International Conservation & Development

In a new report that ranks countries by how well they protect the environment, the U.S. comes in at a disappointing 26th place among 180 nations.

Around the world, urbanization and climate change are transforming societies and environments, and the stakes could not be higher for the poor and marginalized. The 2015 UN climate conference in Paris (COP-21) highlighted the need for coordinated action to address the profound injustice of the world’s most disadvantaged people bearing the greatest costs of climate impacts. Among those at the COP were mayors from around the world advocating for the important role of cities in these efforts.

How fast tropical forests recover after deforestation has major consequences for climate change mitigation. A team including Smithsonian scientists discovered that some secondary tropical forests recover biomass quickly: half of the forests in the study attained 90 percent of old-growth forest levels in 66 years or less. Conservation planners can use their resulting biomass-recovery map for Latin America to prioritize conservation efforts. ...

"We’re documenting over and over again the importance of forests for mitigating floods and providing dry season water,” says Jefferson Hall, a forest ecologist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) in Panama.

I asked Kelly Sims Gallagher, director of the Center for International Environment & Resource Policy at Tuft University’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, what a Republican president — one who opposes action on climate change — could mean for any progress reached in Paris this week.

[from December 2, 2015] Major world leaders today launched an unprecedented global carbon pricing initiative, calling for nations of the world to put a price on carbon pollution to protect the climate and accelerate a transition to ä clean, sustainable energy future. The initiative is sponsored by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund

“Finance is the bedrock of this agreement. It is through commitment of finance that the confidence and the trust that has always been debated in this process is strengthened.” These words of Pa Ousman, Minister of the Environment and Climate Change for the Gambia, reflect a strong sentiment of developing country representatives at the Paris climate negotiations this week: a just climate deal necessitates predictable public flows of money to support the most vulnerable countries in the face of escalating climate disasters, and to enable low-carbon development.

Changing the world is an expensive proposition. But for the representatives for the 195 countries gathered in Paris for the COP21 summit on climate change, the most daunting step might be figuring out how to split the bill. “The elephant in the room is still finance,” said Yvo de Boer, former head of the U.N. climate change body, at the start of the climate talks.

Doreen Stabinsky, Visiting Professor of Climate Change Leadership, Uppsala University, Sweden and Professor of Global Environmental Politics, at College of the Atlantic, Maine, USA, said the price tag for climate damages this century will be in the trillions, with much of that damage in poor and vulnerable countries. “The US is responsible for much of that toll, but they don’t care and they won’t pay. With arm twisting of developing countries, they have language now protecting the richest and heaping devastating costs onto the poorest,” she said.