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 in … Read more
When United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres spoke passionately about the frightening prospect of a climate catastrophe recently, he called it “the defining issue of our time.” Everything in his powerful speech was backed by science. Yet, because secretaries-general cannot say everything, it was incomplete. What Guterres did not say is that global warming is the flip side of … Read more
In a much-anticipated gathering, the United States led a high-level meeting on United Nations reform on Sept. 18, with President Donald Trump and UN Secretary-General António Guterres speaking to the assembled world leaders. Nikki Haley, the US ambassador to the UN, also spoke briefly; in Trump’s entourage was his chief of staff, John Kelly, and … Read more
Christiana Figueres, who piloted the Paris Agreement on Climate Change through years of negotiations to success in December 2015, will become chair of The Lancet Countdown’s high-level advisory board, the British medical publication announced recently. The Countdown project was established in November 2016 to monitor the effects of climate change on health and track progress … Read more
The 2015 Paris agreement on climate change, which came into force in 2016, commits nearly every nation in the world to lowering greenhouse gas emissions, a first major step toward global consensus and cooperation on combating climate change after years of United Nations-led negotiations. But environmental scientists have moved on, asking this question: What if … Read more
