Climate Change

Flooded streets, drifting cars: That’s normalcy for the citizens of Norfolk. The city wants to better protect its residents. But they don't always cooperate.

This two part series analyzes electric mobility in Washington, DC and Detroit.

How is Washington, DC embracing modern mobility and cleaner air? Part of a two part series assessing electric mobility in the US & Germany. 

COP 23 was one COP in two zones: The Bula zone was the site of the official negotiations  - with little relevance to what happens in the real world. The Bonn zone hosted dozens of civil society kiosks and hundreds of events searching for real solutions.

What does a normative framing and a push for the gender-responsiveness of climate finance mean for the global climate finance architecture and the Green Climate Fund? A set of four new information briefs as part of an annual update of the Climate Finance Fundamentals (CFF) briefing series explores this relationship.

Instead of changing our economic system to make it fit within the natural limits of the planet, we are redefining nature so that it fits within the economic system.

Some twenty-four years after the adoption of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), a lot has been done to advance climate change law, both internationally and in Germany and the European Union. However, neither international law nor national law have been able to achieve true progress. Global emissions continue to rise, and the anticipated impacts of climate change are now becoming reality. 

More than two thirds of anthropogenic GHG emissions are caused by only 90 companies. These oil, coal and gas companies are reaping exorbitant profits and are getting huge government subsidies. It’s time to make them pay a levy for the loss and damage they cause. A proposal from the Climate Justice Programme (CJP).

The history of climate policy is also one of the massive sway of the energy industry lobby. More recently, however, that lobby is having to surrender its forts- is dirty business losing its sway on politics? 

Globally, political leaders are lauding the acceptance of the global and legally binding Paris Agreement on Climate Change at COP 21 as a historical moment. It achieves a goal long believed unattainable. However, judged against the enormity of the challenge and the needs and pressure from people on the ground demanding a global deal anchored in climate justice (“system change, not climate change!”), the Paris Agreement can only be called a collective failure and disappointment. Read a critical assessment by hbs colleagues from around the world.