By Guy Edwards and J. Timmons Roberts
Recently, China is behind a new wave of trade and commercial ties across Latin American which focuses almost exclusively on natural resources including fossil fuels, mining and agricultural commodities.
China’s rapidly increasing investment, trade and loans in Latin America may be entrenching a heavily polluting economic model which is out of step with the required action to achieve cleaner and more sustainable economies.
By Guy Edwards and J. Timmons Roberts
The Chinese financed project would replace Costa Rica’s old national oil refinery.
China’s rapidly increasing investment, trade and loans in Latin America may be entrenching high-carbon development pathways in the region, a trend scarcely mentioned in policy circles. High-carbon activities include the extraction of fossil fuels and other natural resources, expansion of large-scale agriculture and the energy-intensive stages of processing natural resources into intermediate goods.
This paper addresses three examples, including Chinese investments in Venezuela’s oil sector and a Costa Rican oil refinery, and Chinese investment in and purchases of Brazilian soybeans.
By Guy Edwards, Michael Murphy and Paola Eisner
Deteriorating political stability, which has allegedly left 150 injured and 50 dead, does not bode well for Venezuela’s plans to host a climate summit in November before the UN Climate Convention meets in Peru this December.
By Guy Edwards and Timmons Roberts
This year Lima will host the next major round of UN Climate Change negotiations. The opportunity to establish climate change as a key domestic issue and achieve progress at the UN negotiations will not come around for another generation.
By Guy Edwards and Timmons Roberts
As delegates begin to reflect on the limited success of the UN Climate Change negotiations in Warsaw which ended last week, eyes are now turning optimistically to Peru as the incoming president of COP20 in 2014.
Climate and Development Lab 