This paper (Druckman A, Chitnis M, Sorrell S and Jackson T (2011). Missing carbon reductions? Exploring rebound and backfire effects in UK households, Energy Policy Volume 39, Issue 6, Pages 3572-3581) examines the rebound effect. Households are expected to play a pivotal role in reducing the UK's greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and the UK Government is encouraging specific household actions to help meet its targets. However, due to the rebound effect, only a portion of the GHG emission reductions estimated by simple engineering calculations are generally achieved in practice.

Drought. Past Problems and Future Scenarios by Sheffield and Wood E F (2011, Earthscan), examines how UK Drought is one of the likely consequences of climate change in many regions of the world. Together with an increased demand for water resources to supply the world's growing population, it represents a potentially disastrous threat to water supplies, agriculture and food production, leading to famine and environmental degradation. Yet predicting drought is fraught with difficulty.

A report by the IPCC finds that close to 80% of the world‘s energy supply could be met by renewables by mid-century if backed by the right enabling public policies. It argues that the that the rising penetration of renewable energies could lead to cumulative greenhouse gas savings equivalent to 220 to 560 Gigatonnes of carbon dioxide (GtC02eq) between 2010 and 2050. The upper end of the scenarios assessed, representing a cut of around a third in greenhouse gas emissions from business-as-usual projections, could assist in keeping concentrations of greenhouse gases at 450 parts per million.

PBL (Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency) has published a new study which assesses the effects of present European meat, dairy and fish dietary consumption on biodiversity, land use and GHG emissions. The study has also developed a series of scenarios that model the effects of possible dietary and other shifts on global land use and GHG emissions by means of coupled macro-economic and environmental models. Regarding the present situation the main findings are:

Growth in emission transfers via international trade from 1990 to 2008 (Peters G P, Minx J C, Weber C L and Edenhofer (2011) PNAS) demonstrates the need to consider the embedded emissions in imports when assessing a country’s contribution to GHG emissions. This paper finds that for developed countries, the embedded emissions in imports have increased faster than national-territory emissions, and that most of these are a result of non-energy intensive manufacturing.

The Global Legislators Organisation (GLOBE) has published a major study into the status of climate change legislation in 16 of the world’s largest economies. The study, completed in partnership with the Grantham Research Institute at the London School of Economics, the following findings: Legislation is being advanced, to varying degrees, in all of the study countries Most of the legislative activity has taken place over the last year and a half – contrasting sharply with the difficulties experienced by the international negotiations over the same timeframe