Many economies set climate mitigation targets for 2020 at the 2009 15th Conference of the Parties conference of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Copenhagen. Yet no retrospective review of the implementation and actual mitigation associated with these targets has materialized. Here we track the national CO₂ emissions from both territory and consumption (trade adjusted) perspectives to assess socioeconomic factors affecting changes in emissions. Among the 34 countries analysed, 12 failed to meet their targets (among them Portugal, Spain and Japan) and 7 achieved the target for territorial emissions, albeit with carbon leakage through international trade to meet domestic demand while increasing emissions in other countries. Key factors in meeting targets were intensity reduction of energy and the improvement of the energy mix. However, many countries efforts fell short of their latest nationally determined contributions. Timely tracking and review of mitigation efforts are critical for meeting the Paris Agreement targets.

The ability of businesses to adapt effectively to climate change is highly influenced by the external business enabling environment. Constraints to adaptive capacity are experienced by small and medium enterprises (SMEs) across sub‐Saharan Africa, regardless of the gender of the business owner. However, gender is a critical social cleavage through which differences in adaptive capacity manifest and in Africa most entrepreneurs are women. We conduct a systematic review to synthesize existing knowledge on differential vulnerability of female entrepreneurs in Africa to climate risk, in relation to their sensitivity to extreme climate events and their adaptive capacity. We synthesize this literature using a vulnerability analysis approach that situates vulnerability and adaptive capacity within the context of the wider climate risk framework denoted in the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report. In doing so, we identify gendered barriers and enablers to private sector adaptation and suggest women entrepreneurs face a “triple differential vulnerability” to climate change, wherein they: (1) are often more sensitive to climate risk, as a result of their concentration in certain sectors and types of enterprises (e.g., micro SMEs in the agricultural sector in remote regions); (2) face additional barriers to adaptation in the business environment, including access to finance, technologies, (climate and adaptation) information and supportive policies; and (3) are also often concurrently on the frontline of managing climate risk at household levels. Since various forms of inequality often create compounding experiences of discrimination and vulnerability, we pay particular attention to how factors of differential vulnerability intersect, amplify, and reproduce.This article is categorized under: Climate and Development > Social Justice and the Politics of Development Vulnerability and Adaptation to Climate Change > Institutions for Adaptation

We examine the effects of natural disasters on agricultural households that make rent-in or rent-out transactions. Our econometric approach accounts for the effects of disaster exposure on the adjustments in the quantity of operated land and agricultural income conditional on the land quantity adjustments. Using a household survey data set from Bangladesh, we find that farmers were able to partially ameliorate their losses from exposure to disasters by optimizing their operational farm size through these land rental transactions. Land rental market may be an effective instrument in reducing disaster risks, and postdisaster policies should consider this role more systematically.

Understanding how energy efficiency improvement can mitigate CO₂ emissions is critical for global climate change policies to ensure environmental sustainability and a low carbon future. Being the catalyst for training future generations, universities can play a leading role in this vision by adopting energy-saving and emissions reduction strategies. Using HESA data, a centralized system of reporting energy use and corresponding emissions, we adopt a two-step system GMM estimation procedure to estimate the effect of energy efficiency on CO₂ emissions for 119 UK universities over the period between 2008–2009 and 2018–2019. Results confirm that higher energy efficiency is conducive to lower emissions. However, the less-than-elastic relationship between energy efficiency and emissions implies that energy efficiency improvement alone cannot enable the UK universities to comply with their net-zero objectives unless they increasingly adopt renewable energy sources. Despite this, universities were able to avoid 2.21 gtCO₂e emissions over the sample period due to energy efficiency improvements. Our results are robust to alternative specifications.