Christiana Figueres News

U.S. President Joe Biden on Wednesday announced America's return to the international Paris Agreement to fight climate change, the centerpiece of a raft of day-one executive orders aimed at restoring U.S. leadership in combating global warming.The announcements also included a sweeping order to review all of former President Donald Trump's actions weakening climate change protections, the revocation of a vital permit for TC Energy's Keystone XL oil pipeline project from Canada…

The U.N.'s climate chief said on Friday she will step down in July, at the end of a six-year term, and praised governments for reaching a 195-nation deal in Paris in December to shift the world economy from fossil fuels to cleaner energies. Christiana Figueres, a 59-year-old Costa Rican, said she would not accept any extension of her term as head of the Bonn-based U.N. Climate Change Secretariat after what she called the historic Paris Agreement. "We now move into a phase of urgent implementation…

Burning all the world's fossil fuel reserves could thaw the entire Antarctic ice sheet and push up world sea levels by more than 50 metres (160 feet), over thousands of years, an international study said on Friday. Such a melt, also eliminating the far smaller ice sheet on Greenland, is a worst case of climate change that would inundate cities from New York to Shanghai and change maps of the world with much of the Netherlands, Bangladesh or Florida under water. "Burning the currently attainable fossil fuel resources is sufficient to eliminate the (Antarctic) ice sheet," the scientists wrote in the journal Science Advances. Antarctica contains ice equivalent to 58 metres of sea level rise.

The world will take years to limit climate change to manageable levels, with no miracle fix at a Paris summit this year despite growing signs of action by governments and companies, the United Nations climate chief said on Thursday. Senior officials from almost 190 nations will meet from Feb. 8-13 in Geneva to work on a draft U.N. deal to limit global warming. The agreement, built on national plans for curbs on rising world greenhouse gas emissions beyond 2020, is meant to be finalized at the Paris meeting in December. Christiana Figueres, head of the U.N.

Record high ocean temperatures will make 2014 the hottest year on record, or at least among the very warmest, in evidence of a long-term trend of global warming, the U.N.'s weather agency said on Wednesday. Including this year, 14 of the 15 most sweltering years on record will have been in the 21st century, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said of the findings issued during 190-nation talks in Lima on ways to fight climate change. "There is no standstill in global warming," WMO Secretary-General Michel Jarraud said in a statement.

At the UN's Climate Summit this week a diverse group of global leaders, from World Bank president Jim Yong Kim to California Governor Jerry Brown, spoke of the need for polluters to pay for each ton of carbon they emit. More than 1,000 companies pledged their support for the effort. Carbon pricing, largely rejected by the United States and struggling in Europe, is suddenly all the rage, with China leading the charge. The world's biggest greenhouse gas emitter plans to establish a national market for carbon permit trading in 2016 and has already launched seven regional pilot markets. Boosters of carbon pricing policies say that once China sets a national price on carbon, others will follow.

President Barack Obama's plan to cut greenhouse gas emissions from U.S. power plants, due to be announced on Monday, will win muted applause abroad with some hopes it could help a U.N. deal to fight climate change in 2015. Emerging economies including China and India are likely to be lukewarm because they have often said that Obama's plans for emissions cuts until 2020 - even if fully implemented - are far short of the curbs they say are needed by the rich. But the U.S. plan to limit emissions by existing power plants could put pressure on other nations in U.N. talks on a deal meant to be agreed at a summit in Paris in late 2015. Obama's plan will be a "good signal" for Paris by showing that "one of the world's biggest emitters is taking the future of the planet and its people seriously…

extract greenhouse gases from the air, a U.N. report said on Sunday. solar or nuclear power was affordable and would shave only about 0.06 percentage point a year off world economic growth. Edenhofer, co-chair of a Berlin meeting of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). "I'm not saying it's costless. I'm not saying climate policy is a free lunch. But it's a lunch worthwhile to buy," he said. The report, endorsed by governments, is meant as the main scientific guide for nations working on a U.N. late 2015 to rein in world greenhouse gas emissions that have hit repeated highs, led by China's industrial growth. warming. percent from 2010 levels by 2050, and then close to zero by 2100, to keep temperatures below 2C. Such cuts are far deeper than most governments are planning.