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Climate change experts met in Cardiff this week to discuss Wales’s approach to managing climate change.
The event, hosted by the Welsh Government and sponsored by the Minister for Natural Resources, Alun Davies, brought together independent and internationally renowned scientists from the Met Office, the Climate Change Consortium of Wales and the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Resource following the recent publication of a comprehensive assessment of global climate change by the UN.
Aberystwyth University is set to sign agreements with Seoul National University to share miscanthus germplasm, based on principles of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity to help boost bioenergy production and combat climate change.
East Asian indigenous genetic resources of miscanthus are useful for improving existing miscanthus bioenergy crops elsewhere in the world. Miscanthus may be used to create higher energy yields on lower grade lands which are less suitable for food production.
European energy policy makers recognise the importance of bioenergy crops in the future mix of renewables, and national policies are being developed to encourage their commercial deployment.
A major research programme led by Ricardo-AEA for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) will help to inform the policies described in a UK government report on adapting to the effects of climate change, which was laid before parliament yesterday
The first report on the National Adaptation Programme (NAP) sets out what government, businesses, communities and civil society are doing to prepare for and adapt to climate change. The Ricardo-AEA research programme, called PREPARE, produced five significant studies published by Defra yesterday which will help government to design the types of policies and services described in the NAP. Ricardo-AEA delivered the PREPARE research programme in partnership with Ipsos MORI, Alexander Ballard Ltd, the University of Leeds and a panel of experts in climate change adaptation.
Governments around the world have increasingly been using economic stagnation as an excuse for climate inaction. But a letter published today in Nature Climate Change by Dr Chris Hope, Reader in Policy Modelling, Cambridge Judge Business School and Mat Hope, School of Sociology, Politics, and International Studies, University of Bristol, suggests this neglect is unwise.
The research estimates the mean damage caused by emitting an additional tonne of carbon dioxide today is $107 per tonne if economic growth in the rich world is around 2% per year. But if rich economies continue to stagnate the mean damage rises to $138 per tonne.
The Freight Transport Association has welcomed the conclusions of the Department for Transport’s (DfT) Freight Carbon Review, published today. Based largely on the success of FTA’s Logistics Carbon Reduction Scheme (LCRS), government has decided to continue working with industry to improve freight’s carbon performance.
The LCRS was endorsed by the Department for Transport in 2011 and has shown over the last three years that industry is capable of voluntarily recording and reporting carbon emissions without the need for additional tax and regulation. Additionally, the scheme has set a carbon reduction target to reduce the carbon intensity of its freight operations by 8 per cent by 2015 against a 2010 baseline.