Renewable Resources Report

On August 10, RNRF conducted a virtual round table on the issues facing America’s infrastructure and explored how to create a progressive path forward during climate change. Speakers were Doug Sims with the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), and Cris Liban with the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (LA Metro). Both speakers discussed the…

Pew and SYSTEMIQ, with the help of their thought partners University of Oxford, University of Leeds, The Ellen MacArthur Foundation, and Common Seas, recently released a report titled “Breaking the Plastic Wave” that focuses on ways to prevent plastic pollution in the world’s oceans. The report provides a global analysis of marine plastic pollution and…

Conn Nugent, senior fellow at The Ocean Foundation, spoke at a virtual meeting of the RNRF Washington Round Table on Public Policy on July 22, 2020. His talk was titled, “Recent developments in rulemaking and rule enforcement that govern mining of the ocean floor beyond national jurisdictions.” Nugent previously served as the project director for…

The 2020 United Nations Climate Change Conference, also known as COP26, was originally scheduled to be hosted by the United Kingdom in Glasgow, Scotland from the 9th to 20th of November, 2020. This was supposed to be the first “global stocktake” on the progress of the Paris Agreement’s implementation, an important step in the timeline…

By Kristy Dahl, Senior Climate Scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists In May of 2019, I had the opportunity to provide written testimony to the House Science, Space and Technology Committee’s hearing on “The Need for Resilience: Preparing America’s Transportation Infrastructure for Climate Change.” I focused on how the many impacts of climate change—from…

By Dr. Elizabeth Southerland, a member of the Environmental Protection Network, served in the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) from 1984 to 2017. She was the director of the Office of Science and Technology in EPA’s Office of Water from 2012-2017. This article was originally published in The Guardian. On the first Earth Day in 1970, millions…

In 2019, there were 14 weather and climate disaster events with losses exceeding $1 billion each across the United States: three inland flooding events, eight severe storm events, two tropical cyclone events (Dorian and Imelda) and one wildfire event. 2019 experienced an above-average year of costs ($45.0 billion) as the 40-year (1980–2019) annual cost average…

The United Nations High Level Panel for a Sustainable Ocean Economy (HLP) commissioned HLP Expert Group, a global group of over 70 content experts, to organize and edit a series of “Blue Papers” to explore pressing challenges at the nexus of the ocean and the economy. The HLP identified 16 specific topics for which it…

By Teresa Hartmann, Programme Specialist, Environment and Development, World Economic Forum Geneva Climate change was one of the most-discussed topics at the 2020 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Prior to the forum, weforum.org published a piece titled COP25 climate talks: What just happened, and what lies ahead? The article summarized December’s UN climate change meeting in…