When UN climate chief Simon Stiell addressed climate and energy ministers from the G7 group of rich nations on Monday, he issued a frank message: “It is utter nonsense to claim the G7 cannot – or should not – lead the way on bolder climate actions”. He added those countries should be “leading from the front” through much deeper emissions cuts and bigger and better climate finance. A day later, the gathering of the most powerful industrialised democracies responded with a tepid outcome, serving up a new commitment on ending coal power generation – weakened by a loophole in the language – a reha ..read more

Heather McTeer Toney is the executive director of Bloomberg Philanthropies’ Beyond Petrochemicals Campaign. Living in a community on the edge of an acres-wide petrochemical plant in Texas or Louisiana means that you can see, smell, and taste plastic pollution every day. All too often leaders who are charged with making decisions about plastic pollution are too far removed from the impact and easily miss the risks to human health and the environment. This past week, a thousand miles away, delegates from over 170 countries met in Ottawa, Ontario, to discuss just that: pollution from plastic. Thi ..read more

Since January, swathes of southern Africa have been suffering from a severe drought, which has destroyed crops, spread disease and caused mass hunger. But its causes have raised tough questions for the new UN fund for climate change losses. Christopher Dabu, a priest in Lusitu parish in southern Zambia, one of the affected regions, said that because of the drought, his parishioners “have nothing”- including their staple food. “Almost every day, there’s somebody who comes here to knock on this gate asking for mielie meal, [saying] ‘Father, I am dying of hunger’,” Dabu told Climate Home outside ..read more

Rukka Sombolinggi, a Torajan Indigenous woman from Sulawesi, Indonesia, is the first female Secretary General of AMAN, the world’s largest Indigenous peoples organization.  Gathered in NYC in mid-April, 87 Indigenous leaders from 35 countries met to hammer out a set of demands to address a common scourge: the green energy transition that has our peoples under siege.   Worldwide, we are experiencing land-grabs and a rising tide of criminalization and attacks for speaking out against mining and renewable energy projects that violate our rights with impacts that are being documented by ..read more

Isatis M. Cintron-Rodriguez is a Puerto Rican climate scientist and staff associate at Columbia University’s Earth Institute. Liane Schalatek is associate director at the Heinrich Boell Stiftung Washington with expertise in UN climate funds and finance. Lien Vandamme is senior campaigner for the Climate & Energy Program at the Center for International Environmental Law. Imagine losing your home to catastrophic floods, your loved ones to unprecedented hurricanes, your livelihood to raging wildfires, or your ancestors’ graves to rising sea levels.   Then, to add insult to injury, i ..read more

As negotiations over a new global climate finance goal move into a higher gear, divisions are sharpening over who should be required to cough up the money needed to help vulnerable countries shift to clean energy and build resilience to climate change. For German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, all “those who can” – and “in particular the strongest polluters of today” – should step up, in addition to industrialised nations that already provide funding. “Strong economies share strong responsibilities,” she said in a nod to G20 countries on Thursday at the Petersberg Climate Dialogue in Berl ..read more

Rachel Kyte is professor of practice in climate policy at the Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford. With spring in full bloom, the world’s finance ministers, development and financial leaders, and philanthropists met for the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) Spring Meetings in Washington, DC last week.   In their midst, Brazil, the current president of the G20, insisted on a balanced focus between ending poverty and food insecurity and combating climate change. President Lula makes no secret of his desire for a new international financial architecture, desig ..read more

UN climate chief Simon Stiell has said he hopes to see fewer people attend the annual COP climate negotiations after participants at COP28 in Dubai last December hit a record high of nearly 84,000. Stiell said this month that he personally “would certainly like to see future COPs reduce in size”, telling an audience at London’s Chatham House think-tank that “bigger doesn’t necessarily mean better”. In Dubai, where the 2023 summit was held from November 30 to December 13, the Expo City site was so large that important delegates were ferried around on golf buggies while electric scooters were av ..read more

As a budget freeze for Argentina’s public universities amid soaring inflation leaves campuses unable to pay their electricity bills and climate science under threat, the country’s researchers and students are taking to the streets in a nationwide demonstration on Tuesday. The dire outlook for Argentina’s renowned higher education system under President Javier Milei, a right-wing populist, was highlighted on April 22 – Earth Day – by Argentine plant ecologist Pedro Jaureguiberry, who was announced as a finalist in the prestigious Frontiers Planet Prize. ​“The current budget for universities in ..read more

The finance ministers of Brazil and France pushed this week for a tax on US-dollar billionaires of at least 2% of their wealth each year, with the $250 billion it could raise going to tackle poverty, hunger and climate change. Brazil’s Fernando Haddad and France’s Bruno Le Maire promoted their proposal at the Spring Meetings of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) in Washington, alongside IMF head Kristalina Georgieva and Kenyan finance minister Njuguna Ndung’u. “In a world where economic activities are increasingly transnational, we have to find new and creative ways to tax th ..read more