Cooling technologies are vital for a functioning society – refrigeration for food and medicine, air-conditioning to adapt to a warming planet and heat pumps for decarbonised heating. But the refrigerants inside these technologies can exacerbate climate change, some of them hundreds or thousands times worse than carbon dioxide over a short time frame. Fortunately, there […]
The UK is this week in the midst of yet another unseasonal heatwave – and with global temperatures rising every year, it’s only going to get worse. Many people around the world are turning to air-conditioning to find some relief from the heat, but air-conditioning is itself a part of the problem as it also […]
As the latest rupture in an increasingly unstable geopolitical landscape, military strikes on Iran by the USA and Israel will likely increase pressure on the world’s ability to feed itself – and it begins with synthetic fertilisers. It is barely more than century since the Haber-Bosch process was developed and the industrial production of ammonia […]
The UK Government has promised global climate leadership, yet new evidence shows that programmes designed to protect forests, oceans and climate stability in developing countries are being quietly cut, scaled back or drip-fed year-by-year. At least £11.6 billion was pledged for international climate finance (ICF) between 2021-26. According to reporting this week in the Guardian, […]
Has the world woken up to the threat of environmental crime? The outcome of several days of dialogue in Vienna this week raises more questions than answers. More than 100 states, represented by hundreds of delegates, met at the United Nations to negotiate the global response to environmental crime as part of a Second Meeting […]
Ten years ago, on 12 December 2015, 195 governments adopted the Paris Agreement at the 21st UN Climate Change Conference (CoP21). A decade on, it is time for both reflection and renewal.