Revenue from the new measure is expected to contribute to sustainable fuel use in domestic air transportation by the end of the decade, as well as a pensioner bonus increase of approximately $2.18 billion annually for those receiving the smallest benefits. The Danish government’s goal is to have the nation’s first exclusively green-fueled domestic route operating by 2025.
Together they cover more than 6,200 square miles, tripling the country’s marine area under protection, and are the country’s first to be co-managed by Indigenous communities.
The deal comes as part of a debt forgiveness program —called the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries initiative— overseen by the IMF and the World Bank. As a result of its participation in the program, Somalia’s external debt will fall from 64% of GDP in 2018 to less than 6% of GDP by the end of 2023.
The Southeast Asian country will become the third Asian nation, after Taiwan and Nepal, to legalize same-sex marriage. A new amendment to its Civil and Commercial Code will change the words “men and women” and “husband and wife” to “individuals” and “marriage partners.” The next step will be an amendment to the country’s pension fund law to recognize same-sex couples.
The European Commission has agreed that Germany should be allowed to pay the energy giant RWE some €2.6 billion in state aid for the early closure of coal power stations. Under German law, no more electricity is to be produced from coal from 2038 onward. However, this new agreement moves the date forward to 2030.
“We’ll make it clear that when drug companies won’t sell taxpayer funded drugs at reasonable prices, we will be prepared to allow other companies to provide those drugs for less,” White House adviser Lael Brainard said on a press call.
The Biden administration has now cancelled an unprecedented $130 billion in student debt for more than 3.6 million Americans, offering much-needed relief to low-income families across the country.
Conventional cooling, such as air conditioning, is a major driver of climate change, responsible for over seven per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions. If not managed properly, energy needs for space cooling will triple by 2050, together with associated emissions.
Brazil’s national development bank BNDES has launched the Arc of Restoration program to restore degraded or destroyed woodland amounting to 23,160 square miles – an area nearly the size of Latvia – in the Amazon rainforest by 2030. It also seeks to capture 1.65 billion tons of carbon from the atmosphere by 2030.
At the COP28 Climate Summit in Dubai, the U.S., Czech Republic, Cyprus, Dominican Republic, Iceland, Kosovo and Norway in formally joining the alliance, which was launched in 2017 by the U.K. and Canada. The new members have committed to not developing new unabated coal power plants and phasing out existing unabated coal plants.
