Monthly Archives: April 2022

Pinterest sets the bar in the fight against climate disinformation

This post was co-authored by Michael Khoo of Friends of the Earth

Climate disinformation on digital platforms is a serious threat to the public support needed to solve the climate crisis. It has been so effective at delaying climate action, it was called out for the first time by the UN’s climate report and highlighted by President Obama. But we aren’t doing nearly enough to stop it.

We see a small number of outlets creating the vast majority of climate disinformation, amplified by the platform algorithms that force conspiratorial lies onto mainstream audiences. We have seen major events like the fossil fuel infrastructure failure in Texas’ 2021 winter storm be twisted into false attacks on renewable energy. As Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen showed in her release of 10,000 documents, companies like Facebook know these problems exist, and are doing precious little to stop it.

That’s why we’re excited that this month both Pinterest and Twitter (newly at the helm of Elon Musk) unveiled strong new climate misinformation policies. EDF and FOE, co-chairs of the Climate Disinformation Coalition, worked with both companies over the last year to help develop these policies. Pinterest’s policy has a strong definition of climate disinformation and sets the gold standard in the industry. Twitter’s policy addresses the very real problem of the monetization of climate disinformation through advertising. Both are living proof that all social media companies can and should do much more to stop the spread of climate change disinformation.

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Posted in News, Setting the Facts Straight / Read 1 Response

Unlocking the planet-saving potential of crediting natural climate solutions

With contributions from Julia Paltseva, senior analyst, Britta Dosch, analyst, and Christine Gerbode, senior research analyst, all at Environmental Defense Fund. 

Gardens of the Queen archipelago off the coast of Cuba

Earth’s forests, oceans, wetlands and other natural landscapes have the power to pull carbon out of the atmosphere and to store it – making well-managed ecosystems key resources in the fight to halt climate change. The latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found protecting these resources offers one of the highest mitigation potentials.

Efforts to keep healthy ecosystems intact, restore those that have been cleared or degraded, and improve how these landscapes are managed can have huge benefits to people and the planet, like improving water quality or protecting biodiversity. When these efforts also increase carbon storage or avoid greenhouse gas emissions, they are known as natural climate solutions, or NCS.

Healthy ecosystems around the world are disappearing rapidly, as more of the planet is degraded or converted to other uses. This continued loss could have dire consequences for the entire globe through its effect on climate, while doing particular harm and injustice to the Indigenous and local communities who have historically stewarded many of these crucial environments.

Scaling up global funding and support for NCS activities is an opportunity to limit climate damage while enhancing and protecting the enormous good these ecosystems provide – and benefiting the local people carrying out these important tasks.

One way to do this is to incorporate NCS activities into global carbon markets by crediting emissions. Environmental Defense Fund is now leading a collaborative process to lay out the key considerations and challenges of supporting NCS with the potentially powerful tool of crediting emissions reductions and removals—and of making sure the systems to support this tool are ethical, equitable and effective at the much larger scales of ambition needed to meet the moment.

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Posted in Carbon Markets, Forest protection, Indigenous People, Plants & Animals / Comments are closed

The latest IPCC report unpacks the role of innovation. Here are five key takeaways.

Wind energy

Photo credit: Pexels.

Last week, the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the world’s leading body on climate science, issued another stark warning on the state of the climate crisis. With every fraction of a degree at stake, the world needs to speed up the clean energy revolution as quickly as possible to secure a safer future.

This sixth assessment report lays out a variety of pathways and solutions that can limit global climate warming and stymie the most harmful impacts of the climate crisis. The top takeaway: We need to swiftly and equitably transition to a global clean energy economy through rapid and wide-scale deployment of existing solutions like solar, wind, batteries and heat pumps. For the first time, however, the report also dedicates a chapter to innovation – the process of developing, testing and scaling new climate solutions. In all pathways studied, these new solutions will be important for addressing emissions in sectors where today’s clean energy solutions are not enough.

Here are 5 key takeaways about climate innovation in the IPCC report that policymakers should know.

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Posted in Greenhouse Gas Emissions, Innovation / Read 1 Response

Countries must heed IPCC reports as they review collective progress under the global stocktake

This post was authored by Maggie Ferrato, Senior Analyst for Environmental Defense Fund.

Forest family photo of World Leaders at COP26 in Glasgow, Scottland. Karwai Tang/ UK Government via Flickr.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s latest Working Group III report has made it clear that the world is not on track to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement—and emissions have continued to rise across all sectors—despite the technological and policy solutions that are increasingly available to decisionmakers.

It’s an important message that needs to be repeated with more urgency than ever. We already know we must do much more to reduce our emissions, including by transitioning more quickly from fossil fuels and rethinking how we grow our food. And in February, the IPCC’s Working Group II report highlighted the dramatic impacts the planet faces from a warming atmosphere, and how this decade is a critical window to adapt to our changing climate and limit the damage by dramatically cutting our emissions.

The IPCC reports taken together send a clear signal that countries must urgently set their ambitions much higher in the fight against climate change.

The good news is that the Paris Agreement was designed to ratchet up ambition over time. One of the mechanisms to make this happen, a process known as the “global stocktake,” is an opportunity to assess countries’ collective progress toward the Paris Agreement’s long-term goals on mitigation, adaptation and finance.

The IPCC reports provide an important backdrop for the UN’s global stocktake process. Here’s how countries can leverage the scientific research from the IPCC to conduct a stocktake that succeeds in increasing global ambition and action.

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Posted in International, Paris Agreement, United Nations / Comments are closed