On November 4, 2019, President Donald Trump officially began the formal process to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris Agreement. Although the President had announced his intent in June of 2017, he was unable to formally submit the intent to withdraw until three years after the agreement had entered into force. Climate activists and opponents...
The last few months has represented a transition in the UKs climate narrative following the UK general election on the 12th December 2019 and subsequent victory for the Conservative party with a 45% majority. Securing 365 seats in Parliament, they have the largest Conservative majority government since Margaret Thatcher. Many ‘safe’ Labour seats were lost...
At the end of 2019 Ukraine had several major events that will affect its climate policy. The new Parliament organized a hearing on “Priorities for Environmental Policy for the Next Five years”. During the hearing the Minister of Energy and Environment of Ukraine, deputies, and researchers presented a vision of the environmental priorities for the...
25 district municipalities of the City of İzmir are cooperating in the fields of nature protection, climate crisis, migration, inequality and poverty under the leadership of the Metropolitan Municipality. This initiative seeks to create an exemplary model for Municipalities in Turkey. Many projects are being carried out by the Metropolitan to prepare the city against...
On December 2, 2019, a high-level Inter-Agency policy dialogue was held in Bangkok between the Office of the Natural Resources and Environmental Policy and Planning (ONEP) and the Office of the National Water Resources (ONWR). The dialogue addressed “the need for cross-agency and multi-level collaboration to make Thailand’s water resources management more climate-resilient in the...
2019 was a year of increasing visibility of climate change: motivated global citizens stepped up to the plate and demanded change from global leaders, many 2020 presidential candidates from the U.S. finally put real focus on climate change as one of their top priorities and campaigning strategies, and “climate crisis” was the word of the...
Nothing is more important than breathing for survival. But even breathing is threatened in Korea. The South Korean National Assembly officially declared the fine dust issue as a ‘social disaster’ in March 2019. And in December 2019, fine dust was selected as the most important environmental issue of 2019 in a vote of citizens. According...
Earlier in the month of November 2019, the Constitutional Court refused a mining company’s final challenge of a 2018 High Court decision to set aside Ministerial approvals for a proposed coal mine in South Africa. The Constitutional Court had the final say on the approvals for a coal mine inside an Mpumalanga Protected Area and...
The UN Climate Change Conference, COP 25, took place this last December 2019 in Madrid, Spain. As part of the Paris Climate Agreement, Saudi Arabia was present and an active participant in discussions that were aimed at negotiating ambitious plans to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees C. Yet again, as in previous conferences, Saudi...
At his annual press conference on December 19, 2019 the President of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin, admitted that climate change is indeed happening. However, the Russian President also explicitly stated that “nobody knows” what causes climate change, thus casting doubt on the overwhelming scientific consensus that what we are experiencing has direct anthropogenic causes....
