Carbon markets are considered a key policy tool to achieve cost-effective climate mitigation1, 2. Project-based carbon market mechanisms allow private sector entities to earn tradable emissions reduction credits from mitigation projects. The environmental integrity of project-based mechanisms has been subject to controversial debate and extensive research1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, in particular for projects abating industrial waste gases with a high global warming potential (GWP).

This study systematically evaluates the environmental integrity of Joint Implementation (JI) in the first commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol. Analysis indicates that about three-quarters of JI offsets are unlikely to represent additional emissions reductions.

The report "The impact of good practice policies on regional and global greenhouse gas emissions" by NewClimate Institute, PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency and the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis looks at the impact of “good practice” emission reduction policies in nine different areas globally and across six

"I don't know where to get the money from, treatment is too expensive," says Sergei, who lives in Saint Petersburg.

China is expected to become the world's third largest nuclear generating nation around 2017 pushed by its national target against climate change, said US energy information administration (EIA) Mon

Anthropogenic declines of animal pollinators and the associated effects on human nutrition are of growing concern. We quantified the nutritional and health outcomes associated with decreased intake of pollinator-dependent foods for populations around the world. The researchers assembled a database of supplies of 224 types of food in 156 countries.

Climate strongly influences global wildfire activity, and recent wildfire surges may signal fire weather-induced pyrogeographic shifts. Here we use three daily global climate data sets and three fire danger indices to develop a simple annual metric of fire weather season length, and map spatio-temporal trends from 1979 to 2013. We show that fire weather seasons have lengthened across 29.6 million km2 (25.3%) of the Earth’s vegetated surface, resulting in an 18.7% increase in global mean fire weather season length.

Paris: Scientists presented rare evidence today linking climate change to a specific weather disaster: flooding that killed more than 170 people in Russia in 2012.

Recent estimates of the global carbon budget, or allowable cumulative CO2 emissions consistent with a given level of climate warming, have the potential to inform climate mitigation policy discussions aimed at maintaining global temperatures below 2 °C. This raises difficult questions, however, about how best to share this carbon budget amongst nations in a way that both respects the need for a finite cap on total allowable emissions, and also addresses the fundamental disparities amongst nations with respect to their historical and potential future emissions.

There is a tremendous desire to attribute causes to weather and climate events that is often challenging from a physical standpoint. Headlines attributing an event solely to either human-induced climate change or natural variability can be misleading when both are invariably in play. The conventional attribution framework struggles with dynamically driven extremes because of the small signal-to-noise ratios and often uncertain nature of the forced changes. Here, we suggest that a different framing is desirable, which asks why such extremes unfold the way they do.

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