In this treatise, Mark Carney (Canadian economist who currently serves as Governor of the Bank of England and Chairman of the G20’s Financial Stability Board) and Michael Bloomberg (American business magnate, politician, and philanthropist, whose wealth is estimated at $43.3 billion) explore wow to make a profit from defeating climate change

From rising sea levels to more severe storms and more intense droughts, climate change will present serious risks to, and create major opportunities for, nearly every industry. Citizens, consumers, businesses, governments, and international organisations are all taking action. And entrepreneurs are developing disruptive technologies that will create and destroy value.

The challenge is that investors currently don’t have the information they need to respond to these developments. This must change if financial markets are going to do what they do best: allocate capital to manage risks and seize new opportunities. Without the necessary information, market adjustments to climate change will be incomplete, late and potentially destabilising.

Public policy, consumer demand and technological innovation are driving a shift towards a low-carbon economy. Which companies and industries are most, and least, dependent on fossil fuels? And who stands ready to provide resilient and sustainable infrastructure? Which financial institutions are best positioned to gain and which to lose? In every case, which firms have the governance, resources and the strategy to manage, and profit from, these major shifts?

We believe that financial disclosure is essential to a market-based solution to climate change. A properly functioning market will price in the risks associated with climate change and reward firms that mitigate them. As its impact becomes more commonplace and public policy responses more active, climate change has become a material risk that isn’t properly disclosed.

In response to a G20 request to consider the financial stability risks, the Financial Stability Board created a taskforce on climate-related financial disclosures. Its purpose is to develop voluntary, consistent disclosures to help investors, lenders and insurance underwriters manage material climate risks. As befits a solution by the market for the market, the taskforce is led by members of the private sector from across the G20, including major companies, large investors, global banks and insurers.

After a year of intensive work and widespread consultation its recommendations are now publicly available. They concentrate on the practical, material disclosures most relevant to investors and creditors and which can be compiled by all companies that raise capital as well as financial institutions.

We are pleased that all taskforce members, companies with market capitalisation of $1.5 trillion and financial institutions responsible for assets of $20 trillion, have announced their support for the disclosure recommendations. We encourage others to participate in the consultation, to become early adopters thereafter, and to encourage the companies in which they invest to also make the disclosures.

A year ago in Paris, 195 countries committed to limit the rise in global average temperatures to less than 2C. With better disclosure, a market in the transition to that world can be built. That market will expose the likely future cost of doing business, of paying for emissions, and of changing processes to avoid both those charges and tighter regulation. And it will help smooth price adjustments as opinions change, rather than concentrating them in a short, dangerous space of time.

Of course, given the uncertainties around climate, not everyone will agree on the timing or scale of adjustments required to achieve this goal. But the right information will allow optimists and pessimists, sceptics and evangelists, to back their convictions with their capital.

Early disclosure rules allowed 20th-century financial markets to grow our economies by pricing risks more accurately. The spread of such standards internationally has helped lift more than a billion people out of poverty. Climate-related disclosures could be as transformative for 21st-century markets.

Members approve new Department of Climate, Biodiversity, Land and Water, plus work plan that better syncs with the SDGs

The 155th session of the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO) Council that held recently in Rome, Italy has endorsed the creation of a new department focused on climate change and approving a fine-tuned strategic framework that fully aligns the organisation’s work with the 2030 Global Agenda.

Starting next year, the new Department of Climate, Biodiversity, Land and Water will lead FAO’s efforts to support countries in adapting food systems to climate change and fulfilling their commitments made under the Paris Climate Treaty. It will also oversee all FAO work related to the sustainable management of land and water resources which underpin global food production.

Speaking at the council closing session, FAO Director-General José Graziano da Silva thanked its members for endorsing the adjustments to FAO’s working structure, “And for recognising the urgency to enable FAO to better focus on the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals, as well as the Paris Agreement.”

The FAO Reviewed Strategic Framework represents a light recalibration to the organisation’s work plans to reflect recent global developments – particularly the new 2030 Sustainable Development Goals that are now driving the international development agenda. It incorporates SDG metrics, indicators and targets indicators directly into FAO’s own progress monitoring framework.

The Council also approved the creation of a new office of the Chief Statistician to ensure a standardised approach to data reporting across FAO and agreed with the proposal to appoint an additional Deputy Director-General position, charged with overseeing the organisation’s  work related to technical cooperation, resource mobilisation, partnerships and South-South cooperation.

The newly approved strengthened management structure will bolster FAO’s ability to deliver technical and other assistance to countries as well as improve the quality of data used to monitor and evaluate progress.

The Council is the executive arm of FAO’s top-level governing body, the Conference of Members. Made of up 49 member nations elected for staggered three year terms, the Council convenes between sessions of the main conference to provide advice and oversight related to programmatic and budgetary matters.

Global concentrations of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas and cause of climate change, are now growing faster in the atmosphere than at any other time in the past two decades.

That is the message of a team of international scientists in an editorial published 12 December 2016 in the journal Environmental Research Letters. The group reports that methane concentrations in the air began to surge around 2007 and grew precipitously in 2014 and 2015. In that two-year period, concentrations shot up by 10 or more parts per billion annually. It’s a stark contrast from the early 2000s when methane concentrations crept up by just 0.5 parts per billion on average each year. The reason for the spike is unclear but may come from emissions from agricultural sources and mainly around the tropics – potentially from farm sites like rice paddies and cattle pastures.

Scientists involved in the editorial will discuss these trends at a session during the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in San Francisco on Tuesday, 13 December 2016.

The findings could give new global attention to methane – which is much less prevalent in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide but is a more potent greenhouse gas, trapping 28 times more heat. And while research shows that the growth of carbon dioxide emissions has flattened out in recent years, methane emissions seem to be soaring.

“The leveling off we’ve seen in the last three years for carbon dioxide emissions is strikingly different from the recent rapid increase in methane,” says Robert Jackson, a co-author of the paper and a Professor in Earth System Science at Stanford University. The results for methane “are worrisome but provide an immediate opportunity for mitigation that complements efforts for carbon dioxide.”

The authors of the new editorial previously helped to produce the 2016 Global Methane Budget. This report provided a comprehensive look at how methane had flowed in and out of the atmosphere from 2000 to 2012 because of human activities and other sources. It found, for example, that human emissions of the gas seemed to have increased after 2007, although it’s not clear by how much. The methane budget is published every two to three years by the Global Carbon Project, a research project of Future Earth.

Methane, Jackson says, is a difficult gas to track. In part, that’s because it can come from many different sources. Those include natural sources like marshes and other wetlands. But the bulk, or about 60 percent, of methane added to the atmosphere every year comes from human activities. They include farming sources like cattle operations – cows expel large quantities of methane from their specialised digestive tracks – and rice paddies – the flooded soils make good homes for microbes that produce the gas. A smaller portion of the human budget, about a third, comes from fossil fuel exploration, where methane can leak from oil and gas wells during drilling.

“Unlike carbon dioxide, where we have well described power plants, almost everything in the global methane budget is diffuse,” Jackson says. “From cows to wetlands to rice paddies, the methane cycle is harder.”

But a range of information – such as from large-scale inventories of methane emissions, measurements of methane in the air and computer models – suggests that this cycle has shifted a lot in the last two decades. Jackson and his colleagues, for instance, report that the growth of methane in the atmosphere was mostly stagnant in 2000 to 2006. But that changed after 2007.

“Why this change happened is still not well understood,” says Marielle Saunois, lead author of the new paper and an assistant professor of Université de Versailles Saint Quentin and researcher at Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l’Environnement in France. “For the last two years especially, the growth rate has been faster than for the years before. It’s really intriguing.”

Saunois adds that this runaway pace could threaten international efforts to limit warming from climate change to 2 degrees Celsius. The research provides a strong argument that “we should do more about methane emissions,” Saunois says. “If we want to stay below 2 degrees temperature increase, we should not follow this track and need to make a rapid turn-around.”

Pinpointing where those methane emissions are coming from, however, isn’t easy. Many environmental advocates in North America have raised concerns that expanded drilling for natural gas in recent years could lead to a surge in methane emissions. But Saunois says that based on available data, the more likely source, at least for now, is agriculture. She and her colleagues aren’t sure what may be driving this increase. According to the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO), livestock operations around the world expanded from producing 1,300 million head of cattle in 1994 to nearly 1,500 million in 2014 – with a similar increase in rice cultivation in many Asian countries.

Saunois and Jackson argue, however, that the story isn’t all bad news. A number of researchers have experimented with different ways of reducing methane emissions from farms. Feeding cows a diet supplemented with linseed oil, for example, seems to reduce the amount of methane they belch out. “When it comes to methane, there has been a lot of focus on the fossil fuel industry, but we need to look just as hard if not harder at agriculture,” Jackson says. “The situation certainly isn’t hopeless. It’s a real opportunity.”

“Climate Technology – the UNFCCC home for technology”, a new website that showcases UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) support to countries for climate technology action, was launched by the UN organisation’s secretariat on Monday, December 12 2016.

“Just as technology was the main catalyst in the development of fossil fuels, so it is the driver of successful climate friendly solutions, especially low-emissions technologies such as renewable energy and energy efficiency and also including the many solutions to adaptation to extreme climate. It is therefore essential to reach the goals of the Paris Agreement,” says the UN body.

Called TT:CLEAR, the website aims to be a go-to tool for speeding up the  development and transfer of climate technologies. It contains easy-to-search databases for fundable technology projects and policies  that countries could implement in their drive to shift onto low-carbon and climate resilient development pathways.

Linked to this, the website will function as a key resource for countries as they implement their climate action plans – called nationally determined contributions (NDCs) – to achieve the Paris Agreement’s objectives.

The website is also the home of the UNFCCC Technology Mechanism. It contains comprehensive information on its Technology Executive Committee (TEC), including the TEC’s up-coming meetings and relevant documents. It also links to the Climate Technology Centre and Network, the implementing arm of the Technology Mechanism, which provides free technical assistance to developing countries on climate technology issues.

Furthermore, the website showcases developing country technology action plans seeking support  for implementation. It also contains information on the technology needs assessments that developing countries undertake to scale up implementation. The website highlights technology activities that developed countries have supported  in developing countries.

Finally, the new TT:CLEAR also contains information about support for climate technology activities, including links to finance sources.