Climate 411: United Nations

In March 2020 the International Air Transport Association (IATA) wrote to the 36-member Governing Council of the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) requesting that the Council re-write the rules of ICAO’s flagship Carbon Offsetting and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation (CORSIA). CORSIA requires airlines to offset their carbon emissions above the average of 2019-2020 emissions. […]

The International Civil Aviation Organization’s (ICAO) Council is meeting through June 26, and Council members have been asked to make a decision at this session that could undermine the agency’s flagship climate program. ICAO’s Carbon Offsetting and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation (CORSIA) requires airlines to offset emissions above a baseline set at the average of […]

The coronavirus pandemic has created a global health and economic crisis that has affected families all over the world and nearly all industries, with aviation taking a particularly steep toll. Airlines may feel under pressure to save money at any cost, but hastily rewriting the fundamental structure of the industry’s flagship market-based program to address […]

At just before 2:00 pm Sunday afternoon in Madrid, at a sprawling conference center on the outskirts of the city, a new record was set — and not an enviable one. That’s when the gavel finally fell on COP 25 — the 25th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention […]

International cooperation on carbon markets, covered in Article 6 of the Paris Agreement, is at the top of the agenda for the COP 25 climate talks in Madrid this week. Since leaving the Article 6 section of the Paris Agreement without agreement at COP 24, negotiators have continued to work over the past year to […]

This post was coauthored by Kelley Kizzier from EDF, Kelly Levin from World Resources Institute, and Mandy Rambharos, Article 6 negotiator, South Africa. It originally appeared on WRI’s blog.  As delegates arrive in Madrid for the UN Climate Change Conference (COP25) this week, one issue is top-of-mind: finalizing the rules on how countries can reduce […]

With 2020 fast approaching, countries, companies, and other stakeholders are taking stock of their climate commitments. As they consider ways to meet and enhance climate goals, interest in net zero emissions commitments and carbon removal technologies has grown. But what these discussions reveal is that forests are crucial. Capable of significantly reducing net emissions at […]

This post was authored by Aoife O’Leary, Natacha Crete and Marie Hubatova from Environmental Defense Fund Europe Today at the United Nations Climate Action Summit, the youth movement with Greta Thunberg at its helm, called out the world leaders in attendance for a lack of action in the climate emergency. Greta’s impassioned plea again makes […]

Negotiators are meeting in Bonn, Germany this week and next on the back of the successful negotiations in Katowice, Poland where the Paris climate agreement “rulebook” was mostly agreed, on time. A feat nearly unprecedented in the often glacial UN climate talks provides hope that countries can continue to work together in light of the […]

Protecting forests, including through forest carbon credits, is one of the most important solutions to climate change. But ProPublica readers may miss that.

If you fly, aviation emissions are likely the largest part of your personal carbon footprint. Absent policy change, aviation’s emissions are slated to triple in the coming decades, making it one of the fastest-growing sources of carbon pollution worldwide. To achieve the Paris Agreement goals of holding warming to well below 2 degrees Celsius and […]

Some major companies, including airlines, took the lead last December in Katowice, Poland in rejecting the use of dubious carbon credits toward their climate efforts. Despite this drumbeat against bad rules for cooperative approaches under Article 6 of the Paris agreement, experienced government negotiators fell short and did not finalize these guidelines in Katowice. This […]

Letting Clean Development Mechanism credits into the aviation climate agreement could cut CORSIA’s effective participation from about three quarters down to less than 20 percent, negating its climate impact.

Agriculture negotiators arrived in Katowice, Poland eager to get to work on the Koronivia Joint Work on Agriculture during COP 24. Over the course of the first week of the COP, it became clear that the negotiators were determined to keep the momentum towards addressing agriculture issues in the context of climate change.

At the climate talks in Katowice, two issues will be particularly important: how to operationalize the Paris Agreement’s transparency system, and how that transparency system should link to a new framework for international carbon market cooperation.

Katowice, Poland was an odd location to pick for this year’s UNFCCC Conference of Parties (COP 24). The city is small and its ambiance may not be very conducive for climate negotiations (it is frigid, dark, and shrouded with coal smog in December). Yet this is where the important task of finalizing the rules of […]

Meeting the Paris Agreement’s ambitious goal – to hold “the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2 °C above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 °C above pre-industrial level” – will necessitate dramatic reductions in total emissions of greenhouse gases. Market-based approaches that follow well-established […]

Climate ambition is often thought of in terms of the stringency of emission reduction commitments, expressed by countries under the landmark Paris Agreement as Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs). While the NDCs that have been pledged by countries are important, they are only the first step. To truly assess progress in reducing global climate pollution, it […]

At last November’s COP23 in Germany, Parties involved in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) negotiations on agriculture celebrated a notable victory after agreeing to create the Koronivia Joint Work on Agriculture (KJWA). The KJWA marks a shift in focus from agricultural adaptation activities only, to a broader discussion of mitigation related […]

In what could be the iconic decision of COP 23, negotiators in Bonn agreed to new future negotiation processes to “jointly address” a number of new agriculture topics, overcoming longstanding hurdles that had blocked progress on the topic in recent years. Why is this important? Emissions from agriculture are expected to continue growing as the […]