John Vaillant online & Cal Flyn on stage (17:00 BST)

For hundreds of millennia, fire has been a partner in our evolution, shaping culture and civilization. Yet in our age of intensifying climate change, we are seeing its destructive power unleashed in ways never before witnessed by human beings, with wildfires raging in many parts of the world.

Winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize, John Vaillant, and Scottish author and journalist Cal Flyn, together explore our rapidly changing relationship with fire. In our ever-hotter, more flammable world, in which regions historically less affected by such disasters are now on the front lines of this growing environmental crisis, most recently in California, they reflect on what needs to be done to tackle the climate emergency.

Drawing on his international bestselling book Fire Weather, the story of the brutal urban wildfire of Fort McMurray that turned entire neighbourhoods into firebombs and drove 90,000 people from their homes in a single afternoon, Vaillant delves into the lives irrevocably altered by these disasters.

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