Topic: climate change

Domestic legislation, the Climate Change Act 2008, commits the United Kingdom to an 80 percent emission reduction from 1990 levels by 2050. The legislation also mandates a system of five-year carbon budgets to progress toward that target.

This report summarizes key UK policies already enacted and in development that are likely to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions across the country, discusses the implications of the current policy scenario for the country’s GHG trajectory, and identifies issues to watch going forward. Our analysis finds that if future carbon budgets are to be met, progress in emission reductions must accelerate.

As climate change has resulted in sea level rise, its impacts on states like Florida are profound. This fact sheet examines those impacts as well what county governments and others are doing to respond.

Hurricane Sandy is the most recent event to expose the vulnerability of the United States to extreme weather, with costly disruptions to businesses, people’s livelihoods, and critical infrastructure. This fact sheet by WRI examines the connection between Hurricane Sandy and climate change as well as the impacts.

This report draws on projections from the “Energy Roadmap 2050” to assess whether the European Union is on track to reach its greenhouse gas (GHG), renewable energy, and energy efficiency targets. We find that the EU is on track to surpass its 2020 GHG reduction and renewable energy targets based on current policies, but that additional measures will be required to meet the 2020 energy-efficiency target and the 2050 GHG-reduction goal.

In the context of the U.S. goal to achieve “in the range of a 17 percent emission reduction by 2020 compared with 2005 levels,” this report examines key existing and emerging federal policies that are likely to reduce GHG emissions in the United States. U.S. government GHG projections suggest that additional policy action is likely to be necessary in order to achieve the president’s GHG reduction target and continue significant emissions reductions after 2020.

Japan’s fast-start finance (FSF) commitment is one of the largest amongst developed countries, but it is important to consider the contents of this commitment. Japan has played a significant role in global efforts to finance climate change activities in developing countries, and its FSF commitments account for almost half of the FSF that developed countries have pledged for 2010-2012. However, it is essential to better understand the broad range of instruments and activities that the government includes in its FSF, as different governments consider different types of finance to constitute FSF, so self-reported figures are not directly comparable between countries.

During the design of REDD+, Parties recognized that REDD+ actions will likely not be sustainable unless they account for the role of local people and ecosystems. As a result, Parties defined seven “safeguards” to guide implementation of REDD+, among them transparency, participation, protection of biodiversity, and protection of the rights of local people.

Governments in REDD+ countries are tasked with providing information on how these safeguards will be “addressed and respected.” One option is to develop a national system focused on implementing the safeguards and to provide information on how the system functions. The purpose of this report is to support this process by providing a framework for what a robust national system to implement the REDD+ safeguards would include.