Over 100 countries have adopted national renewable power targets, with particular focus on wind and solar power (WSP). WSP offers many socioeconomic and environmental benefits but it has two major drawbacks: 1) it's comparatively costly and 2) it's not always available when we need it (i.e. intermittency).
My guest on this week’s Wonkcast is Kevin Ummel, project manager Carbon Monitoring for Action (CARMA), a newly updated CGD database that reveals the carbon dioxide emissions, electricity production, corporate ownership, and location of more than 60,000 power plants around the world.
Last month saw back-to-back summits with lots of overlap in agenda but very little among the officials involved or the policy community that attempted to shape the outcomes. Within a single week, leaders of the world’s most powerful countries convened in Los Cabos, Mexico, for the G-20 Summit; some then traveled on to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, for the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, a.k.a. Rio+20, the 20th anniversary of the Rio Earth Summit.
IMF managing director Christine Lagarde startled IFI watchers last week by warning at a CGD-hosted speech that the world faces “a triple crisis—an economic crisis, an environmental crisis and, increasing, a social crisis.”
Despite protestation from all sides that there should be only one development agenda post-2015, the Rio process continues on what appears to be a parallel, overlapping track. Not least that’s because the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are facing the same issue as the process to come up with new Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) –everyone with a sectoral agenda is arguing that their topic is vital to sustainable development. Many of them are surely right. But if poverty
Today’s Washington Post reports Senate passage of the food safety bill. It passed 73 to 25, despite the putative rise of anti-regulatory sentiment, because a raft of stories about food poisoning made American families anxious about food safety. On climate safety, however, Congress remains paralyzed despite clear evidence that extreme weather is hitting American families harder every year .
With less than a week to go until the start of the next round of global climate negotiations, in Cancun, Mexico, climate policymakers see further work on ambitious finance pledges made at the Copenhagen climate talks last year as key to progress towards collective action to avert runaway climate change. Mexico’s ambassador to Washington has stressed the value of such incremental progress.
Especially during the hot summer months, some of us might daydream about packing up and relocating to a small tropical island somewhere in the Pacific. From a development perspective, however, small island states face unique challenges—most obviously from rising sea levels, but also from the economic dynamics created by their small size and isolation.