ACCRA (the Africa Climate Change Resilience Alliance) is a coalition of just five international organisations and their local partners in three countries in Africa who realised that change is inevitable and wanted to know how we can best help prepare people for it. That's not defeatism on a climate change agenda, by the way. Just a simple recognition that even if we get the best legally binding international treaties on greenhouse gas emissions,... Read more

The concept of the 'green economy' is a complex one, and the international community has yet to come to a political consensus on its meaning, use, usefulness, ensuing policy implications, or what actually constitutes a green economy.  The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) believes that to achieve equitable and sustainable development there needs to be a balance between the economy, society, and the environment.... Read more

The Rio+20 Conference on Sustainable Development got a small boost as Ban Ki Moon's High-Level Panel on Global Sustainability (GSP) launched its report last month, entitled Resilient People, Resilient Planet: A Future Worth Choosing. Made up of 22 global bigwigs, the Panel's goal was "to formulate a new vision for sustainable growth and prosperity along with mechanisms to achieve it." The hope was that... Read more

The discussion paper just launched by Oxfam, A Safe and Just Space for Humanity, has many positive aspects that can be shared with organisations and movements in the Global South. It also contains elements that are in line with Oxfam's commitment to eradicating poverty and protecting the environment.  The document proposes a doughnut, which adds a pastry to the mix of sustainable development recipes, and we should review... Read more

The doughnut 'compass' is a powerful idea. The original 'planetary boundaries' concept focused on biophysical factors: there was some internal logic to this - it aimed to identify the conditions under which we couldn't expect the planet to continue supporting us, regardless of how we care to organise ourselves as a human race.  But of course, as soon as you ask practical questions about how we might manage our interaction... Read more

What's going on in the diagram above? Start with the outer ring. In 2009, a group of leading Earth-system scientists (Rockström et al) proposed a set of nine Earth-system processes (like freshwater use, climate regulation, and the nitrogen cycle) that are critical for keeping this planet in the stable state which has been so beneficial to humankind over the past 10,000 years. (That's the Holocene Epoch, and it's nothing to sniff... Read more

Seasonality is the observation that rural livelihoods in developing countries undergo regular, predictable, and often massive, changes according to the pattern of the seasons. In particular, the annual rains bring about - or bring to a peak - all sorts of effects - and most of them adverse if you are poor. These include starvation, energy depletion, increases in sickness, migration, shortage of money and going into debt. It was a regular... Read more

It remains to be seen exactly what the Durban Platform will mean in the long run, but with frustration mounting at the slow progress of negotiations despite growing evidence of adverse climate impacts, attention is turning towards alternative scenarios where the risk of litigation looms large. Whether as a  liability claim (analogous to tobacco or asbestos  litigation against business),  or as an argument in a case about... Read more

In the early hours of Sunday morning, governments meeting at the UN climate change conference in Durban, South Africa, set a path towards a new legally binding agreement for all countries to cut emissions. But the deal did little to meet the needs of poor people already fighting climate change, and risked blurring important distinctions between the responsibilities of developed and developing countries. In a significant political... Read more

It's now two years since the frantic campaigning and manic diplomacy that led to the Copenhagen climate change conference, and the blame games that followed its inadequate result. As the next UN climate talks get under way this week in Durban, South Africa, we need a new script to explain what has been achieved since 2009 and what must come next in the fight to tackle climate change. The good news is that the UN talks on climate... Read more