Global rich must cut their carbon footprint 97% to stave off climate change, UN says By Irina Ivanova CO2 levels hit record high
This year s economic shutdowns have done little to reduce the world s carbon emissions. While pollution has dipped, greenhouse gases keep accumulating in the atmosphere, locking in future decades of climate disruption and extreme weather. A recent United Nations report says the so-called emissions gap the difference between where we are likely to be and where we need to be on climate policy is as big as ever.
As for who s chiefly responsible for the gap, it s the global rich, the report says. Just 10% of the world s population emits nearly half of the world s carbon pollution. The top 1% of income earners around the world, a group that includes 70 million people, account for 15% of emissions more than the 3.5 billion people in the bottom 50%.
I am a research fellow in ocean law & policy at U.C. Berkeley School of Law, Center for Law, Energy, and the Environment; a human rights attorney at Blue Ocean Law; and a lecturer in International Relations at Stanford University, where I teach American Empire in the Pacific. At CLEE, I work on both domestic and international ocean law issues, including offshore energy, marine scientific research, and deep sea mining. Outside of CLEE, my research and writing focus primarily on the intersection of empire, environmental justice, and human rights in Oceania, particularly in U.S. insular areas. I have published in journals including Global Environmental Change, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and the Columbia Human Rights Law Review.
Author: Chris Bauch Professor of Applied Mathematics, University of Waterloo, Madhur Anand Professor & Director, Global Ecological Change & Sustainability Laboratory, University of Guelph and Peter C. Jentsch PhD Candidate, Applied Mathematics, University of Waterloo
COVID-19 vaccines are on the horizon. Lately, it seems like each week brings news of another clinical trial demonstrating vaccine efficacy. But if supplies are initially limited, decision-makers will need to make hard choices about who should get them first.
One approach is to prioritize groups who are most vulnerable to serious outcomes like hospitalization and death, such as the elderly. Another approach is to prioritize groups who are most responsible for spreading the infection. The question is which approach will work best in a given population.