Across england and wales tomorrow. Lots of sunshine to begin with but clouding over from the west and that is because rain across South West England will spread through the morning into parts of western wales, rest of wales through the afternoon and also in Northern Ireland. Get some sunny spells breaking through, 24 26, east anglia and the south east corner. But the afternoon cloudier than the morning. A few storms in northern scotland. But as we head into sunday night as humidity levels continue to creep up, some torrential downpour possible through wales, the midlands, northern england. As much two inches of rain possible in one or two spots. That will continue through the night and into the early hours. And then more persistent rain spreading into eastern parts of scotland. Hello, this is bbc news with reeta chakrabarti. The headlines. Borisjohnson and jeremy hunt take part in the first of 16 hustings in front of the conservative Party Members who will choose which of them becomes the next Prime Minister just to be clear you wound not be making any comment at all about what happened . I think that is pretty obvious from the foregoing mrjohnson avoided answering questions about why the police were called to the flat he shares with his partner on thursday night. President trump has announced plans to impose additional sanctions on iran as tensions between the two countries ratchet up further. Police have arrested a 25 year old woman on suspicion of two assaults and endangering an aircraft, after a plane was escorted by two typhoons into stansted airport. Campaigners have joined Richard Ratcliffe outside the Iranian Embassy to show solidarity with him as his Hunger Strike over his detained wifes plight enters its eighth day. And the government announces a new permanent memorial to mark the First National windrush day which honours the british caribbean community. Now on bbc news, discussion on the challenges of avoiding short termism in modern society, and how to prioritise the well being of future generations. Hosted by author and journalist linda geddes. Hello, and welcome to bbc futures long termism how to think in deep time bbc future at hay festival, where we are taking a longer view of the 21st and encouraging more long term thinking and also encourage some of our politicians and policymakers to do the same. With me today we have some excellent panellists. Roman krznaric, a public philosopher and author who is writing a book about long term thinking and the challenges facing democracy. Sophie howe, the future generations commissioner for wales who is trying to encourage our politicians and policymakers to try and take that view of the impact of their decisions for future generations and all their descendants. And martin rees, one of the uks most eminent scientists, a member of the house of lords and author of a new book, on the future prospects of humanity, which takes the reader on a thrilling journey through the coming century and beyond. A very warm welcome to all of you. Before we hear from our panellists, we will hear a short word from bbc future who are going to tell us a bit more about why we should be taking this longer view of civilisation. Our societies today are shaped by short termism. In the relentless twitter filled world of 2019, the present moment commands all our attention. We are saturated with knowledge, and standards of living of mostly never been higher but today, it is difficult to look beyond the next news cycle. If time can be sliced, it is only getting finer, with ever shorter periods now shaping our world. In politics, the dominant timeframe is a term of office. In fashion and culture, its a a season. For corporations, its a quarter. On the internet, it is minutes and on the financial markets, mere milliseconds. Meanwhile the planet is warming, antibiotic resistance looms and inequality rises. There is no more timely example than our slow response to Climate Change. This year, schoolchildren from around the world have been campaigning for a longer term perspective and their right to inherit a safer, cleaner planet than the one given to their elders. As the young climate activist Greta Thunberg told uk politicians recently, tackling Climate Change involves ditching short term ways and using cathedral thinking. But for many of us in adulthood, how many of us can say we are thinking about the well being of future generations and those not yet born . How often do we contemplate the impact of our decisions as they go rippling to the decades and centuries ahead . We need a deeper perspective on time. If our civilisation is to flourish for thousands or even millions of years, then we must learn how to extend our frame of reference beyond the present moment. Its time to look at the world and our descendants through a much longer lens. Here we are at the hay festivaljust a few days after children from around the world took part in more school strikes protesting against our inability to act on Climate Change. Even primary age kids are getting in on the act. At my kids school in bristol, the school organised their own protests so kids didnt have to take that time off school and it was really well attended and this is just a clear example of the Younger Generation calling out to the older generation and saying, please help us act to protect our futures, but yet on Climate Change and many other issues, it seems we are really not very good at taking that longer view. Roman, you would go a step further. You have argued that we are essentially colonising the future and robbing future generations in the process. Thats right. I think we all know that we live in an age of pathological short termism, politicians cannot see beyond the next week, when nations bicker around conference tables, focusing on near term interest while the planet burns. We are constantly tweeting, pressing that buy now button. But its exactly as you say, we have colonised the future, we treat the future like a distant colonial outpost devoid of people where we dump our ecological degradation, technological risk, Nuclear Waste and public debt and its bit like the way that when britain colonised australia, they drew on this legal doctrine known as terra nullius, empty land, so they took it as if there were no Indigenous People there. Of course there were. We have shifted from terra nullius to tempus nullius, where there is an empty future and we rape and pillage the future and we dont think about future generations. I used to be a political scientist and was teaching democratic theory and comparative politics and it never once occurred to me that we disenfranchise future generations in the same way we disenfranchised slaves and women in the past, we give them no political power, no political voice and thats exactly what Greta Thunberg and your kids and my kids have been protesting about in these climate strikes, so we are at the moment right now where we need to engage in an intergenerational Liberation Movement and liberate those future generations. From the clutches of the present. Sophie, as future generations commissionerfor wales, you are really at the sharp end of trying to encourage people to take a longer view, and especially politicians. Id love to hear more about how your role came to be and what it involves. Wales is the only country in the world which has legislation which protects the interests of future generations through our well being of future generations act which was passed into law by our National Assembly in 2015 so it does a number of things but i suppose the overarching premise is that all of our policymakers in wales, it applies to all of our public services, our health board, local authorities and National Bodies and really significantly the Welsh Government itself, they have to demonstrate how they are taking decisions which meet todays needs without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs. You dont have any powers to force people to act. I cant force anyone to do anything or force government to stop doing something. But i have whats called review powers, name and shame. When you have an institution responsible for advocating on behalf of future generations, which is an institution established by government and by our National Assembly, they do have to sit up and take notice. Would i like more powers . Yes, i would, who wouldnt . An interesting case study, the first future generations commissioner in the world was in israel, he had powers to actually veto legislation as it was going through parliament. Interestingly, he became so challenging to the government that they abolished him and his position after his first term so some difficult things to navigate there. Martin, as a member of the house of lords, you have the ability to influence politicians to some extent. Not very much. Youve also been writing a book about the long term future of our society, and some things from Climate Change to overpopulation to artificial intelligence. How do you feel we can shake politicians out of this short term way of thinking . I think its great that we have these campaigning schoolkids, thats great because that raises awareness and it would be shameful if we left a depleted world for future generations, especially when we mind how much we owe to the heritage of generations past but of course there is a problem, politicians focus on the parochial and local and focus on getting re elected, and i know people have been advisors to government and they dont have direct impact, the politicians agenda, so the only way this can happen is if the public are made aware of this, thats why these protests by young people are important because politicians do respond to what is in their inboxes and whats in the press. What we have to do is make sure they can take these long term decisions without losing votes. Let me give you two examples of this. Four years ago, there was a paper encyclical, the first time a pope said we had an obligation to the environment and the long term and that had a huge effect, in latin america, africa, east asia where the pope has a billion followers, making it easier to get consensus at the paris climate conference. That was great. He got a standing ovation at the un for this. More recently, mr michael gove, would not have been exercised about non reusable drinking straws, legislating that, had it not been for the blue planet programmes fronted by our secular pope, david attenborough, who energised the public. Doesnt that show a problem . The Plastic Straws issue is interesting. In response to public outcry and so on, its a token sound bite, weve banned Plastic Straws but actually what we need to be looking at is a circular economy, reducing our use of plastic, not just finding these sort of small interventions. I completely agree with that and we need the radical changes in the economic field but also the political field. I sort of see your position almost like a first step, a bridge to more radical changes in democracy because one of the conundrums of this long term issue is do we really need enlightened despots and benign dictators to deal with problems, many people have talked about that. I dont think theres there is any tradition of benign dictators staying benign for long, we need to radically transform democracy. There is the future Design Movement in japan when they bring together citizens assemblies and they get half the citizens in a city to think about how they deal with the problems today, and the other half is given these ceremonial kimonos, these robes, and they are told they are citizens from 2060 and they then make policies for the city and it turns out the citizens from 2060 make policies which are much more radical, much more progressive and this movement now is campaigning and been successful in getting local governments with a final view to having a ministry of future. I think we need Citizen Assembly models like theyve had in ireland, for example, to represent the views of future generations. It has shown that it can be very, very successful. Do you think its necessary to have some degree of short term pain for long term gain or is there a way of having the best of both worlds . I think there are ways of having the best of both worlds. In the Climate Change arena, if we accelerate research and development into clean energy and speed it up so it can be adopted more quickly, that is again for the world but if i could express a paradox, i spoke last week in ely cathedral, and what striked me then is that the people who built ely cathedral, they thought the world would end in 1,000 years. Their horizon was very limited in space as well but they built a cathedral that wouldnt be finished in their lifetime and it seems paradoxical that we would have these much broader horizons in time and space but are more short term, but there is a reason. People in the middle ages may have thought the world would end in 1,000 years but they thought the lives of their children and grandchildren would be the same as theirs. Thats why they thought their grandchildren would appreciate the cathedral when it was finished. Now, of course, we have no idea what lives will be like, for our children and grandchildren. If you look further ahead. Genetic modification and all these things will change human cathedrals. Change human beings themselves. They can invest in the long term. This cathedral idea. The other people say we need to have this vision of creating things and making investments but we will never see the benefits. There is a real value in that. Its not cathedral thinking but sewar thinking. Many people might know that in 1858, 0ne one of the great put with changes in this country, the great stink. People were dying from polluted sewage. What happened in 1858 was the stench was so bad, the smell came into the newly rebuilt Parliament Building and politicians literally could not breathe. After ignoring the issue of sewerage, this kick started them it was so bad. After ignoring the issue of sewerage, this kick started them to invest massively in the Sewerage System sojoseph bazalgette spent so much time building the Sewerage System. The messages politicians need to be afraid. Why does Greta Thunberg say, your house is on fire. Its part of sewer thinking that we need to build a sense of emergency or we wont do anything. Roman, you have been making a case for rethinking representative democracy. Do you feel democracy needs to change . I feel democracy is dying, and the kind of form we have today should die. Representative democracy was only invented a couple of centuries ago, at a time when we were in the ecological era known as the holocene, when we had a stable climate, but now were in the anthropocene, when we have changed the climate. 0ur Political Institutions were not designed to deal with these global problems. If you wanted to invent a Political Organisation to create global agreement on Climate Change, you would never invent nation states. Thats mad. You need things like these citizens assemblies, or future citizens juries, things like that. I think we need to think about, how do we give voice to young people . One of the ways its happened in the United States is that there are campaigns, legal campaigns, to give rights, constitutional rights, to future people. A bit difficult in this country where there is no written constitution, but in the eu and other places it is possible to enshrine the rights of future people. It sounds mad how do you give rights to people who dont even exist . Yet, we can do it. Its just a legal mechanism, and there are battles going on to do this right now. Exactly what our legislation is designed to do, and i suppose, give me perhaps not enough, but to give me some power to try to enforce that. Representative democracy comes back to the people that we are representing, doesnt it . So actually, as a public, we fundamentally need, i think, to change the way that we think. We are currently spending about 50 of our entire budget going into the National Health service, which i love as much as everyone else, but actually its a National Illness Service. We need to take money from the National Illness Service and put it into a National Wellbeing service to keep people well in the first place. Those sorts of decisions are not that popular. So theres a need for, you know, a big popular discussion about how we start thinking, planning, and doing things for the future. A big population level discussion. Something at the local and city level, but we need something at a global level, surely, as well, for climate and energy, just like we have a world health organization. Otherwise it will be only these huge commercial conglomerates which have a global reach. We have got to have some international, publicly supported organisations to compete with them and control them. I completely agree with that, and i also agree with my 10 year old daughter, who said to me the other day, she said im not given a vote in the european elections. She said, so, why dont i ask granny if she will vote for who i want . And lets just swap votes . And i thought, thats such a really good idea. Applause. I would love to see a movement where anyone under the age of 16 is given a vote by someone over the age of 60. I think, even if theyre not actually given their votes, just having a discussion between the Younger Generation and the older generation about where they would like things to move might be interesting. Ok, so weve talked about the coming century, but lets zoom out further. Martin, looking even further ahead, thousands of years or even millions of years into the future, where do you see civilisation heading . Will we even be here at all . Well, i think the important point is that this century is special. Its a century when, for the first time, we can change human beings themselves. With genetic modification and cyber technology, et cetera. Whereas in the past, evolution of human beings and their character happened on a slow, darwinian timescale. Now its going to happen much quicker. And i do think this is a real game changer, because we can read the literature written 2,000 years ago by classical authors and see their artefacts and admire them. Human nature was the same then as now. But i think theres no reason to think that any intelligences a few centuries from now will have any emotional resonances with us. They may be quite different entities, because the change in the future is going to be a sort of secular intelligent design, rather than just evolution. And so human beings themselves, here on earth and perhaps by then far beyond the earth, are going to change much faster. And even though the time laying ahead is even than the time that has elapsed up until now on the earth, 4. 5 billion years, things are going to change faster. And thats why its completely impossible to predict things 1,000 years ahead, still lessi million or1 billion years ahead, because the changes going to be faster than ever. We seem to be having some quite apocalyptici like rain, if anybody is wondering what the noise is. Ok, id like to ask all of you, how optimistic are you about the future . You can give it a mark out of 10, if you like. Martin . Im a technical optimist but a political pessimist, in that i think we already have the technology to make a better world for the 7. 5 billion people who live on it now, and the gap between the way things are and the way they could be is an ethical indictment of us, collectively. So i am pessimistic that we will use technology optimally, but thats not a reason for not trying. Weve got to try and hope that we can avoid the downsides of new technology, and avoid despoiling the environment and make sure that we leave a heritage for future generations, just as important as the heritage, sewers, and all of that left to us by the victorians. Well, if you spend a lot of time with children, young people, who are our future generations, there are obviously people we cant spend time with because theyre not born yet, but if you do that, as i do, i have five future generations of my own, i feel fairly optimistic that actually, they have got the right answers and the right mindset and a lot of the right solutions, to be solving some of the big challenges ahead. But i would agree with you, in terms of the current political climate, i feel fairly pessimistic, about these sort of day to day decisions. But then i think, internationally, there is a Real Movement forming around this. And when you see Jacinda Arderns government in new zealand having this big focus on the wellbeing budget, notjust these Narrow Economic measures. Youve got the welsh future generations act, parts of which have been picked up by countries across the world, the canadian government have just amended their legislation to put in this bit about future generations. There is a Movement Building in the netherlands to do something similar. Gibraltar, a tiny area, but going to have legislation. And then some of the long term thinking that is coming without legislation, but coming from other countries across the world. I think there is a movement, a movement growing. Butjust having the kind of governance around it, its not enough. It has to flow through to the day to day decisions that Decision Makers are making all the time. Roman, how about you . One word that makes me optimistic, and its this word death. That human beings die. We will all die, but we all want to leave a legacy, which is the other important word, apart from death. We want to find ways of being remembered well by future generations. We have a choice about the kind of legacies we want to leave. We can leave an egoistic legacy and get a wing of the National Gallery named after us, which is what the sort of russian oligarchs want in terms of legacy. We can have a familial legacy which we all feel when you have children and you want to leave things to your own progeny. But i think we can also make a step from there to a kind of sense of transcendent legacy, that we want to be remembered well by all future generations, and i think theres something very beautiful in the new zealand maori concept, which is called whakapapa, their word for intergenerationalism. This idea we are all in a great chain of being, connected to people in the past and animals and plants in the past, and to the future. Right now the light happens to be shining on us, on this short moment. But if we have a sense of a longer now, a bigger sense of time going into the past and the future, then we can feel the living and the dead and the future all here in the room with us, and that concept of legacy, i think, is our ultimate hope. Well, im afraid that is all we have time for today. Thank you very much to our panellists, martin rees, sophie howe and roman krznaric. And thank you to our audience. I hope everybody is thinking more long term. Voiceover for more stories about long term thinking and a deeper view of civilisation, head to bbc. Com future. Good evening. Its been a while since ive been able to say this, but a lovely start to the weekend for many. Most places were dry. Most places had the sunshine as well and skies a little bit like this. But over the next few days, were going to see a few changes. It will get humid in a few areas but could also turn quite stormy particularly across parts of england, wales, and eastern scotland before later in the week, the sunshine returns and the temperatures really will start to shoot up. Now bringing about the change for the next few days is the proximity of this area of low pressure which is spinning towards us. High pressure has been with us to start the weekend and it will be to a certain degree through the night and into tomorrow keeping most places dry. Will be some thicker clouds but some patchy rain into northern scotland. And then later in the night, the isles of scilly, West Cornwall could turn increasingly wet and increasingly breezy. But for most, partly clear skies and staying dry with temperatures roughly around the 10 12 degree mark. Now, as you go into sunday, it should be a bright start for many. The main exception initially will be the far north of scotland patchy rain in the mainland and then rain toward western cornwall. But that wetter weather will spread across parts of cornwall, wales, South West England and into Northern Ireland during the afternoon. A few isolated, maybe thundery showers across the highlands of scotland but much of scotland, good part of england though, staying dry. Morning sunshine giving way to cloudy conditions turning very humid in the south. And as humidity increases, the threat of thunderstorms increases as we go into sunday night. Particularly across parts of wales, into the midlands, and northern england. Now, rainfall amounts will vary quite widely but we could see up to 50 mm, two inches of rain in one or two spots. That could cause some flash flooding in places certainly through the night and into the early hours of monday, the worst of those storms and as we creep into monday, eastern scotland could see some heavy and persistent rain. Still the chance of the odd rumble of thunder but its just the sheer persistence of it accompanied by some other cool easterly winds which will continue to blow that rain in. Still some heavy rain across the far north of england, particularly north east. Elsewhere, isolated showers in Northern Ireland, england, and wales. The morning cloud, when it breaks up, it is going to feel increasingly humid with temperatures in the mid to upper 20s. Still in the teens across some parts of scotland. So, there you go through monday night into tuesday, the rain is across northern scotland but through monday night into tuesday, more thundery downpours could return. Pinpointed exactly where they could be but uncertain at the moment. But certainly for parts of england, some torrential storms possible and as i said, it gets even hotter and even more humid as we go through the rest of the week. Bye for now. This is bbc world news today. Our top stories President Trump says the us is going ahead with more sanctions on iran, but warns military action is still an option. The frontrunner to become britains next Prime Minister, borisjohnson, refuses to answer questions about police being called to the home he shares with his partner. Sri lanka extends the state of emergency imposed after the Easter Sunday suicide bombings two months ago. And a national day held in the uk to mark 70 years since hundreds of caribbean migrants known as the Windrush Generation arrived to help rebuild post war britain. Hello and welcome to world news today