Beginning in December in China’s Wuhan City, the highly infectious COVID-19 has crossed boundaries and oceans with supersonic speed. It has already claimed more than 83,000 lives, with one million and a half infected so far. In the process, the world has come to a standstill. The numbers of deaths and confirmed cases are rising by leaps and bounds. No …

The 25th Conference of Parties (COP25) of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) ended just days ago. Already, many reviews, mostly negative, have come out globally including in this newspaper. I called the COPs often a process of “active inaction” in my first book on climate politics published by Routledge in 2014. The zenith of its failure was …

The UN’s longest-ever climate negotiations, continuing non-stop for almost two extra days, drew to a close on December 15 with not much to celebrate. Nations on both sides—developed and developing—held hardline positions resulting in utter disappointment, so expressed grudgingly by the UN Secretary General himself. Countries failed to agree on many of the sought-after outcomes, including rules to set up …

The Asia-Pacific Climate Week was held at the UN Conference Centre, Bangkok from September 2 to 6, 2019. The objective was to have a regional dialogue on how to rachet up ambition in mitigation and speed up adaptation actions. This event has also been held in some other regions. It covered a whole range of issues including adaptation, mitigation, loss …