Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
There is good reason to expect that the transition process will be more difficult than we tend to hear about, and that technological solutions, while essential, aren’t enough to address the climate crisis.
Many model pathways designed to meet the climate goals of the Paris Agreement rely heavily on large-scale carbon dioxide removal (CDR), also known as “negative emissions”.
But fossil fuels are doomed by depletion in any case, so what sense does it make investing the few resouces we still have in a technology that doesn’t have a future? In the end, CCS is mainly a failure of the imagination: we can and we should do much better than sweeping the carbon underground.
So what do we actually know about climate mitigation in cities? In our new paper, published in Nature Climate Change, we take stock of all the city case studies currently available in the peer-reviewed literature.
Blue carbon is increasingly being championed by organisations and governments as a tool for climate change mitigation and adaptation, as well as addressing multiple Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). What is blue carbon, how much potential does it actually have, and how could we use it?
We were pretty daunted by that conversation, but one of the things that also came out of it was that a lot of these efforts that it would take to sustain a strike were things like a local food system, things like alternative currency systems, whether that’s a literal currency or whether that’s something like a time bank or a sharing economy, things that make our communities more resilient anyway, things that we know we have to do in order to replace the capitalist system, things that we know we have to do in order to respond to the climate crisis and make our communities less vulnerable.
The Paris Agreement’s inclusion of “well below 2°C” and “pursue … 1.5°C” has catalysed fervent activity amongst many within the scientific community keen to understand what this more ambitious objective implies for mitigation.
Climate Ecoforestry is a viable methodology for retracing our way back to the Holocene relatively quickly. Permaculture and ecovillage design provide the means to implement and to take that to scale rapidly enough to matter.
Academics gathered in Oxford this week to discuss how to constrain fossil fuel supply as part of efforts to tackle climate change.
Agroforestry — integrating trees into cropland or pastureland — is often discussed as a promising strategy for helping to ease the threat of climate change because trees are particularly good at sucking carbon dioxide from the air and socking it away for the long term.
Can simply changing how and what we grow really make a difference to a changing climate?
Journalist Judith D. Schwartz turns her attention to one of the biggest socio-economic-ecological issues of the 21st century – water management – in her new book, Water in Plain Sight: Hope for a Thirsty World.
