Climate & Environmental Policy

The coming set of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) will seek to protect ecosystems, conserve resources, and lift millions of people out of poverty. But, though the SDGs will stand on solid legal ground, that ground must be developed further, argues Barbara Unmüßig, president of the Heinrich Böll Stiftung.

Standing on the shore of the Baltic sea a few miles outside of Copenhagen, Denmark, the view’s about what you’d expect. Rocky shore, grey horizon, a boat here or there. But this shore is special. Look up, and you’ll see — and hear — three giant offshore wind turbines cutting through the air. Each stands 500 feet tall, with three blades (each close to 200 feet long), spinning non-stop.

The COP 20’s “Lima call for climate action” is no wake-up call but a worrisome sign of a feeble multilateral climate process plagued by political deafness and leaving poor and vulnerable communities alone with the impacts of climate change.

About an hour’s drive outside of Sevilla, Spain’s old city, past grazing black-footed pigs and olive orchards, sits the Abengoa Solucar complex, and it’s truly a sight: Imagine cresting a hill and then all of the sudden seeing several large towers, over 500 feet high, with hundreds of beams of light striking them — solar rays from an army of mirrors arrayed in a circle on the ground below. They’re called heliostats.

Natural resources should be a major contributor to development in some of the countries that need it most. And yet, in some of world’s poorest and most fragile states, they bring just the opposite.

Lili Fuhr and Niclas Hällström sharply criticize climate-change goals that are based on risky or underdeveloped technologies.

Germany's short-term 2020 climate targets are in jeopardy. This is a serious drawback: if the Energiewende should prove ineffective on the climate front, it will fall short on its declared objective and discourage other countries from following suit. The German government is now taking first steps to fight the country's coal power.

The Conference of Parties (COP) of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change is meeting in Lima, Peru until December 12, 2014.  In this interview, Barbara Unmüßig, Co-President of the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung, speaks about the prospects of the Lima summit, the future of the multilateral climate process and the perspectives for the Green Climate Fund.

In the climate finance arena, the Adaptation Fund (AF) has pioneered direct access. To date, six national implementing entities (NIEs) in Africa have commenced the challenging process of programming direct access funding domestically. This collaborative research report provides lessons learnt on how to strengthen the accreditation of future NIEs to the AF and to jump-start their engagement with the Green Climate Fund (GCF).