All posts by Katrin Heeren
Climate Change Report Calls For Immediate Action – Or Adaptation To Sinister Scenarios
High speed mitigation “The high speed mitigation train needs to leave the station very soon and all parties have to get on board,” warns IPCC Chair Rajendra K. Pachauri at the launch of the keenly awaited report of working group III “Mitigation of Climate Change” on Sunday, 13 April in Berlin. It is now proven […]
Continue readingClimate Paradox: Do We Need To Phase Out Coal?
Launch of Working Group III Report, IPCC: 14 April, Berlin While we are in the midst of a steadily progressing Energiewende in Germany, world climate scientists from the renowned climate science body IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) are releasing their newest findings these days in Berlin. The results presented in Yokohama some weeks ago […]
Continue readingDid Europe Sacrifice Its Climate Leadership Role To Backwards-Oriented Money Making Business?
High level climate and energy experts from politics and industry discussed the future European energy policy intensely during the Second European Energy Congress on March 31st and April 1st 2014 in Brussels, organised by the Süddeutscher Verlag Veranstaltungen GmbH. Competitiveness trumps climate policy Competitiveness has replaced climate policy since the crisis, according to the former […]
Continue readingGerman Energiewende – A Weapon Against Climate Change, A Blueprint For A Third Technological Revolution?
Time is running out. Jeffrey D. Sachs, renowned world economist and director of the Sustainable Development Solutions Network strongly urges policy leaders of high and middle income countries to kick-start massive climate action immediately and congratulates Germany on its Energiewende. “Carbon arithmetic is brutal: We are close to surpassing the 2°C ceiling, but the world […]
Continue readingFrom Pioneer To Laggard: EU Support For Renewable Energy – On Decline?
Until recently, the EU has played a pioneer role in both the promotion of renewable energies and advocating global climate action. The EU Commission’s policy framework for climate and energy in the period from 2020 to 2030, released on 22 January, provides little hope for renewable energies to continue their success story.
Continue readingSolarkiosk Business Model Energizing Villages
Imagine a small village in rural Africa, people working on their fields and living in self-built huts made from clay and limestone. I was living in such a community when volunteering for a local afforestation project near Mount Kenya for a couple of weeks. It caught me by surprise that every single person living in […]
Continue readingZero Grazing Cows Creating Energy For Cooking
Entrepreneur and CEO of Sustainable Energy Strategies in Kenya, David Karanja started to design a new concept approach on bioenergy for his home region Nairobi River Basin five years ago. At the time he was concerned about the continued deforestation in this region that is mainly caused by fuel wood demand. Most of its inhabitants […]
Continue readingSustainable Energy for All (SE4ALL) – Will The German Energiewende Survive The Elections?
The objective of this article is to underscore the significance of the UN Initiative “Sustainable Energy for All” and to examine how an industrialized country strives for sustainable energy supply, and contradictorily elects a government that threatens to turn back the clock to fossil times: The German Energiewende. I will start with the bigger picture: […]
Continue readingEducation for Sustainable Development: Framing The Future We Want For All
As of today, two years before the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) reach their target date of 2015, the global community has launched various international and national thematic consultations on elaborating a future development agenda. The processes of evaluating and advancing the current MDG framework and the process of developing a proposal for new Sustainable Development […]
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