China’s efforts to shift away from coal will be blunted by the country’s growing carbon footprint overseas, argues Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz.
The European Commission has proposed a strategy for the Paris climate talks that includes the aim of achieving a “Paris Protocol”. According to Susanne Dröge and Oliver Geden of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP) in Berlin, this strategy does not take into account the new global context of the negotiations. They urge the EU to drop the word “protocol”, consider how to align the international process with internal EU climate policy making, and accept that a science-based approach to climate action in the tradition of the Kyoto protocol is not viable.
In its third conclusions on climate diplomacy, published on 20 July 2015, the Council of the European Union reinforces its commitment to addressing climate change as a key foreign policy and security matter.
“Perhaps I’m a case study for what happens in the federal government when we start on a tough problem,” says Alice Hill, the senior director for resilience policy and the National Security Council and former senior counselor to the secretary of homeland security.
In advance of the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris this December, many publics around the world name global climate change as a top threat, according to a new Pew Research Center survey measuring perceptions of international challenges.
National security leaders deal with deep uncertainty on a daily basis about everything from North Korea’s ability to produce a nuclear weapon to the location and timing of the next terrorist attack by non-state actors such as ISIS and al-Qaida. Security decision-makers don’t use uncertainty as an excuse to ignore security threats.
Violent conflicts and security crises around the world have many different causes and effects. The vast majority of them, however, are in one way or another related to energy policy. Yet experts from the foreign policy, security and energy communities have been reluctant to fully grasp the security implications of promising green energy technology and market developments, argue Rebecca Bertram and Charlotte Beck.
Sponsored by Climate Vulnerable Forum members Bangladesh and Philippines, together with all other Climate Vulnerable Forum members and a total of over 110 countries co-sponsoring, including the African Group and the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, the UN Human Rights Council unanimously adopted a new resolution today on human rights and climate change.
The Compact of States and Regions, the only global platform to record greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reduction targets and inventory data from sub-national governments, has today announ
Pope Francis’ Encyclical Letter “Laudato Si”, published on 18 June 2015, is a moral plea for action against climate change and environmental degradation. Besides laying out the Pope’s critical stance on the ecological, spiritual and economic motives to ‘save our common home’, it also sends a central message to policy makers that: international political climate action is more important now than ever.