Refresher and Context The 29th Conference of the Parties (COP29) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) took place in Baku, Azerbaijan, from November 11 to November 22, 2024. A UN "Convention" is an international treaty or agreement among countries to tackle a...
The annual Conference of Parties (COP) on climate change has grown into a bloated international meeting where thousands of lobbyists, non-profit advocates and representatives from most of the 195 countries in the world vie for attention and influence. There are estimated to be 40-50,000 people...
The climate change conference COP29 is currently taking place in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan. This year's conference includes a pavilion dedicated to global food systems, aimed at creating a platform for "collaborative dialogue, knowledge sharing, and decision-making" regarding the important role of agriculture and...
A report by Frank and Sudarshan, ecological economists at the University of Chicago, provides an excellent example of how human and environmental well-being is connected to the well-being of animals – in this case, to the health of the vulture population in India. Ecological economics,...
On Monday, June 17, 2024, 20 out of the 27 countries in the European Union (EU) voted to adopt the world's first Nature Restoration Law. The law passed with a slim majority, as Leonore Gewessler, the Austrian Minister for Climate Action, decided at the last...
On December 19, 2022, representatives from 188 countries adopted a new agreement on biodiversity, now known as the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF). The 2022 GBF aims to halt and reverse biodiversity loss by adopting four overarching global goals and 23 targets, including conserving 30%...
As a graduate student at Yale University School of Forestry, Thomas Crowther was intrigued by a question his roommate was asked: how many trees were on Earth? While his roommate didn't see the significance of the question, Crowther took up the challenge of using a...
April 22, 2024, will be the 54th anniversary of the first Earth Day.The 1960s decade in the USA was a time of widespread citizen protests and demonstrations. Citizens used protest marches and sit-ins to campaign for civil rights. Women demanded equality in the labor market...
In a critical step towards global sustainability, the United Nations (UN) adopted seventeen Sustainable Development Goals(SDGs) in 2015. SDG12 addressed consumption and production. Its third indicator target (SDG 12.3) focused on food waste and loss. The UN set a target of halving food waste by...
In 1700, so many beaver pelts were stored in Montreal warehouses that they threatened to glut the market, something that traders had already experienced in previous years. So, fearing that prices in Europe would crash, orders were given to pile up and burn fully three-quarters...
