The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the world’s premier body for climate science, released two crucial reports in early 2022 under its 6th Assessment Report that confirm what we already know: The climate crisis is an issue of the present and its impacts are already being felt across the world, with the hardest-hitting impacts disproportionately affecting the more than …
Climate action: We’re running out of time
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is a United Nations (UN) body set up to commission major assessments of the state of science on climate change and issue their assessment report every five or so years. It has three Working Groups (WGs): WG I is for climate science, WG II for vulnerability impacts and adaptation, and WG III for …
Another grim warning on climate change
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a global body under the United Nations (UN), has been conducting periodic reviews (every six or seven years) of the state of scientific knowledge on climate change for the last 30 years. The agency is currently in the process of publishing its Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) in three parts. The first part was …
This is not tax-payer money
Seen from the global south, the funding scenario that results from a fragmented global-policy arena is totally unfair. The Bangladeshi climate scholar Saleemul Huq discussed matters in a D+C/E+Z interview. In my reading, the Glasgow climate summit COP26 basically resulted in leaving it to market forces to put a check on global warming. The agreements made invite private-sector companies to …
If finance is not agreed, nothing is agreed
Where do we stand after COP26 and where to go?
World leaders, delegates from the nation countries recently gathered in the 26th Conference of the Parties (COP26) hosted in partnership between the UK and Italy in November 2021 in Glasgow to agree on a path forward for tackling global warming. Parties debated over the issues on net zero-emission, Loss and Damage, Mitigation and Adaptation, Finance, Transparency to develop a …
The third era of climate change is upon us
The issue of climate change was first identified by the scientific community three decades ago, through the first assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was agreed upon back in 1992 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Since then, the issue has grown in importance, and the way …
We must urgently prioritise adaptation to address the climate emergency
The recently-published report of Working Group-I of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is a renewed wakeup call on the urgency of taking action at the global level to address climate change. It has, with more accuracy and confidence, confirmed that at least one degree Celsius of temperature rise compared to pre-industrial level can be attributed to human activities. …
Is a global goal on adaptation possible?
At the historic Paris Agreement on Climate Change made at the 21st Conference of Parties (COP21) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in 2015, all the countries of the world agreed on a global goal on mitigation as well as setting a global goal on adaptation. The global goal on mitigation was relatively simple, as it …
Can the G7 leaders rise to the occasion?
The leaders of the G7 countries—consisting of the US, UK, Canada, Japan, Italy, France and Germany—will be holding their annual meeting in the UK in the second week of June and have a number of major issues on their agenda, including how to roll out global vaccination against the coronavirus and how to tackle climate change. What do they need …
OPINION: We must discuss the Paris Agreement every day – not just once a year at COP
As the pandemic again threatens the annual UN climate summit, known as the COP, it’s time to push on with a fresh approach that uses all opportunities for climate action The British government, as the host of the COP26 U.N. climate conference that was originally planned for November 2020, decided to postpone it a year due to the COVID 19 …