Environment Archive

Editor’s note: Guest columnists Richard Gowan and Pyotr Kurzin are filling in for Stewart Patrick this week. The United Nations Security Council may be about to pass its first-ever resolution on the implications of climate change for peace and security. The council has talked about climate security since 2007, and it has acknowledged that environmental challenges such as droughts and degradation of farming land can fuel conflicts in regions like the Sahel and the Horn of Africa. But it has not laid out a systematic approach to assessing these risks or responding to them. This could be about to change, as Niger […]

As former U.S. President Barack Obama once mused, there are times in global diplomacy, as in baseball, when “hitting singles” is adequate. This month’s COP26 climate summit in Glasgow was not one of those moments. With the fate of the planet on the line, world leaders should have been swinging for the fences. Instead, they played small ball, chalking up only incremental gains rather than the historic breakthrough the occasion demanded.  Going into the Glasgow summit, the United Nations Environment Program had delivered some blunt news: The world’s emissions reduction pledges before COP26 accounted for only one-seventh of the reduction actually needed to […]

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken is currently on a five-day tour of sub-Saharan Africa, his first to the region since taking office in January. Having already visited Kenya and Nigeria this week, he will conclude his tour Saturday in Senegal. The trip comes amid intensifying challenges for U.S. policy across Africa, including a deadly new crackdown on pro-democracy protests in Sudan following last month’s coup, a persistent civil conflict in Ethiopia, and mounting concerns about instability, democratic regression and the viability of the state in Nigeria, the continent’s most populous nation. Washington is also concerned about China’s deepening relationship […]

Lately, leaders of all generations have been referring to the world’s shared obligations toward “future generations.” At the G-20 summit in Rome in late October, for instance, the U.K.’s Prince Charles reminded delegates of their overwhelming responsibility toward “generations yet unborn,” whose health, happiness and prosperity will be determined by the way today’s leaders respond to the climate crisis. More recently, during a Nov. 12 protest in Glasgow, 18-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg called for those attending the nearby COP26 climate summit to listen to the “voices of future generations” that are “drowning” in leaders’ “greenwash and empty words and promises.”  But who […]

The COP26 climate change conference in Glasgow that wrapped up Saturday was intended to draw the world’s attention to the slow-burning emergency of global warming, as well as create policies for mitigating and adapting to its worst effects. Above all, however, the international gathering illustrated the problems of timing and collective action that frustrate efforts to stop climate change.  At the summit, world leaders, scientists and activists called for urgent action to reduce emissions and slow the rise in average global temperatures before the world crosses a threshold into an unlivable future. Instead, the conference delegates drafted what amounts to […]

At the recently concluded COP26 Climate Change conference in Glasgow, African countries—led by leaders of major continental states including South Africa, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Kenya—made the case for firmer commitments on climate funding from rich, more industrialized nations and a longer timeline on the transition away from coal and other fossil fuels.  One of the major announcements to come out of the summit was South Africa’s “watershed” finance agreement with several Western powers to transition off of coal-burning power plants. But despite the triumphalism surrounding that deal, African delegates generally left the Glasgow summit disappointed that their […]

The standard, “flirting with apocalypse” narrative that dominates U.S. media coverage and political debates regarding climate change goes something like this: China, which is the world’s biggest carbon emitter, and India, which is lightly industrialized and still quite substantially poor, currently represent the biggest threats to saving the environment. The supposedly more altruistic West, by contrast, is prepared to make huge investments to forestall disaster. People who cling to this all-too-easy framing correctly say that if the world’s two most-populous countries do not radically constrain their carbon output, nothing the United States or Europe can do, including rapidly attaining net-zero […]

Every day, the gargantuan U.S. intelligence community, with its budget of $84 billion, scans the world looking for threats to the United States. In a landmark report released last month, the National Intelligence Council identified a big one: climate change. The world’s failure to curb greenhouse gas emissions and the brutal impacts of climate change, the assessment warns, are now poised to upend geopolitics over the next two decades as global warming exacerbates diplomatic tensions, cross-border competition and instability in heat-stressed countries. It is hard to overstate the importance of this new report, which is the latest National Intelligence Estimate, the intelligence […]

This is the web version of our subscriber-only Weekly Wrap-Up newsletter, which gives a rundown of the week’s top stories on WPR. Subscribe to receive it by email every Saturday. If you’re already a subscriber, adjust your newsletter settings to receive it directly to your email inbox. On Sunday, Nicaraguan voters will go to the polls to choose the country’s next president. In reality, they do not need to wait until those votes are counted to know who the winner will be. The outcome is already a foregone conclusion: President Daniel Ortega will win reelection, with the only uncertainty being the percentage of the […]

There is still a week to go before the scheduled conclusion of COP26, but that has not stopped climate change activist Greta Thunberg from declaring this year’s U.N. climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland, “a failure.” Thunberg castigated the world’s wealthy countries for “giving beautiful speeches and announcing fancy commitments and targets,” while refusing to take the kind of drastic action that scientists agree is necessary to avert a global catastrophe. Earlier this week, WPR’s Elliot Waldman sat down with Stewart Patrick, a WPR columnist and senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, to discuss some of this week’s developments from Glasgow, […]

The 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference, or COP26, currently taking place in Glasgow, Scotland, has brought together a wide array of African leaders, policy specialists, businesspeople and activists focused on one goal: how to square the goal of reaching net zero carbon dioxide emissions globally with the continent’s industrialization needs and financial realities. During the first two days of the summit, more than 25 African leaders representing nearly half of the continent’s 54 countries took center stage to make the case for a justice-oriented approach to solving the climate crisis. Speaking Tuesday at an Africa-focused event at the conference, Congolese […]

Editor’s Note: This is the web version of our subscriber-only weekly newsletter, Europe Decoder, which includes a look at the week’s top stories from and about Europe. Subscribe to receive it by email every Thursday. If you’re already a subscriber, adjust your newsletter settings to receive it directly to your inbox. Brexit-watchers had their eyes fixed on Paris today for a meeting between French European Affairs Minister Clement Beaune and U.K. Brexit Minister David Frost to discuss the two countries’ dispute over fishing licenses. It doesn’t appear any solution has yet been found, though France isn’t yet following through on its threat to ban British […]

World leaders are gathered in Glasgow, Scotland, for what many consider the most important climate change talks in global history. COP26, as this year’s United Nations Climate Change Conference is known, is the largest diplomatic gathering since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.  The negotiations are meant to be based on scientific findings and policy proposals—not entirely apolitical, but less politically tinged than, say, discussions concerning transnational migration or human rights violations. That’s because, when it comes to climate change, countries are judged on the merits of their plans, not their political systems or their respect for civil liberties. While […]

The annual United Nations Climate Change Conference, known this year as COP26, is underway in Glasgow, Scotland. High-profile figures from the private sector and philanthropic organizations, as well as national political leaders, have all gathered to discuss ways to reduce emissions of planet-warming greenhouse gases—all while the scientific community warns that the window to avert a global catastrophe is rapidly closing. Today on Trend Lines, Stewart Patrick, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a weekly columnist for WPR, joins Elliot Waldman to discuss the latest developments from Glasgow and the sticking points that are preventing more […]

On Oct. 14, just two weeks before the start of the United Nations’ Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, an unusual organization commemorated its fifth anniversary: Stay Grounded. The group, founded in 2016, is an international activist network of more than 170 smaller protest movements from across the globe. Through “mutual support and exchange of experiences,” it hopes to inspire and guide collaboration around the shared goal that brings its members together—namely, reducing “aviation and its negative impacts.” In the years since Stay Grounded started work, it has made a case for seeing anti-airport social movements as a truly global phenomenon. […]

Since Oct. 20, five young climate activists have been on a hunger strike in Lafayette Square in Washington. Their protest started the day after news emerged that U.S. President Joe Biden planned to downsize his $3.5 trillion domestic spending bill, including by cutting a $150 billion clean electricity program. The activists say that they are “sick and tired of broken promises” and will continue to starve themselves until their leaders deliver “bold and transformative climate action.”  A few days into the protest, the young activists resorted to sitting in wheelchairs, and one of them, 26-year-old Kidus Girma, was hospitalized overnight for nausea, dizziness […]

Climate change is bad for your health. That is the unequivocal finding of The Lancet’s annual “Countdown” report, which was published last week by a team of nearly 100 scientists from 43 institutions around the world. Global warming, the authors write, is not just an environmental disaster, but is also exposing humans to searing heat and extreme weather events; increasing the transmission of infectious diseases; exacerbating food, water and financial insecurity; endangering sustainable development; and worsening global inequality. And, they conclude, the data in this year’s report should represent a “code red for a healthy future.” For the past two years, […]