital. More satellites. Scale was assumed to equal success. Yet orbital congestion is rising. Supply chains remain fragile. Regulatory frameworks are disjointed. Space traffic management has shifted from aspiration to operational liability. Sustainability is no longer branding; it is a design constraint.

In this issue of ROOM, those themes recur. From satellite mission design that integrates collision risk from inception, to robotics as labour strategy, to Europe’s evolving regulatory posture – a pattern emerges. The industry is moving from adolescence to adulthood. 

If Mars becomes rhetorical while the Moon becomes industrial, we should say so. If Artemis is primarily geopolitical signalling, we should acknowledge it. If autonomous systems will carry the burden of exploration and infrastructure, then workforce planning, insurance and liability regimes must adapt.

The point is not to diminish ambition. It is to align it with credible architecture.

Europe also faces a strategic choice. It can continue reacting to US political cycles and commercial pivots. Or it can define its own doctrine – rooted in sustainability, resilience and economic utility.

Debates over sovereignty, dependency and space traffic management show Europe beginning to grasp this shift, recognising that access to space is not purely technological; it is political and economic too. Reliance on external systems is not neutral, nor is postponing regulatory decisions in the hope that growth will self-correct.

The next phase of the space economy will not be defined by who plants the next flag, but by who builds systems that endure.

Endurance means embedding sustainability into procurement. It means treating debris mitigation and collision avoidance as first-order engineering parameters. It means designing lunar and orbital infrastructure with clear economic logic. It means accepting geopolitical volatility as structural, not temporary.

Behind these debates lies a deeper question: how will humanity organise itself beyond Earth? Asgardia, approaching its tenth anniversary in October, was once dismissed as fanciful. Yet as sovereignty and responsibility become central to space activity, the idea of a space nation appears less indulgent and more prescient – an early attempt to confront the governance questions that expansion will inevitably demand.

The space industry does not lack imagination but, arguably, it lacks discipline precisely when discipline matters most. Space is woven into climate monitoring, communications, security and economic stability. Its governance affects Earth directly.

The future of space is extraordinary. If the past decade was about acceleration, the coming one should be about alignment.

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Foreword by Editor-in-Chief Clive Simpson as published in the Spring 2026 issue of ROOM Space Journal 

Earth's climate imbalance

The World Meteorological Organization’s (WMO) State of the Global Climate report 2025 confirms that 2015-2025 are the hottest 11 years on record, and that 2025 was the second or third hottest year on record, at about 1.43C above the 1850-1900 average.

Extreme events around the world, including intense heat, heavy rainfall and tropical cyclones, caused disruption and devastation and highlighted the vulnerability of our inter-connected economies and societies.

The ocean continues to warm and absorb carbon dioxide. It has been absorbing the equivalent of about eighteen times the annual human energy use each year for the past two decades. Annual sea ice extent in the Arctic was at or near a record low, Antarctic sea ice extent was the third lowest on record, and glacier melt continued unabated, according to the report.

“The state of the global climate is in a state of emergency.  Planet Earth is being pushed beyond its limits.  Every key climate indicator is flashing red,” said UN Secretary-General António Guterres.

“Humanity has just endured the eleven hottest years on record. When history repeats itself eleven times, it is no longer a coincidence.  It is a call to act,” said Mr Guterres.

 WMO’s flagship State of the Global Climate report was released on World Meteorological Day on 23 March, which has the theme Observing Today, Protecting Tomorrow.

For the first time, the report includes the Earth’s energy imbalance as one of the key climate indicators.

The Earth’s energy balance measures the rate at which energy enters and leaves the Earth system. Under a stable climate, incoming energy from the sun is about the same as the amount of outgoing energy. 

However, increasing concentrations of heat-trapping greenhouse gases - carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide - to their highest level in at least 800,000 years have upset this equilibrium.

The Earth’s energy imbalance has increased since its observational record began in 1960, particularly in the past 20 years. It reached a new high in 2025. 

 “Scientific advances have improved our understanding of the Earth’s energy imbalance and of the reality facing our planet and our climate right now,” said WMO Secretary-General Celeste Saulo. “Human activities are increasingly disrupting the natural equilibrium and we will live with these consequences for hundreds and thousands of years.”

“On a day-to-day basis, our weather has become more extreme. In 2025, heatwaves, wildfires, drought, tropical cyclones, storms and flooding caused thousands of deaths, impacted millions of people and caused billions in economic losses,” said Celeste Saulo.

The warming of the atmosphere including near the Earth’s surface (the temperatures that humans feel) represents just one percent of the excess energy, whilst about five percent is stored in the continental land masses.

More than 91 percent of the excess heat is stored in the ocean, which acts as a major buffer against higher temperatures on land. Ocean heat content reached a new record high in 2025 and its rate of warming more than doubled from 1960-2005 to 2005-2025.

Another three percent of the excess energy warms and melts ice. The ice sheets on Antarctica and Greenland have both lost significant mass and the annual average Arctic sea-ice extent for 2025 was the lowest or second lowest on record in the satellite era. Exceptional glacier mass loss occurred in Iceland and along the Pacific coast of North America in 2025. 

 he warming ocean and melting ice are driving the long-term rise in global mean sea level, which has accelerated since satellite measurements began in 1993.

Ocean warming and sea level rise will continue for centuries, according to projections by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Changes in ocean warming, and deep ocean pH are irreversible on centennial to millennial time scales.

The report is accompanied by an interactive story map. It has a dedicated supplement on extreme events, highlighting their cascading impacts, including on food insecurity and displacement.

It includes a chapter on climate and health, showing how rising temperatures, shifting rainfall patterns and changes in extremes are affecting where and when health risks emerge, how severe they become and who is most exposed.

It highlights the examples of the mosquito-borne dengue disease and of heat stress – and illustrates how climate data, early warning systems and integrated climate services for health can protect people in a warming world.

“And in this age of war, climate stress is also exposing another truth: our addiction to fossil fuels is destabilizing both the climate and global security.  Today’s report should come with a warning label: climate chaos is accelerating and delay is deadly,” said Mr Guterres.

The State of the Global Climate Report 2025 is based on scientific contributions from National Meteorological and Hydrological Services, WMO Regional Climate Centres, United Nations partners and dozens of experts.

“WMO’s State of the Global Climate report seeks to inform decision-making. It is in keeping with the theme of World Meteorological Day because when we observe today, we don’t just predict the weather, we protect tomorrow. Tomorrow’s people. Tomorrow’s planet,” said Celeste Saulo.

Climate fiction meets reality

 

On the final day of The London Book Fair last week, a panel discussion featuring Lucy Stone, Founder and Executive Director of Climate Spring, and broadcaster and Climate Fiction Prize judge Simon Savidge offered a timely reflection on the state of climate fiction.

It came just ahead of the announcement (18 March) of the Climate Fiction Prize shortlist on – a moment that increasingly feels less like a niche literary event and more like a marker of where contemporary storytelling is heading.

What emerged from the discussion was not simply that climate fiction is growing, but that it is changing.

A decade ago, much of what we might have called climate fiction was rooted in warning – speculative futures designed to jolt readers into recognising the scale of the crisis. Those stories had a clear purpose and, arguably, played an important role in helping to translate abstract science into something more tangible and human.

But as both speakers made clear, that distance between fiction and reality has narrowed, perhaps to the point of disappearance.

Climate fiction is no longer primarily about imagining what might happen. It is increasingly about exploring what is already happening – and what it feels like to live through it.

This shift changes the tone as much as the subject matter. While there are still dystopian elements, the books being discussed from the longlist are not uniformly bleak. What stood out was their emotional range: anger, certainly, but also hope, resilience, even moments of humour and tenderness. These are not simply stories of collapse, but of people navigating systems under strain – social, environmental and technological.

That human focus is key. As Stone suggested, fiction has a unique capacity to answer a question many people are now asking, often implicitly: what does this mean for us? Not in terms of policy or targets, but in terms of daily life – relationships, communities, choices.

Savidge echoed this from a reader’s perspective, noting that many of the longlisted works resist being didactic. The most effective climate fiction does not preach. Instead, it reveals – drawing readers into situations where the implications of climate change are lived rather than explained.

Another striking aspect of the discussion was just how broad the field has become. Climate fiction is no longer a clearly bounded genre. It now cuts across literary fiction, speculative work, thrillers, even elements of romance and historical narrative. In that sense, it is less a category than a lens – one that increasingly shapes how stories are told, regardless of form.

Certain themes do recur. Questions of inequality and access – who is able to adapt, and who is left exposed – are central. So too is the idea of community: how people come together, or fragment, under pressure. Technology, particularly artificial intelligence, is beginning to intersect with these narratives in interesting ways, raising questions about control, agency and dependency.

And underpinning much of it is a shifting relationship with the natural world. Not nature as something separate, but as something we are inextricably part of – a perspective long understood in other traditions, now reasserting itself in contemporary fiction.

What is perhaps most significant is that none of this feels imposed. Many of the writers being discussed did not set out to write “climate novels” as such. Rather, as the conversation suggested, the climate crisis has become impossible to exclude. It sits within the fabric of storytelling, just as it now sits within the fabric of everyday life.

For those of us who have spent years writing about climate, science or technology in a journalistic context, this evolution feels both inevitable and necessary. Journalism remains essential in explaining what is happening and why. But fiction operates differently. It allows us to inhabit situations, to test emotional and ethical responses, to experience – however briefly – the texture of a changing world.

In that sense, the rise of climate fiction is not simply a literary trend. It is a cultural response to a shifting reality.

As the shortlist for the Climate Fiction Prize is announced, it offers a snapshot of that response – a set of stories attempting, in different ways, to make sense of where we are.

And perhaps that is the point. Not prediction, but recognition.

Because if there is one thing the discussion at the London Book Fair made clear, it is this: the future climate fiction once warned us about is no longer approaching. We are already inside it.

It is a perspective I’ve explored in my own forthcoming novel, Flood Waters Down, set in a flooded version of the English Fens – a landscape that, like many others, may be closer to that future than we would like to think.

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Climate Fiction Prize 2026 longlist

Dusk by Robbie Arnott (Chatto & Windus, Vintage); Every Version of You by Grace Chan (VERVE books); The Tiger’s Share by Keshava Guha (John Murray Press, Hachette); Helm by Sarah Hall (Faber & Faber); Albion by Anna Hope (Fig Tree, Penguin Random House); Awake in the Floating City by Susanna Kwan (Simon & Schuster); The Price of Everything by Jon McGoran (Solaris, Rebellion Publishing); Hum by Helen Phillips (Atlantic Books); Endling by Maria Reva (Virago, Little, Brown); The Book of Records by Madeleine Thien (Granta Books); Juice by Tim Winton (Picador, Pan Macmillan); and Sunbirth by An Yu (Harvill, Penguin Random House).