Climate Change

The 2024 UN climate change conference put climate finance and carbon trading at the top of the agenda, but the big story was the influence wielded by fossil fuel companies and petrostates. The annual UN climate conference known as the Conference of the Parties (COP) takes place in a different city every year.  In 2024, delegates from almost 200 countries gathered for COP 29 in Baku, Azerbaijan. Disagreement marked the start of the summit and foreshadowed the end result. While most climate conferences come down to the wire, COP 29 came closer to collapse than almost all the talks that had...

We are seeing efforts to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions,* but according to 10 recently published, authoritative scientific reports and studies, we are not doing anywhere near enough to meet the targets laid out in the Paris Climate Agreement. We have seen hopeful progress that includes the prodigious growth of renewable sources of energy, and the uptake of electric vehicles. The world's largest economy passed landmark climate legislation, and courts have ruled in support of climate action.  We have seen a wide range of conservation efforts and ever-increasing protected areas along with unprecedented restoration and reforestation efforts all around the...

Global warming has spawned feedback loops that exacerbate the climate crisis. Climate change is about much more than hotter temperatures, the heat fuels wildfires and extreme weather including storms. It also melts sea ice in the Arctic and the Antarctic which drives sea level rise. It drives down agricultural yields and exacerbates the refugee crisis. All of these climate impacts coalesce and interact, often involving feedback loops. As defined by the NOAA, A positive feedback loop increases the effect of the change and produces instability. In climate change, a feedback loop is something that speeds up or slows down the...

There is a growing body of research directly linking individual extreme weather events and wildfires to anthropogenic climate change. According to one study, more than 70 percent of all studied extreme weather events were made more likely due to climate change. As reported by Change Oracle, The World Weather Attribution group (WWA) concluded that the climate crisis has made South Asia heat waves 30 times more likely and the UK heatwaves 10 times more likely WWA concluded that heat in the Pacific Northwest in 2021, was “virtually impossible without human causes climate change”. WWA also explained that anthropogenic climate change...

This year we have witnessed the hottest June, and July 2023 may be the hottest month in 120,000 years in what is shaping up to be the hottest summer in the hottest year in recorded history. Not only is the planet warming but there is a wealth of evidence suggesting this trend continues to accelerate.

What will it take for us to avoid a climate catastrophe and stem biodiversity loss? Will we continue to ignore incontrovertible evidence calling for change? Is humanity doomed to destroy itself? We are facing the perilous combination of climate pollution and environmental degradation. Research reaffirms what we already know, human activities are systematically dismantling the planet's interrelated ecosystem. A World Wildlife Fund (WWF) report indicated that we have lost almost 70 percent of wildlife populations in the last half-century, we are losing dozens of species every year and one million species are currently at risk of extinction. A 2022 IPCC...

Standing ovation after the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework was approved at COP15. Image Credit: The Convention on Biological Diversity Just before Christmas, international governments signaled they may be ready to make a dramatic shift away from humanity's penchant for destroying the natural world. On Monday, December 19, COP15, the largest UN biodiversity conference in more than ten years concluded in Montreal with a deal that has been hailed as a transformational, once-in-a-decade agreement.  Despite intense negotiations, world leaders committed to taking "urgent action" to "halt and reverse biodiversity loss" by 2030. More than 15,000 people participated including governments, NGOs, and...

The 27th United Nations Climate Change Conference, known as COP27, concluded with a historic decision to establish and operationalize a type of climate finance known as the loss and damage fund. The 27th COP was held from the 6th to the 20th of November 2022 in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt. More than 100 heads of state and thousands of delegates and 35, 000 people, took part in high-level events and key negotiations and events showcasing climate action around the world. Here is a brief history of climate finance and a summary of the achievements and shortcomings of COP27. There have been three...

Over the last three decades, the UN has brought the world together to secure historic international agreements and advance global climate action. The annual climate change meetings are formally known as the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC or FCCC) Conferences of the Parties (COP). These conferences rely on the best available science to direct climate action and provide guidance for policymaking. The climate COP process was born n 1992 as part of the Rio Earth Summit which was held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The agreement that emerged from that meeting provides a framework for negotiating specific international treaties...

The U.S. climate bill, more formally known as the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) of 2022 was signed into law by President Joe Biden on August 16th.  The 755-page bill includes 100 climate, energy, and environmental programs that are designed to cut U.S. carbon emissions by 40 percent. The incentive-driven approach in the IRA is expected to avert more than a billion tons of carbon by 2030.  The IRA has provisions for emissions reductions in every major sector of the economy including electricity production and transportation as well as energy-intensive manufacturing industries like steel, chemicals, and cement.  The IRA pays for itself, creates jobs,...