Heading into the December global climate talks in Paris, India’s leaders continue to assert they will not announce when their greenhouse gas emissions will peak.
One leading Indian politician, however, former Environment Minister, Jairam Ramesh, recently said that the country could plateau emissions starting in 2025 or 2030. Ramesh, a former self-described “economic hawk,” called this goal “doable and necessary for India.”
For many years, India had been teaming up with China in international climate negotiations to argue that the rapidly developing countries did not need to take major early action to constrain emissions since the rich countries were responsible for the vast majority of cumulative emissions. This argument has become progressively weaker as the reality of human-caused climate change made the dangers of inaction more and more obvious — and as the price of renewable power just kept dropping.
The big game changer, though, was the U.S.-China climate deal announced last November. The United States committed to a 26 to 28 percent reduction in carbon pollution by 2025 compared to 1990 levels — and China for the first time committed to peak in carbon pollution by 2030, if not sooner.
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Colombia’s long-standing internal conflict and the country’s contribution to climate change share one common root cause: land concentration. Policies to strengthen access to land and to ensure sustainable land use might therefore hold the key to promoting peacebuilding in Colombia, while simultaneously reducing emissions.
As disasters wreak havoc all over South Asia, health impacts have increasingly emerged as a major concern for communities and governments in the region. It underscores the need for concerted efforts towards building synergies between the Paris Agreement, the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction and the 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda, particularly now, in the post-disaster reconstruction phase, to ensure “building back better” and future disaster prevention.
In the Inner Mongolian county of Horinger, Northwestern China, afforestation efforts have transformed a barren, dusty landscape into a pine forest. Planting trees has diminished the sandstorms, boosted biodiversity and improved the environment generally. As the climate emergency worsens, the potential for planted trees to draw carbon out of the atmosphere is being re-examined. What can the world learn from the Chinese experience with afforestation?
Two events in August 2019 underlined the complexity of paving the way to a climate-neutral world: the publishing of the new IPCC report and the Amazon fires. Both events demand that climate diplomats move beyond a narrowed focus on energy in decarbonisation debates.