Category: Green transition

Why we need to invest in safe and clean mobility
Green transition

A package deal: why we need to invest in safe and clean mobility

By Nneka Henry, Head of the UN Road Safety Fund and Jane Burston, Executive Director of the Clean Air Fund

As economies around the world have developed, rapid industrialisation and urbanisation have often been accompanied by rapid motorisation. These trends are set to continue as developing countries continue to industrialise and car ownership grows. The management and regulation of road safety and air pollution are failing to keep up.

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Development Matters
Green transition

Collateral damage? The Russia-Ukraine conflict and energy transitions in Least Developed Countries

By Dr. Harry Verhoeven, Senior Research Scholar at the Centre on Global Energy Policy, Columbia University

Discussions about climate are, always, discussions about distribution- of costs, benefits and sacrifices. For years now, the grand bargain required to ward off the existential threat of human-induced global warming has been clear. Rich, developed economies need to swiftly and comprehensively decarbonise their energy and industrial systems in ways that both mitigate the intensity of climatic changes and that enable the planet’s poorest societies to follow a cleaner, more equitable growth trajectory. Doing so would generate time, resources and appropriate technologies for those currently marginalised in the global economy to respond more effectively to climatic upheaval. Understood as such, combating climatic changes should also help address those other mega-problems challenging 21st century civilisation: multidimensional poverty; yawning inequalities between and within countries; and the structural exclusion of hundreds of millions of people from access to public goods to which they are ethically and legally entitled.

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Development Matters
Green transition

Time for a UN agreement on carbon pricing

By José Antonio Ocampo, Professor at Columbia University and former UN Under-Secretary-General for Economic and Social Affairs and Finance to the G20

Climate change has become an existential threat to humanity. The world has failed to adopt the decisions needed to meet the Paris Agreement targets, restated at COP26 in Glasgow last year, to keep the rise in average global temperature to under 1.5oC above pre-industrial levels and well below 2oC. As the most recent report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change indicates, current national commitments are still insufficient: CO2 emissions need to fall by around 45% by 2030 from 2010 levels and global emissions need to peak before 2025.

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Development Matters
Green transition

Doing climate adaptation better

By Saleemul Huq, Director, International Centre for Climate Change and Development, Independent University Bangladesh

I have written about the need to ramp up adaptation in order to avoid the worst impacts of human-induced climate change around the world, as lead author on adaptation for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) for over a decade. So the Sixth Assessment Report of the IPCC containing that message was nothing new. 

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Development Matters
Africa, Green transition

How can Africa benefit from the private sector’s growing interest in climate finance?

By Anzetse Were, Senior Economist, FSD Kenya

While the private sector across the world is on a journey towards greening their activities, COP26 marked a milestone so significant that it was termed the Business and Finance COP. In other words, COP26 made ‘climate action mainstream business’. But what challenges and opportunities does this newfound interest present for Africa?

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Development Matters
Green transition

How to fix the failures of climate finance

By Saleemul Huq, Director, International Centre for Climate Change and Development, Independent University Bangladesh

One of the positive outcomes of the COP26 held in Glasgow, Scotland in November 2021 was a universal acknowledgement of the failure of developed countries to deliver climate finance to developing countries, and even of developing countries themselves to actually deliver to the most vulnerable communities within their own territories.

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Development Matters
Green transition

Why COP26 failed to address loss and damage from climate change

By Saleemul Huq, Director, International Centre for Climate Change and Development, Independent University Bangladesh

On 9 August 2021, the science working group of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report showed that greenhouse gas emissions from human activities are responsible for approximately 1.1°C of warming since 1850-1900. Climate change is not just what is happening now and will happen in the future but also what has been happening for over a century. Today we are dealing with the loss and damage caused by this historical warming.  

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Development Matters
Green transition

How much is an elephant worth? Valuing natural capital to protect nature and improve wellbeing

By Ekkehard Ernst, ILO Research Department and Geneva Macro Labs

Countries in the Global South dispose of a wealth of natural resources. Yet, many of them are also among the least developed. In the following I will argue that we have the tools to ensure that restoring and maintaining this astonishing biodiversity will enable these countries to reach middle-income status over the next decade, at the same time safeguarding our survival.

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Development Matters
Green transition

Keeping 1.5 degrees alive means a better future for everyone

By Jayathma Wickramanayake, Secretary-General’s Envoy on Youth, and Heeta Lakhani and Marie-Claire Graf, Focal Points – UNFCCC Youth Constituency

“Climate change will affect youth, children and future generations the most if we do not take action now!” This narrative is frequently heard at climate events in recent years, yet climate commitments and targets set by world leaders continue to focus on the distant future instead of prioritising the urgent climate action needed today. Families are already being repeatedly knocked into poverty, while eco-anxiety is rising among children and youth confronted by a disastrous future. Heat waves are leading to school closures, while floods, cyclones and droughts are driving unprecedented rates of food insecurity.

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Development Matters
Green transition

Greening international debt data

By Rachid Bouhia, Economist in UNCTAD’s Division for Globalization and Development Strategies

The pandemic has exposed and exacerbated alarming debt levels in developing countries. By the time COVID-19 emerged, public debt in developing countries had increased steadily since 2013, in a context of more recurrent external shocks and rising fragilities in their debt positions, including those related to climate change. By the end of 2019, their total public debt – external and domestic – stood at 59% of combined GDP, the second-highest level on record (Figure 1). On a more positive note, there had also been a notable increase in the diversity and quantity of climate-related financial instruments at the national and regional levels. Information on the nature and scale of these initiatives is today critical to our understanding of – and policy response to – debt statistics.

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Development Matters