02 May 2023 - Do forests create rain? It is a question that has been debated for a long time. We know that trees produce huge amounts of water vapor that is pumped from humidity in the ground and condensed into clouds that generate rain, but the mechanisms that govern...
12 April 2023 - The fact that the IPCC incorporates in its core business, risks of failure to the Earth system and to human civilisation, that we would not accept in our own lives, raises fundamental questions about the efficacy of the whole IPCC project. If low risks...
06 April 2023 - While many European countries press ahead with the clean energy transition, aiming to replace dependence on Russian gas with renewable energies, others such as Italy, seem more interested in signing new gas contracts with countries like Libya. The...
16 March 2023 - We are in a desperate race to avoid locking in a pathway to human extinction. This requires brutal honesty on the threats we face. Climate change, not China, Russia or the US, is the greatest threat the world faces; it will only be overcome with...
08 March 2023 - Some 23% of Fortune 500 corporations claim to engage with the Sustainable Development Goals framework. Yet, a peer-reviewed study found that a measly 0.2% have developed concrete methods and tools to evaluate their progress toward relevant SDGs. This...
08 March 2023 - The yearly COP is the highlight of the climate calendar. Yet, as emissions continue to climb and the impacts of climate change worsen, it is time we asked what the COP process is really achieving and how it can be overhauled to ensure it helps to...
28 February 2023 - With an agreement on loss and damage, COP27 marked the end of negotiations on all essential components of the global climate agreement. It is now time to shift gear. The current COP and Presidency leadership process cannot deliver climate action at...
17 January 2023 - Europe needs to be leading the charge to a more sustainable world, but is being held back by short-termism and poor policymaking, argues Systemiq's Janez Potočnik. "Co-operation in a fragmented world" is the title of the gathering of the great and...
13 January 2023 - As Davos kicks off, 30 world-leading economists and economic thinkers from 16 countries have signed an open letter to world leaders calling for bold steps to tax wealth, income and companies to avoid a dangerous threat to democracy. Jayati Ghosh,...
27 December 2022 - Since the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, the ESIR group advocated the need for the EU institutions to avoid relying exclusively on short-termism, and instead adopt a “protect, prepare and transform” (PPT) approach for resilience. “Protect”,...
