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Nearly 59,000 Iranians die prematurely due to air pollution in year to March, according to officials.
Companies face shifting sustainability reporting standards in 2025, navigating global mandates, voluntary frameworks, and strategic choices in sustainability reporting. The sustainability reporting landscape is at a pivotal moment in 2025. Companies across regions are navigating a complex mix of evolving standards, regulatory mandates, and investor expectations. Understanding framework adoption trends is critical because these choices […]
A bid by host nation Brazil to establish a "road map" for the world's phaseout of fossil fuels did not materialize
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Second of three stories about our Sustainability Strategy pillars: Environmental Stewardship, Our People and Communities, and Responsible Business.
The post Domtar’s Sustainability Strategy: Our people and communities appeared first on Corporate Knights.
A boutique private-credit firm set up by former Credit Suisse bankers has agreed to provide a lending facility to support a new carbon program in the Bahamas.
Members of Indigenous groups left the summit with concrete progress on some of their priorities, including land designation and direct finance.
COP talks bring together thousands of people once a year with a goal to advance the fight against climate change. They’re cathartic events where hyper-technical diplomatic talk takes center stage. But as is often the case when very large numbers of humans congregate in a single place, there are also tears, laughs and anger.
A majority Chinese-owned plant at Indonesia’s most important nickel site is cutting back production as its tailings site is nearly full, according to people familiar with the matter, highlighting the industry’s growing waste management challenge.
Companies aren’t just paying insurers to backstop them if a disaster strikes, they’re shelling out consulting fees to help prevent losses in the first place.
Firefighters call for long-term investment and say UK is dangerously underprepared as climate crisis worsensWildfires have devastated more moorland, forests and fields in the UK this year than at any time since records began, putting huge pressure on the country’s fire service, figures show.The Global Wildfire Information System estimates that by November, wildfires had burned 47,026 hectares (116,204 acres) in 2025 in the UK – the largest area in any year since monitoring began in 2012, and more than double the area burned in the record-breaking summer of 2022. Continue reading...
Blazes that smoulder in the permafrost, only to reignite, are extending fire season though winter, leaving vegetation struggling to recoverIn May 2023, a lightning strike hit the forest in Donnie Creek, British Columbia, and the trees started to burn. It was early in the year for a wildfire, but a dry autumn and warm spring had turned the forest into a tinderbox, and the flames spread rapidly. By mid-June, the fire had become one of largest in the province’s history, burning through an area of boreal forest nearly twice the size of central London. That year, more of Canada burned than ever before.The return of cold and snow at the close of the year typically signal the end of the wildfire season. But this time, the fire did not stop. Instead, it smouldered in the soil underground, insulated from the freezing conditions by the snowpack. The next spring, it reemerged as a “zombie fire” that continued to burn until August 2024. By then, more than 600,000 hectares (1.5m acres) had been destroyed. Continue reading...
The fingerprints of Russia and Saudi Arabia are all over the decision text in Brazil. But a group of nations led by Colombia and the Netherlands offer hopeGenevieve Guenther is the founding director of End Climate SilenceThe 30th conference of the parties (Cop30), the annual climate summit of all nations party to the UNFCCC, just ended. Stakeholders are out in the media trying spin the outcome as a win. Simon Stiell, climate change executive secretary for the UN is, for instance, praising Cop30 for showing that “climate cooperation is alive and kicking, keeping humanity in the fight for a liveable planet”. But let us be clear. The conference was a failure. Its outcome, the decision text known as the Global Mutirão or Global Collective Effort, is, in essence, a form of climate denial.In 2023, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) determined that the world had already developed, or planned to develop, too much fossil fuel to be able to halt global heating at 2C. It acknowledged that the capital assets built up around fossil fuels must be stranded – that is to say, abandoned and not used – if warming was to be limited to 2C. But the Cop30 decision text ignores all this. Indeed, it never even mentions fossil fuels.Genevieve Guenther is the founding director of End Climate Silence, and the author of The Language of Climate Politics Continue reading...
In western Chad, villagers are desperately trying to hold back the sand as the climate crisis wreaks havoc on one of the hottest countries in the worldOn the ochre sands of Kanem, the neat vegetable gardens and silver-green palm trees of Kaou oasis stand out, incongruous in this desert province of 70,000 sq km in western Chad.Oases such as this, on the edge of the Sahara, have sustained human life in the world’s deserts for thousands of years. Globally, an estimated 150 million people rely on the water, arable land and access to trade networks they provide. But in Chad, such oases are disappearing fast. Continue reading...
As Mumbai sees increased energy demand from new datacenters, particularly from Amazon, the filthiest neighbourhood in one of India’s largest cities must keep its major coal plantsEach day, Kiran Kasbe drives a rickshaw taxi through his home neighbourhood of Mahul on Mumbai’s eastern seafront, down streets lined with stalls selling tomatoes, bottle gourds and aubergines–and, frequently, through thick smog.Earlier this year, doctors found three tumours in his 54-year-old mother’s brain. It’s not clear exactly what caused her cancer. But people who live near coal plants are much more likely to develop the illness, studies show, and the residents of Mahul live a few hundred metres down the road from one. Continue reading...
A fragile Cop30 consensus is a win. But only a real bargain between rich and poor nations can weather the climate shocks that are comingThis year’s UN climate talks in Brazil’s Belém ended without a major breakthrough. The text of the final agreement lacked a deal to shift away from fossil fuels, delayed crucial finance and the “mutirão” decision contained no roadmap to halt and reverse deforestation. But the multilateral system at Cop30 held together at a point when its collapse felt close. This ought to be a warning: next year’s conference of the parties must strike a better bargain between the rich and poor world.Developing countries are far from united on some issues. Over rare earth minerals China sees any move as targeting its dominance, while Africa sees it as essential for governance. Elsewhere petrostates did not support Colombia’s call for a fossil fuel phase-out. Yet the global south broadly coheres around a simple principle: its nations must be equipped to survive a climate emergency they did not create. That means cash to build flood defences, make agricultural systems resilient, protect coastlines and rebuild after disasters strike. They also demand front-loaded finance to transition to clean, green economic growth.Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. Continue reading...
Getting to net zero CO2 emissions globally means we can halt global warming. This requires a rapid phase-out. It’s physicsWith another set of global climate talks behind us, the Australian government faces some tricky tasks before it takes over negotiations at the next round of talks next year in Turkey.
Cop30 in Belém, Brazil, did not deliver the bold fossil fuel phase-out roadmap we needed, but it did nudge the system forward with more scrutiny of fossil fuel producers.
And despite the weakness of the outcome, one can gain some important comfort by the fact that Bélem – and the G20 in Johannesburg at the weekend – both solidly endorsed the Paris agreement, its central goal of keeping warming to 1.5C and the importance of net zero emissions.
Cop30 agreed that an “ambition accelerator” will be needed to fill the gap between what governments are planning (projected to warm the world by 2.6C) and the agreed guardrails of the Paris agreement: a limit of 1.5C.
It also, crucially, began the momentum for developing a roadmap for a just transition away from fossil fuels, with more than 80 countries – including Australia – signing the “Belém declaration” on a transition away from fossil fuels.While this declaration didn’t get support from the whole conference, Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, has promised to move forward on its implementation during the course of this year, until he hands over to Cop31 in Turkey. Continue reading...
The Philippines is one of the countries most at risk of the climate emergency due to its low-lying island geography. With sea temperatures rising, the country deals with increasingly frequent and intense typhoons, rising sea-levels that threaten coastal communities, and changing rainfall patterns that disrupt agriculture. The country is one of the smallest contributors to climate change but one of the places most affected by its impacts. Gideon Mendel’s visceral portraits from his project Drowning World show people in Bulacan province dealing with the climate emergency in their daily lives Continue reading...
Many European luxury and fast fashion brands have set themselves ambitious sustainability targets. But how many of these have actually been met? DW investigates.
After Oakland, Calif., reneged on a contract allowing coal shipments, a Kentucky company went under. Courts say the city must now pay hundreds of millions of dollars.
