As thousands of companies announce their plans to reduce carbon pollution, a small group of sustainability consultants has become the primary arbiter of corporate climate action.
The Science Based Targets initiative, or SBTi, helps companies develop an action schedule to reduce their climate footprint through a combination of reducing greenhouse gas pollution and removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. After years of small-scale sustainability work, SBTi is growing rapidly and governments are paying attention.
But while the group has won praise for pushing the private sector into constructive conversations about climate emissions, its growing influence has also drawn scrutiny and raised questions about why a single organization is setting the standards for many of the world’s largest companies. Read the whole story.
—Ian Morse
Earth is probably safe from a killer asteroid for 1,000 years
The news: A new study has found that no asteroid larger than a kilometer will hit Earth in the next 1,000 years.
How they did it: A team of researchers modeled when asteroids cataloged by NASA were expected to approach Earth in their orbit, before pushing those estimates up to 1,000 years into the future. By identifying “the fraction of the orbit that can bring the object close to Earth,” the team was able to model impact risks much further than has been possible with other methods.
