Carbon bombs and the global climate change mitigation agenda

Carbon bombs are fossil fuel projects with more than 1 gigaton of potential CO₂ emissions. University of Leeds researchers have established the global list of such projects consisting of roughly 200 oil and gas fields and 200 coal mines.

The potential for defusing new carbon bombs, putting existing ones into harvest mode and how to engage with the ‘forgotten regions’ of China, Russia and the Middle East are some of the interesting themes emerging from their analysis.

In this webinar we will present the research and discuss its implications for the framing – and prospects of success – of global climate change mitigation efforts. We will also hear from efforts on the ground to defuse carbon bombs and explore what everyone can do to help defuse a carbon bomb and avoid a gigaton of CO₂ emissions.

Speakers

Svitlana Romanko is founder and director of Razom We Stand, an international organisation based in Ukraine and has been an environmental lawyer for over twenty years and climate justice campaigner for a decade. She holds a PhD in Environmental, Natural Resources, Land and Agrarian Law, and a doctorate on Climate Change Law, Climate Governance and Climate Policy. Svitlana worked for 350.org and Laudato Si Movement, campaigned for a Just Green Recovery and Green Deal in Eastern Europe, launched and coordinated the Stand With Ukraine campaign to end global fossil fuel addiction that feeds Putin’s war machine.

Soumya Dutta is a long standing people’s science and climate justice activist who has written extensively on climate, energy, environmental governance, rivers etc, has engaged with multiple nature dependent livelihood based communities and helped them build knowledge and resilience, has intervened in sub-national, national and international climate policies and frameworks. Over the last 15 years, he has engaged with the UNFCCC process and spoken in over 50 meetings and conferences in different UN fora. He also made presentations/lectured in universities in many continents and authored studies on ESS/ESG of international financial institutions.

Kjell Kühne directs the Leave it in the Ground Initiative (LINGO) which works on ‘game-changing’ strategies to bring fossil fuel burning to a swift end. For the past decade, he has worked on a range of campaigns and mechanisms to move beyond fossil fuels from the community to the UN level. In parallel to steering LINGO’s work, he is currently in the final stages of pursuing a PhD in Geography at the University of Leeds under the supervision of Jamie van Alstine and Paul Routledge.

Read more in the research paper “Carbon Bombs” – Mapping key fossil fuel projects and the Guardian article Revealed: the ‘carbon bombs’ set to trigger catastrophic climate breakdown