Technical negotiations around the creation of international carbon markets have wrapped up in Madrid, leaving a mess for the high-level phase of talks that begins Tuesday.
“Natural Climate Solutions” have been in the news a lot these past two years, and they’re also in the minds of people and businesses looking to achieve carbon neutrality. Demand for offsets generated through better management of forests, farms, and fields increased 264 percent over the past two years, leading to a seven-year high in volume of voluntary carbon offsets.
As greenhouse-gas emissions hit yet another all-time high, it’s more important than ever to maintain our planet’s living carbon sinks and slash industrial emissions. Here are six key take-homes from the latest Global Carbon Project analysis.
The answer is a cautious but clear ‘yes’. But not all standards and all types of forest mitigation activities are equal. Here we consider which carbon standards and project types could be eligible under the emerging emissions trading system for international flights.
The UN’s latest Emissions Gap Report says net greenhouse gas emissions will have to fall by 60 percent in just ten years to prevent temperatures from rising to cataclysmic levels. The news came as US President Donald Trump vowed to withdraw his country from the Paris Climate Agreement. Now former US Secretary of State John Kerry has announced an initiative of its own. Dubbed “World War Zero”, it has plenty of star power but little yet in the way of publicly-available details.
The Paris Climate Agreement aims to keep global temperatures from rising more than 1.5°C, but current ledges will let them soar 3.2°C. By waiting so long to fix the mess, the cost of fixing it is now somewhere between $1.6 trillion and 3.8 trillion per year, according to the UN’s latest Gap Report, which is published every year ahead of global climate talks.
In carbon accounting, many people talk about “nesting” forest carbon projects into jurisdictional programs, but what does it actually look like? Some critics say it looks like “Swiss cheese”, with selected forests cut out of a landscape to develop projects, hindering national or subnational emission reduction programs. This begs the question: Is nesting detrimental to large-scale mitigation… or does it actually enable it?
