Climate Change

Participants of a key meeting in Poland to prepare the UN Climate Change Conference in Katowice in December 2018 (COP24) highlighted the wealth of economic opportunities when acting on climate change, and the urgent need for a just transition towards a low carbon society that both protects the climate and jobs. Speaking at the business day of the so-called “Pre-COP” ...

On the heels of one of the deadliest summers of climate-related weather disasters affecting countries all over the world, an unprecedented gathering of global leaders has launched the new Global Commission on Adaptation to catalyse a global movement to bring scale and speed to climate adaptation solutions. The Global Commission on Adaptation is led by Ban Ki-moon, 8th Secretary-General of the United Nations; ...

The meeting of Ministers and Heads of Delegation from the Least Developed Countries (LDC) group held recently in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, has been described as productive. The delegates had gathered from October 15 to 16, 2018 to discuss the priorities of the LDC group in preparation for the international climate negotiations in Katowice, Poland in December. Mr. Gebru Jember Endalew, ...

Western countries need to reduce their intake of red meat dramatically if they want to truly tackle climate change. That’s according to a new study, published in Nature journal this week, which says beef consumption needs to fall dramatically. “The food system is a major driver of climate change, changes in land use, depletion of freshwater resources, and pollution of aquatic and ...

Britain has asked its climate change experts to advise on whether it should set a date to meet a net zero emissions target, the government said on Monday, October 15, 2018. Britain has a target to cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 80 per cent compared with 1990 levels by 2050. However, campaigners have warned this does not go far ...

UN Climate Change Executive Secretary, Patricia Espinosa, and UN Secretary-General’s Special Representative for Disaster Risk Reduction and head of the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR), Mami Mizutori, in an op-ed published on October 11, 2018 by the Thomson Reuters Foundation, insist that climate change is now a major multiplier of disaster losses worldwide There has been a doubling of extreme weather events ...

The climate alarm could not have been much louder than the special report (SR15) that was released on Monday, October 8, 2018 by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). While the Paris Agreement presented the famous target of limiting global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius, or well below 2.0 degrees, the special report shows that such a range may actually be political wishful ...

Institutional reform is a key intervention towards ensuring the resilience of African economies and the livelihoods of communities, says the African Climate Policy Centre (ACPC) of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (ECA). According to James Murombedzi, Officer-in-Charge of ACPC, communities have long practiced many adaptation strategies and devised many viable responses to changing conditions. “However, there are limits ...

Three and a half year after the historic Urgenda-verdict by the The Hague district court, the Dutch judiciary, again, ruled in favour of Urgenda. The The Hague Court of Appeal affirmed the 2015 decision of the The Hague district court that the Dutch State violates its duty of care by not taking enough action to lower its CO2 emissions by ...

The “Global Warming of 1.5°C” report released by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) on Monday, October 8, 2018 confirms the need to maintain the strongest commitment to the Paris Agreement’s aims of limiting global warming to well below 2°C and pursuing efforts towards 1.5°C, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) has said. The IPCC’s special report clearly ...