Climate

The world needs a reset and to restart well intentioned cooperation projects from start. Because right now the UN and EU projects look like software built on code from the 80s, rickety, patched, slow to adapt, and prone to crashing under the weight of outdated assumptions.

Murat Kurum as President-Designate of COP31

Opening these samples is like cracking open air that existed long before dinosaurs, before forests, before animals of any kind. As lead researcher Justin Park put it: “It’s an incredible feeling to crack open a sample of air that’s a billion years older than the dinosaurs.”

What makes Souk El Tayeb in Lebanon remarkable is not only its insistence on local, seasonal produce, but its belief that dignity and sustainability must go hand in hand. Farmers are paid fairly. Villages are uplifted. Traditional recipes are kept alive not as nostalgia but as knowledge systems: real food is carbon-light, waste-free, and is adapted to the land.

You can go to a site or go online, order the tree and pick it up or if if possible have it delivered. A live tree doesn't shed needles after a few weeks and it's obviously the ecological choice to cutting down millions of 7 to 15 year old trees every year.

The IPCC provides the world’s policymakers with comprehensive summaries that synthesise and contextualise what is known about the drivers of climate change, its impacts and future risks, and how adaptation and mitigation can reduce those risks. Through its assessments, the IPCC identifies the strength of scientific agreement in different areas and indicates where further research is needed.

Overall, links between climate change and biodiversity are relatively well covered in national strategies, but the relationships involving pollution — including how climate and biodiversity pressures heighten pollution risks — are often missing. Policies designed to explicitly manage trade-offs, especially around pollution, remain limited.

The United States is here as the biggest donor to the World Bank, which is now the interim trustee and host of both the TFFF as well as the Loss and Damage Fund. So they hold the purse strings to some of the biggest parts of climate action. And at home, they're also using tariffs and economic sanctions to weaponize climate action and to prevent other countries from being able to take the action they need domestically to respond to the climate crisis. So the US is very much here. They've taken off the gloves and they're ready to throw down, as are their other fight club buddies Canada, Australia, Norway, and the EU.

We have heard that peak climate change might be in sight. Does Mars have more clues about our future? Travelling from Mars’s equator toward...

At COP30 in Belém, Brazil, scientists delivered another stark update: global fossil-fuel emissions are set to rise yet again this year. But for the...

Qatar remains a master of doublethink—burning gas by the megaton while selling “sustainability” to a world desperate for clean air. Wake up from your slumber people.

If you’ve ever watched a recycling truck weaving through city streets, you’ve seen the problem firsthand. Most of what we call “recycling” still depends on long-distance transportation and centralized sorting facilities. Those systems are energy-intensive and prone to contamination — the dreaded mix of wet food, plastic wrap, and paper that renders recyclables useless.

More than sixty years after France’s nuclear tests in the Algerian Sahara, radiation still lingers in the sand. At Reggane and In Ekker, plutonium traces remain where underground detonations vented into the open air. The sites were never fully decontaminated after France’s withdrawal in 1966. Algeria now monitors them with help from the International Atomic Energy Agency, but vast areas remain off-limits to herders and researchers.

If we seize this moment, the 2026 review can catalyse a new wave of finance (see Green Finance mechanisms in the UAE), innovation and policy coherence — and move us closer to the vision of a nature-positive world by 2050. If not, the checkpoint risks becoming another missed opportunity while ecosystems, livelihoods and economies continue to degrade.

The UAE is positioning itself as the Middle East’s green finance hub — mobilizing billions in sustainable bonds, ESG funds, and innovation capital to support its Net Zero 2050 vision. Green Prophet’s UAE Green Finance 2025 Report explores how banks, investors, and policymakers are shaping the next cleantech frontier, from Masdar City to Abu Dhabi’s sovereign initiatives.