To coincide with COP26, the Design Council will be hosting a two-day Design for Planet festival at V&A Dundee, on 9-10 November, which it hopes will be “a landmark event to galvanise the UK’s design industry into committing to a sustainable, climate-first future”. The Design Council hopes that around 100 people will attend in person, with more joining through live-streaming and digital workshops. “We want people to leave the festival with constructive insights and tools to champion design as a powerful agent of change. We aim to stimulate the systems shift required in the design industry to address the climate emergency,” the Design Council says. URGE will be helping with programming the event and delivering workshops. We will be announcing more details here on our newsletter but you can also register for updates from the Design Council here

How to Build a Water Smart City: Bloomberg’s City Lab pieces together a “blueprint for the water-smart cities of tomorrow”. Read the feature here

More on cities: launching on September 21, UrbanShift will “engage with more than 20 cities across Asia, Africa and Latin America, bringing together local and global stakeholders to work towards a resilient, inclusive, low-carbon urban future”. The scheme is funded by the Global Environment Facility and led by the UN Environment Programme.

The Trouble With Packaging: Creative Review “delves into the complexities of sustainable packaging design”. Echo’s Andrew Capper refers to the scale of the problem at major FMCG brands: “All of these companies, have spent decades making packaging, essentially, as efficient and as cost effective [as possible]. All of their investment, all of their machinery, all of their supply chain has been built around that. And now we’re at this place where we’ve got to make these changes, and at a very fundamental level it comes with a huge price tag attached.” Read the article here

IKEA is continuing its sustainability efforts with plans to sell clean energy to Swedish homes through its Strömma subscription service. The service will supply certified solar- or wind-generated electricity and include a mobile app to monitor usage. Details here

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