Energy Resources & Access

At first glance, California and Syria appear to have little in common other than Mediterranean climates. But two new studies – focusing on severe droughts in these places half a planet apart – highlight a yawning gap in the abilities of developed and many developing countries to adapt to the effects of climate change. Each study, appearing in the current issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, documents ways in which global warming is boosting the likelihood of additional droughts as severe and prolonged as those the two have experienced.

New research published in January reveals that vast stretches of the ocean interior abruptly lost oxygen during the transition out of the last ice age that occurred 17,000–10,000 years ago. This event was the most recent example of large-scale global warming, and was caused primarily by changes in Earth’s orbit around the sun. Past climate events provide informative case studies for understanding what is currently happening to the modern climate system, says 2013 Fellow Sarah Moffitt.

Clean energy innovation and decarbonization efforts will be overwhelmingly concentrated in rapidly industrializing countries, where demand for energy is high and deployment opportunities are broad, says a new report from a group of 12 energy scholars.

The European Union led the world in wheat production and exports in 2014-15. Yet Europe is also the region where productivity has slowed the most. Yields of major crops have not increased as much as would be expected over the past 20 years, based on past productivity increases and innovations in agriculture. Finding the causes of that stagnation is key to understanding the trajectory of the global food supply.

Following national trends, greenhouse gas emissions linked to climate change continue dropping locally [in Tucson, Arizona], a government report shows. The region’s weak economy clearly is playing a role in the decline, a University of Arizona expert said. But it’s not just dollars and cents. Recent signs of a shift to solar energy and to natural gas from coal burning for electricity also have made a difference, said the UA expert, Derek Lemoine, an assistant professor who specializes in energy and environmental economics.

There's a growing understanding of the factors that contribute to ocean acidification in coastal areas and how shellfish respond. A new study looks at the risks to shellfish and identifies areas where livelihoods are most at risk. ...

Trying to predict where India will swerve on climate policy seems as hard as predicting which way an auto-rickshaw driver will swerve in a Kolkata traffic jam. “Overall, we’re still holding our breath, waiting to see what Modi and India are going to do on greenhouse gas emissions and climate,” Heather Coleman, Oxfam America’s climate policy leader, said. “I don’t think this announcement sheds more light on that.” Read more

On Wednesday, the European Union will unveil its post-2020 climate-change strategy, kicking off a 40-day period during which most industrialized nations are expected to upload their strategies to the United Nations web site. By the end of June, every country in the world should have offered its own Intended Nationally-Determined Contribution to the climate challenge, and by October we’ll know how they all fit together. ...

Although environmentalists had hoped for more progress when Obama came into office, most give him credit for having done what he has in the face of Republican opposition. “Obama has done an amazing amount on climate in his six years, and it certainly looks like he is trying to make this a legacy issue,” says Kevin Kennedy, director of the US Climate Initiative at the World Resources Institute, a non-govern­mental environmental-research organization in Washington DC.