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...
More than 700 million people in Sub-Saharan Africa still use traditional biomass (wood or charcoal) on open fires or inefficient traditional cookstoves for cooking. This results in serious health effects; each year, between 150,000 and 250,000 children under the age of 5 in...
What are the implications of the implementation of national climate policies, and how do they add up to the greenhouse gas emission reductions needed to keep global warming to well below 2 ˚C or even 1.5 ˚C? Are current investments and innovations aligned with long-term...
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...
This new PBL-JRC-IIASA report presents a set of scenarios that limit global warming to below 2 °C and 1.5 °C, by using either the full portfolio of reduction options, as represented in the IMAGE and POLES model, or by assuming an alternative strategy that would limit the use...
In 2017, the warmest year on record of years without the occurrence of El Niño, and a year with normal global economic growth, the increase in global greenhouse gas emissions resumed at a rate of 1.3% per year, reaching 50.9 gigatonnes in CO2 equivalent. This was mainly due...
Opportunities exist in G20 countries (Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, EU, India, Indonesia, Japan, Republic of Korea, Russian Federation, and the United States) to strengthen existing climate policies.
Current climate policies are inconsistent with the objectives of the Paris Agreement, but model-based scenario analyses also show that there are several opportunities to strengthen current climate policies.
