The oil-and-gas industry is impervious to extreme weather events, from the Philippines to Sardinia. But both precedent and experience could turn its world upside down - and soon.
The latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report calculated a ‘budget’ for greenhouse gas emissions if global average temperature rise is to be contained within 1.5-2C. Amid fractious debates between rich and poor at the UN climate talks in Warsaw, Phil England spoke to Christian Aid’s
During the cold war, nuclear near-catastrophe provoked an enlightened political response. Will history be repeated over the climate emergency?
The International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is a unique public service that produces valuable scientific reports. But is yet another 1,000-page document what is needed now, asks Øyvind Paasche.
A combination of extreme weather events and a coming temperature rise may be enough to induce the serious political shift needed over climate change.
When the rice harvest season finishes in a few weeks, fields in India will turn black as farmers burn thousands of acres. This practice shows one of the failures of the Green Revolution, with devastating regional and global consequences. A food-security-obsessed India cannot ignore these issues fo
A new manifesto argues that the advance of democracy and of sustainable development is at heart a shared endeavour. Halina Ward & Clare Shine explain the initiative’s purpose and invite support.
The understanding of global climate change has deepened since the 1970s, in parallel with voluminous research into and clear scientific evidence of its reality. The obstacles to recognition remain powerful. But this, the 2010s, really is the crucial decade.
The containment of greenhouse-gas emissions requires political will. But to get to that point the debate about global warming needs to escape from two key diversions, says Øyvind Paasche.
So familiar has the social economy of energy become in modern societies, so routine its extraordinardinary wastefulness, so toxic its effects, that the capacity for a better way can be missed. By questioning the how, why and what of energy use, says Rebecca Willis, new possibilities - of living, t
Water scarcity in the Middle East & North Africa is at the root of the region’s uprisings. In the coming years, it will also be the source of further social unrest across the region.
A fresh awareness of system-failure and resource-constraint draws on the experience and ideas of the 1970s. But this time the vision of radical change is real possibility as well as urgent necessity. (This article was first published on 1 December 2011)
