What would you do if your antibiotics supply dried up? How would you cope if you were no longer able to get your prescription medicines?

Supply chains can be fragile, and in the medical world a failure of supply chains can be fatal. Chemotherapy agents, antibiotics, ADHD drugs, and cancer treatments have all been affected by shortages in recent years.

Professor Kostas Selviaridis, Chair in Operations and Supply Chain Management at Lancaster University Management School, is here to talk about his work with the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) and other organisations to build innovation, resilience and sustainability into their supply chains.

We look at what countries can do to avoid these issues – from stockpiling to changing regulations to horizon scanning and anticipating problems, and discover if the UK is different to other countries, and what nations can learn from each other.

Kostas tells us about how working with NHS England and the UK Department for Health and Social Care has led to insights and changes to the system, how Covid and Brexit have shaped actions throughout the supply chain, and how there is now more emphasis being put on value over cost when it comes to choosing suppliers to better avoid points of failure in the system.

Find out how much the world relies on China and India for so many medicine materials and what that means for supply chains; uncover how much of the UK medicine supply is made on our shores; and consider the problems that come with generic lower-cost medications as opposed to those with patents.

Plus, we run through Jan’s medical history, are astounded at the value of pig intestines (whether the pigs like it or not), and wonder at how many hours are spent each week in the NHS trying to find alternative medical products.

And… should we worry?!?

Find out more about Kostas and his work here: https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/lums/people/kostas-selviaridis

Here is a link to the Access to Medicine Index: https://accesstomedicinefoundation.org/insights-resources/index-ranking

And you can hear our discussions with Drs Cliff Shelton and Fanny Burrows about their experiences of sustainability within the NHS here: https://pod.co/transforming-tomorrow/the-net-zero-healthcare-mission

Episode Transcript

Would you know if you or a colleague were being exploited at work? How would you describe decent work, and would you recognise if you weren’t in it?

Labour exploitation is not always easy to identify, and we are about to discover how both workers and employers can partake in these practices without realising – and how they can stack up from underpayment or zero-hour contracts to become something much worse.

Dr Ophelia Chidgey, from the Pentland Centre, is co-author along with our own Professor Jan Bebbington of the report Decent Work: A Review of Evidence for Effective Prevention and Detection of Labour Exploitation. The report played a role in the establishment of the UK Government’s Fair Work Agency.

Ophelia tells us about the continuum of exploitation concept, with decent work at one end and modern slavery at the other. We talk about the various steps along the scale, and what happens to move workers along it, and how the whole concept of labour exploitation needs to be addressed at a systems level.

We talk about which sectors might be most exposed to exploitation, the foundation of the Fair Work Agency, what it might mean moving forward for the UK, how we have previously suffered from looking at the symptoms rather than the case, and how Ophelia and Jan’s work helped shape the way forward.

Plus, we discuss whether Jan is a good employer, see how Australia is ahead of the UK in certain areas, look at loopholes that might allow employers to avoid complying with certain regulations, and consider if you can ever tell the truth about your boss if they are sat next to you!

Two previous Transforming Tomorrow episodes that tie in with this one are Do You Know Your Employment Rights and Human Trafficking.

To access the report discussed in this week’s podcast see here: https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/pentland/activities/hubs/modern-slavery-and-justice/decent-work/

And find out more about the Fair Work Agency here: https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/fair-work-agency

Episode Transcript

The software and aviation industries have similar carbon footprints globally – and that was the case even before AI became the behemoth it is now. So, we really need to know more about how software and programming can change, and what we can do about our footprints.

Software engineer Annie Freeman ups the Kiwi quota on the show as she joins us to share her experiences and knowledge working in sustainable IT, green software – and code pruning.

We discover just what those terms mean, how software designers and programmers can influence their products’ impact on the environment, and how green ops and fin ops (but not special ops) fit into the picture.

Annie tells us how more efficient software can lead to the need for fewer servers, and thus benefits both the bottom line for a business and the environment, and how webpages can be built to have a similar impact.

We consider how AI can help with these tasks, but has also led to firms drawing back on commitments to reduce their climate impact, and the effects it has had on both coding and editing code.

Plus, why did some airlines take a single olive out of each salad on board their planes? Why do data centres in Australia have different footprints from those in the USA? And what would happen if you were to get rid of that legacy code embedded deeply into your website?

Discover more about Annie here: https://anniefreeman.co/

Find out more about the Green Software Foundation here: https://greensoftware.foundation/

And you can listen to our previous episode AI, Data Centres, and The Great Energy Problem here: https://pod.fo/e/3403ed

Episode Transcript

‘Conflict is costly’ – yet we see it arising around the world on a constant basis. And climate change can create the conditions for conflict and violence.

So, just how many of these conflicts are related to climate change and weather shocks – and why? And what can we do to break the climate-conflict cycle?

Professor Jean-François Maystadt, from UCLouvain in Belgium and Lancaster University Management School, brings his expertise as an economist specialising in conflicts, natural disasters and forced migration to show us the connections.

We learn that between 5% and 20% of all conflicts globally in the last century had a link to climate change, and see the regional variations in causality across South Asia, Africa and the Middle East in recent years, with some surprising revelations.

We look at the effects of economic shocks in countries such as Somalia, low rainfall monsoon seasons in India, and drought in Syria. And we discover often it is those with more resources who are able to leave a region following a natural disaster, leaving behind those with little to begin with.

We see how many countries choose to intensify practices rather than adapt when it comes to coping with the effects of weather and climate on agriculture and other industries; and come to understand how having nothing to lose can influence the actions of those entering conflict.

JF explains the importance of strong national and regional institutions in helping to prevent conflicts arising, why some communities can cope with shocks when others cannot and collapse into violence, and the importance of agriculture in the big picture.

Plus, how refugee camps can have a positive economic effect on the area around them, how farmers in Kenya benefit from weather-based insurance policies, and why Jan has inner conflict over doughnuts.

Read more about Jean-François’ work here: https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/lums/people/jean-francois-maystadt

Episode Transcript

We cannot expect the technology of tomorrow to be better than the humans of today. So, if we want Artificial Intelligence and other tech to be better, then we need to improve as people.

Dr Cornelia Walther, from our hosts the Sunway Centre for Planetary Health, joins us at the Global Tipping Points 2026 Conference at Sunway University to discuss AI’s links to tipping points, and to the future of humanity.

The complexity of AI makes it hard to know what’s to come, but Cornelia stresses the technology can be both good and bad. The problem is it operates on the garbage in, garbage out principle, when we need it to work on a values in, values out basis. If we want to see that change, we must alter our priorities.

As the last of the analogue generations, living through the move towards a time of hybrid intelligence (HI) – mixing natural intelligence and AI – we consider the effects on our brains of delegating previously everyday functions to the phone in our pocket or the computer on our desk. Will it lead to us all having robot partners?!

We find ourselves asking, how can we avoid repeating the mistakes of the past and take advantage of AI as a force for good?

This episode was produced in conjunction with the Sunway Centre for Planetary Health, hosts of the conference.

We know language is key to getting the message across on climate change, nature and biodiversity loss, and tackling global tipping points. So what do we need to talk about?

Said Faisal is an advisor on disaster risk management, and the former Executive Director of the ASEAN Humanitarian Assistance Centre. He is also one of the MCs for the Global Tipping Points 2026 Conference at Sunway University. As such, he has been in the perfect position to take in all the discussions and get a view of the whole picture.

He joins us – with his Jerry Maguire references but without his rap group – to talk the importance of messaging, the need for business to look beyond profit, the power of a critical mass of people in moving us towards positive tipping points, and whether the Global South message has been ignored in the past and how important it has been to hear that voice at GTP 2026.

We stack up logic, emotion and belief alongside climate, disaster and sustainable development, and take a ride across the whole conference agenda, from nature to culture and religion.

This episode was produced in conjunction with the Sunway Centre for Planetary Health, hosts of the conference.

Not all tipping points are negative – and not all of them relate to the climate. So, what are positive tipping points? And how about social tipping points as well?

Dr Steve Smith, Research Fellow at the Global Systems Institute and Green Futures Solutions at the University of Exeter, knows the answers. Steve was a lead author on the 2023 and 2025 Global Tipping Points reports, and is a leader in the field of positive tipping points for several years.

He is with us at the Global Tipping Points 2026 Conference at Sunway University in Malaysia to explain the concepts to us. We’ll find out about how positive tipping points might come about, what is needed for them to gain traction, and just how little of a country’s population is needed to get firmly behind an issue to affect real change.

Steve will tell us about the drivers and barriers to change, the importance of groups of businesses to progress, and the role of keystone actors, and the technological, societal and environmental factors that come into play.

This episode was produced in conjunction with the Sunway Centre for Planetary Health, hosts of the conference.

How can we build infrastructures to be climate and nature resilient? Do we sometimes focus too much on safeguarding and not enough on improvements when it comes to action?

In the third part of our series from the Global Tipping Points 2026 Conference at Sunway University in Malaysia, we are joined by Professor Erik Berglöf, Director of the House of Governance and Public Policy at Stockholm School of Economics, to look at the importance of governance and finance, and the nature of planetary health.

We discuss the role of positive tipping points, how governance can encourage a tip over in the right direction, the importance of nature as critical infrastructure for all life on earth – and the global economy – and the need to enforce laws if they are to have an effect. We also look at how business, but most importantly nations, value nature, and the importance of placing a financial value on it if companies are to treat it seriously.

This episode was produced in conjunction with the Sunway Centre for Planetary Health, hosts of the conference.