2011 was a year of revolution. The Arab Spring was followed by a summer of protests across Southern Europe, with the Occupy movement emerging in the US in the autumn. Beginning with Occupy Wall Street in New York, camps sprang up in dozens of countries and hundreds of cities and towns – 600 in the US alone

The Chinese are on a global shopping spree with a mammoth of a shopping cart in tow. In a climate ridden with geopolitical struggles, many over natural resources, China is strolling the isles and picking products to its heart’s desire. The world’s second-largest economy is on a breathtaking binge –  one that poses a threat to our future, according to economist Dambisa Moyo

Likened to a modern day gold rush, development of the UK’s shale gas resources has generated both excitement and dissent in equal measures

In fascinating and iconoclastic detail - on everything from the cash in your pocket to the food on your plate and the shape of our working lives – Cancel the Apocalypse describes how the relentless race for economic growth is not always one worth winning

What’s impossible for the individual can be achieved by many: How alternative financial institutions are helping the transition to a low carbon economy

Our old institutions, the banks, government and city fathers, have led us to believe that they have earned a place at the heart of society. A heart that, as we have witnessed over the last few years, is no longer beating true

At times, it’s hard to imagine how any of us could make a dent in the vast issues that loom up before us – climate change, the recession, energy prices. But groups of people are working together to produce some astounding results

We’re running out of time. It’s absolutely vital that, as far as the three major crisis debates are concerned – finance, energy, climate – each of us makes up our mind about what we think

Paving the way for developing communities to establish livelihoods, Sublime speaks to six organisations who are working tirelessly to achieve the same goal

The financial crisis? We’re moving on. Oil? BP’s off the front page now. Climate change? Depends on who you listen to. It’s time to read the small print. Being something of an anorak as well as an advocate, I keep a daily log on my website of developments on the three issues that I think will probably dominate the 21st century. It embraces the interconnected crises of finance, energy and climate change, and I call it the Triple Crunch Log. Reading through it at year end provides an opportunity to gauge the tempo as well as the scale of these dramas, and to look for the small details on which to base any sketch of the future big picture. Taking an eclectic look at the Triple Crunch Log for 2010, each of the three themes has involved major developments during the year. The financial theme has seen a remarkable bounce-back of stock markets. As the year ends, stock exchanges are around the same value they enjoyed just before the credit crunch unfolded in 2008. The energy theme has seen the largest peacetime oil spill ever. BP’s Macondo spill in the Gulf of Mexico has had ramifications that extend far beyond the tiny amount of oil left unextractable in the miscreant