Energy

Philippines to build first offshore wind farm: What lessons can it learn from Asian neighbours?

WRI has launched a new microsite on #JustTransitions. It highlights initiatives by governments, communities and companies that provide lessons for how workers and communities can benefit from the transition to a zero-carbon economy.

Industries with an excess of waste heat can transform it into cold, providing for their and nearby industries process cooling energy demand. When a cluster of businesses cooperate to reduce waste and pollution, efficiently share resources and help to achieve sustainable development, they constitute an eco-industrial park. Learn more about district cooling in eco-industrial parks and some good practices around the world.

There’s been a resurgence in the old-fashioned technique of burning wood to produce energy. [But] the idea that setting trees on fire could be carbon-neutral sounds even odder to experts who know that biomass emits more carbon than coal at the smokestack, plus the carbon released by logging, processing logs into vitamin-sized pellets and transporting them overseas. And solar panels can produce 100 times as much power per acre as biomass.

ESMAP launches its first clean cooking interactive e-course

Our paper on the AERI - Arctic Environmental Responsibility Index has just been made public: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bse.2698. AERI is an environmental ranking of 120 oil, gas, and mining companies that extract natural resources in the Arctic. The ranking was put together by an international team of 10 researchers from Canada, Finland, Greece, Norway, Russia, the UK, and Uzbekistan, drawing on the input of 173 experts based in 17 countries. The purpose of the index is to promote “a race to the top” among extractive companies and across the seven different Arctic jurisdictions by encouraging competition among companies on environmental protection. We therefore hope that the index will be spread as widely as possible.