AFP UK

A climate protester in Munich last month

Laure-Anne Gateaux did not train as a tropical ecologist only to end up sitting on a busy shopping street in her lab coat with one hand glued to the ground.

But that was where the 34-year-old French scientist found herself after giving up her job last year to focus instead on campaigning for more action on climate change.

“I don’t want to be here, I’m afraid of the consequences… but we are desperate,” she told AFP at a protest in Munich staged by a group known as Scientist Rebellion.

“I was just counting dead trees, I was counting droughts, I was counting floodings. I don’t want to do that!” she said.

“As an ecologist, you just count deaths. You just count hectares of land burning. It is not possible, we need to stop it before our entire planet collapses.”

Founded in 2020, Scientist Rebellion is a loosely federated network of scientists in more than two dozen countries that coordinates acts of civil disobedience to highlight the climate crisis.

With the urgency of the environmental catastrophe growing, the group has also intensified their protest action in recent months.

– ‘Listen to the science!’ –

The group also targets universities, research institutes and major scientific journals, prodding them and their staff to speak out more forcefully on what they describe as the existential threat of global warming.

One major demand of the group is the cancellation of debt in developing countries, which it says is hampering the fight against climate change. 

In Germany, Scientist Rebellion is calling for a speed limit on motorways and the return of a super-cheap public transport ticket that was introduced this summer to help fight inflation but had a limited shelf life.

In Munich, Gateaux and 14 other Scientist Rebellion activists in white lab coats glued themselves to a busy shopping street between the gleaming showrooms of automotive giants Mercedes-Benz and Cupra.

Chanting slogans such as “You can’t negotiate with physics!” and “Listen to the science!”, they brought traffic to a standstill for several hours on one of the city’s busiest streets.

Originally from countries including the US, France and Spain as well as Germany, the protesters also risked the wrath of retailers to glue posters to shop windows in the area. 

Members of the group have also recently demonstrated in front of the Finance Ministry in Berlin, stormed asset management company Blackrock and glued themselves to cars in the Porsche showroom in Wolfsburg.

Sylvain Kuppel, 36, a French expert in the water cycle, took time off from his work at a French research institute to join the Munich protest.

– ‘There is no time left’ –

Asked whether he was afraid of the consequences, he replied: “I’m much more afraid of what will happen to us.” 

“As a human being, I can only be terrified of what is going to happen to us and of what has already started to happen,” he said, holding back tears.

Members of Scientist Rebellion are among an increasing number of climate activists staging eye-catching stunts to draw attention to their cause.

Protesters recently threw tomato soup over a Van Gogh painting in London and mashed potatoes over a Monet work in the German city of Potsdam.

Such protests have drawn a barrage of criticism, but activists say the drastic actions are warranted.

“Everything I’ve studied tells me that there is no time left. We are all very desperate,” said American environmental science student Nate Rugh, 35.

Victor De Santos, a 34-year-old Spanish environmental scientist, quit working in academia a couple of years ago. 

“For me, it doesn’t make sense to keep studying — we have to act. We have people already doing science and saying it out loud, but nobody is listening,” he said.

Shen, which stands 4.6 metres tall and 12 metres long, is thought to be male

Dinosaur fans got a glimpse of a Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton as it went on display in Singapore Friday before an auction next month, as experts slammed the big-money bone trade as “harmful to science”.

The 1,400-kilo frame, composed of about 80 bones, will be the first T-rex skeleton auctioned in Asia, according to Christie’s, which has not given an estimate for the lot.

Dubbed Shen, meaning god-like, it will be on display for three days before being shipped to Hong Kong to be sold in November.

“None of the 20 T-Rex that exist in the world is owned by either an Asian institution or an Asian collector,” said Francis Belin, president of Christie’s Asia Pacific.

“We really wish that Shen will find a new home amongst our Asian collectors here.”

The adult dino, which stands 4.6 metres tall and 12 metres long, is thought to be male. It was excavated from private land in the Hells Creek Formation in Montana in the United States in 2020.

“I’ve never seen a real-life fossil before… It makes me feel in awe because it’s quite majestic,” said Lauren Lim, 33, who went to view the exhibit.

— ‘Bad news for science’ —

Shen — which lived during the Cretaceous period about 67 million years ago — is not the only dino auctioned in recent years.

In July, the first skeleton of a Gorgosaurus went under the hammer for $6.1 million in New York. Another T-rex, “Stan”, was sold for $31.8 million by Christie’s in 2020.

But the trend for prehistoric auction lots has some experts concerned.

“It’s a sad thing that dinosaurs are becoming collectible toys for the oligarch class, and I can only hope this fad ends soon,” said Steve Brusatte, a paleontologist at the University of Edinburgh.

He told AFP the trend was “bad news for science”, and the remains belonged in museums.

Thomas Carr, a paleontologist from the US, described such sales as being “unquestionably harmful to science” even if the skeletons had been studied before being sold.

“A secure, permanent collection ensures that the observations that a scientist makes of a fossil can be tested and replicated — and a commercially held fossil has no such assurance,” Carr said.

Belin, of Christie’s, said he hoped a public institution would buy Shen, and added that the whole skeleton had been fully researched, recorded in 3D and “all the elements of the skeleton will be made available for the public to research”.

“We strongly hope that the new owner, whether it’s an institution or private, will ensure that it’s being seen by the public,” Belin said.

Chinese veterinary experts have been invited to Taiwan for a rare visit between the two sides after a male panda was moved into end of life care

Chinese veterinary experts have been invited to Taiwan, zoo officials said Thursday, for a rare visit between the two sides after a male panda that symbolised an era of warmer ties was moved into end of life care.

Relations between China and Taiwan have been on ice since 2016 with Beijing severing official communications and government visits between the two sides scrapped.

But Taiwan has made an exception after Tuan Tuan, a male panda that was gifted to the island by Beijing in 2008, fell ill in recent weeks and looks to be entering his twilight days.

Taipei Zoo said the Chinese vets will stay for seven days and observe, rather than conduct, health checks.

“The main purpose is to visit Tuan Tuan and see his present condition,” Eve Wang, Animal Section Chief of Taipei City Zoo told reporters. 

“They expressed their desire to come in person to visit Tuan Tuan.  I also think it will be a very meaningful trip,” she added.

It is not clear when the vets will arrive but Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council said Wednesday they were processing their visa applications.

Tuan Tuan and his breeding mate Yuan Yuan were given to Taiwan by Beijing at a time when relations between the two neighbours were more cordial.

In a nod to the Chinese Communist Party’s goal of one day taking Taiwan, their names combined mean “reunion” or “unity”.

The couple became huge stars in Taiwan and Yuan Yuan has since given birth to two female cubs.

– ‘Panda diplomacy’ –

China only loans pandas to foreign zoos which must usually return any offspring within a few years of their birth to join the country’s breeding programme.

But Taiwan was granted an exception as part of a brief charm offensive China launched in the late 2000s and was fully gifted both Tuan Tuan and Yuan Yuan and any offspring they had.

Vets first noticed Tuan Tuan, 18, was ill in August when he began suffering seizures and appeared increasingly unsteady and lethargic.

Subsequent scans showed he had a brain-lesion and he was placed on anti-seizure medication.

Earlier this week Taipei Zoo said they suspected Tuan Tuan had a brain tumour and he was moved into palliative care.

Beijing has long deployed “panda diplomacy” and the gift of Tuan Tuan and Yuan Yuan was a move seen to endorse the presidency of then Beijing-friendly leader Ma Ying-jeou.

China views Taiwan as part of its territory and has vowed to one day bring the self-ruled democratic island back into the fold, by force if necessary.

Relations took a dive in 2016 when President Tsai Ing-wen was elected.

Beijing loathes Tsai because she views Taiwan as an already sovereign nation and not part of “one China”.

Under President Xi Jinping, Beijing has since ramped up economic, military and diplomatic pressure on Taiwan.

The EU has struck a deal on legislation to phase out new CO2-emitting vehicles by 2035, in favour of all-electric models

The European Union on Thursday struck an agreement on legislation to phase out new CO2-emitting vehicles by 2035, negotiators announced.

The talks between representatives of the European Council, fronting the 27 member states, and the European Parliament started Thursday and underpin the bloc’s transition towards a carbon-neutral future.

“We have just finished the negotiations on CO2 standards for cars,” tweeted French MEP Pascal Canfin, who heads the European parliament’s environment commission.

“Historic (EU) decision for the climate which definitively confirms the target of 100 percent zero emission vehicles in 2035 with intermediary phases between 2025 and 2030.”

Cars currently account for about 15 percent of all CO2 emissions in the EU, while transportation overall accounts for around a quarter.

The agreed text, based on a proposal by the EU executive in July 2021, calls for reducing CO2 emissions from new cars in Europe to zero by 2035. 

This means a de facto halt to sales of new petrol and diesel cars, light commercial vehicles and hybrids in the bloc by that date, in favour of all-electric vehicles.

European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen praised the agreement as “a crucial milestone to reach our 2030 climate target”.

There is a waiver for “niche” manufacturers, or those producing fewer than 10,000 vehicles per year.

Sometimes called the “Ferrari amendment” as it will benefit luxury brands in particular, these vehicles are allowed to be equipped with a combustion engine until the end of 2035. 

– ‘Far-reaching’ –

BMW CEO Oliver Zipse, who is also the president of the European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association (ACEA), said the decision was “extremely far-reaching”. 

“Make no mistake, the European automobile industry is up to the challenge of providing these zero-emission cars and vans,” he said.

But more needed to be done for the industry to meet this target, added Zipse, such as having “an abundance of renewable energy, a seamless private and public charging infrastructure network, and access to raw materials”. 

The European Parliament had in June voted in favour of the 2035 ban on all vehicles with internal combustion engines.

Conservative MEPs and Germany had shown reluctance over some of the targets, fearing the costly burden they will place on EU automakers competing against global rivals with looser targets.

Currently around 12 percent of new cars sold in the European Union are electric vehicles, with its consumers shifting away from CO2-emitting models as energy costs and greener traffic regulations bite.

Meanwhile, China — the world’s biggest automobile market — wants at least half of all new cars to be electric, plug-in hybrid or hydrogen-powered by 2035.

This handout picture released by NGO Imazon shows an Angelim Vermelho tree (Dinizia Excelsa Ducke) which is the tallest ever found in the Amazon

Felipe Guimaraes leaps on and off a surfboard on the sand as he shows tourists the basics of surfing. Here, on Rio de Janeiro’s Ipanema beach, the stricken Amazon could not feel further away.

In Western capitals, the plight of the world’s largest rainforest is seen as a key issue in Brazil’s election, with much at stake for a world scrambling to curb the climate emergency.

However, fires and deforestation have taken a back seat in a dirty and divisive election campaign, and many Brazilians have bigger concerns beyond those happening in a vast area thousands of miles away.

“I dunno man, it’s so far away, but it’s obvious it is important and good to take care of” the Amazon, says bare-chested surf instructor Guimaraes, 27, adding there are more “visible issues” than the rainforest.

Many Brazilians list the economy, crime, education, and corruption as their top worries.

“The country has enormous social inequality, we are recovering from a pandemic. Today, some Brazilians are only worried about surviving one more day. Having a job, having food on the table, access to a doctor,” Daniel Costa Matos, 38, an IT analyst from the capital Brasilia, told AFP.

While he thinks the Amazon is “of extreme importance,” his biggest worry is corruption.

“The climate crisis, the problem of deforestation in the Amazon, is still far from the reality of many Brazilians,” said 36-year-old climate activist Giovanna Nader, who uses her podcast and Instagram account to sound the environmental alarm.

“We need to educate, educate, educate.”

– ‘Sometimes we feel alone’ –

For Brazil’s Indigenous community, the fight can often seem lonely, even after four years raising the alarm about violent, environmentally harmful policies they say have occurred under far-right President Jair Bolsonaro.

Most Brazilians never visit the rainforest. The capital of Amazonas, Manaus, is some 2,800 kilometers (1,739 miles) from Rio de Janeiro.

It is about the same distance between Paris and Moscow.

“What worries us a lot is that the vision of Brazilians on environmental protection … is very superficial,” says Dinamam Tuxa, executive coordinator of the Association of Brazil’s Indigenous Peoples (APIB).

“Sometimes we feel alone, that we are fighting such a powerful force that are the big corporations exploiting our territories, and that there is no engagement among the Brazilian population.”

– Personal attacks and disinformation –

Fires and deforestation are not new problems in the Amazon. However, the destruction has increased 75 percent under Bolsonaro compared to the previous decade. 

His rival, former president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who also grappled with the problem, only briefly touched on the rainforest on the campaign trail, mainly when drumming up votes in the Amazon itself.

However, it has been largely absent from an election campaign marked by disinformation and extreme polarization.

“It has become a political campaign of a lot of personal attacks between the two candidates. So, I think we are seeing more a focus on … fake news than the Amazon for example,” said Karla Koehler, a 35-year-old artist sunning herself on Ipanema beach.

“I think this is a very specific election… It is about political survival” and “maintaining basic democratic rights.”

Bolsonaro’s detractors see him as a threat to democracy and the country’s future, after a term marked by Covid carnage, attacks on the judiciary and media, and warnings he would not accept an election loss.

Lula, meanwhile, is still associated by many with a massive corruption scandal that saw him jailed for 18 months before the charges were annulled on procedural grounds, without exonerating him.

Latin America’s largest country has more than 33 million people living in hunger, according to the Brazilian Network for Research on Food Security. Some 11 million people cannot read or write, according to government statistics.

The country also has one of the highest crime rates in the world, with 47,503 murders in 2021, a figure that was nevertheless the lowest recorded in a decade, according to the Brazil Forum for Public Security.

“The challenge is getting people and their leaders to understand that the environmental agenda is directly linked to factors such as hunger, housing, crime, and the economic crisis,” said Marcio Astrini, the executive secretary of the Climate Observatory, a coalition of environmental groups.

Ten years after Sandy left one of the world's cultural and economic powerhouses tragically swamped, scientist Klaus Jacob said New York City is far from prepared for a new era of intensifying storms

Long before Superstorm Sandy devastated New York City and the surrounding region in 2012, scientist Klaus Jacob issued a prophetic report warning city leaders that such paralyzing flooding was imminent.

Then Sandy made landfall on October 29 of that year, leaving well over 100 people dead in the United States, including 43 New York City residents. It caused $19 billion in damages across the metropolis, triggering lengthy power outages, temporarily displacing thousands of people and damaging tens of thousands of residential units.

More than two feet of water flooded into Jacob’s own home in a quaint Hudson River town in New York state, an irony he suffered because municipal zoning laws barred him from raising the building enough to avoid such inundation.

“A week after Sandy I got a letter in the mail: ‘Now you can raise it,'” recounted Jacob, a geophysicist at Columbia University specializing in disaster risk management.

The experience speaks to the much larger challenges of short-sighted thinking as climate change warnings grow ever-more dire.

Ten years after Sandy left one of the world’s cultural and economic powerhouses tragically swamped, Jacob says the city is far from prepared for the coming era of intense storms.

New York received billions of federal dollars and invested in rebuilding. A number of resiliency projects remain in the planning stages while a few, including one to reduce Manhattan’s coastal flood risk, are underway.

Jacob said subway repairs that fixed thousands of holes would allow the vital transportation system to fare better in the wake of another Sandy-esque storm.

And the US Army Corps of Engineers recently detailed a $52 billion plan to erect a massive system of storm surge gates and seawalls.

But that will require years of bureaucracy to get approvals, and isn’t slated to begin construction until 2030.

– Climate and housing –

An October report from New York’s comptroller — an elected official responsible for scrutinizing the budget — criticized some city agencies for dawdling, with several projects stalled and billions in federal funding unused and still available.

Last fall’s Hurricane Ida meanwhile highlighted the city’s persistent frailties, including aging sewer infrastructure.

In a mere hour Ida poured more than three inches of rain onto Central Park — nearly twice what the city’s sewage system is capable of handling — and, according to Jacob, “the subway system became the default sewer system.”

Dozens of people in the region died. Several of the deceased lived in New York City basement apartments that flooded.

If Sandy hit tomorrow “we’d be way worse off,” said Thaddeus Pawlowski, an urban designer focused on climate resiliency, who formerly worked at the NYC Office of Emergency Management.

“Our housing situation has gotten so much worse. Our neighborhoods are so much more unequal,” Pawlowski told AFP.

New York is facing an acute housing crisis, but a fair proportion of the city’s new residencies have been in coastal neighborhoods like Williamsburg and Long Island City. Municipal data mapped by local outlet The City shows some 2,000 new units were built square in the floodplain of Coney Island, a district Sandy pummeled. 

The state has bought out some homeowners living in vulnerable neighborhoods, including in Staten Island’s Ocean Breeze, where hundreds of homes were purchased and demolished.

“That’s a good pilot program, but it’s bread crumbs — we need loaves,” said Jacob. “Buying out is not enough. We need to have a place where they can move.”

Jacob cited need for denser residential buildings, but emphasized new construction must eye climate risk rather than cater to the real estate industry.

“We don’t have any long-term vision, such that short-term measures, like building housing, work together with that long-term vision,” he told AFP. 

“Without that vision being developed, I think we are just fiddling around forever on the edges.”

– ‘Massive mobilization’ –

Climate experts and political leaders agree there’s no silver bullet — mitigating risk and shoring up resiliency demands sweeping planning and investment in conjunction with neighborhood-scale storm management, like shrub-filled bioswale ditches that filter runoff.

“We are not going to be able to say, ‘we did one project and now we are safe forever,'” said Rohit Aggarwala, the city’s chief climate officer. “That just is not the way it is going to work.”

Pawlowski pointed to the Green New Deal — a proposed congressional plan to reshape America’s climate and economic policy — as a way forward.

“We need a massive mobilization,” he said.

Jacob did say that, unlike some of the United States’ low-lying coastal cities like New Orleans, New York has “the luxury of high typography” that should inform building strategies.

Perhaps morbidly, he noted the city’s cemeteries occupy its highest points: “We could swap the dead and the living.”

Above all, Jacob urged against inertia, saying “either we are psychologically overwhelmed, or the water will overwhelm us.”

“Which one do you prefer?”

NASA said the meteor that smashed into Mars on December 24, 2021, left a crater 492-feet wide

Scientists who study Mars on Thursday revealed the remarkable Christmas gift they received from the planet last year.

On December 24, 2021, a meteorite hit Mars’ surface, triggering magnitude 4 tremors, which were detected by NASA’s InSight spacecraft  — which landed on the planet four years ago — some 2,200 miles (3,500 kilometers) away. 

The true origin of this so-called marsquake was only confirmed when the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) was able to take a picture of the newly formed crater created by the hit when it flew over the impact site less than 24 hours later. 

The image is impressive, showing blocks of ice that were spewed up onto the planet’s surface around the 492-foot (150-meter) wide and 70-foot (21-meter) deep hole.

The crater is the largest ever observed since the MRO began its Mars orbit 16 years ago.  

And though meteorite impacts on Mars are not rare, “we never thought we’d see anything that big,” Ingrid Daubar, who works on the InSight and MRO missions, told reporters at a press conference Thursday. 

Researchers estimate that the meteorite itself would have measured between 16 to 39 feet across. An object of that size would have disintegrated in Earth’s atmosphere before falling to the ground here. 

“It is simply the biggest meteorite impact on the ground that we have heard since science has been done with seismographs or seismometers,” said planetology professor Philippe Lognonne, who participated in two studies related to the observation published in the journal Science Thursday. 

NASA released an audio recording of the collision, which was made by speeding up the vibrations collected by the seismometer.

– ‘Useful’ ice presence –

The valuable information gathered in studying the crash will contribute to deeper knowledge of Mars’ interior and the history of how the planet was created, scientists said.

The presence of ice, in particular, is “surprising,” said Daubar, who also co-authored the two studies. 

“This is the warmest spot on Mars, the closest to the equator, we’ve ever seen water ice,” she said.

In addition to the information this discovery offers about the Martian climate, the presence of water at this latitude — and not just near the poles — could prove “really useful” for future human visitors to Mars, director of NASA’s Planetary Science Division Lori Glaze said. 

“We’d want to land the astronauts as near to the equator as possible,” she said, to take advantage of warmer temperatures. 

“That ice could be converted into water, oxygen or hydrogen,” Glaze said.

The impact was powerful enough to generate seismic waves both down to the planet’s core and across its crust horizontally, making it possible to study Mars’ internal structure — revealing that the crust on which InSight sits is less dense than the crust the waves traveled over from the crater site. 

The end of InSight’s mission — which recorded more than 1,300 marsquakes in total — could come in the next couple of months, according to Bruce Banerdt of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, due to the expected accumulation of dust on the lander’s solar power panel. 

It’s “sad,” he said, while celebrating that the probe worked “marvelously” for four years. 

A woman stands with her buffaloes beside damaged rice crops after devastating floods in Jacobabad, Pakistan, in August 2022

The United States said Thursday it would provide another $30 million in flood aid to Pakistan, hoping to reach nearly two million additional people after the historic disaster.

The US Agency for International Development said the new aid would include emergency food and nutrition, screening for malnutrition, shelter assistance and kits to help families prepare for winter.

USAID chief Samantha Power, who visited Pakistan last month, said she had seen a “sunken world” from the floods which killed more than 1,700 people and 1.2 million livestock and at their height submerged one-third of the country.

“For those who survived, unimaginable challenges still lie ahead. Although the water is receding, the damage remains vast,” she said in a statement.

“The United States continues to stand with the people of Pakistan during this heartbreaking time.”

The assistance brings to $97 million the flood aid to Pakistan by the United States, the largest donor.

France next month plans a donors conference to discuss broader aid to Pakistan, one of the most suspectible countries to climate change despite its minimal role in global carbon emissions.

The impacts of climate change are already being felt across the world

Country climate pledges leave the world on track to heat by as much as 2.6 degrees Celsius this century, the United Nations said on Wednesday, warning that emissions must fall 45 percent this decade to limit disastrous global warming.

The United Nations Environment Programme, in its annual Emissions Gap report, found that updated national promises since last year’s COP26 summit in Glasgow would only shave less than one percent off global greenhouse gas emissions by 2030.

The world has warmed nearly 1.2C since the start of the Industrial Revolution and already faces increasingly ferocious climate-enhanced weather extremes like heatwaves, storms and floods.

The Emissions Gap report examines the difference between the planet-heating pollution that will still be released under countries’ decarbonisation plans and what science says is needed to keep to the Paris Agreement goal of limiting warming to between 1.5-2.0C.

A day after the UN’s climate change agency said governments were still doing “nowhere near” enough to keep global heating to 1.5C, UNEP found progress on emissions cutting had been “woefully inadequate”.

It said that additional pledges made since the COP26 summit in Glasgow last year would not even cut emissions by one percent by 2030. 

Failure left the world “hurtling towards” a temperature rise far in excess of the Paris goals, it added. 

“It’s another year squandered in terms of actually doing something about the problem,” the report’s lead author, Anne Olhoff, told AFP.

“That’s not to say that all nations have not taken this seriously. But from a global perspective, it’s definitely very far from adequate.”

The report found that in order for temperature rises to be capped at 2C, emissions would need to fall 30 percent faster by 2030 than envisioned under countries’ most up-to-date plans. 

To limit heating to 1.5C, the gap is 45 percent.

Under the 2015 Paris deal, countries are required to submit ever deeper emission cutting plans, known as Nationally Determined Contributions, or NDCs. 

UNEP found that “unconditional” NDCs — which countries plan regardless of external support — would probably lead to Earth’s average temperature rising by 2.6C by 2100. Scientists warn that level would be catastrophic for humanity and for nature. 

Conditional NDCs — which rely on international funding to achieve — would probably lead to a 2.4C temperature rise this century, it said. 

All told, current plans are likely to see a five- to 10-percent reduction in emissions by 2030 — a far cry from the drop of nearly 50 percent required for 1.5C. 

– ‘Missed opportunity’ –

UNEP said that in 2020, carbon pollution fell more than seven percent, largely thanks to Covid-19 lockdowns and travel restrictions. A fall of that magnitude is needed every year this decade to stay on track for 1.5C. 

But it said greenhouse gas emissions in 2021 could end up being the highest on record — some 52.8 billion tonnes — because countries threw themselves into fossil-fuelled pandemic recoveries.

“We see a full bounce-back in emissions after Covid,” said Olhoff. 

“It’s a missed opportunity in terms of utilising these unprecedented recovery funds to accelerate a green transition.”

Separately, the International Energy Agency said on Thursday it believed global energy emissions would peak in 2025 as surging oil and gas prices spurred a drive to renewables.

But UNEP said that while the switch to greener tech in the power sector was accelerating, several industries were lagging behind in the push towards net-zero emissions.  

For example, in the food sector, which is responsible for around a third of emissions, dietary changes and cutting food loss could help reduce the sector’s footprint by more than 30 percent by 2050.

– ‘Avoid as much damage as possible’ – 

Olhoff said the financial sector was “part of the problem rather than part of the solution” to climate change, with hundreds of billions funnelled annually to fossil fuel projects. 

UNEP suggested the introduction of an effective carbon price under a global cap and trade system that would push investors to consider the environmental impact of their portfolios.

It also called for central banks to make more funds available and help create global low-carbon technology markets.

UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said Thursday’s report showed the world “cannot afford any more greenwashing”.

“Commitments to net zero are worth zero without the plans, policies and actions to back it up,” he said in a video message. 

Last year the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said that the world was likely to reach and even exceed 1.5C within decades, no matter how quickly emissions fall in the short term. 

Olhoff said that for every year that passed without significant emissions cuts, 1.5C was getting “less realistic and less feasible”.

But she insisted that governments needed to accelerate the green transition to avoid as much damage as possible. 

“The more we learn, it’s absolutely clear that we should aim to get (temperature rises) as low as possible,” Olhoff said. 

“Even if that means 1.6C instead of 1.5C, that’s definitely better than 2C degrees, just as 1.7C is worse than 1.6C.”

Even if energy emissions peak in 2025, the world is still on track for a dangerous rise in temperatures

The International Energy Agency said Thursday it believes global energy emissions will peak in 2025 as surging prices due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine propel investment in renewables.

Only last year the IEA said there was “no clear peak in sight” in energy emissions, but the new higher investment in wind and solar is setting up demand for all fossil fuels to peak or plateau, leading to a drop in emissions.

“The global energy crisis triggered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is causing profound and long-lasting changes that have the potential to hasten the transition to a more sustainable and secure energy system,” the IEA said as it released its latest annual World Energy Outlook report.

Based on the latest measures and policies announced by governments in the face of soaring energy prices, the IEA forecasts global clean energy investment to rise by more than 50 percent from today’s levels to $2 trillion per year by 2030. 

Those measures will propel sustained gains in renewables and nuclear power.

“As a result, a high point for global emissions is reached in 2025,” the IEA said.

Global energy-related CO2 emissions are then set to fall back slowly from a high point of 37 billion tonnes per year to 32 billion tonnes by 2050, it added.

The Paris-based organisation, which advises energy-consuming nations, said that its forecast sees demand for all types of fossil fuels peaking or hitting a plateau.

Coal use, which has seen a temporary bump higher, will drop back in the next few years as more renewables come online.

Natural gas hits a plateau at the end of the decade, instead of the previous forecast of a steady rise.

Oil demand levels off in the mid-2030s and then gradually declines towards mid-century due to uptake of electric vehicles, instead of the earlier estimate of a steady increase.

Overall, the share of fossil fuels in the global energy mix in the IEA’s stated policies scenario falls from around 80 percent to just above 60 percent by 2050.

– Energy markets ‘changed’ –

“Energy markets and policies have changed as a result of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, not just for the time being, but for decades to come,” said IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol in a statement as the report was released.

But that will still leave the world on track for a rise in global temperatures of around 2.5 degrees Celsius by the end of the century, which would likely trigger severe climate change impacts.

The IEA also has a scenario to arrive at zero net emissions in 2050, which is seen as necessary to hit the 1.5C warming target enshrined in the Paris climate pact.

That would require clean energy investments to rise to $4 trillion per year by 2030, instead of the current forecast of $2 trillion.

“The IEA, with all its expertise and authority is clear: clean energy investments must triple by 2030, and gas is a dead end,” said Laurence Tubiana, head of the European Climate Foundation and France’s former climate ambassador.

“The current European energy crisis clearly proves the dangers of gas: high price, volatility, geopolitical dependence,” she added.

“We are approaching to the end of the golden age of gas,” the IEA’s Birol said at a later news conference.

The IEA’s analyses show “that we are seeing a turning point in the history of energy and this crisis indeed accelerates clean energy transitions,” he added.

However Birol noted that energy security, not climate change, is “the biggest driver for renewable” energy development currently.

Another motivation is that governments want to ensure they have got in on the manufacturing of new renewable energy technologies.

“The three drivers, when they come together, is the reason I am optimistic we are going to see an acceleration of clean energy technologies,” Birol said.

– Russia takes $1tn hit –

The IEA’s analyses also concluded that this energy crisis has also harmed Russia’s long-term economic outlook. 

By reducing natural gas supplies to European nations it has not only pushed them to accelerate their transition to renewables, but reduced the attractivity of gas in security terms while making it expensive for developing markets.

“Russia’s role in the international energy affairs will be diminished, much diminished in terms of oil and gas trade,” said Birol.

“As a result of the decline in oil and gas sales between now and 2030, Russia will lose about $1 trillion in export revenues” according to IEA calculations, he added.

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