English references

The world has entered an era of “global water bankruptcy” that is harming billions of people, a UN report has declared. The overuse and pollution of water must be tackled urgently, the report’s lead author said, because no one knew when the whole system could collapse, with implications for peace and social cohesion. All life depends on water but the report found many societies had long been using water faster than it could be replenished annually in rivers and soils, as well as over-exploiting or destroying long-term stores of water in aquifers and wetlands.

“Water crisis” has become the default label for almost any episode of water stress, from short-lived droughts to decades-long overuse of rivers and aquifers. Yet in many regions of the world, water problems no longer resemble a crisis in the conventional sense. They represent a post-crisis failure state in which human–water systems have exceeded their hydrological carrying capacities, and societies have spent beyond their sustainable hydrological budgets for so long that critical water assets are depleted, some ecosystem damages are irreversible on human time scales, and a return to “normal” is infeasible even with prohibitive economic, social, and environmental costs.

Flagship report calls for fundamental reset of global water agenda as irreversible damage pushes many basins beyond recovery

Like living beyond your financial means, using more water than nature can replenish can have catastrophic results.

Back in 2018, Yale economist William Nordhaus won the Nobel Prize for his work on his Dynamic Integrated Climate-Economy (DICE) model. The idea was to set up a picture of the global economy, add on some estimates of the economic costs of warming with a “damage function,” plus estimates of what climate policy would cost, and all adjusted with a discount term to account for how people value current production more than future production (according to economists, at least). That way you can calculate an “optimal” climate policy in the form of a carbon tax that would precisely compensate for warming damages without burdening the economy too much.

The nation’s top banks are quietly advising their clients on how to build a financial life raft — or perhaps life yacht — from the wreckage of runaway climate change. Make no mistake: The forecasts coming from Wall Street’s leading financial institutions are bleak. But they also point their clients to potential profit-making opportunities from the havoc spreading across the planet, writes Corbin Hiar.

As authorities declared 2024 the hottest on record, a key private sector climate alliance, the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ) abandoned a requirement that members be aligned to the Paris agreement. That was followed by a network of net zero asset managers suspending work, and deleting from its website its statement of commitments that members must adopt, after BlackRock, the biggest of them all, quit its ranks.

A carbon bomb is any fossil fuel extraction project that will generate more than one gigatonne of carbon dioxide (1GtCO2) over its remaining life.

Since the Paris Agreement in 2016, the world’s 60 largest private banks financed fossil fuels with USD $6.9 trillion. Nearly half – $3.3 trillion – went towards fossil fuel expansion. In 2023, banks financed $705 billion in fossil fuel financing with $347 billion going to fossil fuel expansion alone.

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A focus on economic stability in the near-term makes the climate crisis worse in the long-term.

Higher rates slow the renewable energy transition and shield oil and gas producers from competition by low-carbon producers

Tiny plastic particles can travel worldwide, ending up in urban, rural, and remote areas. They take an even faster transport pathway than oceanic currents: the atmosphere.

As automakers around the world set bold targets for vehicle electrification, many in the industry are looking to nickel — an integral component of most lithium ion batteries — as a major hurdle.

The fast fall of PG&E after California’s wildfires is a jolt for companies considering the uncertain risks of a warming planet

US and UK financial institutions have been among the leading investors in Russian “carbon bomb” fossil fuel projects, according to a new database of holdings from recent years.

In 2005, I was the lead counsel on behalf of the US in one of the biggest corporate accountability legal actions ever filed. That trial proved that the tobacco industry knew it was selling and marketing a harmful product, that it had funded denial of public health science, and had used deceptive advertising and PR to protect assets instead of protecting consumers.

An investor’s rant gives an insight into the City’s short-termist view of the environment crisis

For the past few years, scientists have been frantically sounding an alarm that governments refuse to hear: the global food system is beginning to look like the global financial system in the run-up to 2008.

The Bank of England governor warned last week of ‘apocalyptic’ food price rises. Yet war in Ukraine, climate change and inflation are already taking their toll all over the world. Apocalypse is an alarming idea, commonly taken to denote catastrophic destruction foreshadowing the end of the world. But in the original Greek, apokálypsis means a revelation or an uncovering. One vernacular definition is “to take the lid off something”.