In the Paris Climate Agreement, which went into effect on 4 November 2016, countries promised to implement policies to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. A report by NewClimate Institute, PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency and the International Institute for...
The Paris Agreement’s objective is to keep global warming to well below 2 ˚C or even 1.5 ˚C. Now, 4 years after Paris, the question arises whether countries are indeed doing enough to achieve this objective? What are the possible impacts of the promises and national climate...
There is strong interdependency between the use of food, energy and water resources and it is closely linked to environmental challenges, such as climate change and loss of biodiversity. These linkages are expected to become even more important with an increasing demand for...
The UN Climate Change Conference in Madrid (COP25) is the next step for governments to implement the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement. PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency contributes to this process with several studies and reports on climate change which not only...
Afforestation can provide an important contribution to limiting climate change, as trees take up CO2 from the atmosphere. However, the implementation of relatively cheap afforestation should not lead to lower investments in, for example, renewable energy or the...
Under current unconditional pledges, the world is heading for a 3.2 °C temperature rise, according to the 2019 edition of UNEP’s annual Emissions Gap Report. The technologies and policy knowledge on how to reduce emissions are available, but transformations must begin today....
Several organisations and companies have developed scenarios to explore global future energy pathways that achieve the Paris climate goal of limiting temperature change to well below 2 °C. A new report by PBL compares these scenarios on key transition indicators. The report...
Human activity probably started influencing climate already thousands of years ago. Permanent agriculture and livestock herding led to large-scale changes in natural ecosystems. This is concluded in a paper published in Science on 30 August 2019, led by an international,...
We know there is a global emission gap between current policies, nationally determined contributions (NDCs), and the Paris Agreement goal to keep the global temperature rise this century well below 2 °C, but how can we close this gap? The policy brief ‘Beyond the emission...
In the transition to a more sustainable land future, our land footprint will, among many land-use change drivers, mainly depend on the interplay of population growth, agricultural efficiency, land-use regulation and consumption changes. In a new study published in Nature...
