20 reports in this theme, newest first.
In 2022 the median fuel importer's bill jumped from 4.5% to 7.4% of GDP, and the jump tracked how much each country imported, not how clean its power was (r = −0.08). Import bills are mostly oil and gas for transport, heat and industry, so the transition protects only when it reaches those uses. When it does, it also cuts the 86% of fossil air-pollution deaths borne by importers and the emissions behind climate risk.
Burning coal, oil, gas and biofuels caused 48% of the 3.8 million deaths from outdoor fine particles in 2017, the same combustion that drives climate change. Each million tonnes of fossil CO₂ carries about 105 deaths a year in lower-middle-income countries and 9 in rich ones, so poorer countries, which emit 11% of fossil CO₂, bear 34% of fossil-fuel air-pollution deaths. Cleaning the air must be paired with methane cuts: alone it adds 0.26°C by 2050, but with methane cuts only 0.02°C.
Closing every extreme-poverty gap with targeted transfers would add just 0.07% to global CO₂. Reaching the same goal through broad growth at today's carbon intensity would add about 100 times as much. Most countries escaped mass poverty at under 2 tonnes of CO₂ per person, and 44 developing countries with 4.2 billion people cut poverty and carbon intensity together after 2015. Explicit fossil-fuel subsidies of $725 billion a year are more than six times the extreme-poverty gap.
In low- and middle-income countries, 69% of people now cook mainly with gas or electricity, up from 27% in 1990, but 2.03 billion still rely on wood, charcoal, coal or kerosene. In sub-Saharan Africa the number using polluting fuels has risen by about 340 million since 2000, and charcoal users have more than tripled. At least 1.37 billion people without clean cooking already have electricity, which makes efficient electric cooking a second lane alongside LPG. Even so, the 2015–2023 pace would leave about 1.6 billion people without clean cooking in 2030.
Thirty-six countries with 3.0 billion people combine high climate hazard, high pollution exposure and weak coping capacity — across the Sahel, West and Central Africa and South Asia. The opportunity is concentrated too: the 60 countries breathing 25 µg/m³ or more emit 74% of the world's coal CO₂ and half its greenhouse gases, so in a handful of airsheds the same coal and methane cuts that slow warming would clean the air for billions.
Electric-car sales are on an S-curve that takes them from 10% to 90% in about ten years, and solar power in about seventeen, but the energy system's low-carbon share is moving at a pace that would take 170 years. A transparent race model shows that keeping peak warming below 2°C needs the whole system to move at roughly wind's pace, and below 1.7°C at solar's. The budget for 1.5°C runs out around 2028 on every path.
Across 110 economies that started the century below half the OECD's income, starting poorer did not mean growing faster. Among countries with similar access to power and similar outage rates, poorer ones caught up about a percentage point a year faster for each halving of starting income. Mapping catch-up growth since 2000 against electricity, logistics, cooling and connectivity shows power as the binding gate and the others as multipliers that depend on it.
Internet use has exceeded electricity access by more than five points in only 10 of 3,072 country-years across the Global South, and health coverage has rarely passed 60 before electricity reaches 90 per cent. Yet health is the slowest layer to build. On current trends only 28 of 129 low- and middle-income countries reach universal energy, water, health and digital access by 2050. Their data shows the order in which to build.
Mobile payments connect households to pay-as-you-go solar, but digital collection alone does not make an energy portfolio bankable. This report examines the infrastructure, contract economics and financing structures that turn small payments into durable energy access.
Forecasts of fossil demand now disagree about the direction after 2030, which makes prediction a poor basis for policy. What is not in dispute is that resource revenue is becoming shorter-dated and more variable. That is an asset–liability problem, and it has four known treatments.
Pakistan imported 17 GW of solar panels in a single year. South Africa's rooftops went from under 1 GW to over 7 GW. Lebanon's solar capacity rose thirteenfold. None of these were planned transitions; all followed a crisis that made the incumbent unaffordable or unavailable. This report asks what determines whether such a window produces a leapfrog or a diesel generator.
Nexus disruptions travel along whichever link is tightest: gas into fertiliser into food in 2022, drought into hydropower and into shipping lanes in 2023 and 2024. Clean technologies break those particular chains — and create new ones. This report maps four substitutions, what each buys, and what each newly requires.
Green industrial strategy tends to offer every sector the same package. But an aluminium smelter is stopped by the price of electricity, an electronics plant by a four-hour outage, and a garment factory by a heatwave or a flood. Sorting industries by their binding constraint produces a different — and cheaper — sequence of investments.
Climate policy treats adaptation and mitigation as parallel agendas competing for finance. In economies building both capital stocks at once, they are better understood as complements in production — with a minority of cases where they genuinely compete. This report sets out where the dependencies run, where the conflicts are real, and how to appraise an asset that discharges both duties.
Air pollution contributed to 7.9 million deaths in 2023, and an estimated 5.13 million excess deaths a year are attributable to fossil-fuel air pollution that a transition would remove. The burden is heaviest in the thirty-three megacities, where combustion is densest and exposure closest. This report sets out the evidence that decarbonization is, in practice, the largest public-health programme available to them, and how to design it to collect that return.
Climate litigation was a northern sport: a Dutch foundation, a German grandmother, an American youth cohort. In the past decade the centre of gravity has shifted south, where courts have ordered governments to implement their own climate laws, blocked coal plants and deforestation, and written a right to a stable climate into constitutions that never mentioned it.
Climate change and air pollution come out of the same combustion, which has made it natural to treat them as one problem. They differ in residence time by five orders of magnitude, in the geography of their harm, and in the sign of their effect on the planet's energy balance — and each difference changes what a combined strategy can do.
Every serious polycrisis strategy names the same four elements, and the list has never been the problem. The four differ in who captures their benefit and in whether anyone but the beneficiary can supply them — which determines the instrument that can deliver each, and explains why combined strategies underperform their parts.
Pollution, poverty and climate cause one another in every direction, and are managed by three ministries on three timetables. Integrated strategies keep failing not because the analysis is wrong but because integrated things must still be bought by a single budget holder on a single clock. The remedy is to appraise on the fastest.
The clean transition is usually argued as climate policy — a cost accepted now for a distant temperature. Read instead as risk-mitigation infrastructure, it lowers four coupled dangers at once: climate destabilisation, air-pollution mortality, energy insecurity and coercive energy geopolitics. The operative variable is not ambition but deployment.