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So what do the world’s great investors have their eyes on in Africa, in addition to the usual natural resources – minerals, petroleum and timber – that they’ve always coveted? In a word, land. Lots of it. The land-grabbing 'investors' are purchasing or leasing large chunks of African land to produce food crops or agrofuels or both, or just scooping up farmland as an investment,

At the moment, the grabbing of Africa’s land is shrouded in secrecy and proceeding at an unprecedented rate, spurred on by the global food and financial crises. GRAIN, a non-profit organisation that supports farm families in their struggles for community-controlled and biodiversity-based food systems, works daily to try to keep up with the deals on its farmlandgrab.org website.[vi]

Apart from the African governments and chiefs who are happily and quietly selling or leasing the land right out from under their own citizens, those who are promoting the new wave of rapacious investment include the World Bank, its International Finance Corporation (IFC), the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and many other powerful nations and institutions. The US Millennium Challenge Corporation is helping to reform new land ownership laws – privatising land – in some of its member countries. The imported idea that user rights are not sufficient, that land must be privately owned, will efface traditional approaches to land use in Africa, and make the selling off of Africa even easier. GRAIN notes the complicity of African elites and says some African 'barons' are also snapping up land.

In 2007, the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) released its first “Prism” model and Model for Estimating the Regional and Global Effects of Greenhouse Gas Reductions (MERGE). 

EPRI updated both analyses in 2009 to reflect economic and technological changes that have the potential to affect projected emissions and the technologies to address them. 

The Prism analysis projects that by 2030, 60% of the total U.S. generation mix would consist of low- or non-CO2 emitting generation

In the latest Electric Power Research Institute Journal, an article titled "Hydropower Reservoirs: A Question of Emissions" notes that reservoirs used for hydropower and for pumped-hydro energy storage are not necessarily as green as you might imagine. Or rather, they might be too green: carbon-rich organic material that accumulates on the reservoir floor can be the source of carbon emissions. A recent study of the 90-year-old Lake Wohlen, in Switzerland, for example, found high emissions of methane, as recently reported in the journal Environmental Science and Technology, in an article titled: "Extreme Methane Emissions from a Swiss Hydropower Reservoir: Contribution from Bubbling Sediments."

Researchers from FOM Institute AMOLF, together with Philips Research, have developed a new type of anti-reflective coating that can reduce the reflection of a silicon wafer, the base material for solar cells, from 40% to 1%. This can significantly increase the efficiency of solar cells.  The new anti-reflection coating can also find applications in coatings for lenses, cameras and photo detectors.

With 2020 just over the horizon, WRI’s 2020 NDC tracker reveals that 68 countries have indicated they will enhance the ambition or action of their NDCs next year -- but they represent only 8% of global emissions.