Holding the Baby in a Heating World: Reflections from Solutions House London

This week England recorded the hottest day of the year and the hottest June on record. In France, alarms sounded as schools closed amid temperatures soaring to 40°C (104°F). Outdoor work was banned in some Italian regions as the country issued heatwave red alerts for 17 cities. Meanwhile, the Mediterranean Sea reached a record 30°C, that’s six degrees above the seasonal average.

Even the most familiar summer days now carry a different edge a prelude to something more severe. Scientists are clear: these aren’t outliers, they’re signals. Europe is warming at twice the global average. And with the world's leading climate scientists warning that we have less than three years to get effective climate measures in place, the moment doesn’t call for panic, it calls for clarity, purpose, and recalibrated resolve.

A Container for Urgency and Emotion

Against this backdrop, I reflect on last week’s Climate Action Week and the first-ever London edition of Solutions House, a sister to our beloved New York event. From the moment we began prep the day before, Solutions House made clear it’s more than an event. It’s a container. A deliberately designed space to hold those working in sustainability, our energy, our urgency, our grief, our brilliance.

Below are some personal reflections from the day, written from my hot home office in London, in between cold baths to cool down and wondering: will summer ever feel bearable again?

Behind the Scenes

Solutions House didn’t begin on Tuesday 24th, it began weeks earlier with a fast and mighty turnaround from the Futerra and Unilever teams. I arrived the day before at Unilever’s head office ready for a long day of labelling and prep, but the bulk of materials didn’t arrive until later. Instead, the team huddled together in a cool room with sweeping London skyline views, ironing out details, wrangling last-minute ticket requests, designing signs and getting names to the printer. Late into the evening we finally wrapped up and were ready for the following day.

Tuesday morning, coffee in hand, I made my way from Blackfriars station to the venue, buzzing with anticipation. As guests arrived and gathered around the breakfast pastries, conversations sparked immediately. I found myself in flowing dialogue, we hadn’t even started the first session of the morning and I’d had conversations about internal sustainability comms challenges, the people-first imperative of ESG and welcomed a colleague only two weeks into her new role alongside two former teammates of mine.

A Room Full of People Who Get It

What struck me most throughout the day of conversations in the coffee breaks was the sense of psychological safety. These weren’t surface-level networking moments. Conversations flowed easily, held by a shared understanding that we’re all working, in some way or another, on this tangled web of climate and sustainability. We spoke openly about the emotional toll of this work, the weight of political rollbacks, funding cuts, and the looming uncertainty of a US administration acting almost directly against a liveable future.

There was no need to perform. Just a shared sense of being “in it” together.

While none of the panels of the day spoke directly to nature, this was a theme that for me, kept surfacing in my coffee break conversations, from meeting a member of the WWF team who worked on the Prescription for Nature campaign, visible across London it provides a dose of nature in the stuffy hustle of commuter stations. To meeting members of the team at Business for Nature, right through to a coffee break chat about an attendee’s recent trip to photograph Puffins in the Isle of Man.

Nature as a Constant Undercurrent

This subtle but powerful theme ran through the day for me: our relationship with nature. Not just in terms of protection or restoration but as refuge, reset, and resistance.

It felt evident to me that we’re all craving the grounding force of green spaces, especially when everything feels like it’s spinning. It reminded me of a recent moment: working to a tight deadline, tense and distracted, when my housemate suggested a ten-minute walk in the woods. I resisted. But two minutes in, I paused. I heard a bird call I didn’t recognise. Cue the Merlin Bird ID app, (my current obsession) which identified that call as a woodpecker. Just standing there, trying to trace the sound, something shifted. When I returned to my desk, I was calmer. Clearer. The task got done.

Nature moments matter. They’re not indulgences, they are tools of inner resilience.

Acting sustainably IS the competitive advantage

Many sessions of the day explored how sustainability creates business advantage, finding new ways to talk about the benefits of sustainable action and commitments. In our panel titled ‘From Climate Commitments to Competitive Advantage’ we heard about Unilever’s latest innovation, Wonder Wash. Leveraging the insight that 80% of consumers use a quick wash once a week, people’s habits are shifting and don’t always require a long wash, this new product works effectively on a 15 min wash cycle and helps its users reduce their water and energy use. For Unilever this innovation created a new category that they estimated to be worth €2 billion by 2026.

But it wasn’t just Unilever. The Game Changers panel spotlighted athletes gaining competitive edge from plant-based diets, achieving better health, better performances. With many well-known athletes such as Lewis Hamilton, Venus Williams and Novak Djokovic all following a vegan diet its common knowledge that a plant-based diet can support better health and planetary health. The EAT Forum released a new white paper during London Climate Action week, it’s headline finding: “Building Our Food Future outlines how shifting diets could prevent up to 24% of avoidable deaths while unlocking gigatonne scale emissions cuts.”

What better advantage is there than that?

From Planetary to Personal

Another piece of commentary that’s been playing on my mind from the past week, comes via conversations held by the Outrage + Optimism podcast where they discussed ways to truly create urgency, that we must talk about the climate crisis in terms everyone can relate to, lives lost, communities displaced, and the toll on our physical and mental health.

Because we do feel grief for animals. We mourn the destruction of wild places, ocean floors and great forest canopies. But somehow, that hasn’t always translated into collective action. Perhaps it’s time to focus more deliberately on the human impacts: the child with asthma in a polluted city, the elderly person alone in a heatwave, the activist burnt out from carrying too much for too long.

At Solutions House, those conversations came to the surface. We spoke not just about emissions, but about emotion.

There was a shared sense that we need more than strategies, we need stamina.

Inner Development and Holding the Baby

Which brings me onto one of the most moving sessions at Solutions House, Parenting the Future, led by our CEO Lucy Shea. Building on a metaphor she first shared on LinkedIn, Lucy invited us to see sustainability as a baby we’re all caring for. Fragile, demanding, hopeful. And sometimes overwhelming.

We reflected, gently and honestly, on what "holding the baby" looks like in our own organisations and in ourselves. What coping strategies are we using? Where are we burnt out? When was the last time we paused long enough to come back to ourselves?

In a field that prizes action, urgency, and deliverables, this session gave us permission to feel. And it reminded us: we are not machines. If we want to keep going, we have to hold space for grief, rest, and recalibration. It was a rare moment to pause and refill our cups. A reminder that you can’t hold the baby if your arms are trembling.

You need breaks. Stillness. Moments of self-connection before diving back in.

Culture, Creativity, and Collective Renewal

Solutions House closed with a jolt of creative energy, delivered through the Culture Nexus session. Artists and storytellers lit up the room with visions of what’s possible when creativity meets climate ambition. Our chief solutionist Solitaire Townsend reminded us all: even if you don’t think of yourself as creative, you are.

Reminding us that data might inform, but stories move. Culture can shift public will faster than any policy and with deeper resonance. The session heard from some incredible creative minds, there were so many sound bite, mic drop moments that I can’t do them justice, you’ll just have to keep an eye on the Solutions House website and join the newsletter for the session recordings to land!

After a long day of insight, intensity, and vulnerability, we left with something essential: a spark.

A reminder that yes, we’re in a crisis. But we’re also in a moment of radical potential.

What now?

This summer’s heat is a warning and a call to action. But it’s also a mirror, forcing us to ask difficult questions:

• How do we build resilience while staying open-hearted?
• How do we centre human wellbeing, not as an outcome, but as a core strategy?
• How do we protect nature, while letting it protect us in return?

From Solutions House to global headlines, the message is clear: we must connect the dots between the climate crisis, our inner lives, and our health. Because this isn’t just about the planet.

It’s about people.

It’s about us.

And that makes the work not only necessary but deeply personal.