Coming attraction: IPCC s upcoming major climate assessment
Despite the speed bump posed by the COVID-19 pandemic, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is rolling toward completion of its Sixth Assessment Report, the latest in a series that began in 1990.
IPCC’s assessments, produced by many hundreds of scientists volunteering countless hours, have long been the world’s most definitive statements on human-induced climate change from fossil fuel use. Rather than carrying out its own research, the IPCC crafts its consensus assessment reports based on the vast array of peer-reviewed work in science journals. The draft reports are scrutinized by experts and officials in UN-member governments before they become final.
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LONDON (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Efforts to adapt to worsening climate change impacts are no longer playing “Cinderella” to better-financed work to cut emissions - but big obstacles still stand in the way of staying safer from climate threats, adaptation experts said on Thursday.
Those range from inadequate investment in adaptation work, to over-zealous accountability mechanisms for public spending and a failure to include local people in developing plans and judging their success, they told an online discussion.
Too many poor countries, meanwhile, are waiting to receive donor cash to adapt to more extreme weather and rising seas, when rethinking their own spending could also play a role, said Tom Mitchell, chief strategy officer for Climate-KIC, a European Union-funded climate innovation initiative.
Doughnut economics is the brainchild of Kate Raworth, who describes herself as a renegade economist. Inside the inner circle is the social foundation, which has to be large enough to meet everyones basic needs, while the outer circle defines the environmental ceiling; exceeding that puts us into an unsustainable ecological overshoot, writes Trevor Hancock. (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan) It will come as no surprise to fans of the British satirical fantasy writer Tom Holt that economics has something to do with doughnuts. In his YouSpace series, a doughnut is the wormhole to an alternate reality, a parallel universe inhabited by elves, goblins, gnomes, dwarves and other fairytale characters who are ripe for exploitation.
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(Reuters) - U.S. President-elect Joe Biden must place environmental justice at the heart of his plans to tackle climate change by tailoring policies to address the global inequalities at the root of the crisis, guests in a Reuters Next panel said on Thursday.
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Biden has pledged to return the United States to a leadership role in climate diplomacy by rejoining the 2015 Paris accord, and spend $2 trillion on projects to decarbonize the economy while creating thousands of jobs.
The United States’ role as the world’s biggest historical emitter of planet-warming gases gave the country a special responsibility to remedy the disproportionate impact of climate change on developing countries, marginalized communities, women and indigenous peoples, participants from campaign groups said.
Yves here. “Attraction” isn’t exactly the word I’d use for the IPPC climate reports due out in 2021 and 2022, unless you are the sort that enjoys renderings of a freight train bearing down on you. However, for climate change activists, the IPPC studies are critical rallying points, both for reinforcing the urgency of taking action and for getting behind some (many?) of their recommendations.
Despite the speed bump posed by the COVID-19 pandemic, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is rolling toward completion of its Sixth Assessment Report, the latest in a series that began in 1990.
IPCC’s assessments, produced by many hundreds of scientists volunteering countless hours, have long been the world’s most definitive statements on human-induced climate change from fossil fuel use. Rather than carrying out its own research, the IPCC crafts its consensus assessment reports based on the vast array of peer-reviewed work in science journals. The draft reports are scrut