Vishal Prasad is director of Pacific Islands Students Fighting Climate Change. When the International Court of Justice (ICJ) delivered its advisory opinion on climate change last year, it marked a turning point not just for the Pacific, but for international climate law. The court was unambiguous: states have legal obligations to protect the environment from […]
Brazil is rushing to regulate its critical minerals industry and unlock its vast untapped reserves of rare earths, aiming to position itself as a strategic producer with Chinese and US companies competing for fresh supplies. Despite opposition from some environmental and Indigenous rights groups, lawmakers in Brazil’s lower house of Congress passed the government’s critical […]
The two countries set to lead this year’s COP31 have unveiled three headline goals for November’s UN climate summit – on electrification, waste and buildings – following six months of consultations with governments. At mid-year climate talks in Bonn, Turkish COP31 President-Designate Murat Kurum and the talks’ chief negotiator, Australia’s Chris Bowen, billed the targets […]
Bill Hare is the CEO of Climate Analytics, a global climate science and policy institute working to accelerate climate action. The word ‘implementation’ has featured long and loud recently in discussions about the UN climate process. The host government of last year’s COP30 summit, Brazil, argued that it should be an “implementation COP”. And if you talk […]
Kicking off proceedings at the mid-year climate talks in Bonn amid fraught global geopolitics, UN climate chief Simon Stiell told delegates that tackling the global climate crisis is “the hardest, but most important, thing humanity has ever tried to do together”. Perhaps hoping to forestall the usual diplomatic wrangling that routinely bogs down the talks, […]
Ocean and coastal creatures are being put at risk by the spills, noise, dredging and shipping associated with new offshore oil and gas infrastructure, says a new report by a group of environmental NGOs. The report by 12 environmental groups analysed planned new offshore oil and gas blocks covering 430,000 square kilometres – an area […]
As competition for minerals needed to produce clean energy technologies intensifies, a growing number of countries have resorted to an age-old mechanism to cope with the threat of scarcity: stockpiling. The world’s biggest economies are racing to shore up reserves of cobalt, lithium, graphite and rare earths, which are needed to produce batteries, electric vehicles, […]
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China’s carbon emissions bounced back up in early 2026 as “inflexible” grid management caused the country to waste vast quantities of clean power and burn more fossil fuels instead, new analysis shows. After recording a first full-year decline in 2025, China’s carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from energy and industry grew by 2% in the first […]
In 2021, amidst a wave of corporate net-zero targets, a campaign group called Investors for Paris Compliance was set up in British Columbia, aiming to use investor pressure to hold Canadian companies to account on their climate promises. In the five years since, the group has notched up several wins: pressuring National Bank into providing […]
