This IGSD Background Note summarizes the science supporting the need for fast climate mitigation to slow warming in the near term (2022–2041). It also describes the importance of cutting short-lived climate pollutants and protecting sinks in order to slow self-reinforcing feedbacks and avoid tipping points. It explains why winning a fast mitigation sprint to 2030 is critical for addressing the climate emergency and how the sprint complements the marathon to decarbonize the economy and achieve net-zero emissions.
The Center for Environmental Energy Engineering (CEEE) at University of Maryland, the Climate & Clean Air Coalition (CCAC), Centro Studi Galileo, and the Institute for Governance & Sustainable Development (IGSD) have released the Handbook of Best Practices: Room Air Conditioner Installation for the Lowest Carbon Footprint, which explains how to appropriately install high-efficiency room air conditioners (RACs) for the highest energy efficiency and lowest carbon footprint over the products’ lifetime. This comprehensive, open-source guide has been created for HVAC professionals and their business, government, and residential customers.
With climate change and energy efficiency at the forefront of global conversations, the importance of minimizing the carbon footprint of everyday appliances cannot be overstated. Air conditioning creates comfortable work and living spaces, and in climate hotspots is becoming necessary for human survival. RACs also place significant demands on national energy grids and contribute to greenhouse gas emissions. By focusing on optimal installation, the Handbook offers practical steps to mitigate these environmental impacts.
Topics covered include:
- Energy-Efficient Installation Techniques: Explains how the placement and setup of your AC unit can enhance energy efficiency, ensuring that RACs run at peak performance while using less power.
- Choosing the Right RAC Unit: Takes an in-depth look at selecting high-efficiency, eco-friendly air conditioners that are best suited for different climates and building types.
- Refrigerant Management: Reveals the latest developments on sustainable refrigerants that minimize harmful emissions and promote cooling with lower environmental impact.
- Smart Thermostat Integration: Provides Best Practices for integrating RACs with smart technologies to optimize cooling cycles for reduced energy usage.
- Maintenance and Longevity: Gives tips for maintaining RAC systems to ensure they remain efficient over time, helping to extend their life cycle and reduce the need for replacement units.
The authors welcome suggestions from RAC experts regarding edits and additions as the Handbook is improved and made available for translation to other languages.
India’s efforts to address climate change have often centered on carbon dioxide (CO2), but with growing evidence of the substantial impact of short-lived climate pollutants (SLCPs), this focus is sharpening. SLCPs, including black carbon, methane, tropospheric ozone, hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), and nitrous oxide (N2O), are potent contributors to climate change, accelerating global warming with far-reaching implications for health, agriculture, and the environment. Despite their relatively short atmospheric lifetimes compared to CO2, SLCPs have intense warming effects, making their reduction a crucial step toward meeting India’s climate goals. This Primer by IGSD India program provides a comprehensive overview of SLCPs in India, outlining sources, impacts, and potential mitigation strategies.
Nitrous oxide (N2O) is a potent greenhouse gas and an ozone-depleting substance (ODS). Its global warming potential over 100 years is 273 times greater than that of carbon dioxide (CO2). To slow self-amplifying feedbacks and avoid irreversible climate tipping points, the world must quickly cut global human-caused N2O emissions as part of any fast climate mitigation strategy. Because N2O is the most significant ODS not yet regulated by the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer, there is a strong case for adding it to the treaty, at least to control industrial emissions.
While mitigation technology and global attention to N2O are improving, more action is needed to accelerate N2O mitigation. This N2O Primer provides background for a global campaign to reduce N2O emissions. The Primer explains the anthropogenic sources of N2O, explains the benefits of reducing N2O emissions, describes the available cost-effective methods to cut N2O emissions, provides an overview of global governance regimes and initiatives that address N2O, and offers suggestions for strengthening global governance.
IGSD’s supplementary brief presented to the Inter-American Human Rights Court Advisory Opinion Proceedings on the Human Right to Resilience. This supplementary brief further addresses the legal obligations of States to establish and maintain climate resilience in response to the climate emergency to protect and ensure human rights.
Also available in Spanish, El Reconocimiento del Derecho Humano a la Resiliencia en Tiempos de Emergencia Climática, here.
The IGSD Resource Guide on Preventing the Dumping of Inefficient Cooling Equipment provides information and resources for government representatives and their advisors, researchers, academics, non-profit, philanthropic and other nongovernmental organizations, and other citizens to understand the practice of environmentally harmful dumping of new but energy-inefficient cooling equipment that uses high global-warming-potential refrigerants. The Resource Guide also provides insights for those working in other product areas, such as heavy-duty vehicles, involving environmentally harmful product dumping in vulnerable developing countries.
PxD and IGSD are partnering on an initiative to collaboratively identify opportunities for innovation in climate change mitigation, particularly for the greenhouse gases most problematic in agricultural production, methane, and nitrous oxide, as well as carbon dioxide. This initiative includes four analytical pieces on the opportunities for climate change mitigation by smallholder farmers.
Methane is second only to carbon dioxide in its contribution to global warming, and accounts for about half of the temperature increase of human-induced global warming (0.51 °C out of the present 1.06 °C). Strong, rapid, and sustained methane reductions are key to slowing warming in the next two decades, thereby reducing the risks of triggering self-amplifying feedbacks (such as thawing of the permafrost in the Arctic) and of crossing irreversible tipping points (including loss of tropical reefs, the Amazon rainforest, the Greenland Ice Sheet, and the West Antarctic Ice Sheet). Growing recognition of the urgency to reduce methane emissions has propelled over 150 countries to endorse the Global Methane Pledge, which sets a collective target to reduce global methane emissions by at least 30% from 2020 levels by 2030. Achieving this target would reduce warming by at least 0.2 °C by 2050 and keep the planet on a pathway consistent with the goals of the Paris Agreement.
The focus of this brief is on identifying methane mitigation approaches currently suitable for implementation in smallholder farmer and pastoralist contexts.
Climate change poses an existential threat to humankind. The intertwined nature of climate change and human rights becomes apparent as we witness the adverse effects on various dimensions of human life. To address the climate emergency, we must slow down the rate of warming as much as possible as quickly as possible. Only a dual strategy to reduce both non-carbon dioxide super climate pollutants and carbon dioxide (CO2) can keep global temperatures within safe limits and protect human rights for present and future generations. This Brief outlines how the climate emergency is a challenge of temperature, tipping points, and time.
Also available in Spanish and Portuguese.
The Global Cooling Watch report, Keeping it Chill: How to meet cooling demands while cutting emissions – by the UN Environment Programme-led Cool Coalition – lays out sustainable cooling measures in three areas: passive cooling, higher-energy efficiency standards, and a faster phase down of climate-warming refrigerants. The report is released in support of the Global Cooling Pledge, a joint initiative between the United Arab Emirates as host of COP28 and the Cool Coalition.
IGSD Chief Scientist Dr. Gabrielle Dreyfus served as the lead topical author of the chapter on refrigerants.
This paper reviews MLF accomplishments, summarizes TEAP assessment of funding required to replenish MLF, and offers analyses of the benefits that could be achieved with more funding.
