The demands detailed in the new "Five-Point Plan for Solidarity, Fairness, and Prosperity" paper include delivery of promised climate financing.Ahead of a key climate summit later this year, over 100 developing nations on Thursday released a set of demands calling on richer countries to "take responsibility" for their disproportionate role in the global crisis by, among other policies, swiftly and transparently delivering a promised $100 billion ...

Germany's continued obstruction of the TRIPS waiver "means more people will die when they could have been saved if they had access to life-saving vaccines." When German Chancellor Angela Merkel met with U.S. President Joe Biden on Thursday for a White House summit to discuss "ending the Covid-19 pandemic," she was greeted outside by a giant puppet of herself alongside dozens of body bags, symbolizing the victims of Germany's ongoing obstruction o...

We will never end the death and destruction of COVID-19 until we get real about vaccine equity. In a month of high-level meetings from the G7 to the World Health Assembly, we have seen a lot of rhetoric from the global north, and a lot of frustration and urgency from the global south, but still no substantial changes on how to get the world vaccinated. Vaccines offer an incredible opportunity for science to outpace the virus, but now we are seein...

Carbon dioxide, once emitted into the atmosphere, stays there for hundreds of years. When someone uses an offset to counteract emissions they need to make sure the offset they buy also lasts for centuries. For a company to claim that they are achieving net zero – balancing their emissions with an equivalent quantity of removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere – it is essential that any offsets that they use are long-lasting, rather than temp...

From news reports, it might sound like the fossil fuel industry is on the defensive after a landmark court ruling and two shareholder votes challenging the industry's resistance to curbing its greenhouse gas emissions. But how much power do decisions like these really carry when it comes to pressuring the industry to change? As an academic who studies climate finance and is familiar with climate litigation, I think there's something else at work ...

"Big polluters and rich governments should not only reduce emissions to Real Zero, they must pay reparations for the huge climate debt owed to the Global South." A new report published by a trio of progressive advocacy groups lifts the veil on so-called "net zero" climate pledges, which are often touted by corporations and governments as solutions to the climate emergency, but which the paper's authors argue are merely a dangerous form of greenwa...

"We can choose to transform this moment into an opportunity to learn from our recent tragic mistakes... We can choose to invest in prevention." More than a year into the pandemic that's still raging across much of the world, an independent task force of scientists said government leaders are doing far too little to stop future pandemics at their source by ending the exploitation and destruction of nature. The task force was convened by Harvard Gl...

It takes 3,781 litres of water to make a single pair of jeans.Circular production methods could trim the amount of water and other resources denim consumes.Many leading brands are backing a circular economy for jeans. For millions of people around the world, denim is a wardrobe staple. Yet a single pair of jeans uses 3,781 litres of water in its production lifecycle. Now top brands are having a rethink and backing a circular economy for denim. Bi...

A new public-private initiative will provide $1 billion in financing to countries that protect their tropical forests.The US, UK and Norwegian governments have teamed up with global businesses such as Amazon, GSK and Nestlé in an attempt to end deforestation.Destruction of primary rainforests increased by 12% from 2019 to 2020, with the world losing over 4.2 million hectares of forest cover last year.The LEAF Coalition will also benefit billions ...

A new short film featuring climate action leader Greta Thunberg highlights the connections between the climate crisis, ecological emergency, and the Covid-19 pandemic as well as other public health crises that are likely to arise from humans' exploitation of animals—and explains how communities and policymakers can repair people's relationship to wildlife while radically changing our food systems. "For Nature," conceived of by Thunberg and produc...