Media coverage

Government budgets and green funds provided at least US$26 million to help ill-equipped ministries deliver carbon-cutting pledges towards last year’s Paris Agreement. The findings highlight the scale of assistance offered to ensure a maximum amount of intended nationally determined contributions (INDCs), which formed the backbone of the UN deal.

An article explaining a new paper in Nature Climate Change, co-authored by Dr. Michiel Schaeffer of Climate Analytics, which looks at the the differences between various carbon budget estimates from IPCC and other sources.

In freezing President Barack Obama's plan to tackle carbon emissions, the US Supreme Court delivered a blow to a global climate deal - but experts say that US commitments to the deal will survive. Bill Hare: "The Paris Agreement will ride through this. There are many challenges ahead and I am more concerned about countries like Japan pressing ahead with coal than this action by the US Supreme Court."

Opinion piece about the US Supreme Court decision against President Obama's Clean Power Plan, quoting Climate Analytics Head of Policy Dr. Marcia Rocha who finds that without this policy, it would become virtually impossible for the U.S. to achieve reductions consistent with holding warming well below 2 degrees Celsius.

The international agreement to limit CO2 in the atmosphere means that governments can no longer commit public funds or, for that matter facilitate private sector funding for carbon-intensive projects. Beyond funding issues there is a growing risk that these investments will create “stranded assets” as economies shift towards renewables. Laetitia De Marez, senior climate policy analyst at Climate Analytics Inc. in New York: “COP 21 was a clear signal to business that any investment in infrastructure has to be low carbon.”

Bill Hare: "The weak carbon intensity target as stated in China's climate pledges appears inadequate, GHG Emissions have to peak before 2025 in China to limit global warming well below two degrees, five years earlier than proposed by Beijing."

World leaders may have vowed to wean the world from fossil fuels, but prices for oil, coal and natural gas are at their lowest in years. So is that bad news for people hoping to switch the world to cleaner fuels? “Many analysts would take the classical view that a long period of low oil prices would prompt higher demand,” said Bill Hare, chief executive officer at Climate Analytics, a Berlin-based research group. “It depends very much on what governments do to counteract that.”

The actions outlined in the Paris pledges would be expected to lead to global warming of around 3°C. Given that there has already been about 1°C of warming, the measures required to stay below 1.5°C would be beyond heroic. Work by Joeri Rogelj and colleagues suggests that it would mean net emissions having to fall to zero in at most 40 years.

Countries in Southeast Asia are among the most vulnerable to global warming. Now that a landmark global climate deal has been reached, DW examines how this may impact both the environment and the regional economy. The main threat facing the region is sea-level rise and the increased intensity of tropical cyclones. The combination of these two could have detrimental economic and development costs, said Bill Hare, Director of Germany-based Climate Analytics, a non-profit climate science institute.

The inclusion of a 1.5℃ temperature limit in the new Paris climate agreement was a major victory for the poorest countries and island nations who came to Paris saying they wanted the world to act. Bill Hare tells the story of how we got 1.5˚C into the Paris agreement, and how "best available science" can take us there.