Articles 2020

Healthy environment a human right, UN court says in landmark climate ruling

Donald Trump’s administration is to reconsider the official finding that greenhouse gases are harmful to public health, a move that threatens to rip apart the foundation of the US’s climate laws, amid a stunning barrage of actions to weaken or repeal a host of pollution limits upon power plants, cars and waterways.

Trump could reverse the nation’s progress on climate change, but rolling back the Biden administration’s significant climate successes could be a low, slow and difficult process...

Last year I was fortunate enough to be joined by four remarkable women in the British environmental movement. We were speaking at a Deep Adaptation conference in Glastonbury. The way the discussion…

World Bank says subsidies costing as much as $23m a minute must be repurposed to fight climate crisis...

The world’s leading energy economist has warned against investing in large new oil and gas developments, which would have little impact on the current energy crisis and soaring fuel prices but spell devastation to the planet.

Egypt’s Minister of Environment Yasmine Fouad and Minister of Agriculture and Land Reclamation El-Sayed El-Kosayer met on Sunday to discuss preparations for the Conference of the Parties on Climate Change (COP 27), which Egypt will be hosting in Sharm El-Sheikh this year.

Several terms have been used to describe the negative mental health implications of environmental degradation, including ecological grief, solastalgia, climate and eco-anxiety. The American Psychological Association defines eco-anxiety as a “chronic fear of environmental doom”. Some psychiatrists describe this as an anticipated trauma or a “pre-traumatic stress disorder”.

The enormous, unprecedented pain and turmoil caused by the climate crisis is often discussed alongside what can seem like surprisingly small temperature increases – 1.5C or 2C hotter than it was in the era just before the car replaced the horse and cart.

The study from the UN University, the academic and research arm of the UN, looks at 10 different disasters that occurred in 2020 and 2021, and finds that, even though they occurred in very different locations and do not initially appear to have much in common, they are, in fact, interconnected.

After a century of wielding extraordinary economic and political power, America’s petroleum giants face a reckoning for driving the greatest existential threat of our lifetimes. An unprecedented wave of lawsuits, filed by cities and states across the US, aim to hold the oil and gas industry to account for the environmental devastation caused by fossil fuels – and covering up what they knew along the way.

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