International Climate Finance & Policy

Germany is phasing out nuclear power and has come to rely more on coal for its electricity. Despite a steep rise in renewable energy, the use of coal is endangering Germany’s ambitious target to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions.

Just weeks before the Paris climate summit, first funding decisions by the GCF Board at its 11th meeting in Livingstone, Zambia, make the Fund fully operational. Nevertheless, a lot of policy work on outstanding issues is still needed for 2016 before the GCF can stand both the test of time and the test of its own ambition and vision.

Climate change requires urgent action, as hardly any government will deny. Business is also beginning to rise to the challenge. Nevertheless, the voluntary commitments being developed for the climate summit in Paris (COP21) are falling short.

TECN Media Fellow Sandy Hausman travels to tiny Estonia to learn about offshore wind development. 

 Since taking office in February 2006, Prime Minister Stephen Harper has focused on turning this northern country on the edge of the Arctic––which possesses the third largest oil reserves in the world after Saudi Arabia and Venezuela––into an energy superpower. The strategy behind this––burn, baby, burn––is the proposed doubling of the extraction of oil from Canada’s bituminous tar sands, located primarily in the western province of Alberta, from the current 2.1 million to 5 million barrels of oil per day.

As the fifth largest oil producer in the world, Canada's domestic and foreign policy is shaped considerably by energy and resource issues. In the nine years under the Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Canada has focused primarily on its oil industry and on strengthening its position as an energy power – without regard for the environment and local populations. In that context, the Harper government presented economic growth as being dependent on an aggressive expansion of the energy sector. However, that line of reasoning is now losing its force.