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We arrived in Dubai for the COP28 climate summit just after midnight on Sunday 3rd, returning on Friday 8th. In between, Louise (Kjellerup Roper) and I experienced multiple different worlds – hinted at in the following images. A separate sequence on our subsequent trip to Masdar City and Abu Dhabi follows. Among other things, we launched our new white paper – on greenwashing and green hushing – with the First Abu Dhabi Bank (FAB) and the UAE Global Councils on the SDGs.

Up very early to take train and Drain (Waterloo & City line) to Bank station, ahead of an event at the very top of The Gherkin. Watched the sun come up in the east from the top of the Gherkin. The event was hosted by Tech Nation and a range of other organisations. Our CEO, Louise Kjellerup Roper, co-chairs their Climate Committee.

We kicked off with my fireside chat with Elisa Moscolin, EVP for sustainability at Sage Group. Our theme – and that of the event – was the rise of CSO (Chief Sustainability Officer) and the challenge of Sustainability Leadership.

Early on, I recalled being taken around the building by the then site engineer, Sara Fox, a formidable Texan managing 200 male construction workers, while some of the glass was still going in. And, some time later, I had also chaired a long-ago Nestlé dinner atop the Gherkin when their Shared Value Advisory Council, of which I was a long-standing member, came to town.

One highlight today, I think for most of us, was the concluding address from Sir David King. Bracing, to put it mildly.

In very late last night, with train services severely disrupted by Storm Ciaran, from Anthropy23 at The Eden Project. A significantly easier ride though, at least for me, than we had with Anthropy22. The Volans team was further augmented, contributing to at least four sessions (Louise’s on leadership, mine on securing peace and sustainability, a Bankers for NetZero event and the launch of Sacha Dench’s film ‘Flight of the Swans‘), along the way we hosted lively dinners in the Rainforest Biome and at the Cornwall Hotel & Spa.

My session ran for an hour on 3rd November, with three panellists: Scilla Elworthy of The Business Plan for Peace, Lt-General Richard Nugee of the Ministry of Defence, and Colonel Rosie Stone, Human Security Advisor at the MOD. Many thanks also to my friend and colleague Thammy Evans, with whom I did a Carnegie Europe paper on the future role of the military in relation to the climate and biodiversity emergencies, for her help in hooking in Rosie.

I worked up a draft summary of the session earlier today and circulated it to our panellists and team members, with an agreed version due to be submitted to the Anthropy team shortly. Also plan to post a summary once we have an agreed version. Part-way through the session I asked the 200-plus strong audience three questions:

1. Who had served in the armed forces? Perhaps a dozen hands went up.
2. Who was working for the defence industry? One or two diffident hands went up.
3. Who thought the theme of our session was relevant for future Anthropy events? Virtually every hand in the huge room shot up.

With the help of team member George Hopkins, we did another series of video appreciations of the event. The first can be found here, the second here. We will be posting summaries and assessments on the Volans website and through various other channels in the coming days. But here are a handful images that capture some of my own experience of this latest iteration of an extraordinary event.

Heartfelt congratulations to Anthropy founder John O’Brien and his team.

On our penultimate day in Jordan, we visited the Citadel and the Roman Theatre, alongside their museums. We were also steered around the old quarters of the city by Iain Stewart, who I first came across via his BBC series on geology and by speaking at a virtual conference on mining and minerals he chaired for Britain’s Natural History Museum. he now holds the Jordan-UK El Hassan bin Talal Research Chair in Sustainability at Jordan’s Royal Scientific Society.

Iain and his wife, Paola, took us under their wing, among other things steering us uphill to Amman’s Rainbow Street and then on to Trinitae’s Soap House. Fabulous scents and soaps. Inadvertently, we were slightly late back for the last supper with our Exodus group, but it seemed to go down without too much of a storm.

Overall, I couldn’t recommend the Exodus 12-day tour of Jordan more warmly. There were occasional glitches, of course, with the Gaza horrors raging in the background, but the trip more than satisfied the desire to visit the country that ignited when my original nuclear family went briefly across the border with Israel back in 1959, when I was nine and we were living in Cyprus.

Without being greedy, I can’t wait to go again.

Much of the conversation at breakfast was about the sound the jet fighters throughout the night, but a number of us made our way to a view point in the valley beneath the camp where we could watch the sun rise. Delightful to watch the light catch the peaks of the mountains behind us, then work its way down their flanks and out across the valley.

En route to the viewing point, we spotted what looked like – and almost certainly were – gerbil burrows. A camp cat following the group made a point of showing us how he hunted gerbils – and how he controlled the landscape. Quite a remarkable creature.

Observant readers of these entries will have spotted that there are few people shown here – and little or no litter, though the landscape is often filled with both. Artistic license, I’m afraid. As a gesture, I started to pick up some litter on the way back to our camp. Finding a pair of pink children’s trousers, I gingerly lifted them up and, sure enough, three dead beetles and a scorpion fell out.

Then it was off to Aqaba, with a stop along the way to take a look at a Turkish locomotive that harked back to the time during the Arab Revolt when Lawrence helped direct attacks on the Hejaz railway running to Aqaba.

Once in Aqaba, we stayed three hours in a beach resort while some swam in the sea and pools, and we lounged on a pair of loungers in a shady spot and pondered what we have seen and experienced on this trip – all to the sound of an insistent Arab disco beat. I like music, but …