Writing
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Read any highly ambitious climate pledges or reduction targets lately? I’m guessing yes, given the level of attention on corporate responsibility to reduce and mitigate their climate impact. Including —and especially so— Big Tech. However, to do so, all of them must effectively (not just on paper) reduce their emissions. Are they? Here’s the tl;dr…
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161 for — 8 abstensions — 0 against🌍🌎🌏On July 28, 2022, the UN General Assembly adopted a historic resolution declaring access to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment, a universal human right. This is huge. And it has been 50 years in the making. There are many reasons to applaud the many people whi tirelessly…
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New research piece: Together with Chris Hartgerink, we look at scholarly publishing houses and their environmental impact in this guest post. TL;DR: 1) We need transparent, comparable, machine-readable emissions data. We are in a Climate Emergency — there is no time to hide behind wordy (100 pages) reporting. 2) Some of these research publishers are…
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A short while back, the UK’s CMA practically declared greenwashing illegal (by reiterating consumer protection law). One of the recent cases, enforcing these guidelines, was Oatly, an oat milk consumer brand. Their ads are generally designed as advocacy campaigns that raise awareness around the climate crisis, and our dietary choices. We need more companies contributing…
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In the three months since I joined Climatiq to build out our approach to “Strategy and Impact”, I kept coming back to the need to better understand corporate reporting requirements. As a sustainability practitioner, who spends a lot of time thinking about and working at the intersection of digital rights and climate justice, abbreviations like…
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In Issue 3 of the beautifully designed and curated Branch Magazine, I got to share a call to action for SMEs: Together with Chris Hartgerink, Indré Blauzdžiūnaitė and Vineeta Greenwood we look at some of the main challenges for smaller organisations to take a lead on climate action. We reflect on the lack of scope…
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July 29, 2021 marked Earth Overshoot Day. That is the day we are collectively exceeding our planet’s resources for the year, extracting and emitting more than nature can regenerate. It felt like good day to remember the recent Dutch court ruling, which ordered fossil fuel giant Shell to set more ambitious climate targets. In my…
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The European Green Deal sets out a range of critical actions to address the climate crisis: A climate neutral continent by 2050, clean circular economy, transformations and innovation for public infrastructure, the energy sector, building efficiency and more. It also stipulates investments in “environmentally-friendly technologies” and economic growth that is decoupled from resource use. Artificial…
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After sharing my initial post in this series, which estimate the internet’s environmental footprint to be in the range of 4-7% of global greenhouse gas emissions, parts 2-4 focused on what we can do to improve this impact. Part 2 looked at various environmental reports from big tech companies, such as Netflix, Facebook, and Apple…
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Today, I got to publish part 1 of this series, focusing on estimating the internet’s carbon footpringt at large. I look at social media, online advertising, video streaming, connected devices, and artificial intelligence to get a sense of the scale of emissions that can be attributed to the internet. My calculations get me to around…
Cathleen Berger 