The Breakthrough Agenda Report 2024

Since its launch at COP 26, the Breakthrough Agenda has become established as an annual collaborative process centred around the Conference of the Parties (COP) meetings of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). It is currently supported by 59 countries representing over 80% of global GDP, and by over 150 initiatives working to enhance collaboration within major emitting sectors. Countries can endorse

Breakthrough goals to make clean technologies and sustainable practices more affordable, accessible and attractive than their alternatives by 2030 in the power, road transport, hydrogen, steel, cement, buildings and agriculture sectors. This report covers six …

S.A.M. Tool

An intuitive, web-based tool — S.A.M (Stakeholder Analysis and Mapping) — simplifies the process of creating insightful visualizations of stakeholder relationships and power dynamics for projects in all sectors, communities, and regions.

This free, user-friendly, web-based tool will enable all types of decision makers – communities, labor groups, project developers, community-based organizations (CBOs), local, state, and federal officials, etc. to create clear visualizations of local stakeholder relationships and real-time power dynamics and gain deeper insights into the local context and socio-economic landscape.…

State and Trends of Carbon Pricing: International Carbon Markets 2024

Well-designed, high integrity carbon markets can play a pivotal role in financing climate action in developing countries. However, several critical bottlenecks impede the growth of these markets. The 2024 State and Trends of International Carbon
Markets report evaluates the progress made in addressing these bottlenecks, highlights the urgency of these issues, and proposes recommendations to ensure that carbon markets reach their full potential.…

Utilities and Carbon Removal A Gigaton Scale Opportunity

Energy utilities and Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) are important and parallel threads on the path to deep decarbonization. Utilities, especially electric utilities, are leading the energy sector decarbonization efforts — integrating gigawatts of new clean energy resources each year while preparing for surging demand from new climate loads, including transportation and building electrification, clean fuels production, and now carbon removal. Carbon Removal, a suite of pathways to draw carbon down from the atmosphere, is emerging as a necessary complement to direct emissions reduction measures for legacy emissions and hard-to-abate sectors.

In this report, they examine four key threads which intertwine …

Coal-to-Clean Success Stories

Even as there are promising shifts toward cleaner sources of electricity production in much of the world, 73 percent of the global power sector’s pollution still came from coal-fired power in 2021. There are several hurdles to shifting these sources to cleaner options. However, we have seen instances of relatively rapid, managed, and just coal-to-clean asset transitions in diverse geographies. RMI identified three such examples in the case studies below.

– In Chile, a strong mandate from the government attracted international capital that enabled the early retirement of Tocopilla coal units 14 and 15, avoiding hundreds of thousands of tons …

Why Wind and Solar Need Natural Gas: A Realistic Approach to Variability

Wind and solar power will replace consistently dispatchable electricity from fossil fuels with variable and more unpredictable clean energy. Seasonal shifts and annual variations cannot be handled with batteries or other proposed storage solutions like hydrogen. Natural gas will have to bridge the gap for many decades.…

Unlocking New Opportunities for Carbon Neutrality in China’s Building Sector

Achieving a net-zero building sector is critical to China’s carbon neutrality. In 2022, the building sector was responsible for 32 percent of the country’s CO2 emissions. While emissions have plateaued since 2014, the continued growth of the sector underscores the need for immediate action to decouple emissions from expansion. As major consumers of energy and significant users of industrial materials, buildings play a key role in the transition to net zero, not only supporting the goal of carbon neutrality, but also improving quality of life, promoting social equity, and contributing to a green economy.

This report provides sector-level analyses of …

Accelerating Country-led Air Quality Reporting to Achieve Clean Air

There is no single, authoritative, comprehensive, regularly updated, database that provides recent national air pollution levels around the world — not even for fine particulate matter, known as PM2.5, the deadliest and one of the most commonly tracked air pollutants. Access to basic, timely, recurring global air quality data is essential to identify hotspots for action, provide supporting resources, and track progress on pollution reduction across space and time. The invisibility in data, in turn, makes it harder to convince stakeholders to act, and to hold decision-makers accountable for policies, practices, regulations, laws and investments that impact air quality and …

2023 Corporate Citizenship Report

ICF was born out of the belief that companies should do more than make a profit, and that corporate citizenship isn’t separate from their work. Corporate citizenship is at the core of what they do and why they do it. Through our purpose-driven culture, ICF shares one important thing in common—a passion for creating a better tomorrow.

In their latest corporate citizenship report, they share:

– How ICF’s employees are supported—both inside and outside of the office—to ensure their work is meaningful and fulfilling.
– What they’ve accomplished toward minimizing their environmental footprint, including how they continue to achieve their …

Power Shift: How Virtual Power Plants Unlock Cleaner, More Affordable Electricity Systems

Virtual power plants (VPPs) are flexible and quickly deployable resources that are poised to address some of the most pressing, interconnected challenges of our electricity grid: growing loads, a retiring conventional generation fleet, and the need for rapid deployment of new, utility-scale renewable generation. Power Shift: How Virtual Power Plants Unlock Cleaner, More Affordable Electricity Systems shows how distributed technologies, aggregated into virtual power plants, can reduce emissions and costs for ratepayers by managing peak demand, reducing the need for expensive, emissions-intensive gas generation, and unlocking renewable portfolios.

Power Shift provides a vision for what’s possible for VPPs in grid …