Search Climate Insights Directory

The Mekong floodplains, covering approximately 70,000 km2 and including Cambodia's Tonle Sap, are experiencing environmental deterioration driven by rapid economic growth and climate change. While hydropower dams are a significant concern for biodiversity and livelihoods, the document argues that focusing solely on dams overlooks other local threats affecting water resources, vegetation, and fish.

The document examines why the WTO has seen few legal proceedings against fossil fuel subsidies despite their distorting impact on trade and investment. It specifically analyses the compatibility of four fossil fuel support measures in G20 countries with the 1994 Agreement on Subsidies and Countervailing Measures, concluding that litigating consumption subsidies is particularly difficult.

The paper assesses the International Civil Aviation Organization's scheme to offset international flight emissions above 2020 levels, concluding that without strict eligibility criteria, the scheme may fail to produce additional emissions reductions. It warns that allowing unlimited credits from existing Clean Development Mechanism projects could result in no new abatement. The author recommends limiting eligibility to new projects or those at risk of discontinuation.

The text examines Kenya's energy transition, focusing on the shift toward private-sector participation in the geothermal power sector and the effort to modernize the cooking sector to increase the sustainability of charcoal use.

The document outlines a protocol for a systematic review of the positive and negative impacts of mining activities—from prospecting to decommissioning—on social and environmental systems in Boreal and Arctic regions, following Collaboration for Environmental Evidence and ROSES standards.

The research examines the uptake of domestic biogas in rural Bali, Indonesia, using a multi-level perspective framework and stakeholder analysis. It aims to identify pathways for biogas to compete with established fossil fuel-based energy systems and provide co-benefits for vulnerable rural communities, offering insights for Indonesia and other developing countries transitioning to low-carbon energy.

The document introduces the Transition Pathways and Risk Analysis for Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies (TRANSrisk) project, which analyzes the risks and innovation requirements for shifting from carbon-intensive to low-carbon systems to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. It identifies six categories of transition risks: economic, regulatory/institutional, political, social, environmental, and technological.

The authors critique mainstream adaptation research for focusing too narrowly on climate risk and biophysical impacts, which they argue overlooks the wider social context. Using rural Nepal as a case study, the paper highlights that rural livelihoods are undergoing transformations—such as declining farming populations, increased migration, and mechanisation—that are not captured by standard climate-risk frameworks. The authors propose a dual approach to adaptation research that asks both about climate impacts and the most significant general changes occurring in people's lives to better identify vulnerabilities and opportunities.

The document explains that consumption-based emissions inventories (CBEIs) capture the full carbon footprint of a city by including emissions from goods and services produced outside city borders. It identifies that for wealthy, industrialized cities, CBEIs are often significantly higher than territorial inventories. The guide details three main estimation approaches: spending data with input-output models, physical data with life-cycle analysis, and hybrid methods. It advises city planners to align their choice of methodology with their specific goals, such as resident education, peer comparison, or local policy design, while emphasizing the importance of detailed categorization to identify high-leverage areas for emissions reduction.

The Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI), in collaboration with the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and Bolivian partners, applied the Gridded Meteorological Ensemble Tool (GMET) to generate daily climate grids for Bolivia and parts of neighbouring countries from 1980 to 2016. Using a database of over 400 stations, the project demonstrated GMET's ability to incorporate prediction errors and uncertainty into spatial precipitation and temperature data, though it found that satellite-based data remained necessary to fill gaps in data-sparse regions. The project included a technology transfer to train local experts and the release of the tool as open-source software.

The report details a series of Swedish-led dialogue forums in five countries aimed at integrating climate policies (NDCs) with sustainable development goals (SDGs). Common findings across the forums include a critical need for capacity building at local levels, the challenge of translating national policies into regional implementation, and the necessity of securing both international and domestic financing. While stakeholders generally recognized the synergies between NDCs and SDGs, concerns persisted regarding trade-offs between rapid industrialization and environmental sustainability. Country-specific insights highlight Vietnam's focus on integrated water management, Tanzania's debate on the economic costs of environmental degradation, Zambia's emphasis on research and solar potential, Cambodia's focus on inter-ministerial policy coherence, and Uganda's concerns over institutional silos and external financing dependencies.

The document describes Arctic wetlands as critical ecosystems that store vast amounts of carbon and support biodiversity and Indigenous livelihoods. It warns that climate-driven permafrost degradation and human activities like drainage turn these areas into a 'time bomb' by releasing greenhouse gases and toxic mercury. Conversely, it argues that restoration and conservation can serve as a 'saving grace' for climate mitigation and adaptation. The briefing highlights the need for better wetland inventories and comparative analysis of management strategies to improve governance across Arctic states.

The report examines the risks associated with the potential significant decline of South Africa's coal production over the next five to ten years. It highlights the high concentration of coal assets in Mpumalanga province and the resulting vulnerability of local employment and municipal revenues. The authors argue that a 'just transition' requires moving beyond technical energy models to address local-level impacts, including labor redeployment, economic diversification, and the remediation of environmental legacies. It identifies gaps in current governance, such as the conflict of interest within the Department of Mineral Resources, and suggests that existing mechanisms like Social and Labour Plans need systemic improvement to be effective.

The document argues that the United States, as a top fossil fuel producer with a resilient economy, must phase out extraction faster than the global average to meet Paris Agreement goals. It introduces three principles: reducing production at a pace consistent with climate protection, accelerating phase-outs in economically resilient communities, and safeguarding human rights and the environment. The authors apply these principles to U.S. coal and onshore oil, identifying the Appalachian Basin and California's San Joaquin basin as high-priority areas for rapid wind-down due to high carbon intensity, lower relative economic dependence, and significant environmental or social harms.

The document reports on a pilot study using 'cultural probes' and workshops with 13 UK households to understand the 'food journey' from shopping to disposal. It identifies a gap between perceived and actual food waste, noting that while many households claim to waste little, millions of tonnes are discarded annually. Key motivators for reducing waste include saving money and environmental concerns, while barriers include a lack of local composting facilities and retailer packaging. The study highlights that women often bear more responsibility for the early stages of the food journey, suggesting that waste-reduction campaigns focusing on shopping may disproportionately place the burden of change on women.

The protocol outlines a systematic search of academic and grey literature from 2013 to 2017 to identify ecotechnologies that recover or reuse carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus in agriculture. The goal is to address the eutrophication of the Baltic Sea caused by agricultural nutrient runoff by creating a searchable database and an interactive evidence atlas to identify knowledge gaps and clusters.

The report details the development and application of the Small-Scale Irrigation Mapping (SSIM) tool in Burkina Faso, designed to capture irrigation on areas smaller than one hectare. This high-resolution approach, utilizing 30-m Landsat 8 imagery and ground truthing, addresses the limitations of previous maps (250m to 1km resolution) and serves to validate the Targeting Agricultural Water Management Interventions (TAGMI) decision-support tool.

The study evaluates the resilience of the Eastern African Power Pool's electricity infrastructure against climate-induced water availability variations, finding that planning for a slightly wetter climate than historical trends provides the most resilient strategy. It highlights that failing to climate-proof investments can lead to significant electricity price fluctuations in countries like Uganda and Tanzania, whereas Egypt is less vulnerable.

The paper argues that achieving low-carbon and sustainability objectives requires radical departures from current socio-technical trajectories, necessitating a more comprehensive approach to evaluating the feasibility of sustainability transitions pathways (STPs). The authors propose an evaluation frame based on three 'facets': representations for exploring potentials, and the conditions required for STPs to be realized. This framework is intended to complement traditional modelling-based scenario tools by mobilizing multiple forms of knowledge to support interdisciplinary research and strategic interventions in transitions governance.

The paper identifies that the EU's global connectivity via people, capital, and goods exposes it to climate risks originating outside its borders. It finds that many EU countries exceed global averages in exposure related to trade openness, globalization, asylum, and transboundary water dependency. To address these risks, the authors introduce a typology of cross-border impacts and highlight the need for improved supply chain modelling and the application of existing cohesion and external action mechanisms to build resilience.