Confusing and conflicting regulations are scaring away investors from Indonesia's fledgling forest carbon credit scheme aimed at curbing deforestation, lawyers said on Monday.
The Maldives archipelago, threatened by rising sea levels blamed on climate change, said on Monday it would introduce a new environment tax on all tourists who use its resorts and provide its economic lifeline.
Despite the many calls to reform the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), its conceptual underpinnings are strong and it will most likely survive in the post-2012 climate regime. Some modifications may be considered in the short term to strengthen the effectiveness and transparency of the mechanism without modifying the Marrakech Accords.
As the fi nancial crisis continues to take its toll on the
global economy, another serious challenge looms large: preventing the planet from warming more than 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit. Policymakers are now faced with the daunting task of stimulating growth without using carbon-intensive practices and stabilizing the climate without dampening economic recovery.
Industrialized nations can deepen planned cuts in greenhouse gas emissions to shore up a U.N. climate treaty due in December but analysts say there are risks they will promise more than they deliver.
The White House budget update released on Tuesday still reflects a controversial Obama administration plan to combat global warming by auctioning all permits to emit greenhouse gases even though Congress has said it will give away a substantial portion to industry.
Concern over climate change has led the U.S. to consider a cap-and-trade system to regulate emissions. Here we illustrate the land-use impact to U.S. habitat types of new energy development resulting from different U.S. energy policies. We estimated the total new land area needed by 2030 to produce energy, under current law and under various cap-and-trade policies, and then partitioned the area impacted among habitat types with geospatial data on the feasibility of production.
Amanda Sutton looks over a wheat field in northern Colorado and sees a potential "carbon offset project" that could help curb greenhouse gas emissions linked to global warming.
"This is a patch of highly-cultivated land that could provide potential carbon offsets," she said, standing by the field which is owned by the city of Fort Collins and the surrounding county.
