Reasons to Feel Less Helpless

Corals and mangroves are like canaries in the climate change coalmine. Research has shown that these ecosystems are already experiencing harm that may get much worse. But recent work by scholars in HKU’s Swire Institute of Marine Science (SWIMS) and their...

Airborne Solution

Governments need an incentive to take the hard decisions necessary to address climate change, but many, particularly in the developing world, tend to put off taking decisive action because the costs of climate mitigation may exceed the payoffs and take decades to be...

Power Plays

For all the publicity and enthusiasm generated around renewable energies such as solar, wind and biomass, their actual adoption has not been so remarkable. Although their usage in electricity generation has increased from 0.6 per cent of the global total in 1973 to...

The Sovereign State Feels the Heat

Dr Daniel Matthews of the Faculty of Law is an admirer of English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who defined sovereignty as it is commonly understood: escaping nature under the security and protection of the state through a social contract. Hobbes was writing 400 years...

Mysteries of the Deep

A great mystery in palaeoclimatology is the timing and magnitude of the second largest meltwater pulse (MWP-1B). A meltwater pulse is an abrupt rise in sea levels caused by a sudden influx of meltwater. The first MWP, known as 1A, is well documented but until now the...