UNFCCC

They are supposed to be the climate-savers’ gold standard — the key data on which the world relies in its efforts to lower greenhouse gas emissions and hold global warming in check. But the national inventories of emissions supplied to the United Nations climate convention (UNFCCC) by most countries are anything but reliable, according to a growing body of research. The data supplied to the UNFCCC, and published on its website, are typically out of date, inconsistent, and incomplete. For most countries, “I would not put much value, if any, on the submissions,” says Glen Peters of the Centre for International Climate Research in Norway, a longtime analyst of emissions trends. The data from large emitters is as much open to questions as that from smaller and less industrialised nations. In China, the uncertainties around its carbon dioxide emissions from burning coal are larger than the total emissions of many major industrial coun...

As the U.S. prepares for another Trump administration, one area unambiguously in the incoming president’s crosshairs is climate policy. Although he has not released an official climate agenda, Donald Trump’s playbook from his last stint in the Oval Office and his frequent complaints about clean energy offer some clues to what’s ahead. Exiting the Paris climate agreement Less than six months into his first presidency, Trump in 2017 formally announced that he was withdrawing the United States from the Paris climate accord – the 2015 international agreement signed by nearly every country as a pledge to work toward keeping rising temperatures and other impacts of climate change in check. This time, a greater but underappreciated risk is that Trump will not stop at the Paris Agreement. Trump attends a session of the United Nations Climate Action Summit in 2019. When he announced he would pull the U.S. out of the Pari...