Category News

We’re on the “highway to hell”, the UN warned at COP27 – and not in a good way like AC/DC, but in a very bad way, with continuing weather chaos, famine and mass extinction facing us all.

“Red alert for humanity”, “life or death struggle”, “knocking on famine’s door”. These have all been UN assessments of the situation. But, has it changed anything?

Despite the UN’s increasingly inventive language designed to say how it is, another global climate summit looks to just past us by again.

This year’s COP27 summit – sponsored by Coca-Cola (the world’s number one producer of plastic waste) is really achieving nothing!

One UN official said yesterday – “the COP process is at a crossroads, it must urgently realise its purpose or risk poisoning the well for climate action...

Emissions of CO2 are rising so quickly there is now a 50% chance the world will cross a crucial climate change threshold soon, a new report suggests. Emissions for 2022 are expected to remain at record levels, lifted by people flying again after Covid. The report said that if emissions stay so high, the world faces a 50% risk of breaching a key 1.5C temperature rise threshold in nine years.

This would have sweeping consequences for poorer and developing countries.

Average temperatures are now 1.1C above pre-industrial levels, and that increase has already caused major climate disasters this year.

If global average temperatures were to rise to more than 1.5C, the UN says it would expose millions more people to potentially devastating climate impacts.

The researchers have sa...

Yesterday at COP27, the U.S. Government announced the Red Sea Initiative – a major new initiative aimed at conserving the Red Sea’s coastal ecosystem, while promoting high-value, low-environmental impact ecotourism. 

Through an initial U.S. Government contribution of $15 million, the Red Sea Initiative plans to: 

● Protect the Red Sea’s coral reef and surrounding coastal ecosystem against the impacts of climate change and human activity; 

● Empower local communities to lead on climate action; 

● Establish a blended finance mechanism to support businesses in building resilience against climate change, reducing emissions, and creating jobs; and 

● Partner with private businesses and other donors to leverage up to $50 million in total funding. 

To advance the w...

COP27 is the next meeting of the group of 198 countries that have signed the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. It will be held in the Egyptian city of Sharm El-Sheikh on 6-18 November. The UN is urging the world’s industrialized nations to ‘lead by example’ by taking ‘bold and immediate actions’. Five key issues to watch are nature, food, water, industry decarbonization and climate adaptation.

“A third of Pakistan flooded. Europe’s hottest summer in 500 years. The Philippines hammered. The whole of Cuba in blackout. And … in the United States, Hurricane Ian has delivered a brutal reminder that no country and no economy is immune from the climate crisis.”

These are the words of UN Secretary-General António Guterres...

World leaders are set to discuss action to tackle climate change, at the UN climate summit in Egypt. It follows a year of climate-related disasters and broken temperature records. UN climate summits are held every year, for governments to agree steps to limit global temperature rises. They are referred to as COPs, which stands for “Conference of the Parties”. The parties are the attending countries that signed up to the original UN climate agreement in 1992. 

COP27 is the 27th annual UN meeting on climate. It will take place in Sharm el-Sheikh from 6 to 18 November.

Why are COP meetings needed?

The world is warming because of emissions produced by humans, mostly from burning fossil fuels like oil, gas and coal.

Global temperatures have risen 1.1C and are heading towards 1...

Dozens of small coral fragments are anchored to a man-made underwater frame, suspended just a few metres below the surface on the Great Barrier Reef. The pieces of staghorn coral are only a few centimetres long at best, but represent something much greater than what I can see. My divemaster Russel Hosp holds up a sign underwater to communicate.

“We call these fragments of opportunity,” it reads. 

I’m diving at a coral nursery with Passions of Paradise, an eco-certified operator which departs from Cairns daily to take guests out to dive and snorkel the famous reef and one of 13 operators certified as carbon-neutral...

The UK has opened a new licensing round for companies to explore for oil and gas in the North Sea. Nearly 900 locations are being offered for exploration, with as many as 100 licences set to be awarded. The decision is at odds with international climate scientists who say fossil fuel projects should be closed down, not expanded. They say there can be no new projects if there is to be a chance of keeping global temperature rises under 1.5C. 

Both the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the global body for climate science and the International Energy Agency (IEA) have expressed such a view.

The government’s own advisers on climate change said in a report earlier this year that the best way to ease consumers’ pain from high energy prices was to stop using fossil fuels r...

Climate activists are “baffled” over Egypt’s decision to have Coca-Cola – a major plastic producer – sponsor this year’s global climate talks. Campaigners told the BBC the deal undermines the talks, as the majority of plastics are made from fossil fuels. Coca-Cola said it “shares the goal of eliminating waste and appreciates efforts to raise awareness”.

This year’s COP27 UN climate talks are hosted by the Egyptian government in November in Sharm el-Sheikh.

Egypt announced it had signed the sponsorship deal last week.

At the signing, Coca-Cola Global Vice-President, Public Policy and Sustainability Michael Goltzman said: “Through the COP27 partnership, the Coca-Cola system aims to support collective action against climate change.”

But opposition to the decision has grown over ...

When the World Trade Organization’s (WTO’s) 12th Ministerial Conference closed at dawn on 17 June 2022, the 164-member intergovernmental body had finally adopted a fisheries subsidies agreement after 21 years of on-and-off discussions and negotiations.

The WTO’s Agreement on Fisheries Subsidies is a historic step towards tackling one of the key drivers of overfishing on the world’s ocean harmful subsidies nations pay to commercial fishing operators to help keep their businesses profitable. 

One-third of fish stocks worldwide are exploited beyond sustainable levels, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. The $22 billion a year in government subsidies are helping drive this overfishing; the funds go primarily to industrial fishing fleets to artifici...

Coral spawning is a natural wonder. It’s also a pain in the neck for coral researchers. Once a year, at a time determined by a combination of water temperature, the length of the days and the phase of the moon, coral across a reef release buoyant bundles of eggs and sperm into the water. The effect resembles an upside-down snow globe, a blizzard of little pearls rising toward the surface.

The event is magical. And, for scientists, it triggers a crazed late-night frenzy of trying to collect enough eggs and sperm to last them through a year of experiments, until the next spawning.

Now, researchers in Australia have joined a select few labs around the world that have figured out how to trigger spawning on a human-made schedule...