This blog was originally posted on the World Bank's Sustainable Cities blog.
Heavy rain and severe flooding brought the city of Colombo, Sri Lanka, to its knees. In China’s Yangtze River Basin, rivers spilled their banks, inundating towns and villages. In Mobile Bay, Alabama, strong ocean waves carried away valuable coastline.
In each of these locations, disasters caused by natural hazards seemed beyond human control. But instead of focusing only on...
Under the Paris Agreement, countries' long-term climate strategies are meant to plan into the middle of the century. But we have limited ability to foresee future technology, business, lifestyle and political developments. How can policymakers deal with this uncertainty?
We don't know the future. We do know there would be huge benefits to shifting towards a low-carbon economy. Here are answers to seven of the most-asked questions about the economics of the NCE report.
Introduced in a basic form in the 1960s, bike-sharing services are now seemingly ubiquitous in many major cities. The propagation of “dockless” systems, shared bicycles that can be parked nearly anywhere, has led to unprecedented growth, increasing the number of publicly accessible bikes from 1.2 million worldwide in 2015 to more than 16 million in China alone...
The COP 24 climate negotiations in Katowice, Poland delivered mixed results. Finance was an important part of the package agreed upon. Some countries made new financial commitments, but overall pledges fell short of the scale needed to enable truly ambitious action in line with what the latest science is calling for. On a more positive note, negotiators agreed on post-2020 financing rules that improve transparency on both past and future funding, and establish important processes to deliver on the...
Development banks can align their investments in electricity grids with the Paris Agreement by incorporating a shadow carbon price and making sure their investments support long-term plans for decarbonizing the electricity sector.
Countries, stakeholders and expert institutions have been making submissions to the UNFCCC’s Talanoa Dialogue in preparation for December’s COP24 climate conference. Parties’ collective efforts in progress towards meeting the long-term temperature goal of the Paris Agreement will be reviewed at the Conference, to inform further target-setting. To feed into the Dialogue, the Grantham Research Institute and the World Resources Institute have been taking stock of the quantified targets set by different Parties to the...
Two weeks after the publication of the landmark IPCC Special Report on 1.5°C, many negotiators and their ministers will gather in Krakow, Poland. This pre-COP session is just a few weeks before the 24th climate conference (COP24) in Katowice and just after the co-chairs of the negotiating tracks have posted revised text proposals ...
In the past five years, private energy buyers have made significant commitments to reaching 100 percent renewable energy and have voluntarily brought about 14.2 gigawatts (GW) of renewable energy into the electricity market.
However, managing how this renewable energy enters our electricity markets and truly meets a 100 percent commitment to renewable energy remains a challenge. To maximize these renewable energy commitments and ensure that they are contributing to decarbonizing the electricity grid, we are entering a new era of collaboration, in which utilities will need to play...
Companies have set to work on the scenario analysis recommended by the Financial Stability Board's Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD). Building a scenario analysis to explore how climate change will impact business over time is a challenging task, and one of the biggest difficulties lies in selecting and building plausible future...