|
Ukraine’s Zelensky
Meets With Greta Thunberg to Discuss the War’s
Effect on Ecology
Ukrainian
President Volodymyr Zelensky met Thursday with
Swedish environmental activist Greta Thunberg
and prominent European figures who are forming a
working group to address ecological damage from
the 16-month-old Russian invasion. The meeting
in the Ukrainian capital came as fighting
continued around the country. The governor of
the Kherson region, Oleksandr Prokudin, said two
people were killed in the region’s capital in a
Russian strike that hit residences, a medical
facility and a school where residents were lined
up to receive humanitarian aid. Another person
was killed in a morning strike on the village of
Bilzoerka, the regional prosecutor’s office
said.
Central and Eastern
European countries display low ambitions with
their National Energy and Climate Plans (NECPs),
raising concerns about the region’s ability to
meet EU climate goals, campaigners warn.
NECPs are an essential
building block in the EU’s climate policy
architecture because they lay out the specifics
of how each country plans to achieve the
collective goals agreed upon at a European
level. Only three EU countries – Spain, Croatia
and Slovenia – have met the EU’s annual 30 June
deadline to submit their updated national energy
and climate plans, campaigners
say.
Researchers
from the University of Maryland found that in
2022, about 11 football fields of forest were
cut down every minute, and the total area
reached the size of Switzerland, that is, more
than 4 million hectares This released an amount
of carbon dioxide equivalent to India's annual
fossil fuel emissions, the BBC reported. It is
noted that the largest amount of forests was
destroyed in Brazil. The article said that such
a trend does not correspond to the Glasgow
Declaration, which was signed by more than 100
countries at the COP26 climate summit in 2021.
The signatories pledged to stop forest loss and
land degradation by 2030.
With the Climate
Journalism Award we will acknowledge outstanding
climate journalism that adopts an innovative or
original storytelling approach. Stories can be
submitted in five categories and winners will
each receive a cash prize of €2,000. The Award
is managed by the European Journalism Centre, in
partnership with Google News Initiative.
The submission process starts on 14 June 2023,
and ends on 17 July 2023 at 17:00 CEST.
Print,
online, video, and multi-platform storytelling
formats are eligible to win an award and these
may have been published behind a paywall. You
can enter more than one submission but with a
maximum of two categories per
submission.
When it comes to
eco-friendly public
transport, it won’t surprise
many that cities in Denmark, Norway and Sweden
made the top ten. In fact, Copenhagen tops the
chart, followed by Oslo, Paris, Amsterdam,
Hamburg and Helsinki. Milan comes in seventh,
with Lyon, Ljubljana and Lisbon rounding out the
top spots. Paris, Helsinki, Lisbon and Brussels
all scored a ten on their shared bikes and
e-scooters ranking, while
Copenhagen, Amsterdam and Ljubljana scored the
same for electric car sharing. Not one city
received full marks for zero-emission buses. The
five worst overall scorers are Edinburgh,
Birmingham, Granada, Dublin and lastly, Greater
Manchester.
The climate
change-denying TikTok post that won't go
away
Earlier
this year, TikTok vowed to clamp down on climate
change denial. But a BBC investigation tracked
one video that has been viewed millions of times
- and found the company is struggling to stop
false climate information from spreading across
the platform. If you searched for "climate
change" on TikTok in recent months, you might
have come across a video featuring Dan Peña, a
self-styled "business success coach" with
thousands of followers on social media. The
video, shot during the 2017 London premiere of a
documentary film about Mr Peña, shows a heated
exchange between the American businessman and a
member of the audience.
China urges developing
countries to oppose ‘unrealistic’ shipping
levy
China
has urged poorer countries to oppose a levy on
shipping emissions and stronger targets for
decarbonising one of the world’s most polluting
industries, criticising wealthy nations for
setting “unrealistic” goals with “significant”
financial costs. Beijing distributed a
“diplomatic note” to developing nations as they
prepared for a critical meeting at the UN’s
International Maritime Organization in July,
according to four people present at IMO
discussions. The lobbying effort comes days
after France rallied 22 allies behind a shipping
emissions levy. China warned that “an overly
ambitious emission reduction target will
seriously impede the sustainable development of
international shipping, significantly increase
the cost of the supply chain and will adversely
impede the recovery of the global
economy”.
It’s hard to miss
something that weighs 37 billion tons—especially
when it’s all around us. Thirty-seven billion
tons is the
amount
of fossil-fuel-related carbon
dioxide humans release into
the atmosphere every year. We see the damage it
does everywhere—from heat waves to floods to
droughts to wildfires and more. But the CO2
itself? Entirely invisible. Until now. In a
striking new video, NASA
has
made visible the production—and, in some cases,
absorption—of human-produced carbon dioxide for
the entirety of the year 2021. Over that period,
the CO2 in the atmosphere rose by 2.13 parts per
million (PPM), marking the
eleventh year in a row in which the increase
exceeded 2 PPM.
The
thought experiment is a simplified version of a
dilemma currently facing global institutions and
developing countries. On June 22nd politicians
arrived in Paris for a summit to design “a new
global financial pact”. The aim was to work out
how to spread the cost of climate change.
Leaders from poor countries turned up in droves;
aside from Emmanuel Macron, France’s president,
no Western head of state made it. Little
surprise, then, that the jamboree ended without
rich countries contributing a single extra
dollar. Instead, attendees tinkered with the
World Bank and the IMF, the biggest of the
multilateral agencies that seek to reduce
poverty. The lack of action means painful
trade-offs lie ahead.
|
