China’s efforts to curb coal contributes to slowdown in global emissions, says new research
chinadialogue Global carbon dioxide emissions from burning coal, oil and gas as well as from industrial activities grew by just 0.6% in 2014, according to researchers from the Global Carbon Project of the organisation Future Earth. The researchers say emissions have grown even more slowly this year,…
Unlocking Climate Finance
Luis Alberto Moreno Record-strength hurricanes, submerged coastal cities, scorched dust bowls – these are the sort of apocalyptic images that are often used to illustrate the devastating consequences of climate change. But for millions of farmers in Latin America and the Caribbean, a slow-motion cat…
What Paris Talks Have Accomplished So Far
Michael R. Bloomberg The two-week United Nations conference on climate change is halfway over, and no matter what else happens, it has already been a clear-cut success in two critical areas. As important as a global accord is, the most influential actors on climate change have been cities and busine…
What can we expect from Russia in Syria?
Kadri Liik Ever since it started at the end of September, Russia’s military engagement in Syria has given rise to many questions, contradictory interpretations, different hopes and fears. While some have seen it as anti-Western policy, others have hoped that it will eventually lead to a common anti-…
Overcoming Europe’s Twin Growth Challenges
Michael Heise As economic recovery finally begins to take hold in Europe, the imperative for policymakers is to ensure that growth can be sustained far into the future. Fiscal and monetary stimulus may have been appropriate at the peak of the crisis, but they will do little to address the biggest th…
The Big China Story Nobody’s Really Covering
Walter R. Mead The Chinese Discovery of the World is one of major stories of our age: For the first time in China’s 2,500 years of history, millions of its citizens are venturing beyond their home towns and cities and out beyond the boundaries of the Middle Kingdom itself. According to the Wall Stre…
Why defeating the Islamic State won’t bring stability to Iraq
Iraq’s most urgent challenge is to eliminate the Islamic State (IS), but that battle will be just a prelude to myriad conflicts in liberated areas such as Sinjar and Tuz Khormato if the rival parties can’t reach a consensus on their future status. The forces that helped liberate the areas — namely t…
The First Steps In Global Goal Partnership And Implementation
John W. McArthur Over the coming year, one of the multilateral system’s most important tasks will be to implement first steps toward achieving the sustainable development goals (SDGs, or “global goals”). Success requires thinking about both SDG-wide and SDG-specific priorities in parallel. Although …
COP21 Paris climate talks: World powers are aligned and change is possible
Jeffrey Sachs In 1992, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change rightly called for a stabilisation of greenhouse gas concentrations at a level that would prevent dangerous climate change. The UN Climate talks that have just begun in Paris can and should underpin the decarbonisation of the globa…
Preserving the Ottoman Mosaic
Carl Bildt The roots of the Middle East’s many conflicts lie in the unraveling of the Ottoman Empire at the beginning of the twentieth century and the failure since then to forge a stable regional order. As the international community works toward securing a durable peace in the region, its leaders …