global warming

COP26 President Fights Back Tears as the Summit Ends

• November 15, 2021

GLASGOW, Scotland — COP26 president Alok Sharma held back tears as he accepted India’s last-minute motion to weaken the summit’s pledge to “phase out” coal. Sharma had been saying for months that he wanted COP26 to “consign coal to history.” And until India insisted otherwise at the eleventh hour, it looked like the summit …

Climate Change

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Who Is the World’s Greatest Climate Champion?

Mark Hertsgaard

• November 10, 2021

GLASGOW, Scotland — It’s an article of faith in United States political and media circles that American leadership is essential to global climate progress. That message was repeated Tuesday at the United Nations climate conference, COP26, as speaker of the US House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi and a delegation of 16 fellow Congressional Democrats …

Climate Change, US-UN Relations

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The UN Refugee Agency’s Bold Plan to Manage the Crisis of Climate Migrants

Dali ten Hove

• August 1, 2021

As the world inches closer to catastrophic global heating and vulnerable communities from Mali to Myanmar are already suffering the consequences, the United Nations Refugee Agency has been grappling with the growing role of climate change as a driver of displacement. In a first for the agency, it has begun considering whether international refugee …

Human Rights, Refugees, US Foreign Relations

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WORLDVIEWS

A Top German Court Toughens the Nation’s Climate Goals, Requiring Explicit Details

Franz Baumann

• May 25, 2021

In September 2016, the German parliament unanimously adopted the Paris Agreement. The government then translated Germany’s commitments under the agreement into a Climate Protection Law, which was approved by the Bundestag in November 2019 with a wide majority, making Germany the first country in the world with a greenhouse gas neutrality plan. By 2030, …

Climate Change, WORLDVIEWS

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Meet the 20-Somethings Advising the UN Chief on How to Save Planet Earth

Dali ten Hove

• December 11, 2020

HAARLEM, The Netherlands — A group of young advisers has been counseling United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres on climate change as he ramps up warnings of impending “climate calamity” and declares that protecting nature is the “defining task of the 21st century.” The secretary-general’s Youth Advisory Group on Climate Change, consisting of seven 18- …

Climate Change, Secretary-General

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Humanity Faces Climate ‘Suicide’ if US Doesn’t Rejoin the Paris Deal: UN Chief

Mark Hertsgaard

• December 2, 2020

“The way we are moving is a suicide,” United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres said in an interview on Monday, and humanity’s survival will be “impossible” without the United States rejoining the Paris Agreement and achieving “net zero” carbon emissions by 2050, as the incoming Biden administration has pledged. The secretary-general said that “of course” …

Climate Change, Secretary-General

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Cooperate on Climate Now or We’re Doomed, UN Secretary-General Warns

PassBlue

• September 8, 2020

The United Nations secretary-general, António Guterres, spoke extensively with Covering Climate Now, a consortium of hundreds of international media, including PassBlue. This interview, held recently with Agence France-Presse, focuses on the dangers of major countries and investors clinging to the use of fossil fuels and not moving fast enough toward renewable energy, as well …

Climate Change, Secretary-General

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WORLDVIEWS

10 Ways to Push the Climate Change and Conflict Agenda, Despite the Deniers

Adriana Erthal Abdenur

• February 19, 2019

THE HAGUE — It is now well documented that global warming is a multiplier of insecurity and conflict, but holding debates on the topic presents ever-more complex challenges as multilateralism and climate change are increasingly questioned if not dismissed by some of the world’s top leaders and biggest polluting nations. In that light, here …

Climate Change, SDGs, WORLDVIEWS

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Climate Talks Bypass the Poorest, Who Endure Polluted Homes

Barbara Crossette

• December 18, 2018

Today and every day around the world, in bleak rural villages and the poorest urban neighborhoods, millions of people are igniting small fires to cook their meager meals, brighten dark homes or scare away intruders at night. The number of people using small fires is not small. Climate scientists estimate that three billion people …

Africa, Asia, Climate Change

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WORLDVIEWS

As UN Climate Talks Convene, the Earth Veers Toward Catastrophe

Franz Baumann

• November 2, 2017

Two years ago, the governments of the world unanimously adopted the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, a remarkable blueprint of the world’s most pressing long-term predicaments that the United Nations is good at lifting into the global conscience. Cataloguing 17 goals and 169 targets, the agenda contains an inventory of the remedial activities that …