Breaking Waves: Ocean News

This study examines the positive correlation between an area's wealth and biodiversity, known as the 'luxury effect.' The authors present an alternative framework for understanding links between socio-economic factors and ecosystem health which emphasizes the agency of less-wealthy communities in promoting healthy ecosystems where they live.

Operations at a cold war lab exposed at least 1,073 people to radiation. Risks to the nearby communities persist Exposed: The Human Radiation Experiments at Hunters Point is a special report by the San Francisco Public Press, an independent non-profit news organization focused on accountability, equity and the environment. In September 1956, Cpl Eldridge Jones found himself atop a sunbaked roof at an old army camp about an hour outside San Francisco, shoveling radioactive dirt. Continue reading...

Experts say financial movements mean poor nations will in effect get billions less in value from £300bn pledge A failure to factor in inflation means the $300bn (£240bn) climate finance deal agreed at Cop29 is not the tripling of pledges that has been claimed, economists have said. The international talks in Baku were pulled back from the brink of collapse early on Sunday morning when negotiators struck an agreement in which rich countries promised to raise $300bn a year by 2035. On paper, this is a tripling of the previous climate finance target of $100bn a year by 2020, and has been trumpeted as such by the UN and others. Continue reading...

My negotiating team tried in vain to push up support for the global south. Lessons must be learned before the next summit in Brazil Mukhtar Babayev is president of the Cop29 UN climate change conference China was willing to offer more in climate finance, says Cop29 president Nine years after the Paris agreement, and after 11 months of multilateral diplomacy and two weeks of the most intense negotiations at Cop29 in Baku, we have a deal. Under the terms of the Baku breakthrough, the world’s industrialised nations will provide $300bn (£240bn), which, combined with resources from multilateral lending institutions and the private sector will reach $1.3tn in climate financing. Cop29 also finalised, after years of failed attempts, a global framework for international carbon markets trading, a critical mechanism for less polluting and less wealthy nations to raise climate finance. A fund for responding to loss and damage – another new financial resource for less developed nations – was brought in shortly before the summit, and funds are already being paid into it. This deal may be imperfect. It does not keep everyone happy. But it is a major step forward from the $100bn pledged in Paris back in 2015. Mukhtar Babayev is president of the Cop29 UN climate change conference Continue reading...