Leaders or laggards in climate action? Assessing GHG trends and mitigation targets of global megacities

GHG Targets as Insurance Against Catastrophic Climate Damages

A critical issue in climate-change economics is the speci…cation of the so-called “damages function”and its interaction with the unknown uncertainty of catastrophic outcomes. This paper asks how much we might be misled by our economic assessment of climate change when we employ a conventional quadratic damages function and/or a thin-tailed probability distribution for extreme temperatures. The ...

Linking climate policies to advance global mitigation.

T he November 2017 negotiations in Bonn, Germany, under the auspices of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) validated that the Paris Agreement has met one of two necessary conditions for success. By achieving broad participation, including 195 countries, accounting for 99% of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions (1), the agreement dramatically improves on the 14%...

Megacities and climate change - A brief overview.

Cities have developed into the hotspots of human economic activity. From the appearance of the first cities in the Neolithic to 21st century metropolis their impact on the environment has always been apparent. With more people living in cities than in rural environments now it becomes crucial to understand these environmental impacts. With the immergence of megacities in the 20th century and th...

Assessing progress towards global marine protection targets: shortfalls in information and action

Current global marine protection targets aim to protect 10-30% of marine habitats within the next 3 to 5 years. However, these targets were adopted without prior assessment of their achievability. Moreover, our ability to monitor progress towards such targets has been constrained by a lack of robust data on marine protected areas (MPAs). Here we present the results of the first explicitly marin...

Global food efficiency of climate change mitigation in agriculture