25 January 2018, Climate Home News, France, Germany, US among 166 countries late on UN climate dues. our out of five countries missed the agreed date for contributions to UN Climate Change, including some who claim to be leaders on climate change. Four out of five countries are late in making their contributions to the UN climate change body’s operating budget. Donald Trump has actively sought to block US support for international climate efforts, although this was challenged by the senate. The majority of member states support cooperation in principle but have been slow to pay. China, Brazil, France and Germany are among those failing to honour the agreed timeline for payments, a UN Climate Change statement on Thursday revealed. The body’s executive secretary Patricia Espinosa focused on the positive, thanking 31 countries who paid their 2018 share by the due date of 1 January. “I would like to extend my deepest appreciation to the parties that have contributed in a timely way,” she said. “The impacts of climate change are accelerating around the world, and it is essential that the response of the international community also accelerates and is scaled up so that countries can green their economies and build resilience to the inevitable impacts of climate change.” Punctual contributors included the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. While Espinosa did not explicitly call them out, the statement implies 166 out of 197 parties to the UN climate talks are behind on their payments. Read More here
Category Archives: Global Action Inaction
23 January 2018, Climate Home News, Davos 2018: climate change rhetoric and reality. he movers and shakers at the World Economic Forum warn climate change is a major threat to prosperity, but what are they doing about it? Climate change is a hot topic in the snows of Davos this year. The world leaders, business tycoons and celebrities jetting in to the annual World Economic Forum (Wef) have identified the biggest threats to prosperity as environmental. A global risk survey places extreme weather events, natural disasters and failure of climate change mitigation and adaptation in the alarm zone for both likelihood and impact. So you can expect the topic to come up in speeches and panel sessions. India’s Narendra Modi is the headliner, to be followed by Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron. All have something to boast about when it comes to climate protection. All have weaknesses they would rather you didn’t mention. Then comes Donald Trump, who rejects the whole climate agenda, but may not have as much power as he thinks to reverse it. Read More here
19 January 2018, World Resource Institute. Global Environmental Risks Are Keeping Davos Leaders Awake at Night. As movers and shakers — reportedly including President Trump – fire up their private jets to travel to Switzerland for the annual World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, the Forum issued its annual Global Risks Report. For more than a decade, the report has been surveying the WEF’s network of business, government and civil society leaders, asking them to rank global risks based on both their impact and likelihood. In short, the report asks what keeps the global elite awake at night. The answer? Mounting environmental threats. 2 Takeaways from the Global Risks Report First, a majority (five of eight) of the risks respondents said were both most impactful and most likely to happen were environmental risks. These were extreme weather events, failure of climate change mitigation and adaptation, man-made environmental disasters, biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse, and natural disasters. A sixth, water crises, is labeled by the WEF as a societal risk, but it can also be considered an environmental risk. In other words, even while geopolitical and cyber risks are increasing and domestic politics in many countries are in turmoil, the leading decision-makers in business and government remain most concerned about the cluster of risks connected to the environment—many of them related to climate change. Read More here
12 January 2018, Reuters, Warming set to breach Paris accord’s toughest limit by mid century: draft. Global warming is on track to breach the toughest limit set in the Paris climate agreement by the middle of this century unless governments make unprecedented economic shifts from fossil fuels, a draft U.N. report said. The draft, of a report due for publication in October, said governments will also have to start sucking carbon dioxide from the air to achieve the ambition of limiting temperatures to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial times. “There is very high risk that … global warming will exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels,” the U.N. panel of experts wrote, based on the current pace of warming and current national plans to limit their greenhouse gas emissions. There were no historic precedents for the scale of changes required in energy use, to shift from fossil fuels to renewable energies, and in reforms ranging from agriculture to industry to stay below the 1.5C limit, it said. The draft, by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) of leading scientists and obtained by Reuters, says average surface temperatures are about 1C above pre-industrial times and that average temperatures are on track to reach 1.5C by the 2040s. Curbing warming to 1.5C would help limit heat extremes, droughts and floods, more migration of people and even risks of conflict compared to higher rates of warming, according to the draft summary for policymakers. But a 1.5C rise might not be enough to protect many coral reefs, already suffering from higher ocean temperatures, and ice stored in Greenland and West Antarctica whose melt is raising sea levels. Read More here. For expert response read more here