climate

Reducing emissions must be the priority for UK universities but carbon offsetting can also play an important role in the transition to net-zero, according to a group of academic experts from the COP26 Universities Network.

Hundreds of millions of tons of dust are blown off the Sahara desert each year. This dust interferes with the climate system and is capable of both cooling and heating the atmosphere depending on its height, size, shape and colour. It also interacts with cloud formation and weather systems like tropical cyclones. Being able to represent the location and quantity of dust in models is really important as these are the tools we use to make weather forecasts and climate projections.

"EvoFlood: The evolution of global flood hazard and risk" is a new £3.7m project that aims to revolutionise our understanding of flood risk. The project, involving the University of Oxford and led by the University of Hull and the University of Southampton, represents a collaborative endeavour of 9 UK universities, as well as multiple national and international end-user organisations.

A new report demonstrates that for the first time, a majority of Americans live in a jurisdiction with a net zero emissions target. Furthermore, US companies accounting for at least $5.2 trillion in yearly sales have committed to net zero.

New research led by Dr Lisa Wedding, published this week in Global Environmental Change, investigates the carbon-capturing potential of habitats along the California coast and details pathways incorporating blue carbon habitats into climate change policy.

As the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Board of Governors of the World Bank Group convene their spring meetings, researchers from the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment find that most governments' astronomical borrowing during the pandemic pays scant attention to the effects that climate change could have on their ability to repay the debt.

On 5th March, the School of Geography and the Environment became an international hub for decolonizing conservation, by hosting the panel 'The Future of Conservation: COP26 and Beyond'. Born out of #DecoloniseConservation, an engagement campaign from XR Youth Solidarity, the panel was a call to action to begin building solidarity ties between Indigenous and local community leaders and academics, in order to bring a united front to COP26 and seek protections for the rights of over 1.65 billion Indigenous peoples, local communities and Afro-descendants in high biodiversity areas.

On 7 April, Sky News launched the The Daily Climate Show, a new prime time programme dedicated to covering the global climate crisis. Front and centre of the programme is the Oxford University Global Warming Index, which reveals how the Earth's temperature is steadily rising in fractions of a degree. The Index is based on research by Dr Karsten Haustein, Dr Friederike Otto and Professor Myles Allen and maintained by the ECI at globalwarmingindex.org.

A team of four students from Oxford University including Annabella Wainer, 2nd year PhD student at the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment has been named the winner of the 2021 Kellogg-Morgan Stanley Sustainable Investing Challenge.

A major drought and forest fires in the Amazon rainforest killed billions of trees and plants and turned one of the world's largest carbon sinks into one of its biggest polluters. Examining the Amazonian epicentre of the El Niño - Brazil's Lower Tapajós, an eastern Amazonia area around twice the size of Belgium - the research team, led by scientists from Lancaster University, the Environmental Change Insitute, University of Oxford, and The Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation found the damage lasts for multiple years.