Energy, Climate, Environment

The Middle Eastern and Northern African (MENA) region, faced with tumultuous changes in the last five years, shows a picture of shrinking spaces for civil society activism. In contrast, ecological activism is growing and connecting the fight for climate justice to other demands for community and indigenous rights, gender equality, democracy and transparency.

Just in time for the current UNFCCC COP in Morocco (7-18 November 2016), we are publishing the second edition of "Carbon Metrics". The revised edition takes last year's Paris Agreement into account and also looks at the impacts of new technologies such as carbon capture and storage.

This report summarises the key evidence which must be considered about BECCS. It looks at the overwhelmingly destructive impacts of existing large-scale bioenergy production and use and the implications of massively scaling it up, as would be required for a global BECCS programme.

Climate change is already here. With less than 1°C of global warming, the impacts of climate change are already severe on the world’s poorest and most vulnerable people. The report is released by the Carbon Levy Project and outlines several cases where developing countries have suffered real loss and damage from climate change impacts.

The transformation of economic growth towards a lower dependency on fossil fuels and related greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions is essential for the feasibility of a successful global climate strategy. A study by DIW Econ.

Our Coal Atlas contains the latest facts and figures on the use of coal and its environmental and social consequences. With more than 60 detailed graphics, the atlas illustrates the coal industry’s impact on nature, health, labour, human rights and politics.

This case study explores the controversies that arise when conservation groups or specialist companies, often supported by international agencies like the World Bank, arrive with their forest carbon pilot initiatives.

The third and updated edition of the discussion paper "Carbon Majors Funding Loss and Damage". The Climate Justice Programme and the Heinrich Böll Foundation are proposing that major fossil fuel producers ("the Carbon Majors") pay a levy based on their emissions to date and on future extraction to the International Mechanism for Loss and Damage.

This paper demonstrates that an expansion of renewable energy sources is the only path to a secure, affordable and climate-friendly energy system until 2030 and beyond. Renewables not only drastically reduce emissions and other environmental and social burdens; they also reduce energy import dependency and hence increase energy security, strengthen local economies, and create jobs.

Germany’s energy transition, or Energiewende, has been a success story. But one lesson to be drawn is that energy policy decisions taken in one EU member state affect other EU member states as well. For these reasons, the Heinrich Böll Foundation initiated a project entitled “The German Energy Transition in the European Context”.