Amar Causevic

Extreme heat, massive floods, and ever-longer droughts caused by climate change are intensifying in magnitude and intensity across the globe. Forests are threatened by increases in the average global temperature and human-driven economic activity. Artificial intelligence and Earth observation technologies present opportunities to improve environmental sustainability, promoting Sustainable Development Goals through more efficient forest management and stewardship. These technologies can potentially improve the mapping, understanding, and monitoring of forests’ ecosystem services, directly aiding humanity’s efforts to combat climate change. However, increased use of these technologies could also create new risks, making these efforts counterproductive. This perspective article identifies opportunities and risks of using artificial intelligence and Earth observation technologies to protect forests globally. It discusses how risks can be mitigated and what governance mechanisms should be used to design sustainable forest-focused artificial intelligence.

Background: Development finance is vital for low- and middle-income countries to enhance their sustainability agendas, as it provides essential funding necessary to close domestic financing gaps, including in the energy sector. Coal is still a vital power source for the energy sectors in the Western Balkans (i.e., Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia, and Serbia). The energy sector is a critical component in the five countries’ pursuit to decarbonize (i.e., follow the net zero pathways) due to its central role as a primary contributor to greenhouse gas emissions and a critical enabler of sustainability transition. This article presents a mapping exercise of development finance for five Western Balkan countries’ energy sectors. The study conducted a scoping literature review and detailed analysis of the five countries’ energy sector-related development finance flows from 2008 to 2020. This aimed to provide insights into the development finance flows for renewable and non-renewable energy sources in five Western Balkan countries. Results: The scoping literature review indicated a significant gap in knowledge about the effects and effectiveness of development finance in the Western Balkans. Data analysis identified US$3.2 billion in energy development finance in the examined countries. The disbursement ratios were above the global average of 63%. Serbia received the highest proportion of the total funding, while Montenegro obtained the highest funding per capita. The data analysis did not establish a connection between adopting the Paris Agreement in 2016 and increasing development finance flows for renewable energy projects. Around one-third of the disbursed development finance was invested in projects for energy supply using non-renewable sources. Official Development Aid loans represented 37% (US$1.2 billion) of the total funding, contributing to the increase in indebtedness in the five countries. European-based bilateral and multilateral development finance providers were the most important actors in the five examined countries. Conclusions: The amount of the disbursed development finance was insufficient to cover a significant percentage of the needs of the surveyed countries. Although carbon-intensive energy infrastructure received considerable funding, the total amount of disbursed energy development finance ranged between 0.15 and 0.62% of the average gross domestic product for the analyzed countries during the study period. Based on the research findings, we recommend that development finance providers and recipient countries pay greater attention to planning for strategic funding disbursement.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has influenced how investors categorize sustainable investments. More precisely, an invasion has been used as an excuse to label investments in companies supplying weapons used in self-defense to fight against Russian aggression as socially sustainable since they are a tool helping democracy to repel the invasion of the non-democratic counterpart. Suddenly, the weapons industry started becoming an entirely acceptable sustainable investment asset. This demonstrated that weapons are not the cause but only the result of flawed sustainable investing thinking, which can sometimes be based on ideas that vary widely in terms of consistency and accuracy. This paper discusses some of the reasons underlining systematic problems in the sustainable finance realm and lists why defensive weapons can never be classified as an acceptable asset to invest in.

Background: Securing adequate financing for the environment, climate change, and sustainable development has been challenging, especially in low- and middle-income economies. Bosnia and Herzegovina is a country aspiring to become a member state of the European Union. Despite undergoing a socio-economic transition, the country is more than four times as energy-intensive as the average European Union member state. Since the end of the war in the 1990s, the country has received significant amounts of bilateral and multilateral development aid, including environmental finance (e.g., climate finance, funding for biodiversity conservation, impact funding). To facilitate future sustainable finance prioritization, this study analyzes Bosnia and Herzegovina’s environmental finance. Results: The study conducted a scoping literature review and detailed analysis of the environmental finance flows for Bosnia and Herzegovina in the period from 2015 to 2020. The results show that the scientific knowledge on the (effectiveness of) environmental finance for Bosnia and Herzegovina is almost non-existent. The country received US$545.6 million in environmental finance in the studied period and more than 99% of this funding was spent on water, energy, waste, and environmental management. In contrast, biodiversity, resource management, chemical safety and environmental noise received less than 1% of total funding. Bosnia and Herzegovina received 58% of the financing in grants, while 38% was provided in various types of loans. Conclusions: There is a considerable difference in the received funding among different sectors. Funders prioritized a few sectors (e.g., water), whereas others (i.e., biodiversity and nature conservation, chemical safety and noise, and resource management) were neglected. Bosnia and Herzegovina can argue for more equitable funding distribution based on its minor contribution to global greenhouse gas emissions. Providing almost 40% of environmental finance to Bosnia and Herzegovina in loans increases the country’s level of indebtedness. It distorts the principle of climate justice since the country has been an irrelevant greenhouse gas emitter.

The concept of the Anthropocene has reintroduced politics of denial at the centre of critical studies of international relations. This article interrogates Bruno Latour’s explanation of climate change denial with reference to an ontological difference between Modernity and the Anthropocene, together with his advocacy for a new language beyond the Modern gaze. Our aims are twofold: to disclose how Latour’s posthuman critique risk reproducing prevalent forms of climate change denial in the global North, and to question what falls outside Latour’s dualistic frame: the heterogenous ways through which climate change and the Anthropocene is met across the globe; the ambiguous relation with nature through which modernity was formed; the modernist genealogy of Anthropocene discourse, and lastly how discourses of global governance have absorbed posthumanist critique in its attempt to naturalise postcolonial power relations. At stake, we argue, is critical theory’s paradoxical complicity in the denialism it seeks to critique.

Continued greenhouse gas emissions will lead to a rise in temperatures, accompanied by rising sea levels threatening low-lying coastal cities. This vulnerability is especially acute in developing countries’ cities. This study reviews whether Bangkok, Manila, and Jakarta, less prepared emerging urban centers of developing countries, are investing in adaptation projects for resilience against sea-level rise and urban flooding. Sea-level rise and urban flooding resilience projects were identified in the selected cities through secondary research methods, data on multilateral climate funds, and other aggregated funding databases such as Aid Atlas, Cities Adaptation Action, and City Risk Index. Our findings show that even though these cities do have some adaptation projects to address coastal flooding and rising sea-level threats, the funding has been disparate and dispersed due to a lack of continuous, sizeable, and diverse financing options and does not come close to the requirement, given the risks, of covering potential disaster-related losses. Our findings further highlight the need to expand financing beyond multilateral funds and bilateral funding agreements and to include financial mechanisms that incentivize potential stakeholders to invest in projects that ordinarily are considered nonrevenue generating.

NATO's current security doctrine needs to change. It needs to enhance its political will and institutional capacity to manage climate change threats, both within the alliance itself and within the area most vulnerable to its southern flank: the Middle East. NATO will need to evolve into a CATO, a "Climate Alliance Treaty Organization," that deals with the security implications of potential tipping points and develops policies in response. A case study as to how NATO can assume this role can be seen in how the organization dealt with environmental issues in Iraq, in the aftermath of war with the Islamic State.

The developing world is currently undergoing fast urbanization, and urban infrastructure systems built today are likely to influence global greenhouse gas emissions and energy consumption patterns for decades to come. This study draws on the analysis of 1994–2014 climate finance investments by five major multilateral climate funds that have a record of directly supporting urban climate mitigation and adaptation actions in cities across developing countries. The analysis indicates that the administered funds provided very limited support to urban climate finance across the developing world. In middle-income countries mitigation projects within transport sector dominated both urban multilateral climate finance and co-finance. Cities in low-income countries attracted non-considerable amounts of urban climate finance, most of which were supporting urban adaptation efforts. The study concludes by outlining that multilateral climate funds should give higher priority to urban climate finance on their investment portfolios with a particular emphasis on rapidly urbanizing cities in low-income countries.