The United Nations says the world has little time to adapt; the next decade will be crucial in completely rethinking global systems to be net-zero carbon emission to avert unreversible climate chaos. But how will big oil do it? Lucy Woods asks the experts what is being done, and if the great energy transition will be successful in time.

One inescapable difference between ClimateLaunchpad 2020 and previous years has been the monumental challenge of hosting an international event almost entirely online due to the COVID-19 pandemic. While the pandemic is scary, confusing, and fraught with anxieties for both the health of loved ones, and the ongoing uncertainty of wider impacts, as always, the clean tech space has risen to the occasion and remained solutions-focused - despite facing a gigantic, complex problem. “We managed. We are

This year at ClimateLaunchpad the diversity of both ideas and participants has increased, with people from across the globe, from a vast mix of communities, with multiple perspectives working towards the same challenge: climate change. Among this years’ cohort, women and girls have continued to hold leadership roles, and as a result, are changing long-held narratives about gender and climate change.

With over 30 years’ experience in the aluminium smelting industry, Hjaltalín knows a revolutionary idea when he sees one, and when he met Dr Theodore Beck, a professor at the University of Washington, Seattle, USA, he knew he’d found something potentially extraordinary. Hjaltalín met Beck a few times at the USA’s Minerals, Metals and Materials Society conferences. He had heard of the professor’s work and also knows Beck’s family back in Iceland. Beck’s idea was both “interesting and challenging,” says Hjaltalín. The academic idea Beck was working on, was to create a “completely new” aluminium process based on multiple vertical, inert or non-consumable metallic anodes and ceramic cathodes, with a lower temperature electrolyte (800C). The electrolyte dissolves the alumina into oxygen and aluminium, explains Hjaltalín.

“Climate change has always been in my mind,” says Nath. India is the fifth most vulnerable country to climate change in the world, and its effects are already apparent. “We have rising temperatures, decreasing rainfall, and extreme weather events are becoming more and more common," says Nath. Coming from a family of wildlife conservationists, Nath has discovered that places she had grown to love had become increasingly marginalised over the last decade, especially in the race to development.

“If you are serious about the relationship between sustainability and poverty,” says Winthrop, “you have to take a grassroots perspective.” This is why Irish Aid is most interested in micro solutions, she says. The best way to create sustainable wealth and development is from the ground up, by “fostering innovation among subject matter experts,” she says.

Burford began his start-up career investing in the digital tech space over 30 years ago. “I was in my mid-twenties – and sometimes the start-ups crashed!” he jokes. But for the last 10 years, as a leading entrepreneurial coach at EIT Climate-KIC, Burford has focused on the world of climate change solutions. Burford made the switch all those years ago as “apps and that are great.” However, he knew climate change “is this really important problem that humanity needs to solve.”

Dunlop notes one of her first climate related successes was helping her father become “a climate activist warrior”. A Shell executive, her father extracted oil and coal. Over the family dinner table, Dunlop would tell him that his way of economic rationalising without considering people was, “absolutely wrong.” And it worked. “I have watched this total 180-degree change,” she says.

The energy sector is in the middle of a mass transition. The race to decarbonise and switch to renewable energy will present many challenges and opportunities throughout the global industry - including opportunities for international collaboration.

Skipping meals to talk to the media, aiming to get arrested – and still making it to your hockey game. These are just some of the tasks found on the to-do lists of campaigners in Canada who are putting everything on the line to fight for a liveable, just future. Lucy EJ Woods went to meet them. It’s late November 2019 and the pavements are buzzing in St Catherine Street, the busiest shopping area in Montreal, as retailers feverishly prepare for Black Friday – the international festival of material indulgence and opportunity for huge profits, which is just four days away.

Durham County is notably pro-renewables, despite being a mining community. The south facing rooftops are covered with polysilicon and thin-film solar panels. The rounded silhouette of hilly fields decorated with the spinning fans of wind turbines bobbing in and out of sight. Pont Valley sits within Durham, a rural area spotted with detached houses, horses and livestock. On Wednesday 26 February, it was 7 degrees and there were still clumps of snow and ice on the ground...

At the 2015 United Nations' climate negotiations in Paris (COP21), countries pledged to keep global temperature rise below 1.5C. But current policy is set to heat the planet by more than 3C. To help close this gap between promises and reality, Article 6 of the Paris Agreement - the piece of legislation responsible for setting up the mechanisms for a worldwide carbon emissions trading system - was to be finalised at the end of last year in Madrid, at COP25.

Across Europe, and many other places, people are laying their bodies down, facing arrest, calling for government action on environmental policies, including cutting fossil fuel subsidies. In Ecuador, people are putting their lives at risk to reinstate them. The protests were successful. After eleven days of unrest, seven dead, hundreds arrested and thousands injured, the government met with protesters for peace talks, and negotiated the reinstatement of fossil fuel subsidies in Ecuador.

The four-wheel-drive is king of the road in Papua New Guinea. Driving anywhere outside the capital, Port Moresby, is a whiplash roulette of swerving around zigzag crevices and blindsiding potholes. When the Australian government, a primary source of infrastructure aid funding for PNG, evaluated PNG’s road management from 2007-2017, it found almost 60 percent of national roads to be “in very poor condition.” This included sections of PNG’s sparse highways. Although the Pacific island nation is

In 50 years’ time, many energy sector jobs could be made quicker and more efficient thanks to upcoming technology. By 2050, BP’s Energy Outlook 2018 predicts that digital technology improvements – from holograms to self-healing machines – could reduce energy sector costs by 20–30%. The newest of these innovations include light fidelity (LiFi), optical computing, power over WiFi, and quantum sensors.

When big cats cross from one country into another, they can fall victim to wildlife traffickers, drug cartels, highways and more emerging threats. In early April the mutilated body of a jaguar was discovered in Mexico’s Yaxchilán Natural Monument. Researchers investigating the death quickly concluded that the animal, which had been tracked in neighboring Guatemala since 2015, had crossed the border and fallen prey to wildlife traffickers, who may have taken its head for sale on the black marke

Papua New Guinea is a canopy-covered country, with a substantial chunk of the world’s third-largest rainforest and some 7 percent of global biodiversity. It is home to many endemic species, from legless lizards to the amber-plumed Raggiana bird-of-paradise (Paradisaea raggiana), immortalized on the nation’s flag. These natural wonders are ostensibly safeguarded by laws that include the Land Act of 1996, the Environment Act (2000), Forestry Act (1991), Mining Act (1992) and the Oil and Gas Act (

The Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Summit that opens in Port Moresby this week is supposed to be a showcase of Papua New Guinea’s hosting, but the run-up to the event has been overshadowed by fast cars. Italian-made Maseratis, mostly — 40 of them, flown in on specially chartered cargo flights — as well as three Bentleys. At a reported $148,000 per Maserati, and an estimated freight cost of at least $1.2 million, this outlay by the poorest of the APEC member states has put the governme

“I lost everything,” says Joe Moses, recalling the day homes in his community of Paga Hill were demolished. Moses is one of thousands of Papua New Guineans who have lost their homes to make way for new developments as the country prepares to host the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit, which begins Nov. 17. Plans for the gathering in the capital, Port Moresby, were underway as early as 2011, when the summit was held in Honolulu, Hawaii. The government has since embarked on a build

PORT MORESBY — Heavily armed civilian groups have burned and damaged ExxonMobil construction equipment in a land dispute involving a natural gas plant in Papua New Guinea. The civil unrest took place Wellhead A, part of the PNG LNG (Papua New Guinea Liquefied Natural Gas) project. In a statement to Mongabay, an ExxonMobil PNG spokesperson confirmed “vandalism to heavy equipment and some camp buildings,” last week in Angore, Hela province. PNG LNG is the largest infrastructure resource extract