International Environmental Policy

Why the focus on insurance to address loss and damage is a distraction from real solutions.

Limiting global warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial is feasible. This publication is a civil society response to the challenge of limiting global warming to 1.5°C while also paving the way for climate justice.

Oil Giant Royal Dutch Shell has known about climate risks of fossil fuel production for six decades. As early as the 1980s Shell knew about their accountability for 4 % of global carbon emissions. Still, while pragmatically protecting their own offshore oil rigs from the dangers of sea level rise, Shell massively promoted climate denial and climate obstruction as the CIEL report shows.

The prospect of controlling global temperatures raises serious questions of power and justice: Who gets to control the Earth’s thermostat and adjust the climate for their own interests? Who will make the decision to deploy if such drastic measures are considered technically feasible, and whose interests will be left out?

For the past decade, a small but growing group of governments and scientists, the majority from the most powerful and most climate-polluting countries in the world, has been pushing for political consideration of geoengineering, the deliberate large-scale technological manipulation of the climate.

Oil industry actors had early knowledge of climate risks and important opportunities to act on those risks, but repeatedly failed to do so. Those failures give raise to potential legal responsibilities under an array of legal theories.

The massive use of plastics has created an enormous global problem with environmental, economic, social, and health repercussions. The only viable solution to the problem would therefore be to stop plastic waste from entering the oceans in the first place. The authors of this paper propose to launch negotiations on a plastics convention and begin to end this irresponsible disaster.

Species are vanishing at such high speed that researchers are talking in terms of a sixth major mass extinction happening within human history. This introductory publication clarifies the vital development-policy significance of the discussion over biodiversity.

The UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) will hold its 13th Conference of the Parties (COP) in Mexico in December 2016. This briefing explains why synthetic biology is threatening all objectives of the CBD unless the parties act on five key issues.

In Paris in 2015 governments agreed to keep global warming to well below 2 degrees. The mainstream pathways pin theirhopes to risky and costly technologies. In this joint publication, together with Friends of the Earth Germany (BUND) and Misereor, we present alternatives that are possible and necessary for a change of course.