COP Reflections: Inside the conferences meant to save the world
Do I think we save the world with one last COP? Perhaps yes, if we do it together.
international climate change agreements
Will the weather eventually provoke radical action on climate?
With two world summits on the global environment at the end of last year – COP27 and COP15 – there should have been the prospect of an immediate impact on the looming disaster of climate breakdown.
What’s going on at COP27?
If the circus of #COP27 has you feeling🤯, you’re not alone: it’s a total information and sensory overload. And if you do make it past the World Climate Fair into the negotiating rooms, complete gibberish. So what’s going on?
The Upcoming UN Climate Talks in Glasgow Are a Make-or-Break Moment
This year’s climate summit—COP26, in UN-speak—will be the most important since the 2015 talks in Paris, and this will be true however the meeting unfolds.
‘Major Hurdle’ Cleared As Youth Activists Advance Historic Climate Case
An unprecedented climate lawsuit brought by six Portuguese youths is to be fast-tracked at Europe’s highest court, it was announced yesterday.
Reflections on Cop 25
In many ways, COP is bad in that it’s failing to achieve the measures that are so desperately needed to avert the climate crisis and achieve climate justice. But, COP is an opportunity for us in the UK to push our politicians to take stronger action on climate change. ‘People Make Glasgow’ is the official slogan adopted by Glasgow City Council in 2013 – I don’t think it was meant to refer explicitly to the slave trade that helped to build the city but the council openly acknowledge this history, and COP26 is an opportunity to highlight the impacts of historical and current colonialism.
Our Final Exam in Madrid
Draft Agreement 1/CP.25, for instance, calls for all Parties to revise and enhance their Nationally Determined Commitments — their mitigation and adaptation intentions — by October 2020. Regrettably, the draft is not framed as a mandate, merely as advice.
First Cut of the Madrid Climate Summit
I am in the middle of things here at #COP25Madrid where delegates from nearly 200 countries are gathered to dicker and dither about whether they will save the world, or just let it get hotter.
COP25 Madrid: The Good, The Bad, The Ugly, and Why I Want to Go
The simple truth of it is, there is no way out of our climate emergency without an emergency committee to organize a coordinated global response. You might say the United Nations is a poor choice for that role and I would agree, except that all the other choices are far worse.
Existential risk, Neoliberalism and UN Climate Policymaking
International climate policymaking has failed to avoid a path of catastrophic global warming. Two often-overlooked causes of this failure are how climate-science knowledge has been produced and utilised by the United Nation’s twin climate bodies and how those organisations function.
Designing Climate Solutions – a Big-Picture View that Doesn’t Skimp on Details
Let us pause for a moment of thanks to the policy wonks, who work within the limitations of whatever is currently politically permissible and take important steps forward in their branches of bureaucracy. Let us also give thanks to those who cannot work within those limitations, and who are determined to transform what is and is not politically permissible.
Can an Unequal Earth Beat Climate Change?
The new Civil Society Equity Review report — After Paris: Inequality, Fair Shares, and the Climate Emergency — argues that we need to expand our focus from inequality between nations to inequality within nations as well.