Developments in law and policy of energy, commodities and environment
The European Union (“EU”) has passed the world’s most far-reaching mandatory environmental, social, and governance (“ESG”) reporting regime.
The Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (“CSRD”) will apply to an initial group of large EU companies from 2024 and gradually extend its reach to smaller companies over the course of the following four years. It is ultimately…
As noted in our COP27 recap, this year’s climate summit in Sharm el-Sheik involved both the historic creation of a fund to compensate countries most impacted by climate change, as well as lost opportunities to adopt more ambitious and accelerated climate mitigation commitments. Perhaps hidden between these headlines, President Biden announced an initiative with…
The United Nations annual climate change conference—officially known as the 27th Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (“UNFCCC”), or COP27 for short—held in Sharm el Sheik, Egypt, finally concluded early Sunday morning. COP27 was held amidst the ongoing Russian war in Ukraine and its consequent economic turmoil, as well…
Negotiations over the text of the final Declaration appear to have not progressed significantly since yesterday. The issues holding up progress now are the same issues that had been identified at the outset as key: loss and damage; mitigation gaps (weak NDCs); the $100 billion in climate finance promised to developing countries from 2020; and…
COP 27 was electrified yesterday by the speech of President-elect Lula of Brazil. Promising to reverse the deforestation of the Amazon and commenting that Brazil is already a global agricultural giant without the need to clear any more rainforest, he called on wealthy nations to make good on their COP 15 pledge to set aside…
On November 15th, all eyes were on the G20 Summit where news that the meeting between Presidents Biden and Xi had been broadly positive–including instructions for officials to re-engage on climate change–along with the announcement of funding to help Indonesia move away from reliance on coal-fired energy, served as a welcome boost to the mood…
COP27 was never going to be a ‘Big COP’ in the way that COP26 in Glasgow was. It was not originally designed to be one of the five-year ratchet reviews of NDCs set out by the 2015 the Paris Agreement and there were no major new climate change texts due to be negotiated. Sharm’s value…
Today, water and gender day, kicked off the second week of COP 27 after a rest day on Sunday.
Normally technical negotiators would hand over negotiations to ministers after the COP weekend to focus on political issues in the second week. However, at this COP, the Egyptian presidency is apparently not planning to bring ministers…
The day started with the gloomy release of the Global Carbon Project Report which concluded that 2022 was the highest ever emitting year, with increased coal use in India and increased airline use in the U.S. as the main culprits. UN projections are that global emissions must peak by 2025 and halve by 2030 if…
Some frustrations emerged Thursday as it became clear that negotiations on the ‘Cover Text’ for COP27 would not begin until Saturday 12 November. In previous COPs, the text has been almost finalized in negotiations before the meetings started.…
