The 2018 report of the Lancet Countdown on health and climate change: shaping the health of nations for centuries to come

The Lancet Countdown: tracking progress on health and climate change was established to provide an independent, global monitoring system dedicated to tracking the health dimensions of the impacts of, and the response to, climate change. The Lancet Countdown tracks 41 indicators across five domains: climate change impacts, exposures, and vulnerability; adaptation, planning, and resilience for health; mitigation actions and health co-benefits; finance and economics; and public and political engagement. This report is the product of a collaboration of 27 leading academic institutions, the UN, and intergovernmental agencies from every continent. The report draws on world-class expertise from climate scientists, ecologists, mathematicians, geographers, engineers, energy, food, livestock, and transport experts, economists, social and political scientists, public health professionals, and. doctors. The Lancet Countdown’s work builds on decades of research in this field, and was first proposed in the 2015 Lancet Commission on health and climate change,1 which documented the human impacts of climate change and provided ten global recommendations to respond to this public health emergency and secure the public health benefits available (panel 1)

Detention, Deportation and Resettlement: British Counterinsurgency and Malaya’s Rural Chinese, 1948–60

To understand how empires control ‘hostile’ populations, we need to penetrate below overarching terms such as ‘counter-terror’ and ‘winning hearts and minds’, in order to understand discrete constituent techniques on their own terms. Yet technique lifecycles tend to be inadequately researched. This article examines three key techniques used to control rural Chinese during the Malayan Emergency of 1948–60. Detention, deportation and, to a lesser extent, the better-documented technique of resettlement are tracked across the campaign, individually and for their changing salience in the overall blend of counterinsurgency approaches. This approach demonstrates that the main move for each technique (and for the campaign as a whole) was not so much from counter-terror to ‘winning hearts and minds’, as from collective and poorly targeted to tightly targeted approaches. It also demonstrates how far highly repressive measures, such as large-scale deportation, continued much later into the campaign than previously recognised. Above all, it shows how key elements of even an apparently well-researched campaign are likely to be only partially understood, if not seriously misconstrued, in the absence of a technique lifestyle approach