In his video address to the United Nations (UN) General Assembly in September, Chinese President Xi Jinping announced a slight improvement of China’s 2015 Paris climate agreement pledge: national carbon dioxide emissions should now peak before 2030 rather than around 2030.
COVID-19 has killed more than 500,000 people worldwide, made millions more ill, and continues to wreak havoc. But as the saying goes – and without wishing to downplay this human tragedy in any way – it’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good.
By 29 July, according to the sustainability organisation Global Footprint Network, humanity will have used up the Earth’s resource budget for the entire year. This “Earth Overshoot Day” has moved forward by an astonishing two months in the past 20 years and in 2019 it will arrive earlier than ever. Although humanity’s increasing environmental impact manifests itself in many ways, climate change has the broadest and longest-lasting effects.
“We can't afford to fail in Katowice,” said United Nations (UN) Secretary-General António Guterres in his opening remarks at the kick off of the 24th Conference of the Parties (COP24) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), last week, warning world leaders that climate change was running away from us, dragging with it a plethora of problems from rising atmospheric and ocean temperatures, as well as sea levels.
In the next two weeks, thousands of world leaders, business representatives, climate experts, activists and lobbyist, as well as indigenous and local communities, will be congregating in the Polish coal city of Katowice, for the 24th Conference of the Parties (COP) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), or COP24.
In December 2015, recognising the need for an effective and progressive response to climate change, the world’s leaders came together to commit to a landmark agreement under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
The United States (US), despite withdrawing from a landmark accord aimed at curbing climate change, is stonewalling vital United Nations (UN) talks over how to fund poorer nations as they battle against global warming, multiple sources told AFP on Saturday.US President Donald Trump caused global outrage by announcing the US would withdraw from the Paris Accord, but the decision cannot formally take effect until at least 2020 and Washington has vowed to take part in climate negotiations to pro
Next month, the Global Climate Action Summit – one of the largest international gatherings on climate change the world has seen – will be held in San Francisco. The event, whose theme is “Take Ambition to the Next Level,” aims to serve as a launchpad for accelerated action that will enable the world to meet the goals set by the 2015 Paris climate agreement.
At the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris, world leaders at last seemed to recognize the reality of climate change. But the response they are pursuing is fundamentally flawed, given its dependence on “renewable energy sources” – such as solar, hydro, and wind power, as well as biofuels – that actually damage nature.
Member states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations bear minimal historical responsibility to carbon emissions but are equally suffering the impact of climate change as its effects on the world become more apparent. True ‘climate justice’ was needed and in December 2015, with the adoption of the Paris Agreement by 195 countries, justice was served.
Environmental issues like climate change and greenhouse gas emissions have come to shape the global agenda for the future. The logic it follows is simple – no environment, no humanity. This concern was most urgently dealt with on a cold winters’ day in December 2015 in Paris when the leaders of 195 countries agreed to adopt the world’s first ever universal global climate deal.
With the United Nations’ climate change conference underway in Bonn, Germany, rising global temperatures are once again at the top of the world’s agenda.
