A sharp rise in the deployment of carbon capture, utilisation and storage (CCUS) technology is needed globally if countries are to meet net-zero emissions targets designed to slow climate change, the International Energy Agency (IEA) said on Thursday.
To reach that, the amount of CO2 captured must rocket to 800 million tonnes in 2030 from around 40 million tonnes today, the IEA, which advises industrialised nations on energy policies, said in a report.
Up to $160 billion needs to be invested in the technology by 2030, a ten-fold increase from the previous decade, it added.
“Without it, our energy and climate goals will become virtually impossible to reach,” the IEA head Fatih Birol said in a statement.
Danish renewable energy group Ørsted and North America's Building Trades Unions (NABTU) announced on Wednesday a deal to train an offshore wind construction workforce to build the firm's pipeline of projects down the U.S. East Coast.
The number of disasters caused by extreme weather and climate-related events is surging, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies said in a report on Tuesday, but funding is not getting to where it is most needed.
Floods, storms and heatwaves have increased per decade by nearly 35 percent since the 1990s, affecting 1.7 billion people over the last 10 years and killing some 410,000, according to the IFRC’s 378-page report, “Come Heat or High Water”.
Such events now account for 83 percent of all disasters and there is a growing risk of simultaneous emergencies, the report said, adding to signs of a dramatic increase in extreme weather events like the massive storms in this year’s record Atlantic hurricane season.
However, funding to cope with such events does not always flow to the most vulnerable, the study found.
“There is a clear disconnection between where the climate risk is greatest and where climate adaptation funding goes,” said IFRC’s Secretary General Jagan Chapagain, adding that the aid community was “failing” some countries.
Among the countries that were ranked as being most vulnerable to such disasters were Sudan, which has experienced record floods this year, and drought-prone Somalia. But these nations respectively received just 27 cents and 59 cents per person in climate adaptation funding in 2018, the study showed.
Honduras, which is in the path of hurricane Iota just days after being struck by Eta, receives juts $1.22 - a figure which IFRC’s Matthew Cochrane described as “grossly inadequate”.
Three cities increasingly at risk of natural disasters share how smart sustainable technologies can help mitigate climate risk and improve citizen services.
