The European Union (EU) carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM) announced on 14 July could change trade patterns in favour of countries where production is relatively carbon efficient but do little to mitigate climate change. The mechanism could help avoid carbon leakage, but its impact on climate change would be limited – only a 0.1% drop in global CO2 emissions – with higher trade costs for developing countries. At the same time, several of the EU’s trading partners exporting goods in carbon-intensive sectors – including cement, steel, aluminium, oil refinery, paper, glass, chemical and fertilizers – have raised concerns that the CBAM could substantially curtail their exports.

Carbon “sinks”, such as forests or the ocean, play a crucial role in absorbing atmospheric CO2 and thereby reducing the damages caused by climate change and the emissions that drive it.

Dr. Wilfried Rickels and Prof. Martin Quaas's findings show that Australia, Indonesia and Cuba contribute the largest blue-carbon net “wealth” to the rest of the world. However, only a handful of countries have enough blue carbon potential to offset their entire carbon footprint.

EURACTIV looks at Europe’s upcoming forest strategy and how it intends to plant “at least 3 billion additional trees in the EU by 2030.

The capacity of forests to act as a “carbon sink” – absorbing more CO2 than they emit – is decreasing and needs to be reversed, the European Commission said in September 2020 when it presented its 2030 climate target plan.

Explainer: Will global warming ‘stop’ as soon as net-zero emissions are reached?

The treaty is structured around a fundamental right and a fundamental duty. The first article proposes the first ever binding formulation, at a global level, of the right of “every person […] to live in an ecologically sound environment”.

The Pact is a compass defining a direction by means of converging binding principles. Such principles should be used first and foremost as legal parameters to design policies, both domestic and international, that prevent further environmental harm.

Resource Efficient Housing programme is being piloted with Burkina Faso and Sri Lanka as the first 2 selected countries. The programme responds to the urgent need to reduce global greenhouse emissions with a focus on material resource efficiency, given the fact that 50% of the building stock is yet to be built, with most of it to occur in developing countries. The main objective is to support countries building their roadmap towards a resource efficient, low carbon and climate resilient buildings strategy.

Dramatic steps have just been laid out by the EU in the new Fit for 55 package of proposals to achieve 55% reduction of emissions by 2030

Climate change is affecting water supplies around the world. Whether too little water in the form of prolonged and severe droughts or too much through flooding from heavy storms, extreme weather events are reducing the availability of surface water. Given the essential role of clean and safe water for sustaining life, lack of access to it has dramatic effects on sanitation, hygiene, nutrition, and health.

According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), energy efficiency must take a leading role as the “first fuel” in climate-related development assistance in order to achieve the dual objective of reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions while catalyzing economic development.

Addressing climate change will require a near complete transformation in the ways we generate, distribute, and use energy. To maximize the chances of mitigating the worst impacts of climate change, we must reduce the energy needed to sustain current energy consumption by using it more efficiently.