Launching a study that highlighted the role of climate change in causing the glacial rock and ice collapse that triggered the Himalayan flood, WWA co-founder Friederike Otto told reporters that “no amount of local adaptation can fully shield vulnerable people downstream from this scale of destruction”.

The findings released on Thursday are likely to strengthen Nepal’s case for emergency support from the UN’s Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage. Its board members met informally on Wednesday to discuss whether to grant the country a maximum of $20 million towards its estimated $4.8 billion cost of recovery and reconstruction, but no decision has yet been taken.

Nepal’s foreign minister Shisir Khanal told Climate Home News last week that the destructive flood was “exactly the kind of climate-driven catastrophe the Fund was created to address”.

Hard to predict

The WWA study found that rock-ice avalanches are very hard to predict and that moving people out of areas vulnerable to such floods is difficult as their livelihoods revolve around the rivers along which the floods travel.

The recent disaster began on the morning of August 26, when an avalanche started falling beneath a glacier. This caused huge amounts of rocks and glacier ice to fall over a kilometre to a valley floor, where they then picked up more rock and ice and became a flood of debris heading downhill and downstream along the border of Nepal and Tibet.

The torrent entered the narrow Lhende Khola gorge and crashed through the busy Gyirong port border crossing at 170 kilometres an hour. It continued many kilometres downstream before eventually turning from rock and ice to water and slowing down.

The flood swept through villages, roads, bridges and hydropower stations, killing over 1,300 people in Nepal with more than 5,000 still missing. The flood also killed at least 40 people in Chinese-run Tibet.

Those on higher ground away from the river mainly survived but the flood’s speed meant that many people received no warning to seek higher ground or shelter.

While Nepal has early warning systems for flooding caused by rain and glacial lake outbursts, the WWA study noted that rock-ice avalanches are complex and understudied, with methods to monitor them still being explored.

Co-author Walter Immerzeel, mountain hydrology professor at Utrecht University, told journalists that with current methods, the disaster could not have been predicted.

But, he said, in the future it may be possible to use remote sensing techniques to analyse glaciers and rocks to generate a warning before a collapse occurs.

A technique called radar interferometry can detect hotspots which should be monitored with field-based sensors and drones, he said, adding that early warning systems could be installed in these areas using seismometers, water-level measurements and CCTV.

Because doing this for thousands of glaciers across the Himalayas would be difficult, authorities could monitor only the rock and ice faces that are a danger to the river valleys with the most people and infrastructure in them, he added. But this would still require lots of investment together with international collaboration and coordination, he warned.

The study found that another potential adaptation strategy – restricting development in flood-prone river valleys – is socially, economically and politically difficult.

The scientists said habitable land is scarce in these steep river valleys and economic activities like transport and hydropower generation are dependent on the river itself.

Madhab Uprety, a Nepali scientist from the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre, said that, while new development should assess the risks of floods, many existing communities and buildings are already at risk.

Loss and damage

Otto said the flood should be discussed in the context of loss and damage as “there is no doubt that climate change is one of the drivers” and “it’s also one of the types of events that are absolutely outside of the limits we can possibly adapt to”.

As well as the deaths, a Nepali government’s assessment has found that a large amount of infrastructure was damaged, including more than 7,500 homes, 105 bridges, 48 public buildings, 47 cultural heritage assets, 18 schools, 13 hydropower facilities, seven health facilities, and numerous shops, hotels, restaurants, irrigation systems and farms. Over 30,000 people were affected.

Developing countries have called for the loss and damage fund’s board to hold an emergency meeting to discuss how to respond to Nepal’s request for funding. Instead of a full board meeting though, board members met only informally and online on Wednesday, Climate Home News understands. A source with knowledge of discussions said the informal nature of the meeting meant they were not able to take decisions or agree on next steps, which have been left up to the board’s co-chairs.

Speaking before that meeting started, Nepali climate negotiator Manjeet Dhakal said he had “heard of an extremely positive response” to Nepal’s request from board members. “Hopefully there will be something – a decision that the fund will do for exactly the reason that the fund was established,” he said.

Ajay Mathur, former Indian climate negotiator and now head of The Energy and Resources Institute in New Delhi, told a separate press briefing on Wednesday that the Nepal flood disaster would push loss and damage higher up the agenda of international climate talks, particularly if the United Nations Secretary-General decides to champion the cause at the UN General Assembly in New York next week.

Murat Kurum, Turkish environment minister and president-designate of COP31, told Climate Home News last week that he would be “pleased” if the fund could support Nepal and that he will keep calling in every speech for countries to give money to the loss and damage fund.

Jennifer Morgan, former German climate envoy and now a senior fellow at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, called for the loss and damage fund – which currently has around $630 million in contributions – to be topped up with new pledges from governments as well as solidarity levies on things like luxury air travel, super-rich individuals and fossil fuel firms’ windfall profits.

The post Nepal flood destruction shows “limits to adaptation”, scientists say appeared first on Climate Home News.

Currently, as part of the Paris Agreement, every country is responsible for counting and reducing the planet-heating emissions that are produced within its territory. Manufacturing countries, for example, may have high emissions even if what they make is exported for consumption elsewhere.

But new analysis from the European Climate Foundation (ECF) and climate consultancy Matière, based on the tracker’s data, shows that some countries have a high footprint of “imported emissions” from goods and services they ship in. These emissions are often ignored in the places where the products are consumed because they are not formally counted under greenhouse gas inventories.

In the European Union, for example, while domestic emissions have declined since 2015, imported emissions have remained unchanged, the analysis shows. In some countries, like Austria or Sweden, they are as high as the country’s entire annual carbon footprint.

Former EU lead climate negotiator Jacob Werksman said that under the Paris Agreement, these traded emissions are accounted for in the countries where they are originally produced, but importing countries can also take responsibility for their consumption.

“It starts with a wide recognition by many jurisdictions around the world that we need to know the carbon content of these products, and we then need to agree what is a fair, effective, transparent and relatively easy-to-implement way of measuring that carbon in traded products,” he told a launch event for the trade emissions tracker, which contains data for different countries, sectors and gases.

Trade and its role in addressing climate change has become a higher priority at UN climate talks after a push led by emerging economies including China, India and South Africa led to the first trade and climate change dialogue held this year at the mid-year session in Bonn.

At the upcoming COP31 UN summit in Antalya, some voluntary initiatives like the Brazil-led Integrated Forum on Climate Change and Trade are expected to continue, but the issue does not feature in Türkiye’s Action Agenda of climate initiatives and formal negotiations are not scheduled on the topic.

China: the world’s top emissions exporter

As a manufacturing powerhouse, China ranks first in the new tracker as the world’s top-emitting country, but the data shows that a large chunk of the country’s carbon emissions – an amount larger than Brazil’s entire annual carbon footprint – are linked to products that are exported and consumed abroad.

Russia, Brazil, the US and the EU rank as the top destinations for Chinese trade-related emissions, which are mostly linked to components for power generation, basic metals like copper and lead, and non-metallic minerals like graphite and phosphorus.

Yet China is also the world’s top emissions importer, related mostly to agricultural products, fossil fuels and minerals brought from the US, the EU, Japan and India, among others. The US ranks second by a close margin, with both countries importing about 1.6 billion tonnes of CO2 equivalent.

China’s industrial engine starts to break its fossil fuel habit

Richard Baron, ECF’s industrial policy and trade director, said Chinese clean energy products are key for reducing emissions around the world, adding that Europe is “not able to do without those technologies” for its energy transition.

“China has an emissions trading system that counts CO2 differently there. But if China and the EU were to agree on some kind of translation mechanism to say ‘this is how we measure it’, and companies can understand the protocol to navigate both markets, that would set the tone for a lot of other conversations,” he said at the platform’s launch event last week.

The analysis suggests that if the EU and China aligned their climate requirements for products, the resulting standards could influence trade flows representing about 7% of global emissions.

Baron said there’s “a plethora” of multilateral spaces to hold these discussions, including the climate and trade dialogue at the UN climate talks or the Climate Club at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), which seeks to cut industrial emissions.

Trade breaks into agenda of UN climate talks – but will it have teeth?

Controversial trade measures

Instruments like the Europe’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) – a recent piece of legislation that penalises emissions-heavy imported products – are one tool that could be used to address trade-related emissions, said Antoine Oger, executive director at the Institute for European Environmental Policy.

He said a significant portion of imported emissions in Europe are already covered by CBAM, as it includes sectors like cement, iron and steel, fertilisers and aluminium. This then allows the EU “to engage in constructive dialogue with our trade partners”, he added.

But across diplomatic summits, including at UN climate talks, emerging economies have pushed back heavily against the CBAM and other trade measures. The most recent BRICS declaration adopted on Saturday by 11 such countries – including China, India and Russia – condemns “protectionism under the guise of environmental objectives”.

The declaration calls for the “elimination of such unlawful measures”, which they argue have “far-reaching negative implications for the human rights, including the rights to development, health and food security” of vulnerable communities.

“The question of responsibility is a political question,” Oger said. “These emissions exist – they are emitted somewhere to make a product that will be consumed elsewhere. So you can debate responsibility but the idea is for the two parts to recognise there’s a problem.”

The aim, he added “is not to point fingers, but to accept this is a reality of our emissions profiles and ask what we can do about it”.

The post International trade linked to 20% of global emissions – but imports ignored appeared first on Climate Home News.

Quality checks completed, the finished solar panels are loaded onto forklifts and taken to a warehouse – ready for delivery to buyers across Nigeria and in neighbouring West African countries. Each panel is labelled “Made in Nigeria”.

But for Emmanuel Agbola, operations manager at Nigerian solar company LPV Technologies, the company’s mission goes beyond quality control and meeting customer orders.

“We are looking at addressing the immediate power needs of Nigeria,” Agbola told Climate Home News in a quiet room away from the steady hum of machinery on the factory floor, where production began last year.

That is no small task. About four out of 10 Nigerians – more than 85 million people – still lack reliable access to grid electricity, according to Nigeria’s Rural Electrification Agency.

LPV Technologies is among a handful of startups making headway on the nation’s bold ambitions to build a domestic solar panel manufacturing industry, as solar becomes the go-to choice for Nigerian businesses and households fed up with frequent blackouts.

Nigeria’s national grid has collapsed about 22 times during the last two years due to transmission constraints, gas shortages and ageing infrastructure.

That is exactly why local solar panel manufacturing matters, according to Agbola.

“One of our slogans is ‘Make the sun pay for your bills’,” he said.

Solar transforms life for homes and businesses

Nigeria has become one of Africa’s fastest-growing markets for increasingly affordable solar systems, which are providing more reliable and cheaper electricity for homes and workplaces than the fragile power grid.

Nigeria’s rapid solar adoption is being met mostly by small-scale solar installations which have helped bring the country’s total cumulative solar capacity to about 6 gigawatts (GW), according to a report by research provider BloombergNEF.

But almost every panel installed on homes, factories and public buildings across the country is imported – the vast majority from China – something the government wants to change.

“We are preparing to produce in this country the solar technologies that the entire continent will use,” President Bola Tinubu told a group of Chinese investors in 2024.

“Nigeria is a huge market for solar panels. Africa is a major consumer of solar technologies. I do not see why these panels and batteries cannot be produced here,” he said.

Two years on, that ambition is starting to bear fruit.

Not far from LPV’s factory, in the Agege neighbourhood of Lagos, workers are putting the finishing touches to a new commercial-scale veterinary vaccine cold-storage facility.

Up on the roof, 100 of LPV’s “Made in Nigeria” solar panels have been fixed into position. 

Once operational, the panels and attached battery storage will provide round-the-clock electricity for offices, laboratories and cold-storage rooms at the site, helping to keep millions of vaccine doses safely refrigerated even when the national grid fails.

“This will never go off – all year round,” said the civil engineer overseeing work at the site, pointing to the rooftop installation. “It’s off-grid – 24 hours, seven days; constant electricity to run these two cooling units.”

Government bets on local manufacturing

The Nigerian government wants solar power to play a central role in bridging the country’s electricity access gap, but it also wants the equipment that will drive that transition to be produced at home to create new jobs and reduce imports. That aligns with its wider Nigeria First industry policy.

Nigeria’s booming solar market is still overwhelmingly supplied by foreign-made panels. 

Last year, it imported about 2.9 million panels worth more than 400 billion naira ($295 million). More than 70% of them came from China, making Nigeria Africa’s second-largest importer of Chinese panels after South Africa. 

China dominates almost every stage of the global solar manufacturing supply chain and a series of government-led initiatives to kickstart local production have yet to make major headway.

More than a decade ago, the National Agency for Science and Engineering Infrastructure established the country’s first government-backed solar panel factory in Karshi, Abuja. While successive upgrades have increased its production capacity to about 50 MW annually, the facility still supplies only a fraction of Nigeria’s growing demand.

The government has since announced more ambitious projects, including a Renewable Energy Industrial Park in Nasarawa state, expected to manufacture solar cells, panels and batteries, and a solar module assembly plant under construction by the Energy Commission of Nigeria in Enugu. Neither project has yet begun commercial production.

Last year, the government also proposed restricting solar panel imports to encourage domestic manufacturing, though the idea was swiftly dropped.

Chinese imports dominate solar panel trade

The scale of Nigeria’s challenge is obvious during a visit to Alaba International Market in Lagos, one of Africa’s largest electronics markets and a solar retail hub where thousands of panels change hands every week.

One recent morning in June, cart pushers could be seen weaving their way between crowds of shoppers and traffic jams, their trolleys stacked high with loads of freshly imported solar panels.

Nigeria is Africa’s biggest oil producer and fossil fuel exports have been the cornerstone of the economy for decades. But in the bustling market, solar has become such a good business in recent years that traders call it “the new oil“.

Even so, few said they had ever seen panels made in Nigeria.

“Every panel we get is imported,” said wholesaler Ndubuisi Nwobodo, adding that it was the first time he had heard of panels being produced domestically.

At one of the market’s largest solar warehouses, manager Chidiebere Ani watched as workers unloaded another container of supplies from China. He said 95% of the warehouse’s stock of panels came from China.

China controls more than 80% of global manufacturing capacity, according to the International Energy Agency, spanning every stage of the supply chain, from polysilicon and wafers to solar cells and finished modules. 

Meanwhile, production at the LPV factory in Lagos is running at about 180,000 panels per year, Agbola said.

“If we had 10 LPVs, we still won’t be able to meet [Nigeria’s] demand,” Agbola said. 

Even then, Nigerian producers face a tough contest on price. Imported 550-watt panels retail for about 150,000 naira ($110), the same price that LPV Technologies charges wholesalers.

Policy uncertainty seen as hurdle to investment

Nigeria has plentiful affordable labour and – with a population of roughly 240 million – room for market growth as the falling price of panels makes them accessible to more people.

Chinese firms increasingly see opportunities to build manufacturing partnerships with local businesses, said Susan Li, the founder of Chinese solar company Solar Run Energy.

“We have to grow the industry together,” she said, cautioning that foreign investment in the sector would hinge on stable government policies and a steady exchange rate.

Last year’s short-lived proposal to ban panel imports, which was scrapped a month after it was floated, highlighted such investment concerns, said Wangari Muchiri, founder of Kenya-based RE.Think Energy.

“[One minute] solar imports were banned, and then they were not banned,” Muchiri said. 

“If investors come in and there is already a clear path such that everyone knows how tariffs and customs duties are handled, then businesses can plan for those costs,” she explained. “But when policies keep changing, the risk becomes much higher.”

Li said she believed that “as time goes by, [policies] will become more stable”.

Nigeria’s challenges to scale up production

While Nigeria is making its first panels, it does not yet have the industrial capacity to produce vital solar cell components such as polysilicon, wafers and ingots. 

At LPV, Agbola said having to import the components – up to 17 of them – eats into the company’s profit margins.

“When we combine [the cost of importing components] with other fixed-cost elements and we want to do our pricing, it becomes a big challenge for us in the market,” he said. 

Because cells are the main component in a solar panel, LPV’s senior brand and marketing manager Kabir Okehi said it would be “a huge relief” to produce them domestically and avoid the high shipping logistics costs associated with imports. It also takes imported solar cells between six weeks and two months to get to Nigeria.

Many of the materials used in solar manufacturing – including silica, aluminium and steel – are available in Nigeria, but the country still lacks the technical know-how to turn them into higher-value components, experts say. 

“What is missing in our local production is knowledge transfer,” said Mustapha Abdullahi, director-general of the Energy Commission of Nigeria, a government body responsible for strategic national energy policy planning and coordination.

He said Nigeria is still learning about the technologies needed to make solar cells domestically, with research institutes experimenting with materials such as graphene and production methods that could eventually support upstream manufacturing.

“We’re still in the pilot stages, doing reverse engineering to see how things are done,” he told Climate Home News.

Companies struggle to access startup capital

Another major challenge for homegrown solar manufacturing is finance, Abdullahi said, adding that several Nigerian companies have expressed interest in manufacturing solar panels, but many struggle to secure the capital needed to establish production lines.

The government has tried to bridge that gap by connecting local companies with international financiers, while offering incentives to prospective investors, he said.

Last year, Nigeria announced a partnership with Chinese solar giant LONGi to establish a 1,000 MW manufacturing facility in the country. The agreement, Abdullahi said, is intended to accelerate technology transfer and help Nigeria expand domestic production far beyond its current assembly capacity of roughly 300 MW of solar panels annually.

That is equivalent to 545,000 panels – of about 550 watts each – per year.

Production will need to increase nearly ten-fold, Abdullahi estimated, to meet projected future demand.

As new investments and joint ventures start to yield results, that might be possible, he said.

“Nigeria can even be the solar panel hub globally, not just for Africa, and compete well even with China,” he added.

China as a partner, not a rival

But Nigeria should not be aiming to compete with China, rather learning from it as it seeks to build up its solar industry ecosystem – from assembling imported components to eventually making more of them locally, said Godson Ikiebey, a renewable energy specialist at PwC Nigeria.

China did not become the world’s solar manufacturing giant overnight, Ikiebey said. It developed a long-term industrial strategy, invested heavily in manufacturing capacity and steadily climbed the value chain.

“For now, it’s good to have the ambition, but the ambition does not yet match the action,” Ikiebey added. 

China dominates global solar manufacturing not simply because it produces panels cheaply, RE.Think Energy’s CEO Muchiri said, but because it controls technology, supply chains and economies of scale built over decades.

Rather than trying to recreate that system from scratch, Nigeria should join forces with Chinese companies to accelerate technology transfer while developing its own workforce and manufacturing base, she said.

Building an African solar industry should also extend beyond Nigeria, with different countries potentially specialising in different parts of the value chain, fostering regional trade. “This is going to be a big opportunity to look at a regional expansion rather than just one country,” she added.

Bringing such plans to fruition will take time and the goals should be realistic, Chinese investor Li said.

Items such as frames and screws could eventually be produced in Nigeria, but more sophisticated components like solar cells would still need to be imported because their production requires highly automated factories and a stable electricity supply, she said.

“You grow step by step. If you look at the long term, if you grow the seed and water it today, you will get the harvest tomorrow,” Li said.

Clean energy jobs for the future workforce

When President Tinubu described his government’s solar hub plans to Chinese investors, he touted the country’s large, young workforce.

“The labour is cheaper. Our youths are vibrant and skilled. Our people are brilliant and adapt to new technology,” he said.

LPV’s factory in Lagos offers a glimpse of that vision.

A graduate in petroleum engineering, Ibeimo Biobele, 28, had no experience in solar manufacturing when she arrived at the factory a year ago as a member of the National Youth Service Corps – Nigeria’s mandatory one-year national service programme.

Like many university-leavers, Biobele faced an uncertain job market.

More than 93% of Nigerians work in the informal economy, according to the National Bureau of Statistics, meaning there are few skilled jobs for graduates like Biobele.

Today, she works on the production line assembling panels and hopes more such jobs will become available for young Nigerians in the years to come.

“If we had more factories like this, more young engineers would have opportunities after school,” she said.

This article was made possible with support from Surge Africa and One World Media.

Main image: A man carries a solar panel on his head while unloading a truck in Lagos, Nigeria (Photo: Mansur Ibrahim/Climate Home News)

The post Made in Nigeria: The race to build an African solar industry from scratch appeared first on Climate Home News.

Global climate progress sits at the centre of an acute crisis, as the multilateral order that structured international climate cooperation for three decades frays at the seams.

The Trump administration’s withdrawal from 66 United Nations and international organisations in early 2026, compounded by its exit from the Paris Agreement and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change itself, has launched a rupture in the governance architecture and the geopolitical consensus that made multilateral climate action conceivable.

Institutions have been stripped of authority, voluntary commitments left contingent on political will.

At this precarious moment, what can and should climate funders be doing?

• 

  Apr 17, 2026

  Politics

  Q&A: Look beyond Trump for the full story on US climate action, says university dean

  Lawyer Lou Leonard, who leads the climate school at Clark University, says Washington’s attacks haven’t halted climate efforts across American society

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• 

  Aug 4, 2026

  Comment

  Is FOMO undermining climate diplomacy?

  The negotiating community has not become 20 times larger, but the COP has – and the rising number of participants, from politicians to business executives, is getting in the way of the task at hand

  Read more

We recently examined the state of environmental multilateralism through an extensive literature review and interviews with climate leaders from around the world – policymakers, UN officials, regional actors, philanthropic leaders and advocates.

Their perspectives reinforced a sobering finding: more consequential than any single country’s efforts to undermine the multilateral system is the deeper question of whether that system is still fit for purpose.

Climate philanthropy must do more than fill gaps left by retreating governments; it must ask harder questions about whether gap-filling is the right role at all – and prepare to catalyse the emergence of something new.

Change will not come without pain.

As Sarah Millar, programme director at the Climate Emergency Collaboration Group, an international philanthropic network and strategic regranter, told us: “What we’re trying to do here is fundamentally rewire the global economy… it’s everything everywhere, all at once. And that’s really hard to do.”

Filling the gaps or leading change?

The multilateral climate system, for all its limitations, remains relatively intact. Countries other than the United States continue to submit national climate plans and participate in global negotiations. Yet participation is not the same as effectiveness – many commitments fall short of what’s needed.

Meanwhile, new regional, thematic and plurilateral coalitions are emerging; voluntary groupings of countries, cities, companies, and civil society organisations aligned around specific climate objectives are increasingly filling the action gap.

Santa Marta coalition tested as co-chair Colombia turns back to fossil fuels

Climate philanthropy has often responded to these gaps by substituting for absent public finance. Arunabha Ghosh, the founder and former CEO of the Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW), a climate think-tank based in New Delhi, explained: “Philanthropy is having to fill in the gap of public finance where development assistance is failing.” But this instinct deserves scrutiny.

A more fundamental question is whether gap-filling remains the right approach. Does philanthropy keep a failing system limping along, propping up dysfunction – or does it spur transformation and catalyse what comes next? There is no neutrality here – philanthropy cannot pretend its choices are inconsequential. The question is which position advances the transformation the moment requires.

Compounding these strategic questions is a more immediate threat. As formal multilateralism struggles, the civil society actors who might fill the gap face mounting restrictions – a closing of civic space evident not just in the US but in India, Israel, Russia, Turkey, and elsewhere. In the US, the Trump administration has stepped up attacks on philanthropies, threatening legal investigations and the withdrawal of foundations’ tax-exempt status.

For climate philanthropy specifically, there’s a particular risk: support for climate action is increasingly portrayed in some US conservative circles as anti-American.

Conservative actors who emphasise fossil fuels for manufacturing and energy security often equate backing renewables with pro-China stances, since China is the largest green technology manufacturer. Yet the economic evidence points the other way, with the clean energy transition already underway – and the perils of fossil fuel reliance further underscored by the war in Iran.

Winning back the narrative

Underlying all these gaps is a failure of narrative. The story of climate progress – and there is real progress to tell – is not being written by governments.

Christiana Figueres, an international leader on climate change and the former executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, put it this way: “The story of progress is being written by a plethora of other stakeholders – subnationals, finance corporations, NGOs – all of whom are doing their thing together. They’re writing an amazing story, and nobody’s writing it and nobody’s reading it and nobody’s taking note of it.”

This storytelling also needs to be more integrated: climate can’t remain a siloed concern but must be linked to health, education, gender equity and migration. Philanthropy can help make these linkages legible to policymakers and the public – expanding the coalition of actors who see climate as central to their own agendas.

UN sets out narrow path back to 1.5C warming after inevitable overshoot

Four directions stand out for catalytic philanthropic support in this fragmented landscape:

• Shift who gets supported, and convene diverse actors. New pathways are needed to support local communities, civil society coalitions, and subnational actors implementing national climate plans.
• Support compelling narratives and amplify affected voices. Listening to affected communities is critical to shaping a just transition that gives communities real agency over change.
• Engage the private sector differently. New financing instruments and blended finance opportunities require philanthropy to engage more strategically with private sector and corporate actors – not merely as funders but as partners to design how catalytic capital can flow.
• Take strategic risks. Philanthropy may need to fund approaches to implementation, finance, and technology that governments and financial institutions won’t support.

This is a precarious moment for multilateralism, civil society and the philanthropic organisations that sustain it.

But that complexity may also provide an opportunity. Philanthropy willing to ask harder questions, take greater risks, and invest in the connective tissue between issues may do more than keep a struggling system afloat.

To catalyse multilateral climate action, many philanthropies recognise that this is the time to deepen their reach. In the words of Ailun Yang, with the environment program at Bloomberg Philanthropies: “Our main way to engage in this is by supporting smart people and innovative ideas. Philanthropy doesn’t necessarily do these things ourselves, and that is really where our superpower is.”

This piece is adapted from a project conducted by Janet Fleischman and Jyotsna Uppal, funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation’s Environment Program; however, all the views and opinions expressed in this article are the authors’ own.

The post With multilateralism in crisis, what’s next for climate philanthropy? appeared first on Climate Home News.

At COP30, the two governments resolved a deadlock by agreeing that Türkiye would host this year’s annual talks in the resort city of Antalya with its environment minister Murat Kurum serving as COP31 President, while his Australian counterpart Chris Bowen would act as COP31 President of Negotiations.

Previous COPs have occasionally been hosted by one country and presided over by another. For example, COP23 was held in Germany because of the remoteness and small size of Fiji, and COP25 took place in Spain after social unrest flared in Chile. But COP31 will be the first UN climate summit with the powers of the presidency split between two countries.

Under the unusual arrangement, Türkiye will lead on the Action Agenda, the non-negotiated part of COP which brings together businesses, citizens and local governments to step up climate action in different areas, from curbing methane emissions and protecting health to adaptation in fragile states.

In Brazil last year, when the deal was announced to end the long-running rivalry for COP31, Australia’s Chris Bowen said his role would give him the powers of the COP presidency to manage the official climate negotiations, prepare draft texts and issue any overarching “cover” decision.

But speaking to international media in the Turkish city of Trabzon on Thursday, comments from Kurum – made in Turkish and translated into English by an official translator – suggest that Türkiye sees itself as having ultimate control over the formal outcome of the talks.

Asked how the “co-presidency” would resolve any differences that emerge during the negotiations, he responded: “Türkiye and Australia are not co-presidents. Türkiye is the President of COP31 and Australia is the President of Negotiations. We are in consultation with Australia but the final decision lies with the presidency of COP31.”

“No issues” so far

An official document setting out the “modalities” of the partnership notes that the COP31 President will assign an Australian representative as the “President of Negotiations” and “Vice President of the COP”, to whom the functions of leading the COP31 negotiations are delegated for the duration of the conference and “who will have exclusive authority in relation to the negotiations”.

“If there is a difference of views between Türkiye and Australia, consultations will take place until the difference is resolved to mutual satisfaction,” the document adds.

Kurum said this week that the two countries are working in “good harmony and in shared perspectives. So far, we’ve had no issues. We don’t believe we will have. I mean if Türkiye and Australia cannot agree on something, it’s not realistic to expect 196 countries [at the COP] to agree on the same thing.”

Australia’s COP31 team pointed Climate Home News to a speech given by Bowen at the mid-year Bonn climate talks, in which he said: “Australia and Türkiye are working together seamlessly and with one goal.”

The oceans conference in Trabzon, organised by the COP31 presidency, issued a statement on Thursday saying that under Türkiye’s COP31 Presidency, and “in close cooperation” with Australia as President of Negotiations, “we aim to advance action on ocean and seas towards COP31 in Antalya, including through engagement with the Pacific at the Pre-COP”.

Electrification goal to reduce fossil fuels

On other topics, Kurum told reporters that, while the COP31 Action Agenda does not feature any explicit initiatives on transitioning away from fossil fuels, its flagship goal to promote the electrification of economies – through measures like heat pumps and electric vehicles – would “lead to a reduction in the use of fossil fuels and contribute to the clean transition”.

“What we want is to decrease the emissions, and for that we need to use clean energy, and for that we need to make electrification more widespread. And if you do that, automatically [you will] reduce the use of fossil fuels,” he said on the sidelines of the Trabzon oceans conference. He added that COP31 would “build on” the COP28 agreement to transition away from fossil fuels in energy systems.

COP31 leaders unveil global targets, with spotlight on electrification

Asked by Climate Home News about a request by the government of Nepal for an emergency grant from the UN’s new Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage to help recovery from its recent devastating glacial flood, Kurum said he would be “pleased” if the fund supported the South Asian nation.

On August 31, Nepal’s finance and environment ministers asked the fund’s board to take a special decision to disburse post-disaster support for the first time, a call backed by developing-country board members. On September 9, the board’s co-chairs responded in a letter saying they were “engaging with the FRLD board to address your urgent request as rapidly as possible”.

Foreign minister: Nepal needs “meaningful” international support to face climate threats

Asked how he would respond to a UN scientific assessment this month that the world will exceed its goal of limiting global warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels and must then work to bring it back down, Kurum said he accepted that the data shows that keeping to 1.5C is no longer possible. He added that limiting warming to “around 1.5C” would be a success.

Questioned by media as to how he would guarantee the right to protest at COP31, Kurum said his team will “try to meet” any request they receive from civil society.

With demonstrations temporarily banned, over 200 human rights and environmental activists were arrested before and during the NATO military alliance summit in Türkiye’s capital Ankara in January.

Kurum sought to reassure climate campaigners, however. “Don’t worry, thinking you will not be able to voice your opinions or really share your thoughts,” he said.

The post Türkiye says it has “final decision” at COP31 despite Australia running negotiations appeared first on Climate Home News.

“This is exactly the kind of climate-driven catastrophe the Fund was created to address,” Shisir Khanal said in an interview. He added that “stronger global solidarity and meaningful international support” are needed for countries like Nepal, which are facing increasingly severe climate-related disasters.

The floods were caused by a glacier collapsing and triggering a landslide that forced a torrent of water and debris to rush down the Bhote Koshi River valley, causing catastrophic impacts downstream. More than 1,300 people died and over 5,300 are still missing in the area.

Loss and damage fund urged to hold crisis meeting on Nepal

Khanal described the disaster as a “Himalayan tsunami”, telling Climate Home News that early assessments suggest the roads, bridges, hydropower stations, highways and settlements it wiped out could require billions of dollars to rebuild. Reconstruction estimates by the government range between $2.5 billion and $5 billion.

The minister of foreign affairs said Nepal would not be asking the UN’s new Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage (FRLD) “to write a single check for this total amount”, explaining that the government is finalising a post-disaster assessment “to guide our broader international donor appeals”.

Nepal disaster seen as test case for fledgling fund

In reality, if Nepal does receive rapid support from the FRLD, it is likely to be a fraction of the total bill because the fund has a cap of $20 million per project and has little more than $350 million available to hand out in its initial phase.

So far its board has not approved any projects as it is still working out how to allocate its scarce resources, nor does it have a process in place to respond to sudden climate disasters such as glacial lake outburst floods or powerful storms.

On August 31, Nepal’s government sent a direct appeal for emergency grant funding to the FRLD, emphasising that “a prompt response would… demonstrate that the fund can translate international solidarity into timely support for vulnerable countries and communities when it is most urgently needed”.

A couple of days later, eight developing-country board members – later joined by those from small island states – signed a letter, seen by Climate Home News, asking the fund’s board to hold an extraordinary meeting to respond to Nepal’s request.

The FRLD said in a statement that the devastating impacts on the ground “underscore both the urgency and scale of need and reaffirm the fundamental purpose for which the FRLD was established”.

It added that it is “committed to approaching Nepal’s request with the urgency, compassion, and careful consideration that these difficult circumstances require, while respecting the Fund’s governing instrument and established decision-making processes”. As of Wednesday, Climate Home News understands that discussions were still ongoing.

Designing infrastructure for extreme shocks

Khanal pointed to “the unprecedented scale” of the huge flood which occurred within a matter of minutes and swept away river gauges meant to provide early warning in Rasuwa and Nuwakot, near the border with Tibet.

“You cannot easily ‘plan’ against a mountain collapsing,” he said. But the lesson, he added in written responses in English, is that “our historical baseline for infrastructure engineering is no longer sufficient”.

Building resilient infrastructure means that “hydropower projects, roads and early warning systems must be designed for extreme, unpredictable climate shocks”, he said. Another key element will be plans to better understand and protect ecosystems, he added.

The minister noted that Nepal, India and China share a common, interconnected Himalayan ecosystem and all three countries are affected by the impacts of climate change in the Himalayan mountain chain.

“Therefore, our call is for the three countries to work together to strengthen preparedness, resilience and regional cooperation,” he said.

New research from consultancy Systemiq, released on Wednesday, finds that Himalayan glaciers are losing mass 65% faster than a decade ago, and that only around 20 of the Himalaya’s estimated 40,000 glaciers are currently monitored. India alone has 56 glacial lakes rated very high risk, it warns.

Early cross-border efforts on information-sharing

Since the same region of Nepal was hit by smaller-scale but still highly destructive flooding in 2024 and 2025, China and Nepal have stepped up efforts to cooperate in tackling glacier-related risks in the region.

In August 2025, Climate Home News reported that authorities in both countries had agreed to share cross-border information about the risks of glacial lake outburst floods across the Tibetan region, in a first step that could be expanded to the national level in an effort to reduce deaths and damage. 

This May, a delegation from China’s Ministry of Water Resources and the Water Resources Department of the Xinjiang Autonomous Region held talks with Nepalese officials in charge of water and disaster management about establishing a joint disaster information mechanism.

Then in August, a team from the Institute of Mountain Hazards and Environment under the Chinese Academy of Sciences also visited Nepal for scientific research and exchange, sharing China’s experience in monitoring glacial lakes.

Nepal and China agree to cooperate on glacial lake flooding, as warming hikes threat

However, experts told Climate Home News that progress on putting in place concrete measures has been slow. Narendra Khanal, a professor in the department of geography at Tribhuvan University, blamed that partly on Nepal’s traditional administrative system and bureaucratic delays.

“We have to share information with them, and they have to share information with us,” he said. “In my understanding, the Chinese side is also facing difficulties in making this cooperation work.”

Mohan Bahadur Chand, a Himalayan glaciologist and assistant professor at Kathmandu University, said China has the technology and human resources to provide significant information to its neighbour downstream.

But, to make that work, “we have to build trust between the two countries”, which is currently lacking but could be developed, he said. “As scientists, we are already working with them personally. If we create a trusted environment, cooperation should not be difficult.”

Nepal lacks monitoring and warning technology

Experts said Nepal – one of the world’s least-developed countries – does not have the technology or resources to install the sophisticated monitoring and warning systems needed to protect its population from growing threats linked to accelerating glacier melt in the Himalayas.

A senior meteorologist at the Department of Hydrology and Meteorology, who did not want to be named, told Climate Home News that the government had not invested enough in rainfall and weather monitoring stations, especially above 3,500 metres, and therefore lacks reliable data about what is happening at high altitudes.

“The stations we have are operated by different organisations, but many of them are not functioning properly,” the official added.

Comment: The loss and damage fund needs far more finance to deliver climate justice

This year, the UN’s Green Climate Fund released initial funding for a $50-million project to address the risks from four glacial lakes in other parts of Nepal, but has come under criticism for taking seven years to approve the proposal. The fund said this was due to efforts needed to strengthen and consult on the project, as well as administrative, institutional and COVID-related delays.

Foreign minister Khanal said Nepal was calling on the international community for support to tackle global warming impacts into the future.

“This disaster should not be viewed simply as a one-time event requiring one-time assistance,” he emphasised. “We need to recognise the longer-term consequences of rising temperatures and climate change, particularly for vulnerable communities and developing countries.”

The post Foreign minister: Nepal needs “meaningful” international support to face climate threats appeared first on Climate Home News.

The chair’s August Aid to Negotiations is being sold as a pragmatic way to rescue the global plastics treaty. However, the text is starting to resemble the architecture of a Paris Agreement-style framework: a patchwork of vague commitments, nationally determined action and reporting, with the hardest substantive decisions left to a future that, my experience following these negotiations tells me, would never arrive.

In March 2022, governments adopted UNEA Resolution 5/14 by consensus, launching negotiations for a legally binding international instrument to end plastic pollution. I joined the global plastics treaty process in Paris in 2023, where hopes of drafting a treaty capable of confronting one of the defining environmental and human health threats of our time were first derailed by procedural warfare.

Five months later, in Nairobi, I watched the chair close a meeting while delegates still negotiated -allegedly to catch a flight. In 2024 and 2025, in Ottawa, Busan and Geneva, the same small group of blocking states grew bolder, cloaking opposition in language about defending the vulnerable while subsidising a system that fuels the pollution crisis. Offended by ambition, ashamed of nothing.

A year after the last formal attempt to negotiate a treaty, we are tasked with protecting a fragile process. And despite long-standing support, including legal, policy and technical expertise from my own Environmental Investigation Agency, the chair has excluded observers from the rooms where the treaty’s fate is being decided.

In that orchestrated quiet, the loudest proposal emerged: the suggestion that the instrument be a “framework convention.” The new Aid, intended to shape the late-September Heads of Delegation meeting, never uses the word “framework”. It does not need to. It strips back substantive obligations and presupposes future action.

A framework is no match for this crisis

Framework conventions outline broad principles and leave each country to develop its own plan, often delaying tough decisions to future negotiations that may never happen. This tactic is a political shell game: persuading states that want action now to give up meaningful, binding measures to reach agreement.

The Chair’s Aid arrives at a framework by subtraction rather than by proposal, which makes it harder to name and potentially easier to accept. Using the Aid, effectively the rejected text from Geneva, as a basis for the next informal meeting in Bangkok will be sold as a way to preserve a distressed UN system and reach consensus in a fractured geopolitical environment.

This is diplomacy drowning in wishful thinking that the countries fighting binding rules today will approve tougher ones tomorrow. Four years of negotiations and decades of climate diplomacy taught us that this is not a bridge to ambition – this is how ambition dies.

Production is driven by global oil, gas and chemical markets, while products and waste travel across borders. No singular government can regulate its way out of a problem created and amplified by a globalised system.

Countries have tried, and production kept rising. Now there is plastic everywhere we look, and the cost falls hardest on the people least responsible.

That failure is why there was consensus to negotiate a treaty, because this crisis requires global action. The purpose was never to list national efforts and call that progress but to create common global rules to address pollution.

The most politically sensitive issues cannot simply be postponed. How much plastic is produced, which toxic chemicals are allowed in it, which throwaway products are banned, and how future decisions are made are precisely the issues that require global answers. An instrument that refuses to negotiate them will be easier to adopt but useless on arrival.

Learn from climate governance

Supporters of a framework approach may point to the ozone treaty as proof that it can work. But the Vienna Convention succeeded for one reason: governments quickly adopted binding upstream controls on ozone-depleting substances.

Climate offers the opposite warning: a framework followed by contested, delayed and insufficient measures, while emissions keep rising.

The new chair not only deleted a direct reference to “production and consumption” and bracketed similar preambular language copied from the original mandate. The article on reporting borrows language from the Paris Agreement. Another summer of record heat, fires and floods offers a glimpse of how well that model is working.

Nothing suggests that the states blocking binding rules today will suddenly accept them tomorrow, and the exponential rise in unchecked plastic production will not pause while governments wait for courage. Blockage is not being resolved, but just pushed forward.

A framework would lock in the wrong response: unlimited upstream growth with waste management attempting to handle it downstream. No waste system can keep pace with a material engineered for endless growth. 

Keeping to 1.5C of warming is no longer possible – but we must still limit the overshoot

After four years of INC negotiations, governments know this. States must reject the false choice that the only path to agreement is an instrument too weak to solve the problem it was created to address. Compromise is part of diplomacy. Surrender is not.

And if the UN keeps pushing that choice, the countries prepared to act must be willing to pursue alternative pathways. Groups of willing governments have built effective agreements before, and existing environmental regimes can deliver new rules without inventing a new empty instrument. 

This process was never meant to find a lowest common denominator. It was to create the rules necessary to change our direction. Bangkok in September will be where the second iteration of this text is shaped. If ambitious countries do not push back, the argument about a framework convention will already be lost by default.

Negotiations cannot end with governments accepting the crisis rather than solving it. The science is clear and the damage is accelerating. The world does not need another promise to act later. It needs the treaty governments promised to deliver in 2022. 

The post The world doesn’t need a Paris Agreement for plastics appeared first on Climate Home News.

The coalition, spanning the world’s richest to its most vulnerable nations, pointed the finger primarily at those who think “science threatens their economic prospects” – a thinly-veiled reference to fossil fuel-dependent states accused of casting doubt on long-held scientific tenets in the UN climate process.

Fiji’s lead negotiator, Sivendra Michael, went still further. He denounced what he called “a very polluted narrative” taking hold outside the negotiating rooms and singled out ECO, a daily newsletter on the talks produced by Climate Action Network (CAN) International, for overlooking the issue. 

“They are representing developing countries, but they are not representing us,” Michael said. His words hinted at how a rift between governments over the science of global warming has created tensions inside the climate movement.

Watchers of the UN climate talks have told Climate Home News there is growing unease over where the world’s most influential coalition of climate NGOs stands in an increasingly heated debate about how scientific messages produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are crafted and turned into global climate policy. 

UN sets out narrow path back to 1.5C warming after inevitable overshoot

CAN’s international leadership has publicly backed a line of argument, championed by some big emerging economies including India, that questions how fair and equitable the models underpinning the work of the IPCC – the UN’s climate science body – are because they are dominated by research from the Global North. 

But some climate activists, including from nations on the frontline of the climate crisis in the Pacific, are increasingly disappointed by CAN’s silence in a connected row over whether the IPCC’s forthcoming assessment report should be finished in time to inform the next UN scorecard of global climate action.  

Over the last two years, India, Saudi Arabia, China, Russia and Kenya have pushed back against attempts by a large coalition of nations to align the IPCC’s AR7 report timeline with the second stocktake of national climate plans under the UN climate process. They claim this would put a burden on developing countries with limited resources and restrict their ability to provide scientific input into the process.

India flags bias in IPCC assumptions

CAN International Executive Director Tasneem Essop spoke at an online event last month in which panelists challenged the “Friends of Science” campaign launched at the Bonn talks. 

During the webinar, an Indian scientist and government negotiator set out her view that the IPCC’s way of working and scientific assumptions perpetuate inequity between developed and developing countries – and yet its reports have come to be treated as “scripture” that cannot be questioned. 

In her intervention, Essop did not comment directly on the Bonn science campaign nor on the IPCC timeline issue. But the participation of CAN’s leadership in an event where such criticism of the IPCC was aired has sparked concern in some parts of the NGO community.

“The way in which CAN International is playing into what could be the destruction of the IPCC inputs into the climate process is very concerning,” said Bill Hare, who was involved in CAN’s establishment nearly four decades ago and now runs think-tank Climate Analytics. 

Science ‘under attack’ from fossil fuel interests at UN climate talks

He added that it was a mistake for CAN International to align itself with arguments made by India and Saudi Arabia, when those countries are blocking the conclusion of the IPCC’s next key report on cutting emissions in time for it to feed into the next global stocktake, which is due to conclude in 2028.

Like other insiders Climate Home News spoke to, the veteran Australian climate scientist fears these tensions could hamper CAN’s widely recognised power to influence the talks.

“The CAN International voice has been very, very important in the process. That voice doesn’t need to be diluted at this moment in history – that would be a really bad move,” Hare said.

Dialogue to reconcile differing views

Over the last decade, CAN has been working to transform itself into an organisation that is more representative of, and responsive to, voices and needs in the Global South. In 2019, it appointed Essop – a South African expert on climate, energy, poverty and social justice – as executive director, shifting further away from its European and North American roots.

CAN International, which functions as the broader network’s secretariat, says it is discussing how to reconcile varying views on the IPCC and the science and equity question among its hundreds of member groups spread across 130 countries.

“We acknowledge that there are different perspectives within a global network of over 2,000 members on these issues,” CAN International’s Essop said in response to questions from Climate Home News. “Given this diversity, we have democratic processes to build internal agreements.” 

“Science and equity are both fundamental principles for effective climate action and are firmly embedded in CAN’s work,” she added in a written statement. “Putting these principles into practice in a painfully unjust world is not always straightforward, which is why we need continued dialogue across the network.”

Calls for “fair share” approach

The webinar in late August – which aimed to untangle what organisers described as “a growing narrative” that “treats science and equity as opposing priorities” – opened with a presentation by Tejal Kanitkar, a prominent Indian climate scientist who also serves on her government’s delegations at the IPCC and UN climate talks. 

Outlining the findings of a paper she co-authored, Kanitkar argued that the IPCC had used scenarios for future emission reduction trajectories based primarily on assumptions put forward by Global North researchers that are skewed against the world’s poorest nations. These, she noted, were then incorporated into the first UN review of global climate action in 2023 and turned into widely cited emissions-cutting targets for limiting warming to 1.5C – a goal the UN has now conceded will be breached, at least temporarily.

Kanitkar said the “Friends of Science” group included “some of the people who have over-consumed the carbon budget and now use science as a slogan”. When Climate Home News raised the participation of diplomats from vulnerable countries, she said they should be asked why they “accept outcomes that burden the poorest the most”.

Commenting on Kanitkar’s presentation, CAN’s Essop said everyone knows that “imbalances of power dictate who sits at the table, who designs the models and who determines the assumptions underlying them”.

Her wider intervention focused more generally on the need to ensure that emissions-reduction pathways follow an equitable approach and account for the “fair share” of action countries need to take based on their historical responsibilities for climate change. 

IPCC working to update models

Hare later acknowledged that most of the IPCC models used for 1.5C scenarios fail to account for the higher cost of capital and transition financing faced by developing countries. But as this is a “well-known” limitation, the IPCC gives a nuanced reading of the scenarios, and the next generation of models it uses is expected to include more consideration of equity, he added.

Echoing this, a climate scientist from a developing country currently involved in the IPCC process, who did not want to be identified, told Climate Home News that economic models inevitably contain biases and IPCC authors are already working to identify and correct them. 

Despite criticisms of how IPCC scientific reports have been produced, all governments must sign off on every line of a key “summary for policy-makers” at a dedicated meeting. In 2023, the approved summary included the emissions reduction figures in question that informed the UN’s first global stocktake. 

Irrespective of this wider debate, Hare said the “Friends of Science” campaign, which he supports, is focused on the timing of the IPCC’s next assessment cycle rather than the equity of its models.

Unresolved row over IPCC report timeline

A political battle over that time-frame has dragged on for more than two years at successive meetings of the science panel, with governments repeatedly failing to find a solution. 

A large majority of nations have been pushing for a timeline that would ensure the next round of AR7 reports can feed into the UN’s global stocktake. But a group of countries, including Saudi Arabia, India, China, Russia and Kenya, have said at previous IPCC meetings that this would put a burden on developing countries with limited resources and have lobbied for a longer process.

In Bonn this summer, the coalition that wants to align AR7 with the 2028 stocktake – which includes diplomats from Fiji, Nepal, the European Union, Switzerland, Sierra Leone and Panama – vowed to ensure that decision-making in the UN climate process remains based on the “best available science”, including the IPCC assessment reports. 

They pointed the finger at “the usual suspects” but stopped short of singling out any countries at the public press conference. Discussions in the previous week had seen Saudi Arabia and India play down the centrality of IPCC reports in the UN stocktake and oppose calls in draft texts to encourage scientific work on scenarios to limit an overshoot of the 1.5C warming goal.

Bonn upset fuels further tension

A campaigner with knowledge of internal discussions told Climate Home News that many civil society groups from some of the world’s most vulnerable nations, including the Pacific islands, had expected CAN International to back calls in Bonn defending the centrality of the IPCC in UN climate policy-making. 

Despite this, a day before the “Friends of Science” press conference, CAN published an ECO newsletter that did not mention the issue. Instead, it voiced surprise over the claims of an attack on science happening in the negotiations and accused some of the IPCC’s loudest-defending governments of hypocrisy for continuing to expand fossil fuels and not delivering “fair shares” of emissions cuts and finance to the developing world.

“We were really shocked we could not find a common position and then this jarring narrative was being pushed,” the campaigner added. 

After divisions hardened in Bonn, Hare said his organisation was approached by “very upset” CAN members from various regions about the stance taken by the network’s international leadership on the issue.

Industry and NGOs lobby to weaken UN carbon credit rules in “coordinated” push

While Climate Home News understands that internal discussions have continued during the summer, including at a CAN leadership meeting in Nairobi in recent days, the campaigner said that CAN International’s endorsement of the recent webinar that directly challenged the “Friends of Science” coalition did not send a reassuring signal. 

Some observers said they feared it would inflame tensions over how climate science is defined and utilised for policy purposes, with consequences reaching well beyond Bonn.

In a statement to Climate Home News, Essop said that “at a time when communities are experiencing the most horrific impacts of climate chaos, our collective energy must turn to solutions such as filling the Loss and Damage Fund, the phasing out of fossil fuels led by the Global North, and justice for people who are least responsible for this climate emergency”. 

The post As science comes under attack at UN talks, climate movement splits over how to respond appeared first on Climate Home News.

Clean electricity met all of China’s demand growth in 2025 and coal generation fell for the first time in a decade, even as electricity demand rose by 5%, the report found.

Despite a rebound in coal power generation in the first half of 2026, the analysis by global energy think-tank Ember found the growth in clean electricity illustrates a longer-term shift: a massive build-out of wind, solar energy and battery storage and deepening electrification of the economy are starting to make a dent in the fossil-fuel energy system supporting China’s industrial base.

China keeps Indonesia’s battery dream afloat but future less certain

The research identifies early signs that a structural transformation of China’s industrial economy from coal, oil and gas to clean electricity is underway, even if changes on the ground are not yet reflected in national data.  

“The energy foundation of the Chinese industrial economy is shifting,” Muyi Yang, a senior energy analyst at Ember and the report’s lead author, told Climate Home News.

“Fossil fuels are progressively being replaced in the many functions they have historically assumed. Because of that, fossil fuel peaking is increasingly coming into view,” he said.

Electrifying industry

Coal generation has stopped growing in 17 of the 26 provinces and regions analysed by Ember between 2021 and 2025. This includes industrial centres such as Hunan in southern China and Shandong – home to energy-intensive industries like cement production. Together, these regions are home to more than half of China’s thermal power capacity.

A greater share of the Chinese economy is now running on electricity than in other major economies, accounting for 29% of final energy consumption in 2024, compared with about 23% in Europe and 21% in the US. Less than half of China’s electricity was generated from coal in the first half of the year.

Meanwhile, fossil fuel use has fallen in eight of 11 tracked industrial sectors, declining between 26% and 71% from peak consumption levels across fossil fuel extraction, manufacturing industries such as textiles, machinery and food and beverages, transport equipment and chemical materials.

Earlier this year, German company BASF, the world’s largest chemical producer, opened a new facility in southern China, which is fully supplied by renewable energy. The company said emissions from the site could be 50% lower than conventional petrochemical facilities.

In easier-to-electrify sectors such as machinery, electronics and textiles, electricity now supplies about three-quarters of final energy consumption, Ember found.

Fossil fuel use is also showing signs of flattening in the metals smelting and processing sector – one of the most fossil-intensive parts of the economy – offering “encouraging signs” that the transformation is starting to take hold in harder-to-abate sectors, said Yang.

“If that is happening in more and more provinces, and more and more economic sectors that means that fossil fuels are progressively being squeezed out of the energy system,” he said.

“Growing by greening”

China’s vast cleantech manufacturing power has become an engine for growth in its own right, spurring investment, creating jobs and generating export revenues.

Yang described this “growing-by-greening” dynamic as “turning each step of the transition into a source of strength for the next”.

China and Brazil join pledge to triple global nuclear energy capacity

For Li Shuo, director of China Climate Hub at the Asia Society Policy Institute, this is part of what makes China’s lead in manufacturing clean energy equipment “irreversible”, comparing its growth with that of a rainforest, where different parts of the ecosystem thrive by reinforcing one another.   

The early success of deploying wind and solar helped drive down electricity costs, which created favourable conditions for the rapid adoption of electric vehicles (EVs) and in turn boosted demand for batteries that are now critical to balance the grid.

An oversupply of renewable energy incentivised industrial players to benefit from cheap and readily available clean power generation, encouraging innovative solutions to electrify other parts of the economy. In the transport sector, for example, electrification is moving from passenger vehicles to harder-to-electrify trucks.

This abundance of cheap green energy is also making China competitive in what has long been seen as the anchor of Western competitiveness, Li said.

Stalling fossil fuel use

At the same time, China’s huge legacy fossil fuel generation capacity is still expanding, even as coal power plants are being used less intensively.

China brought 30 GW of new coal power capacity into operation in the first six months of the year and coal-fired generation rose 3% over the same period after local governments fast-tracked coal projects to prevent a repeat of severe power shortages in 2021.

Solar surge kept fossil electricity flat in 2025 as China and India made ‘historic’ shift

A further 274 GW of coal capacity is either under construction or has permits to be built while vast amounts of solar and wind power that could not be absorbed by the grid have gone to waste in the first half of the year.

“This doesn’t mean that the transition is losing steam,” said Yang, arguing that China is now grappling with some of the more complex aspects of the transition.

A recent analysis by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA) for Carbon Brief found that China’s CO2 emissions from fossil fuels and cement have plateaued for more than two years following a peak in March 2024. Ember found that on a 12-month moving average, coal generation has been stalling since then, following years of continuous expansion.

In the second quarter of the year, CO2 emissions fell by 1% after China’s oil consumption plummeted 9% as the US-Iran war prevented the transport of oil cargoes from the Gulf through the Strait of Hormuz.

The electrification of the transport sector, particularly electric trucks, was the biggest driver in displacing oil demand as the conflict in the Middle East accelerated the transition.

A lesson in sequencing

China’s bumpy transition offers a useful lesson for other countries at an earlier stage of their transition, said Xunpeng Shi, president of the Sydney-based International Society of Energy Transition Studies (ISETS), a global network of professionals that shares research and fosters collaborations.  

“Build quickly enough so that clean electricity can start taking over and prepare for the pressure on the fossil system before it arrives, because that is the part nobody has done easily,” he said.

For countries that are heavily reliant on revenue from fossil fuel exports, a peak in Chinese fossil fuel use weakens the assumption of rising demand on which investments have long been made.

“For them, the time to plan for that is now, while the revenues are still there,” he said.

The post China’s industrial engine starts to break its fossil fuel habit appeared first on Climate Home News.

According to documents seen by Climate Home News – including a briefing given to government officials – companies, NGOs and the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) have contested the scientific basis for the move, arguing that stronger protection for carbon reductions could hike project costs and restrict the supply of credits to the market.

The climate benefit of credits that claim to reduce or avoid greenhouse gas emissions by storing carbon is undone if that carbon is released back into the atmosphere – something known as reversal risk. To protect against such losses and preserve the credibility of the credits’ carbon-offsetting claims, projects are generally required to set aside a reserve of credits that cannot be sold, as a form of insurance.

How these “buffer pools” are calculated has long been a source of contention, especially in forest conservation projects, which many experts say have historically underestimated the risk of carbon losses. 

In July, the technical UN panel tasked with drafting rules for the Article 6.4 mechanism, which underpins the credits that countries and companies can use to meet their climate goals, proposed a new system. It would require project developers to size these insurance pools of credits based on local risk values derived from new research published by a group of independent scientists.

UK’s budget juggling trick with rainforest loan for bus-fare cap needs transparency

Its supporters have hailed it as a more rigorous approach than current practice in the voluntary carbon market, which largely relies on expert guesswork and, in some cases, gives significant leeway for project developers to come up with their own data.

“The decision on the reversal risk assessment tool will be crucial,” said Federica Dossi, an expert at Brussels-based advocacy group Carbon Market Watch. “It would bring a new paradigm for calculating the number of units forwarded to the buffer pool based on empirical data.”

The technical panel is due to discuss the reversal risk tool and its application to a specific set of projects at a five-day meeting in Bonn this week. It is then expected to forward new recommendations to the mechanism’s regulator, the Supervisory Body, for a decision on whether to approve them at a meeting in early October.

The rules are set to be applied initially only to clean cookstove projects, one of the market’s most popular and heavily criticised credit types. They could then be extended to other activities, including programmes to protect forests. 

Copy and paste?

More than 30 organisations aired their views in lengthy public submissions to the Article 6.4 mechanism, responding to a call from the UN secretariat for external feedback.

A Climate Home News review of those submissions found that there was significant overlap in their messages and, in several cases, sections of the text, or even entire submissions, were copied and pasted by different organisations. This points to a coordinated effort to flag concerns regarding the new rules.

In one instance, tech giant Apple, a large buyer of nature-based carbon credits, warned against relying on one scientific model and called for rules that let project developers use a variety of risk mitigation tools, rather than surrendering buffer credits, to cover the risk of carbon losses. 

Apple’s submission is a lightly-edited version of a separate input presented by the Beyond Alliance, a coalition of corporate buyers and NGOs that promote market-based climate investments. In an apparent oversight in one paragraph, the Beyond Alliance’s name appears in Apple’s submission instead of the tech giant’s. 

The Beyond Alliance told Climate Home News that, after receiving input from its members, it shared its final submission, leaving them to decide if and how they wanted to use it. The coalition rejected any characterisation that its submission advocates for a weaker tool and only reflects business concerns.

The Beyond Alliance added that its members received briefings by UNEP, which Climate Home News understands has played an important role in wider efforts to influence the development of the rules underpinning the UN carbon market. 

Three experts and a European Union diplomat told Climate Home News that the interventions of the UN agency overwhelmingly supported the views of those with a financial interest in carbon markets. 

UNEP’s head of mitigation Gabriel Labbate rejected this accusation. He told Climate Home News that the UN agency contributes technical inputs from a “politically-neutral, science-based perspective” and its positions are grounded in an assessment of environmental integrity and are not shaped by, or aligned with, the financial interests of any market participant. 

UNEP, NGOs criticise scientific basis

In mid-July, representatives from UNEP, Conservation International and The Nature Conservancy (TNC) briefed government officials from Canada, the UK, Germany, Costa Rica, Belgium, Nigeria and Peru, according to a webinar readout seen by Climate Home News.

The online event was organised by the Forest & Climate Leaders Partnership (FCLP), an initiative that brings together 41 countries plus the EU.

The speakers voiced strong criticism of the new proposed rules. A technical advisor to Conservation International, a US-based NGO that runs several large-scale carbon offsetting programmes, told participants the Article 6 panel’s approach was “based on bad science”. This, he said, is because it relies on a single model that he claimed is not appropriate to determine buffer pool contributions, according to a presentation seen by Climate Home News. 

During a high-level discussion led by UNEP’s Labbate, speakers said the application of measures to manage reversal risk on cookstove projects could “impose disproportionate costs and undermine the financial viability of these activities”, according to the readout.

Cookstove programmes issue credits by calculating the greenhouse gas emissions prevented by burning less fuel – usually wood or charcoal – through the use of more efficient stoves. With the new reversal risk tool, these activities would be expected to guard against future carbon losses for the first time under the UN carbon market.

But UNEP, as well as leading NGOs and carbon credit firms, have pushed back against the requirement, arguing this type of credit represents a “flow” of avoided emissions rather than a “stock” of stored carbon that can be released. Scientists reject that distinction, noting that the wood left unburned is still standing in a forest exposed to the same risks as any other.

At the online briefing, speakers also raised concerns that the tighter approach would be replicated for nature-based carbon projects with a direct impact on the future of large-scale forest conservation credits. The Conservation International advisor called it a “bad precedent”.

Both Conservation International and TNC run carbon credit programmes that aim to protect trees from being cut down. Labbate leads the UN-REDD programme, which supports countries developing forest protection initiatives including through carbon credits, and is co-chair of the expert panel advising the Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market (ICVCM).

After the webinar, the organisers shared by email a series of “key messages” and draft submissions produced by the three organisations as optional aids for participants if they decided to prepare their own inputs to the Article 6.4 consultation process

Getting the rules ‘right’

In a statement to Climate Home News, the FCLP Secretariat said members of the coalition welcomed expert views from a range of partners to help them understand the potential impact of Article 6.4 rules on the eligibility of forest carbon credits in international markets.

They added that the FCLP does not have a common position on the rules and its members are free to choose whether to attend webinars and use any of the materials circulated.

In a statement to Climate Home News, Conservation International said “getting these rules right is important to the environmental integrity of the carbon market, while ensuring all sectors have a place in it”. It added that the NGO does not dispute the validity of the scientific research underlying the proposed buffer pool, but recommends a broader approach including multiple models and datasets.

A spokesperson for TNC said the organisation had helped clarify complex materials and their potential implications, while decisions on how to respond remained entirely with participating countries.

‘Inconvenient science’

The scientific basis for the disputed reversal risk tool rests on two pieces of research. A peer-reviewed study, published in Nature in May and led by scientists at several US universities, modelled forest carbon-loss risk across the United States and found existing buffer pools there are undersized by an average factor of six. 

To extend that approach worldwide, the Article 6.4 panel also drew on a second, global analysis by the same research team, which has not yet completed peer review. That study used satellite images, weather records and computer modelling to estimate a 31-42% chance of forests worldwide losing stored carbon within 100 years, depending on the scenario. 

The panel picked one of these scenarios and turned its estimates into fixed risk percentages for individual countries, and in some cases provinces, which projects in those locations would need to apply.

Palestine: Israel’s bombing has left Gaza vulnerable to climate change

Critics say the peer-reviewed portion of the research was calibrated on North American forests, and that applying the same approach to other regions relies on a global study that is still going through academic checks.

But, for William Anderegg, professor of biological sciences at the University of Utah and one of the authors of that research, it is the best science currently available. He described it as “light-years better” than assumptions underlying the voluntary carbon market, where risk numbers are not generally based on independent evidence and tend to be incredibly low. 

Scientific research, including by Anderegg, has found that buffer pools in forestry projects in the voluntary carbon market are substantially smaller than they should be to adequately protect against future releases of carbon. 

“There really seems to be a fairly coordinated campaign to try to weaken the strength of these [Article 6.4] tools and their scientific underpinning,” he told Climate Home News. “It’s a little dispiriting to see folks attack science that’s inconvenient.”

Regulators under pressure?

An EU diplomat told Climate Home News that experts and negotiators working on the Article 6.4 mechanism have faced intense pressure from big carbon credit developers and large parts of the nature-based solutions community. 

“It is very clear that they are lobbying against strong rules, and they want to align the Paris Agreement mechanism with the standards of the voluntary carbon market,” the diplomat said. “They have influence, time and money, even more than some governments, so they can be very effective in their efforts.”  

Last year, the Article 6.4 Supervisory Body, the new market’s regulator, approved rules on the permanence of credits aiming to remove carbon from the atmosphere which critics said were watered down compared to the technical panel’s recommendations. This followed feedback from carbon market firms and conservation NGOs, which submitted dozens of critical views.

EU carbon credits could supercharge world’s clean cooking push, France says

Carbon Market Watch’s Dossi said decisions that strengthen environmental integrity are targeted in particular as they tend to reduce the number of credits that can be issued.

Then, as now, those who opposed tighter rules argued that overly strict safeguards would make some projects too expensive to carry out, with a negative impact on local communities and the climate.

But proponents argue that higher-integrity programmes will drive up market prices, ultimately benefiting everyone.

“If rules ensuring better-quality credits make them somewhat more expensive than they are today, that’s an acceptable consequence, not a reason to weaken the rules, especially since these credits will be used to offset continued emissions,” said Dossi. 

Efforts to pull the rule-makers in different directions are expected to intensify in the coming weeks as a decision on the new credit protection system nears. 

“I really don’t know how this will turn out in the end,” one veteran carbon market expert said. “What I am sure about is that it will be quite a battle.”

The story was updated to clarify FCLP’s position and the attribution of its comments.

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The International Maritime Organization (IMO), which oversees the negotiations, said there had been “constructive discussions” and “genuine willingness within the group to make concrete further progress”.

Em Fenton, senior director at the NGO Opportunity Green who attended the talks last week, said they “demonstrated a strong spirit of solidarity in the face of blatant attempts to undermine the credibility, ambition and equity of a hard-fought multilateral agreement”.

After several years of debate, governments provisionally agreed in April 2025 on a “Net-Zero Framework” (NZF) – a series of emissions reduction targets for shipowners aimed at incentivising them to use cleaner fuels, backed up with financial rewards for meeting the targets and fees for missing them.

But in October 2025, after a high-profile intervention by US President Donald Trump and threats of US sanctions and visa restrictions, the US convinced a majority of voting nations to postpone the adoption of the NZF for a year.

UCL analysis found that, of those who expressed a view at last week’s talks, 38 were in favour of an NZF-style solution while only 17 were against. Those opposed are “consistently composed of strongly fossil fuel-aligned governments”.

An observer of the talks, who did not want to be named, said the countries opposed include the US, Russia, India, Thailand, Argentina, Ecuador and Uruguay, as well as eight oil-rich Gulf nations and shipowner-reliant Liberia and Panama. Governments that support an NZF-style deal include China, Brazil, Mexico, Türkiye, Canada, Australia, Chile, nine African nations, most European countries and small islands.

A new framework to tackle shipping emissions could be adopted if two-thirds of countries that are present and signed up to a regulation called Marpol Annex VI – endorsed by just over 100 states – vote in favour of it, as they did in April 2025.

UCL’s analysis said it was “reassuring” that governments which had taken strong positions in the media against the NZF were being more compromising in the negotiations.

Tweaks are probable

While there is majority support for the NZF, UCL said adopting it would be difficult politically. “The process from here could therefore be as much about producing what appears to be a new package, but one that broadly ends up with similar outcomes in relation to objectives,” UCL argued.

But tweaking the NZF, which resulted from years of negotiations, comes with risks, it warned. For example, changes could reduce the new system’s planned support for low-income countries, turning them against it. Fenton said compromising should not mean “abandoning the principle of justice in the maritime transition”.

UCL said the speed at which shipowners must reduce their ships’ emissions or face fees is likely to be reduced in the short-term but raised in the long-term to meet a goal of net zero emissions by mid-century.

This was a compromise put forward by NZF-supporter Brazil. However, an analysis by the the Institute of Marine Engineering, Science and Technology (IMarEST) has found that this change would lead to more overall emissions than the original NZF trajectory.

UCL has warned it could incentivise liquefied natural gas as a shipping fuel over greener options, which include hydrogen-based methanol and ammonia.

Analysis by UCL and the Rocky Mountain Institute suggests that, while a slower start to the NZF would reduce transport costs in the short term, it would increase them later due to the costs involved in switching the industry over from more polluting fuel to cleaner fuel.

NZF won’t meet emissions goals

IMarEst’s analysis finds that even in its current form – the most ambitious deal on the table – the NZF will not be sufficient for shipping to meet its emissions reduction goals.

It says that only a Pacific proposal to place a levy on ships’ total emissions – rather than just those above a certain level – would meet the industry’s targets to reduce emissions 20% between 2008 and 2030, 70% by 2040 and then reach net zero “by or around, i.e. close to 2050”. This is highly unlikely to be adopted.

Additional talks will be held from November 23-27 and from November 30-December 3 before a potentially final round of official negotiations begins on December 4.

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Heads of government from the 18-member Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) – which includes COP31 co-president Australia – met in Palau’s capital Koror for a week-long summit, where they demanded access to climate finance, ocean action and a regional boost for renewables at COP31.

Palau’s president Surangel Whipps Jr. said during a plenary session that the Pacific must focus on delivering climate and ocean commitments. “It will require greater regional leadership, stronger regional coordination and, above all, unity of purpose,” he said.

The meeting, which ended last Friday, was marked by the absence of some leaders – among them the heads of state of the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu and Fiji, which will host a preparatory session for COP31 in October (referred to as the pre-COP31). There were also tensions over Taiwan’s participation, with China objecting to its presence as an observer.

The forum’s final declaration, published after it ended and signed by all its members, reaffirms that climate change is the “single greatest threat to the security, livelihoods and wellbeing of Pacific peoples”, and notes “the importance of a focused, high-level declaration” at the pre-COP31 to build “political momentum towards COP31”.

Australia and Pacific islands have invited world leaders to attend the pre-COP31 gathering, which will be held in Fiji and Tuvalu from October 5 to 8. While usually a technical meeting for negotiators, the island nations aim to issue a political declaration at the gathering calling for strong outcomes in Türkiye.

Chris Bowen, Australia’s climate minister and COP31 president of negotiations, said in a speech during the Pacific forum that his country is “determined to use COP31 to progress the agenda to make it easier for countries to access the climate finance they need”.

“We won’t miss the opportunity to ensure COP31 is a Pacific COP. Not just because of the location of pre-COP but because of the agenda we are shaping through the Action Agenda at COP31,” he said.

The Action Agenda is a large portfolio of climate initiatives and coalitions uniting governments, businesses and civil society outside of the formal negotiations on everything from health to methane emissions.

Renewable energy investment plan

Announced a year ago, the island nations launched a $14-billion investment plan for a “100% Renewable Blue Pacific” at the forum in Palau. The plan lists strategic projects that would reduce the region’s high dependence on fossil fuel imports, whose soaring costs have become a major burden since the Iran war.

The projects include a $52-million programme managed by Australia to develop off-grid renewables in remote communities across the Pacific, as well as a $100-million blended finance fund aimed at supporting private-sector investments in wind and solar, among others.

Currently, some countries in the Pacific are spending up to a quarter of their GDP importing diesel to power electricity generation, according to a new report by the University of New South Wales in Australia. The investment plan launched at the forum aims to reduce these costs by adding 2.2 gigawatts of renewable generation and around 9 gigawatt hours of electricity storage.

To channel funds into the region, the plan also highlights the role of the recently established Pacific Resilience Facility (PRF), a regional fund that seeks to swiftly disburse funds to climate-vulnerable communities at the local level. Bowen said he would promote the facility to world leaders attending COP31 and “ask for their support”.

Call to transition away from fossil fuels

Separately, the forum endorsed the Belau Declaration which emphasises the need to keep the 1.5C Paris Agreement temperature goal alive. A UN report last week showed that overshooting this limit is now inevitable, but deep emissions cuts could still bring global temperatures back down by the end of the century.

Pacific nations expect to rally support for this declaration at the pre-COP, with Fiji’s climate minister Lynda Tabuya saying in a statement: “Palau is where we build the political mandate. Pre-COP is where we take it to the world.”

The political declaration also says that countries must accelerate the global transition away from fossil fuels “towards a renewable energy future”, and calls for greater recognition of the importance of ocean health in addressing climate change.

UN sets out narrow path back to 1.5C warming after inevitable overshoot

As part of the forum’s outcomes in Palau, countries also noted Tuvalu’s efforts to host the second global conference on transitioning away from fossil fuels, which will gather government representatives in April next year to follow up on this year’s inaugural conference in Santa Marta, Colombia.

Speaking to journalists at the forum, Vanuatu’s climate minister Ralph Regenvanu questioned Australia’s role in talks about phasing out fossil fuels at COP31, adding that “the very least a country like Australia should be doing is stopping future expansion, and it’s not doing that”. During the PIF, the country approved the extension of a major mine that digs and exports coal for steel-making, giving it permission to keep producing until 2055.

Rising seas trigger “development emergency”

As leaders met in one of the world’s regions most threatened by sea-level rise, UN Secretary-General António Guterres released a new report warning that rising seas are now “one of the most profound threats to populations around the world in developed and developing states alike”.

Presenting the report at UN headquarters in New York, Assistant Secretary-General for Economic Development Navid Hanif said rising sea levels are not a “future risk any more” but an accelerating “development emergency” that could hinder progress in vulnerable regions like the Pacific and least developed countries.

The report warns that seas are rising “faster than at any point in recorded history”, with 2024 setting a new record of 5.9 millimetres. This has been driven by human-induced climate change mainly through a process known as thermal expansion – where rising heat causes the ocean to expand – as well as the melting of ice sheets.

Pacific islands seek backing for new regional fund ahead of COP31

The report notes that about 1.2 billion people around the world are exposed to coastal flooding, and says some low-lying islands in Vanuatu, the Solomon Islands and Fiji are already facing forced relocations. Globally, rising seas could cost more than $1 trillion every year by 2050, it adds.

“We cannot stop sea level rise this century but we can determine how much worse it becomes. About half a metre of sea level rise is already locked in in this century because of warming that has already occurred, but beyond that our choices matter enormously,” Hanif told journalists.

Bill Hare, CEO of think-tank Climate Analytics, said the report was a “wake-up call” to the leaders of high-emitting countries that their failure to cut carbon emissions is “creating major risks for the future alongside the impacts we can already observe around us”.

Guterres is set to host a high-level meeting on addressing the threat of sea level rise this month during the UN General Assembly, where countries are expected to adopt a declaration that calls for stronger action, expanded access to finance and “ongoing dialogue” to tackle the issue.

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Palestine’s third nationally determined contribution (NDC), uploaded to the UN climate body’s website this week, says that while “the aggression on the Gaza Strip did not make the climate worse”, “it removed the housing, water and sanitation systems, health facilities, energy networks, roads and livelihoods through which people absorb a climate they were already struggling with.”

The 91-page document lists the types of infrastructure it says Israel has destroyed and notes how the destruction will worsen the impacts of climate change. It says the bombing of hospitals and rising hunger have make it harder for Gazans to cope with the health impacts of climate-driven heatwaves and waterborne diseases.

On beaches of Gaza and Tel Aviv, two tales of one heatwave

The destruction of water tanks, boreholes and desalination plants, meanwhile, have left Gazans struggling with the effects of water shortages and drought, while mass unemployment reduces people’s ability to afford climate-driven price rises. The erasure of most of the Strip’s homes makes it more difficult for people to avoid the sun’s increasing heat, the NDC said.

Many Gazans are now living in the ruins of collapsed buildings or in makeshift shelters and tents that offer little or no protection from high temperatures.

Palestine’s previous goals to cut emissions and adapt to climate change in Gaza, expressed in its last NDC five years ago, were based on a pre-war baseline that “no longer describes anything that exists”, the NDC says. Progress made since 2021 has now been destroyed, it adds.

Green reconstruction of Gaza

Instead of continuing to aim for these adaptation and emissions-reduction goals, the PA is now calling for the green reconstruction of Gaza. It says buildings should be constructed again in an energy-efficient manner with solar panels and served with modern water, waste and transport systems.

While the PA, controlled by the Fatah political party, continues to claim legitimate control of Gaza, the strip was effectively governed by Fatah’s rival Hamas between 2007 and the recent war. Control is now split between Israel and the political wing of Islamist militant group Hamas, after a US-backed ceasefire took effect in October 2025, although a UN-backed committee plans to take over. 

The United Nations, European Union and World Bank have jointly estimated that Gaza needs $71.4 billion of investment in the next two years to recover and build back. This process should be Palestinian-led, they said in April.

But US President Donald Trump has said the US should “take over” and “own” Gaza and redevelop it as the “Riviera of the Middle East”. Israel’s right-wing prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said that Israel should control the territory with civil administration managed by Palestinians favourable to Israel.

With occupation, targets conditional

In the other part of Palestine, the West Bank, the Palestinian Authority carries out some government functions, but ultimate control rests with Israel, which has occupied the West Bank since 1967. 

Because Israel controls planning in most of the West Bank, the NDC argues that the PA cannot pursue all the climate projects it wants. In addition, Israel restricts the movement of PA officials, making data collection difficult, and controls the West Bank’s electricity supply meaning that the PA cannot control whether it comes from dirty or clean sources of energy.

Given this situation, the NDC says that all of Palestine’s new climate targets are conditional but it will aim to reduce emissions 12.8% below a business-as-usual baseline by 2035 and 17.1% by 2040. If the Israeli occupation ends and Palestine regains full sovereignty over its land and resources, it will aim for reductions of 15.1% and 19.1% by 2035 and 2040 respectively under an “independence pathway”.

That could allow, for example, for greater electrification and reducing emissions per unit of growth, the document said.

To achieve the 2035 emissions-reduction target and adapt to the impacts of climate change, the PA says it needs $8.6 billion in total. This funding would be spent on measures like encouraging solar farms and rooftop solar and scaling up solar water heating to cover four-fifths of households. To complement the planned increase in solar power, the authority wants to modernise the electricity grid and install battery storage.

In the transport sector, it aims to promote the uptake of electric vehicles, develop bus rapid transit corridors and scrap old polluting trucks and buses. In Gaza in particular, it wants to deploy 66 electric buses when the conflict ends.

To adapt to climate-driven drought, the NDC includes initiatives to reuse wastewater through treatment plants, build desalination plants in Gaza to remove salt from seawater, and promote irrigation for farmers.

The new climate plan was prepared by Palestine’s Environment Quality Authority, with support from the United Nations Development Programme and the governments of Britain and Spain.

The United Nations recognised Palestine’s statehood in 2012 and it joined the UN’s climate convention and signed the Paris climate agreement – which requires countries to submit more ambitious NDCs every five years – in 2016.

The Israeli foreign ministry did not respond to a request for comment. But in late 2024, then Israeli climate envoy Gideon Behar told Climate Home News that the war and the resulting environmental destruction in Gaza was the fault of Hamas.

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Hailemariam Desalegn, former prime minister of Ethiopia, said energy is critical across the food value chain – from irrigation and processing to cold storage and transport – and should therefore be considered a key pillar of strengthening food systems for the future.

“Energy is not separate from the nutrition challenge. Irrigation needs energy. Cold storage, transport, processing, as well as markets – all need reliable energy,” Desalegn told a panel at the 20th session of the Africa Food Systems Forum in Kigali. He said investments in sustainable energy systems could help reduce post-harvest losses and make nutritious food more accessible and affordable.

Africa loses up to 30% of its food before it reaches markets annually, largely due to poor roads, weak storage and inadequate cold chains, according to a 2025 report by the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA).

Akinyi Walender, Africa director at development charity Practical Action, said poor energy supply in rural communities – where much of Africa’s food is produced – is also limiting productivity. Across the continent, about 600 million people currently live without access to electricity.

“The lack of energy access goes well beyond the inconvenience of not having lighting at home,” Walender said, adding that renewable energy has the potential to power local economies. “When people can access this sort of energy, it can raise rural incomes, improve food security, improve resilience, empower women and stimulate enterprise while creating jobs,” she added. 

Breaking down silos

Unlocking the potential of energy across food systems requires greater coordination, Walender argued, pointing to institutional fragmentation and isolated pilot projects as major barriers. 

“Organisations working on agriculture and energy often operate according to different modalities and the interdependence between agricultural and energy markets is often overlooked,” Walender said, adding that finance institutions also tend to work in silos.

Dana Rysankova, global lead for energy access at the World Bank, told a separate event at the forum that the bank is working to break down those barriers through its newly established Productive Use of Energy (PUE) Centre of Excellence based in Nairobi, which has a mandate to foster collaboration and help develop and design programmes across different sectors.

Can giant batteries unlock Africa’s green industrial future?

In June, the World Bank Group and the African Development Bank Group said that over 50 million people had been connected to electricity across 40 African countries under their Mission 300 initiative, which aims to provide electricity access to 300 million Africans by 2030.

Rysankova said the programme has shown that energy access is just the foundation for linking with other sectors to deliver real economic transformation by boosting productivity and local incomes. 

Mission 300 also aims to electrify schools and healthcare services, as well as bringing power to farmers so that they can use it for irrigation, cold storage and other agricultural activities, she added. 

Bridging the finance and infrastructure gap 

Experts said bigger investments are needed in infrastructure and finance to turn energy access into increased productivity and economic value. 

AGRA’s 2026 foresight report, launched at the forum, puts the annual agrifood financing gap at $180 billion, while estimating that closing Africa’s yearly $67 billion-$108 billion shortfall in infrastructure finance could halve post-harvest losses and increase farmer incomes by up to 40%.

However, the cost of transitioning to clean energy is still a major barrier for farmers and agribusinesses.

Atinuke Lebile, CEO of Nigerian food processing company Cato Foods, told Climate Home News she would like to switch to using renewables but has been held back by the upfront cost of setting up the systems the firm needs.

Rwandan farmer Gezel also said she would like to invest in a solar irrigation pump, but “it is so expensive”.

Practical Action’s Walender said the challenge is no longer whether solutions exist, but how financial support can reach the communities and businesses where it could have the greatest impact.

“Customers are dispersed and have low incomes. Markets are fragmented, and there are high upfront costs for much energy equipment,” Walender said, adding that financial institutions also often perceive agriculture as a high-risk sector.

Egypt seeks to unlock renewable potential to power regional clean energy hub

For food processing, the business case for using cleaner energy more efficiently is particularly strong, said Vivian Maduekeh of Partners in Food Solutions, which has worked with more than 2,000 companies across Africa.

Maduekeh said food processing firms account for between 42 and 70% of energy use across food systems, while energy represents 15-22% of their total production costs. African food businesses also use roughly twice as much energy per kilogramme of product as their global competitors, putting them at a competitive disadvantage.

The problems they face in shifting to clean energy are “risk, perception of risk and the cost”, she explained, adding that financial mechanisms are needed to help businesses overcome those issues.

Maduekeh encouraged policymakers to consider measures like tax rebates on imported equipment and spending more on research and development to bring down the cost of productive-use technologies.

Making a range of affordable equipment available – such as smaller irrigation pumps – could also help make the transition more accessible, she said. The evidence in favour “is very clear”, she added. “We just need to package it and communicate it to the priorities of investors.”

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Andy Burnham, the UK’s latest prime minister, has suggested reducing the amount the British government gives as climate finance grants and providing some of its climate finance through loans instead, in a move it anticipates will save £400 million. 

The government plans to use the savings to fund a cap on bus fares in the UK, triggering accusations from the development sector that Burnham’s proposal “throws Global South countries under the bus”. One likely destination for these new loans is the Tropical Forest Forever Facility (TFFF). 

Will new UK PM’s green measures at home cause climate finance pain overseas?

The TFFF is a new initiative designed to provide payments to countries that protect their rainforests by raising money from governments and private investors, channeling that money into riskier and therefore higher return assets, and using the returns it earns to fund forest protection. But there is a catch. 

The UK has committed to provide around £6 billion in climate finance funded through aid (or official development assistance, ODA) over the next three years. If switching from grants to a loan to the TFFF reduces government spending, it will likely reduce the amount that counts as ODA as well. 

In other words, the government can make the £400 million saving, or meet its £6 billion aid budget-funded climate finance commitment, but it probably cannot do both. The UK cannot have its cake and eat it.

How will it score as ODA?

Whether any loan to the TFFF scores as ODA depends on the OECD’s Development Assistance Committee (DAC) which is currently deliberating on this topic. 

A plain reading of the DAC’s current reporting rules suggests that the TFFF would count as a multilateral organisation: the independent investment arm, the Tropical Forest Investment Fund, would ultimately be a global, official entity (with sovereign governments appointing the board and being sole equity holders), which pools capital from sponsor governments. This would mean that to count as ODA, any loan to it would have to charge less than 5% interest. 

Tropical forest protection fund at risk after UK stalls on pledge

The current concept note suggests a return for sponsor capital equivalent to US borrowing costs of a similar duration: currently around 5.2%, which would make any such loans ineligible. The UK could choose to charge less, but if the UK charges less than it borrows (also above 5%), the difference will add to the deficit in future years. And ODA accounting is not binary: if the UK charges just under 5%, only a small fraction of the loan would count.

At the same time, the risk profile of TFFF is not the same as your average multilateral, and there is speculation that the DAC could allow higher interest loans to TFFF to partially count (by changing the ‘discount rate’ used to measure how concessional the loan is). The TFFF’s own modelling suggests that the risk of the UK losing money on the loan would be fairly limited: roughly a 1% chance of some capital impairment in the riskiest scenario. But some analysts doubt the accuracy of this model and view the risk as much greater.

Would it really save money?

If the risk really is higher, then it might justify counting more ODA on a loan to the TFFF, but it also undermines the arguments that this would create savings for the government. Loans generally don’t count towards the deficit because they create an asset. But that only works if the loan is expected to be fully repaid. If there is a material risk of losing money, then at least some of the transaction will also count towards the deficit. 

One possibility is that the loan will be ‘partitioned’ into a financial asset (the part which is expected to be repaid and wouldn’t count towards the deficit) and a ‘capital transfer’ (the part not expected to be repaid). The greater the risk, the larger that second component, and the bigger the impact on the deficit.

This would be the ODA and public accounting rules working as intended. ODA is a measure of ‘donor effort’, usually taken to mean fiscal impact. If it counts as ODA, it should have an impact on the deficit. And the fiscal treatment itself is governed by numerous international accounting standards, a key purpose of which is preventing politically motivated obfuscation of how governments spend their money. If it costs money, there should be an impact on the deficit even if it is a loan. If it doesn’t, it shouldn’t count as ODA (even if there have been exceptions in the past).

UK halves Green Climate Fund contribution, as it spends more on security

Base funding on need, not accounting

We still know too little about the details to be sure how a loan to the TFFF (or a more exotic transaction) would count towards either ODA or the UK’s headline measures of debt and deficit. The key parameter for each is risk: the lower risk, the more likely it is that the transaction will save money, but the greater the chance that the government would have to spend more ODA elsewhere to meet its climate finance target. 

If the UK believes in the TFFF business model and wants to preserve tropical forests, then it should invest. But this decision should not be driven by optimistic accounting tricks. The government cannot expect to reduce the real value of climate finance to partner countries by giving less in grant money, without this having an impact on commitments to spend that money.

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Following a direct appeal for funding from Nepal’s government on Monday, developing-country board members gathered online and eight signed a letter, seen by Climate Home News, asking the fund’s board to hold a meeting to respond to the request.

The letter, signed by eight African, Asian and Least Developed Country board members, said the debris-laden torrent – which scientists believe was unleashed by a glacial slope collapsing after unusually hot weather – constitutes “precisely the kind of climate-related extreme weather events the fund was established to address”.

“The scale of loss of life, displacement, and destruction of energy, transport, and economic infrastructure warrants the board’s urgent consideration of how the fund’s existing instruments should be mobilised to support Nepal’s government and affected communities,” the letter said.

The rules of the fund’s initial phase, which it is now in, allow for it to support “rapid response”, the letter noted. The fund’s governing instrument says it can provide funds “complementary to humanitarian actions taken immediately after an extreme weather event” as well as funds for “immediate or long-term, reconstruction or rehabilitation”, the letter added.

Governments agreed at UN climate talks to set up the fund in 2022 and it launched its first call for proposals at the end of last year. It received 180 submissions, mainly for long-term projects to help countries reduce the risks from climate threats, like improving water infrastructure in Jamaica or flood response in Bangladesh.

After delaying decisions at its last board meeting as it continued to work out processes, it has yet to approve any funding requests. Despite being set up on the back of the 2022 floods in Pakistan, the board has not yet given out any money in response to climate disasters nor expressed a clear willingness to do so.

The secretariat of the Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage (FRLD) had not responded to a request for comment at the time of publication. A few days ago, it expressed solidarity for those affected by the disaster in a social media post.

Rapid response precedent

The board members signing the letter on Nepal want to set a precedent, with the letter saying the board should consider “any procedural lessons” the response to the flooding “offer for strengthening the Fund’s rapid-response modalities and operational protocols for sudden-onset extreme weather events”.

Harjeet Singh, global convenor of the Fill the Fund campaign, told Climate Home News civil society has pushed “really hard” for the FRLD to be a rapid response fund rather than just inviting requests for project funding and reviewing them at regular board meetings as other UN climate funds do.

“Climate disasters like the one unfolding in Nepal cannot wait for scheduled committee cycles,” he said. “The Loss and Damage Fund was built for moments exactly like this.”

Nepal has received multi-million dollar humanitarian pledges from several governments already and the United Nations’ Central Emergency Response Fund is designed to rapidly disburse aid cash for disasters.

But Singh – also founding director of India’s Satat Sampada Climate Foundation – said that, with disasters becoming more frequent and severe, the humanitarian system cannot support all countries in their recovery efforts and the fund should bridge the gap.

“The Board Co-Chairs must heed the call of developing nations, convene an emergency session immediately, and prove that this Fund is ready to deliver real support when frontline communities need it most,” he told Climate Home News.

While the FRLD’s response to Nepal’s recent disaster could set an important precedent, it is only likely to be of limited practical help. The fund’s rules mean it can only give out a maximum of $20 million to each project in its current initial phase. With only $820 million pledged by rich countries and not all of that yet delivered, it has allocated a total of $350 million to spend so far and without further contributions could run of money next year.

Nepalese climate negotiator Manjeet Dhakal, who visited the affected area just days before the flood, told The Nation magazine that while $20 million “may only be a symbolic gesture”, it “could set an important precedent for how the fund responds when such disasters strike vulnerable countries in the future”.

The government’s disaster authority chief Dharma Raj Upreti told Reuters that it estimates the damage is $2.56 billion, with many homes and critical infrastructure destroyed, as well as over 1,000 people dead. An earlier government estimate put the figure at $5 billion.

Upreti said that in the first four months the cost of rebuilding roads and temporary shelters, providing drinking water and restoring power would be around $52.6 million.

A letter to the FRLD board from Nepal’s finance and environment ministers said that Nepal had only contributed “negligibly to global greenhouse gas emissions yet continues to bear disproportionate and escalating climate impacts”.

Requesting the fund’s board take a special decision to allocate funding to Nepal, the ministers emphasised that “time is of the essence”. “A prompt response would help protect affected populations, restore essential services, prevent further suffering and demonstrate that the fund can translate international solidarity into timely support for vulnerable countries and communities when it is most urgently needed,” they wrote.

Glaciers ‘melt like butter’

Despite initial reports of an earthquake, the US Geological Survey has said the floods were caused by a glacier collapsing and the resulting landslide hitting the bottom of the valley causing “subsequent catastrophic impacts downstream”.

Alton Byers, a scientist at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research, told journalists this week that global warming has seen glaciers recede, glacial lakes forming and glacial lake outburst floods increasing.

He said that a heating glacier is like butter taken out of the refrigerator. “It becomes mushy. It no longer has the ability to hold together. What that means is that masses of rock and glaciers no longer are as resistant to gravity as they once were,” he explained. “Add to that melting water at altitude, which lubricates the interface between the rock and the glacier and you get an increased likelihood of slippage.”

He added that a trigger – like gravity or an earth tremor – can then set off the sudden release of masses of bedrock and glacial ice, “which is what happened last week”.

As well as reducing emissions to rein in climate change, Byers said that authorities can adapt to climate change by not building in flood plains. Many of the destroyed buildings in Nepal were located in places that have flooded before, he noted.

Flood deaths in West African cities raise fraught issue of slum evictions

The disaster took place on the Himalayan border of Nepal and Tibet, which is governed by China. Chinese state media are reporting at least 16 people dead and hundreds missing. China’s government has made no appeal to the loss and damage fund and the board’s letter does not mention China or Tibet.

The FRLD board’s co-chairs are now expected to respond to the letter, with any extraordinary board meeting likely to be held online, so that members from around the world can attend at short notice.

This article was updated on September 4 2026 to include Upreti’s estimate of damages

The post Loss and damage fund urged to hold crisis meeting on Nepal appeared first on Climate Home News.

The concept of a “just transition” has gained momentum and widespread support in recent years. It recognises that countries have varying levels of responsibility for planet-heating emissions and unequal resources to adapt to the impacts of global warming and move away from fossil fuels.

In July, UN Secretary General António Guterres told the High-Level Political Forum in New York: “We need to support the countries, communities and workers that depend on fossil fuels throughout the transition.” While few would dispute that need, governments at the UN climate talks are still working out how to respond to it with concrete action.

With discussions set to produce a decision making the mechanism a reality at COP31, observers want to ensure the new mechanism is more than just a talking shop. 

Here’s what’s at stake in the just transition negotiations before and at COP31:

What has been agreed on the mechanism so far?

At the mid-year climate negotiations in Bonn, just transition was one of the few key issues on which governments reached a consensus, including on how to review the progress of the Just Transition Work Programme (JTWP) – a process that led to agreement on a mechanism last year at COP30 in Belém, Brazil.

Set up in 2022 and launched a year later, the aim of the JTWP is to discuss how to achieve a green economic and social shift that is fair, from the global down to the local level. Its accompanying mechanism will be tasked with strengthening international cooperation, technical support, capacity-building and knowledge-sharing to enable societies to become low-carbon and climate-resilient in a way that does not harm people and shares the benefits.

To phase out fossil fuels, developing countries need exit route from “debt trap”

Anabella Rosemberg, senior advisor on just transition with Climate Action Network (CAN) International, told Climate Home News that the most important outcome in Bonn was an informal document laying out various options for establishing the new mechanism. 

However, this leaves a lot still to be worked out and the preliminary discussions at Bonn were not enough on their own to ensure the operationalisation of the mechanism at COP31, as planned. 

“In the months ahead of COP31, this issue should be a priority for the COP31 presidencies – both Türkiye and Australia,” said Camila Mercure, climate policy coordinator at the Environment and Natural Resources Foundation (FARN), an Argentinian NGO, adding this would help secure more space for debate in the lead-up to and during the annual summit.

So far, an informal workshop for governments and NGOs to exchange views on the JTWP and the mechanism, and to push things forward has been organised from September 30 to October 2 in Sydney. 

How will the review of the Just Transition Work Programme affect the mechanism?  

One task for COP31 is to review the efficiency and effectiveness of the JTWP so far and to decide whether and how it will continue. 

For Laura Restrepo Alameda, advocacy officer at Climate Action Network Latin America (CANLA), the main positive aspect is that it will include a mapping of instruments, initiatives and processes relevant to just transitions under the UN climate convention, the Paris Agreement and among other UN entities. “It’s a resource that will enable us to assess the complementarity and coherence of the various tools available to support the implementation of a [just transition] mechanism,” she told Climate Home News. 

Not everyone wants the JTWP review and the work to launch a mechanism to feed into one another. Russia, Arab nations and a group of large emerging nations pushed for them to be separate – which they believe would make it easier to limit the scope of the mechanism – while the African Group defended joint work between the two processes.

According to Anthony Dane of Southern Transitions, a South Africa-based “think and do-tank”, governments also have varying concerns around the mapping exercise, which is being carried out by the UN climate change secretariat.

He noted in a recent webinar that some want to use it as a basis to argue that a lot is already being done on just transition and so the new mechanism does not need to offer much more, while others are preparing to argue the opposite, highlighting a lack of international cooperation and support. 

How Belém launched the Just Transition mechanism

For Dane, the mapping exercise also raises the bigger question of how to define the scope of “just transition” within the UN climate talks. 

So far, richer countries have favoured a narrower view that focuses on phasing out fossil fuels, while developing countries have pushed for a broader “whole of economy, whole of society” approach that encompasses issues like green industrialisation and sustainable development.

Russia and some other high-emitting nations do not want the JTWP or its mechanism to become a tool for imposing new green trade restrictions, while the European Union has rejected attempts to use it as a forum to dispute its new carbon levy on imports. These debates are set to rumble on.

What will the mechanism do and when will it start?

In Bonn, countries discussed the design features of the mechanism – that is, the elements, governance arrangements, structures and functions it should have. The outcome was an informal preliminary note compiling a range of views and possible options. 

While most country negotiating groups welcomed the document as a basis for further talks, Arab countries said it did not reflect their priorities, with Saudi Arabia insisting it had no formal status. 

“The mechanism must contribute to international cooperation between countries, serve as a guide, support countries so that they can develop just transition strategies, and act as a channel for accessing funding to implement projects within their territories,” said Mercure of FARN. 

But exactly what the mechanism should cover, and what it should not, remain a contentious subject for governments.

A just agricultural transition takes root in Brazil

For example, the Like-Minded Developing Countries – a bloc of more than 20 low- and middle-income nations including China and India – and the Arab Group appear keen to avoid any targets, requirements or conditionalities being imposed on them with regard to transitioning away from fossil fuels (TAFF). 

That contrasts with some Latin American and small island states that would like to see the mechanism used as a way of furthering global commitments already made in 2023 on TAFF and tripling renewable energy by 2030.   

Developed countries, for their part, do not want the mechanism to put too much responsibility on them to provide finance and other forms of cooperation. 

Some experts Climate Home News spoke to, meanwhile, called for the mechanism to lay out actions for different sectors – not just energy but also others like agriculture and heavy industries.

Sandeep Pai, senior lead for international energy transitions at Duke University, said the mechanism should focus on at least eight to ten high-emitting sectors, addressing how to support workers through the transition to cleaner ways of operating. But, he noted “talking about sectors was always an issue at the negotiations”.

Another issue important to civil society groups is that justice should be embedded in the process to operationalise what they have informally dubbed the BAM (short for the Belém Action Mechanism or, more recently, the Belém Antalya Mechanism). 

“The key milestone between now and COP31 must be to define a structure for the BAM with clear governance, coordination and the inclusion of civil society,” said CANLA’s Restrepo Alameda. The network, which represents hundreds of NGOs, is calling for groups that are likely to be hit hard by the transition, such as workers and Indigenous peoples, to have a seat at the table.

Given the short time-frame until a decision to operationalise the mechanism is due to be agreed and adopted at COP31, experts say all these thorny issues are unlikely to be ironed out by then and further discussions may be needed to refine the form and functions of the new body.

CAN’s Rosemberg told Climate Home News that “an ambitious outcome” at COP31 would be to establish the mechanism with its key functions and modalities in Antalya, while setting up a transitional committee to speed up technical work and ensure the BAM is fully operational by COP32 in Ethiopia in 2027.

What is needed on the ground for a just transition?

The top-down nature of decisions taken at COPs generally do not reflect the specific situations of individual countries and communities on the ground – and this is particularly so when it comes to just transition.

Pai of Duke University contrasted India – where much of the transition will be about moving away from coal mining and coal-fired power stations – with countries that use relatively few fossil fuels like Costa Rica and will need to implement a very different set of changes.

He added that each country must define what a “just transition” means to them, according to their contexts and needs: is it about using less oil and gas, promoting green steel-making and lower-emitting buildings, or transforming some other high-carbon activity? The next step is to establish government bodies and policies to plan and drive the transition. 

COP30: Spain’s unions say just transition means renewing communities beyond jobs

“Global and broad declarations on a [just transition] mechanism are a good signal,” said Pai. “But we would be fooling ourselves if we think that just because something is getting declared, it will be implemented.”

When it comes to tackling dependence on coal, for example, Pai noted the difficulty of shutting down coal mines and replacing their role in local economies that tend to be heavily reliant on the industry for both jobs and revenues. According to the International Energy Agency, 3.1 million of the 7.8 million people working in coal-related activities in 2022 were employed in coal mining.

Why is finance the elephant in the room?

Finance – and finding more of it for climate action – has always been a bone of contention between developed and developing countries in the UN climate process, cropping up time and time again across negotiating streams, whether it’s the new goal for tripling resources for adaptation or filling the loss and damage fund.

In the corridors at Bonn, observers told Climate Home News that, for just transition, the discussions on the topic did not centre on setting up a new dedicated fund, but rather touched on how the mechanism could better connect available financial resources with just transition initiatives in countries.

The informal note on the new mechanism includes mobilising and facilitating “grant-based and non-debt-inducing finance” and channelling finance through North-South and other multilateral partnerships. It is unclear whether finance will be included in the final COP31 decision on the BAM. CAN’s Rosemberg has suggested a resource mobilisation taskforce could be set up to start identifying sources of funding.

An analysis by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) shows that, during the first year after mass layoffs, workers losing their jobs in energy-intensive industries – such as power supply, heavy manufacturing and transport – lose an average of 58% of their income, compared with 52% experienced in other sectors.

Pai flagged two challenges when it comes to funding just transitions: many large financial institutions don’t want to invest in low and middle-income countries because of their high-risk profile; and developing countries often lack a well-prepared pipeline of investable projects.

The Just Energy Transition Partnerships (JETPs) launched earlier this decade were an effort to overcome these barriers. The donor-backed initiatives, outside the UN climate process, mobilised billions of dollars from the public and private sectors to help several emerging economies, including South Africa and Indonesia, finance the transition to clean energy in an economically and socially fair manner. 

But the JETPs have run up against some difficulties, such as Jakarta abandoning its plan to shut down a major coal plant early, which was a key part of the original deal. 

Indonesia’s failing Just Energy Transition Partnership is a cautionary tale

With UN climate negotiations on finance seeing positions harden between developed and developing nations as donor governments struggle to meet existing targets, some observers believe talks on funding for just transition are unlikely to produce quick results in the form of hard dollars any time soon.

“Many of those who are asking for money don’t know what they’re asking for, and those who have the money don’t want to give. You can write a paragraph about finance [in the negotiations] but this fundamental reality will not change,” said Pai.

The post From Belém to Antalya – gains, gaps and challenges for a new Just Transition Mechanism  appeared first on Climate Home News.

The UN has released a report this week confirming what many people have feared: the world is going to pass 1.5C of warming.

At current emissions, the remaining carbon budget will be exhausted within roughly three years. We are heading into “exceedance” of the 1.5C threshold: a sustained breach of the Paris Agreement’s primary temperature goal before any possible return below it.

1.5C is the line we should not have crossed – and, once we cross it, the line we must quickly get back below, on what the UN Environment Programme calls an “overshoot, peak and decline pathway”.

Of course, climate risk is a spectrum: 1.4C is not safe, and 1.5C is not a sudden cliff edge. But the further the world moves beyond that level, the harder it becomes for communities and economies to adapt, and the greater the risk of more abrupt or systemic changes.

The importance of 1.5C

Some will argue that exceeding 1.5C means the Paris Agreement has failed, and that it is no longer a useful threshold. I disagree.

Before Paris, the world was heading for roughly 3.5C to 4C of warming. The UN now estimates that warming will reach a lower level of around 2.6C by 2100, due to policies implemented since Paris. That is still far too dangerous, but it is not the same world we were facing in 2015.

When we negotiated the Paris Agreement, 1.5C was not an arbitrary number. It was fought for by small island states and other climate-vulnerable countries because it represented a red line for their survival. Since then, we have witnessed the stark impacts of global temperature rises even in countries that did not consider themselves vulnerable, as seen with the devastating heatwaves in Europe this summer.

WHO issues new guidance on heat-health action plans, as El Niño sets in

The International Court of Justice underlined this in an advisory opinion, endorsed overwhelmingly by the UN General Assembly earlier this year, recognising 1.5C as the primary temperature threshold under the Paris Agreement and affirming that states must align their commitments with it. Overshoot does not move the goalposts. 1.5C remains the benchmark we must work to return to.

Lasting consequences of overshoot

But even as we fight to get back below 1.5C as quickly as possible, we now have to reckon honestly with what overshoot means. We are entering a period for which our societies, economies and institutions are not prepared. Even if overshoot itself is temporary, many of its consequences will not be. The longer it lasts, and the higher temperatures rise, the greater the lasting damage. We therefore need to limit its duration and magnitude.

The longer warming remains above 1.5C, the greater the risk of crossing tipping points in major Earth systems such as ice sheets, the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, permafrost and tropical forests. Crossing them can trigger self-reinforcing changes that may prove irreversible even if temperatures later fall. We need to understand and monitor these systems more than ever. That requires sustained investment in climate science – just as funding is being cut in many places.

An overshoot pathway will also strain human systems. When a flood destroys a home, the damage is not undone because global temperatures later fall. Crop failures, missed schooling, debt and displacement can have lasting effects. Farms, cities, healthcare systems and insurance markets will all have to cope with risks they were not designed for, and risk facing “tipping points” of their own, such as financial panic when markets suddenly reprice risks they had underestimated. Infrastructure built today will stand for decades, so we need to design and plan for the climate risks it will actually face.  

From firefighting to future-proofing: Preventing wildfires must be the priority

Our priority must be to transition away from fossil fuels and rapidly cut emissions, including short-lived climate pollutants like methane. It traps around 80 times more heat than carbon dioxide over a 20-year period, and cutting it sharply can act as an emergency brake on near-term warming. Much of the methane from fossil fuel operations can be cut with existing technologies.

We will also need sustainable carbon dioxide removal, although its role will be limited: trying to use it as a substitute for emissions cuts would be prohibitively expensive at scale.

The radical options

The major risks of overshoot have led to proposals to explore active intervention in the climate system itself. Solar radiation modification (SRM) is the best-known example: reflecting a small share of sunlight back into space to reduce warming. Other proposals would target different parts of the climate and Earth systems, such as trying to stabilise glaciers.

These responses would bring us into further uncharted territory across Earth systems and nature, diplomacy and governance, technology and societies.

Such ideas are born of genuine concern about the major risks facing vulnerable countries and communities as temperatures rise. But even under the most favourable assumptions, these are tactics for managing some of the symptoms of overshoot, not a strategy for addressing its causes. Greenhouse gases would keep accumulating, oceans would keep acidifying, and many of the social and economic impacts of overshoot would remain.

EU warns on solar geoengineering but research debate grinds on

The more we learn about the complexity of the climate and Earth systems we are disrupting and how much uncertainty there already is, the clearer it becomes that full control is likely an illusion, and new interventions bring new complex risks. SRM, for example, could change regional climates, such as rainfall patterns or agricultural production, in ways that benefit some regions and harm others, with knock-on geopolitical risks.

Governance and research needed

None of this is an argument against research into these technologies. On the contrary, the risks they’re responding to are so extreme that we must explore all the options we might have. But we need to understand the potential effects and capabilities much better and from many more angles, including the political and social implications. Serious global governance is particularly urgent, alongside transparent research that is open to scrutiny.

But the fundamental elements of a strategy to navigate overshoot are already understood. The priority is still to rapidly cut greenhouse gas emissions to limit peak warming, protect people against the warming already locked in, and ensure technological innovation aligns with the public interest.

Overshoot is not just an engineering challenge. We need a full-scale response across societies, economies and political systems to prepare to navigate a more uncertain climate.

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In a flagship new report sketching out a way not to lose the most ambitious Paris Agreement goal, the scientists said that global temperatures need to peak at no higher than 1.8C above pre-industrial levels to give the world “a fighting chance” to reverse course. They added that plans to suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere can only play a limited role in this effort and cannot substitute for emissions cuts. 

A return to the 1.5C warming limit will only be reached in an optimistic scenario that sees governments turn their full national climate plans – known as NDCs – into reality and meet their additional, more ambitious targets to reach net zero emissions, said the report published by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP). 

Actual government policy is far off that track. Current measures to cut emissions that are funded and in force put the world on course for around 2.8C of warming by 2100, UNEP has previously found. 

Comment: Keeping to 1.5C of warming is no longer possible – but we must still limit the overshoot

Joeri Rogelj, professor of climate science and policy at Imperial College London and one of the report’s authors, said it is necessary to keep the temperature peak as low as possible as there are limits to how fast the world can reverse global warming.

That is because the scale of carbon dioxide removal (CDR) interventions that can be implemented sustainably and in a just way will otherwise not be sufficient and some measures, such as tree-planting or forest management, will be less effective at higher temperatures, he added. 

Commenting on the report, UN Secretary-General António Guterres called for the 1.5C overshoot to be “as small and short as possible”. This, he added, “demands an overshoot of ambition”, involving accelerating the phaseout of fossil fuels and pursuing the renewables revolution, slashing methane pollution, and protecting land, forest and oceans.

“Governments must over-deliver on national climate plans, net-zero commitments, and beyond,” he urged in a video message. “The fight for 1.5 degrees is the fight for humanity.”

Overshoot, peak and decline

The report comes out nearly a year after the UN conceded for the first time that it is inevitable that global warming will exceed 1.5C temporarily and the world should focus on making that overshoot as small and short as possible.

UNEP’s Executive Director Inger Andersen told journalists that 1.5C remains the key goal, but “we now need a different approach from above”, while stepping up efforts to adapt to a warming world. 

“A return to 1.5C is not assured,” she added. “But limiting the magnitude, duration and consequences of overshoot, while preserving the possibility of bringing temperatures back down, is the best remaining option to protect vulnerable people, reduce losses and secure a livable future for all.”

Battle over cleaning up shipping set to resume at London talks

Scientists warn in the report that warming above 1.5C should not be seen as safe or acceptable. Climate risks above that threshold intensify with every additional fraction of a degree of warming, they said. The report paints a grim picture of expected climate impacts: glaciers could lose more than a quarter of their remaining mass by 2100 and global food production could fall by as much as 14% by 2050 without effective adaptation.

Some small island developing states and low-lying coastal cities could be partially or completely submerged, while damaged ecosystems could further accelerate climate change.

To tackle these impacts, the report emphasises that adaptation and emissions-cutting measures are mutually reinforcing approaches and must advance together, while being responsive to emerging risks, which could be non-linear and arise abruptly.

“This report is a ‘fork in the road’ moment for the planet,” said Surangel Whipps, Jr., president of the Pacific island nation of Palau. “It is a further glimpse into a perilous future that has already arrived. To continue to have a fighting chance, calls for greater ambition are no longer enough – we need to see an urgent and unprecedented increase in political will and investment in a climate-safe future.” 

Cut emissions first, remove carbon after

The authors call for a three-phase approach to bringing temperatures back down: an “immediate response” of deep and rapid emissions cuts and urgent protection for the most vulnerable as warming approaches and passes 1.5C; a “coping and containment” phase focused on reaching net-zero emissions and building resilience as temperatures peak; and a “long-term resilience” phase of net-negative emissions through carbon dioxide removal (CDR) and lasting adaptation as temperatures eventually decline.

Richard Betts, who leads climate impact research at the UK Met Office, said CDR is not a “get-out-of-jail-free card” and should only be additional to emission reductions that need to be achieved with “even more urgency than before”.

Critics of CDR have long pointed to the technology’s record of overpromising and underdelivering, and warn it has been exploited by the fossil fuel industry and some oil-producing states to try to delay the clean energy transition.

Not everyone was fully convinced by the UNEP overshoot report. Veteran climate scientist Bill Hare from Climate Analytics said it “does a good job of describing the hole we’ve dug ourselves into” but “a poor job of showing us that there is a way out”. He argued that its thin treatment of the need for a fossil fuel phase-out and ambitious mitigation pathways to cut emissions risk “turning it into a call to apathy rather than a call to arms”.

“Host of challenges” with CDR

Debra Roberts, honorary professor at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa, told journalists that limiting global warming to around 1.8C is needed to give the world “a realistic and fighting chance” of returning to the 1.5C limit because of the “questionable” feasibility of interventions above that threshold. 

CDR comes with “a whole host of challenges”, she added, including the impacts on food and water security of rolling out large-scale programmes and the unanswered questions of whether newer technologies will work at scale and who will foot the bill. 

“It’s going to happen in a very, very complex decision-making space where the risks and impacts are dramatically becoming more complex and interrelated,” she said. “That’s why the pressure there is keep those emissions as low as possible because they give us the greatest fighting chance of the return to 1.5C in a more equitable and just way.”

The post UN sets out narrow path back to 1.5C warming after inevitable overshoot appeared first on Climate Home News.

Wildfires have devastated communities across the world this summer, claiming lives, displacing thousands of people and leaving billions in economic damage in their wake. In Europe alone, wildfires have already caused an estimated €19 billion in losses this year.

They are an economic, financial and public health challenge that is growing faster than many governments and markets are prepared for – and exposing the real costs of poor land management.

A system built for recovery, not resilience

Far more money is currently spent responding to the disastrous effects of wildfires than preventing them in the first place. The United Nations Environment Programme estimates that more than half of wildfire-related spending goes towards response, while planning receives only around 0.2 percent. This problem is not limited to wildfires; over 95 percent of disaster aid between 2005 and 2017 was allocated to response, and less than 4 percent was directed towards prevention or preparedness.

Forests are critical, but without investment in how land is managed and protected, their value is neither stable nor guaranteed. Protecting forests requires investing not only in conservation, but in the conditions that keep forests standing.

Each dollar invested in wildfire-resistant construction could save around $210 in avoided future economic losses, according to a report by the World Economic Forum and Forest Future Alliance. Despite this evidence that prevention can significantly reduce future costs, wildfire resilience remains chronically underfunded.

This spending discrepancy is creating significant challenges for insurers, asset owners and financial institutions. Global insured losses from natural catastrophes reached $107 billion in 2025, with wildfires, floods and storms accounting for 92 percent of claims.

In this context, insurers are reassessing where and how they are willing to underwrite risk. Around 56 percent of global wildfire losses between 2000 and 2023 were uninsured. In some high-risk areas, insurers are scaling back coverage altogether, leaving homeowners, businesses and governments to shoulder a growing share of the costs – making it increasingly difficult to break even.

Proven solutions are already paying off

In many regions, wildfires are driven not by natural causes but by the deliberate clearing of land for agriculture. Degraded landscapes are becoming drier, more flammable and increasingly vulnerable to catastrophic loss, creating a vicious cycle of deforestation, economic damage and rising emissions.

The answer is not simply stronger firefighting capacity. Governments, investors and businesses must work together to shift capital upstream into prevention, resilience and long-term landscape stewardship of healthy forests. That means planting appropriately, investing in heat-resistant species, exploring approaches that minimise fire footprints through active management, and exploring the AI and technology solutions that are burgeoning.

Solutions to this already exist and are proven to have an impact. Following devastating wildfires year-on-year, Portugal shifted its approach to wildfire management, increasing prevention spending within its national rural fire management system from around 20 percent in 2017 to approximately 60 percent in 2022. While many countries remain locked in a reactive cycle of disaster response, public policy can shift investment upstream and make resilience a priority before fires occur.

Indigenous communities have long used proactive land stewardship to reduce wildfire risk while supporting healthy and productive landscapes. For example, the Cheslatta Carrier Nation in British Columbia traditionally managed fuels through cultural fire practices but now implements mechanised fuel removal methods under commercial agreements. By combining Indigenous stewardship with sustainable forest management, Cheslatta is generating community benefits while also boosting wildfire prevention.

Resilience can also be strengthened through finance and technology. FireSat, a partnership led by Earth Fire Alliance with Google.org, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and Muon, is a satellite constellation designed for rapid wildfire detection. Scanning every 20 minutes, it can detect fires 400 times smaller than current systems and track them through smoke and darkness in almost real time. In California alone, FireSat could prevent up to 350,000 acres from burning each year. It has recently received significant new investments allowing it to expand towards a constellation of more than 50 satellites that will monitor every point on Earth every 20 minutes or less.

In Brazil’s Pantanal, the Embrace the Forest initiative uses AI-powered detection towers across 2.5 million hectares to support earlier intervention and faster response. During the severe 2024 fire season, the initiative contributed to a 40 percent reduction in burned area compared to 2020.

These examples illustrate what is possible when resilience is treated as an investment priority rather than a recovery cost. But we must ensure funding for these measures is scaled before disaster strikes. Initiatives like the Global Wildfire Leadership Network (GWLN) are key, bringing together corporate decision-makers, investors, insurers, governments and Indigenous leaders to direct investment towards prevention and align finance, technology and stewardship to protect nature, safeguard communities and strengthen future economic stability. With a goal of doing more together than the sum of our parts, the network focuses on Forest Future Alliance GWLN Solutions Labs – where partners sign up with the intent to collaborate.

Rewarding prevention

Financial incentives must be created that reward prevention. This can be done by scaling public-private partnerships, supporting long-term landscape stewardship, investing in community capacity including Indigenous wisdom and technology. Ultimately, our terrestrial natural reserves are critical infrastructure that support resilient economies and thriving communities.

One in three people are dependent on forest services, goods and economic opportunities for survival, so it’s in all our interests to protect what we have. Forests support cooling, water and food security – and are a very cost-effective way of removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, where done appropriately.

UN chief warns climate crisis “in overdrive” as El Niño threatens to fuel the fire

No sector can solve this challenge alone. The benefits of wildfire resilience are shared across communities, governments, insurers, investors, utilities and businesses. A single intervention can protect homes and livelihoods, reduce insurance claims, secure water supplies and lower future public costs. Because the benefits are shared, the solutions must be too. Coalitions of actors can take proven approaches further than any one individual or organisation could alone.

As wildfires continue to burn at an unprecedented scale, the opportunity now is to roll out solutions, shift investment upstream and build a future where resilience, rather than recovery, becomes the foundation of thriving economies.

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When Rojo Neog’s village in northeast India was hit by a power cut in July, he headed out to buy candles. Three days later, his body was recovered – swept away by surging floodwaters. His niece said the water had risen from knee- to neck-level in about half an hour.

The devastating floods highlight how climate risk across India is becoming harder to confine to a season or a disaster bulletin. Just weeks before the disaster in Assam, authorities in Mumbai rationed water as reservoir storage fell to just over 10%.

India does not lack warnings about climate risk. The more difficult task is making sure money, institutions and communities are ready to act before those warnings become disasters. Adaptation should not be just an obligation once a crisis has arrived, but an investment made while there is still something to protect.

As governments head towards COP31 in Antalya this November, India should push not only for more adaptation finance, but for finance that arrives earlier and can be traced to outcomes on the ground.

That is the gap India needs to close if we wish to become truly resilient in the face of the changing climate. Money must move with risk, institutions must know what to do before an emergency is declared, and long-term spending must reduce vulnerability before it becomes loss.

India’s adaptation disconnect

This year the disconnect has become painfully clear in Assam, where more than 100 people have died due to the flooding, with nearly 140,000 people across seven districts affected. More than 450 villages remain inundated, while some 49,000 people are taking shelter in relief camps after losing everything.

No financing mechanism can stop a river from rising. But timely measures can change what happens before it does. If forecasts and river levels triggered financing before the water arrived, authorities could position boats and stock shelters, and evacuate people where needed, while families could move cattle, seed, medicines and documents before roads disappeared.

For Indian women workers, a just transition means surviving climate impacts with dignity

India already has much of the information needed to address climate change. High-risk states and districts should agree in advance which local thresholds trigger action, who is responsible and how funds will be released, so officials do not have to negotiate responsibility and budgets from scratch once risk becomes an emergency.

Linking community know-how to financing

Our work in Majuli, a river island district in Assam, shows why this matters.

Across 64 villages, communities helped identify flood and erosion risks, assess their capacity to respond, and to develop resilience measures with indicative budgets and possible funding sources.

Communities often know what would help; the harder task is connecting that knowledge to institutions and finance that can act on it.

Extreme heat costing India’s poorest workers 2% of GDP, survey finds

Public health offers an example of how systems can adapt as risks change. In New Delhi, vector-control workers who once prepared for a defined “dengue season” now remain on alert throughout the year, using surveillance and hotspot mapping to identify risks earlier.

The next step is to make these systems more predictive by integrating climate forecasts into public health planning.

India needs sustained investment in drainage, health systems, wetlands, water security and climate-resilient agriculture. Some will remain public responsibilities; others, including water reuse, efficient irrigation, resilient cold chains and risk-proofed infrastructure, can generate savings or revenue and attract private capital if projects are prepared well.

The economic case for adaptation is not always about generating new revenue. Often, it is about avoiding future costs. Flood shelters, public-health preparedness, early-warning systems and support for the poorest households will still need public or grant finance. The point is to match the finance to the risk rather than treat adaptation as a single financing problem.

Rising disaster bill shows cost of inaction

India is already spending heavily on adaptation, with related expenditure reaching 5.6% of GDP in 2021-22. Yet tracked adaptation finance was only about $15 billion annually, almost entirely from domestic public sources, against estimated needs of about $100 billion a year through 2030.

Internationally, the shortfall is wider: developing countries may need $310 billion-$365 billion annually by 2035, compared with just $26 billion in international public adaptation finance in 2023.

For governments repeatedly paying for flood, droughts and heat relief, the cost of inaction can quickly exceed the cost of building resilience, though not all the costs of inaction appear neatly on a balance sheet.

In floodplain landscapes such as Assam’s Kaziranga National Park, animals move towards higher ground every monsoon as the floodplain fills, crossing roads and leaving the park in search of safety. During the 2024 floods, 215 animals died, including 13 one-horned rhinos.

Development plans in such sensitive landscapes must leave room for water, wildlife and communities to move safely. A wetland may not generate monetary revenue, but the floodwater it stores has real value. The cost of losing that capacity may only become visible when the next flood arrives.

Comment: Climate adaptation in Africa needs investment, not imported solutions

Success should not be measured only by how quickly relief follows a disaster. It should also be measured by what never had to be replaced: people and animals moved before the water rose, seeds kept dry, medicines waiting at the shelter, a wetland that still had room to hold water, and a family that could leave while the road was still open.

Adaptation becomes an investment when it preserves those choices before they disappear.

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For over a decade, Africa has pushed for a UN protocol on drought risk management that would acknowledge drought as an issue requiring a regional and global – not just a national – response, potentially paving the way for more finance to help ensure water is available when drought hits.

A formal protocol would enable countries to transition from reacting to drought once it hits to “a proactive enabling mechanism to address drought and its effects such as migration”, said a Tunisian negotiator on behalf of the African Group of countries last week. Once land is regularly too dry and infertile to grow crops or graze animals, people often leave to seek a living elsewhere.

But this effort to adopt a protocol, led by Africa, has been resisted at successive land restoration COPs under the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), mainly by developed countries, which argue that a legally weaker alternative – a framework – would be faster and cheaper to set up.

Governments at the previous COP in Saudi Arabia in 2024 failed to reach agreement despite talks running past midnight, while this year’s saw African officials coordinate a walkout from negotiating rooms on Wednesday morning, according to two sources at the talks.

Drought deal delayed until 2028

The IISD’s Earth Negotiations Bulletin, a non-governmental organisation which unlike the media is allowed to watch and report on closed-door talks, said a call to suspend negotiations on Wednesday showed negotiations had reached “boiling point” and “made some jaws drop”.

Negotiations resumed after a lunchtime meeting with the Mongolian COP presidency although governments were only eventually able to agree that they could not find consensus in Ulaanbaatar and should resume talks on an instrument to deal with drought in 2028.

Christine Colvin, WWF’s head of freshwater policy, told Climate Home News that, with droughts hitting from Honduras to the English region of Hampshire, something concrete – whether a protocol or a framework – is needed urgently “rather than the can being kicked down the road for another two years as will now happen with the protocol procrastination”.

But, in a closing press conference on Friday, the Mongolian minister presiding over talks celebrated that governments had reached consensus on several “contentious” issues and that agenda items blocked at this year’s COP17 would be put on the agenda for COP18 in Egypt.

US blocks agenda items

Other agenda items that divided countries were on measuring land degradation’s effects on women, enhancing the involvement of civil society and women in land COPs, and the UNCCD working more closely and effectively with the UN’s climate and nature conventions.

On the COP’s opening day two weeks ago, the US representative said the Trump government objects to these agenda items “on their premise and no amount of negotiation will allow us to join consensus on these items. As such we request that they be struck from the agenda at which time we will then be able to approve it, saving us valuable negotiating time.”

A US State Department spokesperson later told Climate Home News that the US wants the UN “to get back to basics by refocusing on its core mandate, eliminating overlap, and reducing competition for scarce resources”.

The spokesperson added, “that means prioritising the concrete work member states created [the UN] to do – rather than diverting limited time, attention, and resources toward social and political agendas, including gender-related initiatives.”

On COP’s first day, the European Union and Brazil pushed back against the blocking of these agenda items, with a Brazilian negotiator saying his country attaches “great importance” to them. But the Mongolian presidency directed governments to adopt the rest of the agenda without the controversial items, which were discussed privately with countries throughout the two weeks.

An EU statement, read out later by Irish minister Timmy Dooley, accused “some parties” (meaning national governments) of having adopted a “less constructive approach” and preventing “discussions on important matters from even commencing”.

The agenda items the US refused to engage with were never discussed and were only placed onto the agenda for the next COP on the last day. Those talks will take place in Egypt in two years’ time, with Donald Trump due then to be in his last year as US president.

No restoration without women

The blocking of the gender agenda item has stymied attempts, agreed on by governments at the last COP, to develop gender-specific indicators for the UNCCD’s next overall framework and to facilitate more women delegates at COPs. Women made up only about a quarter of delegates to COP15 in 2022, UNCCD analysis with the latest data shows

Criticising the move to keep gender off the agenda, the EU said in a statement that it welcomes “the attention being given at COP17 to women pastoralists and herders, recognising their contribution to sustainable land management and resilient rural livelihoods”.

The head of the UNCCD, former Egyptian environment minister Yasmine Fouad, said on Friday that “regardless that the agenda item was blocked”, she was proud that she and COP17 President Batmunkh Battsetseg had led the COP as women and attended the gender caucus (a meeting of groups supporting women at the talks).  

“Without the women,” she told the closing press conference on Friday, “we will not be able to restore land, restore hope, restore life or restore even our children and grandchildren. And we will keep on pushing that agenda.”

The civil society agenda item aimed to allow NGOs to attend land COP negotiations, as they do at climate COPs, and included terms of reference for an Indigenous Peoples Caucus.

A representative of Indigenous Peoples told the COP’s closing plenary meeting that the group had “deep disappointment that the agenda of this COP has removed the dedicated space for indigenous peoples”. “We cannot restore the land while removing the voices of those who care for it,” she said. 

On Tuesday, the UNCCD’s deputy head Andrea Meza was asked about Indigenous Peoples’ participation. She said that the blocking of “one agenda item” is “generating uncertainty in the progress” towards creating caucuses for Indigenous Peoples and for Local Communities within the talks.

Because of the “complex geopolitical situation” making it hard to obtain consensus, coalitions of the willing have become more important, she added. 

Mining out, money in

Outside the formal negotiations, the summit was marked by a focus on the strongly Mongolian issues of the role played by pastoralists and rangelands like grasslands, as well as mining, in both degrading and restoring land.

Part of the conference was sponsored by Australian mining company Rio Tinto and its local partner Oyu Tolgoi. Their presence was protested by campaigners wearing T-shirts calling on the companies to “stop wasting drinking water” and to “get out of Mongolia”.

The UNCDD and others praised the success of the summit in raising more finance for land restoration. The COP saw institutions like the Asian Development Bank and Global Environment Facility pledge money to combat land degradation, with the UNCCD estimating that $645 million of new commitments were made.

An estimated $355 billion a year is needed through 2030 to meet global land restoration commitments, compared with around $77 billion currently invested. Private finance accounts for only around 6% of global investment, according to the UNCCD.  

UNCCD chief scientist Baron Orr told a press conference that many of the announcements were public-private partnerships that use government money to “even the playing field” for companies that want to protect land, in a bid to ensure they are not disadvantaged compared with those that do not.

Such partnerships are a “huge opportunity”, he said, especially as “we’re not in a moment of public finance – public finance is tight in every country.”

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Leaders from the 18-member Pacific Islands Forum (PIF), including Australia and New Zealand, are expected to issue a call for global pledges to the Pacific Resilience Facility (PRF) at a high-level meeting this coming week in Palau, seeking to build a new model for financing climate action.

The new regional fund was formally launched in May this year and is meant to “serve communities at a community level”, swiftly channelling investments for their projects on the ground, according to Fiji’s assistant minister for foreign affairs, Lenora Qereqeretabua.

“We are expecting pledges for the PRF, and these funds will go to communities that apply,” she told journalists at an online briefing. “We have organised it in such a way that it makes our application processes much, much easier than applying for global funding.”

Qereqeretabua added that she expects that PRF funds will be “utilised by communities to protect themselves from climate change and the effects of climate change.”

The Pacific Islands Forum meeting is expected to shape the region’s priorities ahead of this year’s pre-COP, hosted by Fiji and Tuvalu, and COP31, which will be co-led by Australia and Türkiye.

At COP31, a dedicated session on the climate finance needs of small island states will seek to drive pledges into the PRF. The fund has so far received about $172 million in capital – with about $67 million coming from Australia – and aims to close the year with $500 million.

Ocean heat and fossil fuel shocks

Leaders from the Pacific will meet in Palau from Sunday amid an “ocean crisis” of record-breaking ocean heat caused by this year’s “super El Niño”, according to Kevin Chand, Pacific ocean policy director at National Geographic’s Pristine Seas conservation project.

Leaders at the PIF are expected to put forward commitments towards new marine protected areas, which will be key for shielding ecosystems from future climate extremes, Chand said. The forum is expected to issue a statement on the need for ocean action at COP31, and announce commitments towards reaching the global goal of protecting 30% of the planet’s land and sea ecosystems by 2030.

Rising ocean heat could lead to food insecurity and lost government earnings in the region, as key fish stocks like tuna start migrating away from their coastline in search of colder waters, said Coral Pasisi, director of climate change and sustainability at the Pacific Community (SPC).

Climate shocks are deepening existing economic pressures, as Pacific nations have spent up to a quarter of their GDP on fossil fuel imports due to the war in Iran, according to a recent report by the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Australia.

Wesley Morgan, one of the study’s authors, told journalists that partner nations “ought to be putting their money where their mouth is”, and should support the energy transition in the Pacific by covering the upfront costs of switching from polluting diesel to solar power, batteries and electricity grid upgrades.

China keeps Indonesia’s battery dream afloat but future less certain

Given the increase in climate-related shocks and sea-level rise, the PIF should also mention the need to phase out fossil fuel extraction and consumption, said Sindra Sharma, international policy lead at the Pacific Islands Climate Action Network (PICAN).

Last year’s COP30 failed to deliver a global roadmap on transitioning away from fossil fuels, which led to a group of countries – including several Pacific island nations – pursuing their own fossil fuel phase-out summit in Santa Marta, Colombia. Next year’s conference will be hosted by Tuvalu and co-chaired by Ireland, which should also receive backing from the PIF, Sharma said.

Both the chairs of the Santa Marta coalition and the Australian COP31 co-presidency have vowed to continue a push for this topic to be discussed at COP31.

New fund to test allies

As local communities in the Pacific struggle to access global climate funds, the PRF’s planned model for quick, direct disbursements has “very solid and good” intentions, Sharma said, but it will need political and financial backing from donor countries.

“The proof is going to be when the fund actually starts operating and delivering to communities,” she added. “If there is too much bureaucracy in being able to access the funds, for example. These things will have to be scrutinised.”

The facility aims to deliver funds in two categories: one for climate adaptation and “disaster resilience”, and another for social and community resilience that includes areas like community capacity-building, education, data analytics and financial management, among others. It will launch its first call for proposals at the PIF.

Morgan added that Australia will need to “leverage global interests” so that funding is directed to the Pacific Resilience Facility “or else the Pacific won’t be able to trust Australia as a partner”. The country ratified the PRF treaty in May, triggering its entry into force.

“The perception [of Australia] in the region is genuinely divided, and it’s worth being honest about it,” Sharma said, adding that the pre-COP31 in Fiji, which is usually limited to a technical space for negotiations, will determine how meaningful Australia’s advocacy for the Pacific can be.

This time, Pacific nations want to use the pre-COP in early October as an opportunity to demonstrate the challenges their largely low-lying islands face and to advocate for their political priorities, including a renewed global effort to limit global warming to 1.5C by cutting emissions faster and deeper. World leaders are due to visit Tuvalu to experience the frontline of rising sea levels, although Australia and Fiji have yet to confirm who will attend.

“In Bonn, Australia was largely missing on the negotiated outcomes that we so urgently need to see. It’s not enough to get Pacific priorities on the agenda. Agenda placement is not delivery,” Sharma added.

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The US and oil-producing allies like Saudi Arabia want to weaken a proposed plan for cleaner fuels that aims to reduce planet-heating emissions from the industry, which relies heavily on dirty bunker fuels. Shipping currently represents 3% of global emissions.

Those that want a softer system are likely to back a Liberian proposal which expert analysis suggests would see emissions fall by only half at most by 2050, far short of the sector’s agreed climate goals.

After several years of debate, governments provisionally agreed in April 2025 on the “Net-Zero Framework” (NZF), a series of emissions reduction targets for shipowners, backed up with financial rewards for meeting the targets and fees for missing them.

But in October 2025, after a high-profile intervention from US President Donald Trump and threats of sanctions and visa restrictions, the US convinced a majority of voting nations to postpone the adoption of the NZF for a year.

Ralph Regenvanu, climate minister for the Pacific nation of Vanuatu, called the delay “unacceptable” given the urgency of accelerating climate change.

After a round of low-profile talks in May, the first of three further sets of talks on how to clean up shipping will begin at the IMO’s riverside headquarters in London on Tuesday, culminating in a final public session in December.

Em Fenton, who follows the talks as senior director of climate diplomacy at Opportunity Green, an NGO focused on aviation and shipping, said governments should not be sidetracked by alternative proposals to the NZF, calling them “a distraction from a hard-fought multilateral compromise”.

“If countries want to deliver a just and fair maritime transition, there is really only one choice: back the NZF and stand together in solidarity against those who would tear it apart,” Fenton added.

Five proposals on the table

Governments will discuss five different proposals submitted in advance of next week’s meeting. The most ambitious of these is from the Pacific island nation of Tuvalu, which has proposed a levy on the entirety of a ship’s emissions rather than just those above a certain level, as the NZF envisions.

That had been the original demand of Pacific nations before the NZF was provisionally adopted in April 2025. At the time, Tuvalu’s transport minister Simon Kofe described the NZF as disappointing and not ambitious enough.

For this reason, six Pacific countries abstained in the vote on the NZF. While they supported the original plan for its adoption in October 2025, they have used the delay to push again for more ambition.

John Kautoke, advisor to a group of Pacific nations called 6PAC+, told Climate Home News that the NZF “cannot diminish its already inadequate ambition. If anything, the NZF must increase in ambition if we are going to renegotiate its parameters.”

Analysis by the Institute of Marine Engineering, Science and Technology (IMarEST) suggests that, of the five proposals, only Tuvalu’s would meet the 2030 and 2040 emissions reduction targets for global shipping that were agreed by governments in 2023. Those were for cuts of 20% between 2008 and 2030, 70% by 2040 and then reaching net zero “by or around, i.e. close to 2050”.

Despite this, the UK, Australia, Canada and South Africa have formally proposed that governments adopt the NZF, which won support in a 63-13 vote among governments at the April 2025 talks. Trump’s US walked out halfway through.

According to IMarEst’s analysis, while the NZF proposal will not be enough to meet the industry’s targets, it will reduce emissions more cheaply than the Pacific proposal.

A proposal by Brazil – which fought hard for the NZF last October – suggests tweaking the framework to make meeting targets easier in the short term and harder in the long term.

While this compromise will make it more appealing to the owners of polluting ships and countries that support them, IMarEst estimates it would lead to higher cumulative emissions than either the NZF or Pacific proposals.

The NZF stipulates that fees for high-polluting shipowners should be be put into a Net Zero Fund and used to promote clean shipping fuels and a fairer transition. The Brazilian proposal would delay raising and spending these funds by two years, from 2029 to 2031.

Liberia’s proposal weakens emissions cuts

The US and Saudi Arabia are likely to swing behind a new proposal from Liberia, whose government makes millions of dollars a year selling the right for shipowners to register their vessels in the small West African nation via a US-based company.

This proposal would weaken the emissions reduction targets. IMarEst says it would cut the industry’s emissions at most by a half by 2050, falling far short of the target agreed in 2023 for international shipping to reach net zero “close to 2050”.

It would also replace the NZF’s fees for missing targets with a carbon trading system. As a result, there would be no Net Zero Fund and therefore less money available to incentivise green fuels and make the transition more equitable for poorer nations.

Pacific advisor Kautoke said that, as well as preventing shipping from reaching zero emissions by 2050, Liberia’s proposal would mean the Pacific “will not receive any support to deal with the disproportionately negative impacts created by the cost of the transition”.

“We get a double blow if we adopt the Liberian proposal,” he warned. “We get all the cost of a transition without any support, and we have an industry that continues to burn fossil fuels to an unforeseen point.”

Japanese proposal favours shipowners

Japan has submitted a late proposal to amend the NZF so that shipowners have more control over how the fees they would pay for emitting above a set threshold are spent.

University College London professor Tristan Smith has argued that this change means there will be no central mechanism to incentivise investments in clean fuels. He wrote on LinkedIn that under the system put forward by Japan, shipowners would be able to select which green projects their fees would go to. They could choose their own or those of a sister company or other shipowners, rather than funding broader just transition projects that would benefit marine workers or developing countries hit by rising shipping costs.

Despite its flaws, Smith added that Japan’s proposal “could still get taken seriously by some, given how appealing it may seem to shipowners who have consistently demanded control of revenues, and given how the US and other member states have pushed back against the IMO Net Zero Fund and [greenhouse gas] pricing.”

Tacit or explicit approval?

Next week, governments are expected to make statements saying which proposals – or which aspects of proposals – they prefer. More talks will be held from November 23-27 and November 30-December 3 before a potentially final round from December 4.

A new framework to tackle shipping emissions could be adopted at those talks if two-thirds of countries that are present and signed up to a regulation called Marpol Annex VI – endorsed by just over 100 states – vote in favour of it, as they did in April 2025.

The US and its allies are also trying to change the rules to make the next stage more difficult. Decisions that have been adopted at IMO meetings usually take effect automatically unless a certain number of countries object within a certain time period decided by governments, a system known as tacit approval.

But the US wants that to require explicit approval instead, so that any new emissions standard would not come into force unless enough governments – representing a certain percentage of the world’s shipping fleet – actively indicate support for it.

Critics say this change would give a small number of countries with large shipping registries the power to block implementation. Liberia has the world’s biggest shipping registry, run by an American company, followed by Panama and the Republic of the Marshall Islands.

Liberia and Panama have supported the US at the talks on the Net-Zero Framework. The Marshall Islands has long been one of the most vocal supporters of climate action in shipping but, with its officials and shipping registry income vulnerable to US retaliation, did not sign on to the recent Pacific proposal vowing to strengthen the NZF if it is re-opened.

Brazilian negotiator Adriana de Medeiros Gabinio warned in April that the NZF’s opponents are trying to change the rules by which it comes into force as a “safety net to block” it.

This article was updated on 7 September to correct the dates of future talks

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The Climate Change Response (Tort Liability) Amendment Bill, expected to take effect in the coming days after it is formally signed by the Governor-General, prevents all current and future civil claims for climate loss or harm under tort law.

Justice minister Paul Goldsmith said last week that the aim was to give businesses “certainty around their climate change obligations”, noting it would not alter the government’s responsibilities under the Climate Change Response Act 2002 nor business obligations under the Emissions Trading Scheme.

“Our response to climate change is best managed by the Government at a national level and not through piece-meal litigation in the courts,” he added in a statement.

Such litigation, he said, “risks developing a new regime that contradicts the framework Parliament has already enacted” to tackle climate change.

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Goldsmith singled out a key domestic climate lawsuit brought by Northland iwi leader and activist Mike Smith against six big companies: dairy firms Fonterra and Dairy Holdings, energy firms Genesis Energy and Z Energy, New Zealand Steel and coal mining firm BT Mining. A seventh original defendant, Channel Infrastructure, was dropped after it permanently decommissioned its Marsden Point oil refinery.

Smith argued that these companies had caused him harm under public nuisance and negligence law, as well as a third breach of a duty to cease contributing to climate change that has yet to be tested domestically. He did not seek financial compensation, instead asking for the companies to immediately stop emitting or contributing to net greenhouse gas emissions.  

In one of the most advanced corporate climate accountability lawsuits in the world, a trial had been scheduled for April 2027 after the Supreme Court unanimously allowed the case to continue.

Corporate lobbying in the shadows

Smith described the passing of the bill as “deeply concerning”, particularly as it coincided with the Supreme Court hearing another of his climate lawsuits. In that case, Smith v Attorney-General, he argues that the government’s response to climate change and its impacts on Māori communities in particular breaches rights to life and culture.

“That timing raises profound questions about the separation of powers and the rule of law,” said Smith. “Whatever one’s view of the merits of these cases, it is deeply troubling when parliament intervenes to remove a legal pathway while the courts are actively considering fundamental questions about climate responsibility, rights and the crown’s obligations.”

The bill – which says that no person (including the government) can be found liable in tort for emissions-related climate change effects – followed major lobbying efforts by the companies defending themselves in Smith’s lawsuit. They outlined a proposed legal amendment in a briefing note to the government in 2024.

The centre-right government has been fiercely criticised over its lack of transparency in relation to this lobbying activity. The national ombudsman recently found that the Prime Minister’s Office effectively withheld information requested by the Environmental Law Initiative about meetings, discussions and conversations regarding Smith’s case.

Green groups fail to stop bill

The bill sparked huge concern among environmental campaigners in New Zealand and elsewhere. Greenpeace Aotearoa called it a “shocking abuse of executive power” and the vast majority of submissions to a parliamentary inquiry said it should be rejected.

But in the end, it was adopted with little resistance, moving relatively smoothly through parliament, passing its third reading by 67 votes to 53. Sam Bookman, climate law lecturer at Melbourne Law School, told Climate Home News he was not surprised by this, given that the coalition government has a secure majority.

A complaint has been made to the UN special rapporteur on climate change and human rights by Smith, the National Iwi Chairs Forum Pou Tikanga and youth coalition Climate Clinic Aotearoa over what they see as the government’s heavy-handed approach. Smith is also challenging the new law in yet another lawsuit.

“Pathetic”: New Zealand plans to barely cut emissions between 2030 and 2035

Bookman thinks it “very unlikely” that such a challenge will succeed, noting that New Zealand’s constitution is firmly anchored in parliamentary sovereignty.

But the expert in climate law does not see the bill as the end of legal action in the country, noting that New Zealand has a “sophisticated climate litigation landscape with a growing number of specialist and experienced lawyers and NGOs”.

The country is also approaching its next general election in November, and some opposition parties have pledged to restore access to the courts if elected.

Amanda Larsson, global project lead on agriculture for Greenpeace International, said: “This law deserves to be tested, and I strongly encourage the international climate litigation community to unite and help defend New Zealanders’ fundamental right to hold polluters accountable before this becomes a global blueprint.”

Copycat legislation on the rise

New Zealand’s move is part of a small but growing legislative effort to shut down climate litigation around the world.

In the US, Republican politicians introduced legislation in the House and Senate in April that would shield fossil fuel firms from climate liability lawsuits. Similar laws have already been passed at state level in Tennessee, Utah, Iowa and Louisiana.

The German state of Bavaria has put forward a similar proposal to the Federal Council, aiming to block private climate claims as well as the recognition and enforcement of foreign judgments imposing such liability. There are also proposals to limit available remedies and actions in the Netherlands and Belgium.

UN General Assembly backs “climate obligations” set by world’s top court

Bookman said he expects more efforts to counter climate damages litigation and advised plaintiffs to think about how to respond, including drawing on broader support in opposing them.

“Even though it’s very hard for plaintiffs to win these types of cases, companies are very eager to avoid the expense, embarrassment and political accountability that come even with unsuccessful lawsuits,” he said.

The post New Zealand moves to protect business with law curtailing climate litigation appeared first on Climate Home News.

Indonesia produces around 60% of the world’s nickel, a metal used to manufacture batteries for electric vehicles (EVs) – more than any other country in the world. But in 2026, the government sharply reduced how much of its nickel can be extracted from the ground. 

Production quotas were reduced by around 40% this year compared to 2025. Weda Bay, the largest nickel mine on Earth, had its allowance cut by more than 70% and exhausted its full-year quota by the end of May, halting mining entirely; it cannot resume large-scale extraction until next year unless regulators grant an extension.

The policy has sparked a vivid debate in Indonesian policy circles: how can the country shift its strategy from a decade of mining vast quantities of cheap nickel to producing a high-value and low-carbon material that the rest of the world wants for EV batteries.

The cuts aren’t a silver bullet to clean up Indonesia’s nickel industry, whose smelters are powered by coal – the most polluting fossil fuels. But alongside stricter enforcement of environmental rules, it is one side of efforts to produce more sustainable nickel for a premium.

Restricting Indonesia’s nickel output

Production quotas were introduced to stop the collapse of nickel prices because of oversupply in the market. Prices had fallen more than 40% in 2023 alone and kept sliding as Indonesian supply kept growing, hitting a four-year low of around $13,900 a ton in late 2025.

Critics called the recent tightening of production quotas proof that Indonesia’s nickel strategy has failed, arguing that the industry shouldn’t need to throttle its own output to survive. But when assessed against what the policy was supposed to do – push up nickel prices – it has worked. Prices jumped to $20,000 a ton in May, the highest since 2024.

Chinese industry groups representing companies that have invested billions to mine and refine the country’s nickel were furious, warning Indonesia’s president Prabowo Subianto that the cuts put $50 billion worth of investment at risk. But much of that Chinese capital is sunk into smelters and processing plants built specifically to run on Indonesian ore, and cannot simply be moved elsewhere. That gives Jakarta more room to hold its ground than the warning suggests.

Stronger environmental enforcement

Since the start of the year, Indonesia’s forestry task force has seized more than four million hectares of land from mines and plantations operating illegally in protected forests, collecting over two trillion rupiah ($113 million) in fines.

This included 148 hectares seized from Weda Bay for lacking a forestry permit. The share of nickel produced from illegal small-scale mining also fell from about a quarter in 2022 to roughly 10% by 2024.

The crackdown responds to serious environmental damages in the nickel industry. On Obi Island, a waste pond collapsed after heavy rain in June 2025, flooding three villages and killing a resident. Internal company tests found chromium-6 – a carcinogen – in the water, in quantities far above the legal limit. The footprint of another mine near Raja Ampat, which is home to some of the world’s richest coral reefs, grew 60-fold in just eight years.

The market is responding to early cleanup efforts. Low-carbon nickel now sells for a real premium, roughly $18,800 to $19,300 a ton compared with $17,900 to $18,300 otherwise, as carmakers seek to source cleaner materials to comply with the European Union’s new emissions rules for imports.

In turn, this is incentivising the industry to do more to green its operations. Vale Indonesia’s smelter in South Sulawesi now runs almost entirely on hydropower, for example.

None of this addresses coal use, however. Major Indonesian nickel producers still emitted an estimated 15 million metric tons of greenhouse gases in 2023. Indonesia may be cracking down on illegal mining and rewarding cleaner producers but it is still running its mines on the dirtiest fuel available.

Unequal benefits

For Indonesia to truly benefit from producing cleaner and high-value nickel, it needs to reap the economic benefits too. Although the industry has boosted the country’s economic growth, the reality on the ground tells a different story.  

Konawe in Southeast Sulawesi is home to a major smelting complex. Growth in the district jumped from 6% to 22% between 2015 and 2023, driven almost entirely by the nickel industry, according to a study by the Lowy Institute study. At the same time, poverty levels increased slightly and unemployment remained unchanged.

In Halmahera, another epicentre of the nickel industry, spending by the poorest fifth grew just 5% between 2019 and 2022, compared with 28% for the wealthiest fifth, according to a separate study.

Part of the reason for this inequality is the system for transferring mining royalties to district authorities where the mines are located. In theory, they are entitled to the largest share. But in practice, payments are delayed, companies routinely dispute what they owe and royalties are pooled and distributed across a larger area.

The Natural Resource Governance Institute has found that decentralisation handed local governments power to approve new mines faster than they could build their capacity to manage them. Higher output raises national income on paper, but local governments remain constrained by fiscal rules and infrastructure costs that scale with mining.

None of this makes the 2026 quota cuts a mistake. Indonesia has every right to defend its pricing power over a resource it controls. But limiting extraction isn’t going to fix underlying issues around environmental enforcement and revenue-sharing. That requires rules that are consistently enforced, royalties that reach communities living by the mines, and a plan to wean smelters off coal.

The post Indonesia’s nickel production cuts are not enough to create a sustainable industry  appeared first on Climate Home News.

When you live on the edge, you become acutely aware of balance.

As a young woman straight out of university in 1982, I had the privilege of teaching English at a Sudanese girls’ high school. After a couple of years, I landed a job supporting the emergency and relief work during the Sudanese drought and associated famine. 

Those communities in Sudan knew very well that their two most precious assets were the acacia trees on their lands and the seeds saved for next year’s planting season.

Acacia fixes nitrogen in the soil – a natural fertiliser – while the gum Arabic from the trees is an income source. But when drought hits and all animals are sold, and the last of the food is eaten, the only thing left is to cut and sell the trees for firewood and charcoal. Once the trees are gone, the last thing left is the seeds. And once the seeds have been sacrificed for food, nothing is left. 

After witnessing the devastating impacts of this famine, working on development and environmental sustainability became my life’s calling.

From projects in Kordofan and Darfur in Sudan, to Northern Uganda, Somalia, and the arid and semiarid lands of Tanzania and Kenya, I saw how long-term solutions could help move us beyond just a humanitarian response. Because nature is incredibly generous, if we allow it to be.

Solutions like re-establishing the gum arabic trees with communities in Western Sudan, to working on water harvesting in arid lands. Supporting “cut and carry” schemes to replace animal grazing, a major driver of land degradation and the associated desertification. Or re-introducing the old pre-colonial approach of “al-hima”, a practice known by dryland communities for hundreds of years that protects and allows fragile land to rest, optimising soil health and land management.

Land – and its fragility – teaches us a lot. Dryland communities around the world have spent generations adapting to extremes. History that allows pastoralists, farmers, Indigenous Peoples and local communities to understand the deep interconnections between land, water, biodiversity and livelihoods.

Today climate change is pushing these finely balanced systems beyond what they can withstand. As extreme and compounding impacts intensify, the margins for resilience are shrinking, meaning landscapes, livelihoods, and communities are being pushed closer to their limits.

Land degradation now affects 3.2 billion people. Desertification impacts 45 per cent of Africa’s land. Around 95 per cent of the food we eat depends on land, while by 2050, water scarcity could affect more than three-quarters of the global population.

As migration and security rise rapidly on the global agenda, we must also recognise the role that healthy – and degraded – land can play. Healthy, productive landscapes can strengthen resilience and stability. Degraded land can deepen insecurity, intensify competition for resources and leave people with fewer options, including whether they stay or move.

Land also shows us how interconnected our future is. We know the answer is not a simple, single-issue solution. We need to bring together science, local knowledge and multilateral cooperation to understand thresholds, navigate trade-offs and – ultimately – work with nature rather than against it.

This approach is at the heart of the World Restoration Flagships programme under the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration, led by the UN Environment Programme and the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). It recognises ambitious restoration initiatives that show what is possible when we move beyond protecting individual ecosystems to restoring landscapes at scale – halting land degradation, supporting livelihoods and strengthening resilience to climate change.

Now we must build on this work. A ‘Rio Trio’ year – with talks across land, biodiversity and climate change – creates a unique opportunity to put land at the centre of a more integrated response. As the first of these negotiations, COP17 in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, can help set that direction and deliver greater global ambition on desertification, land degradation and drought.

South Africa’s top court blocks Shell’s offshore oil exploration right

Drought will be a key topic. Our challenge remains shifting from reactive crisis response to prevention – stopping drought before it becomes a disaster. The Great Green Wall, a World Restoration Flagship, reminds us the most effective drought solutions are not emergency measures, but long-term investments in healthy landscapes.

That is why collective action on land is such a powerful opportunity. Land is not one issue among many. It is where climate, nature, food, water and security come together. And the places that have lived on the edge for the longest may hold the blueprint for how we can all learn to thrive within the planet’s limits.

Quite simply, land is life. 

As leaders meet in Ulaanbaatar over the next week, we must remember investing in healthy land is an investment in food, health and water security, as well as peace and economic growth. 

The future of people and planet will be shaped by the health of the land beneath our feet. If we restore land, so the Acacia trees across the world can grow, we restore hope in a future for every community. 

The post How safeguarding land protects our future appeared first on Climate Home News.

While discussions on oceans at UN climate talks have so far been limited to annual informal dialogues on the sidelines, African countries, the European Union, some Latin American nations and small island states have launched a bid for COP31 to incorporate ocean protection measures into “negotiated decisions”.

COP31 co-presidents Türkiye and Australia have responded to this call and are working with interested countries on a voluntary ocean roadmap, described as a “concise action plan” and expected to include regional and international steps to integrate measures to safeguard the planet’s ocean and climate.

At a meeting in Türkiye in September, which plans to convene more than 25 ministers from Asia-Pacific, Africa, Europe and Latin America, governments will consider how to incorporate the recommendations of the informal UN ocean dialogues into global climate policy, according to the Turkish co-presidency.

Whitney Berry, associate director of climate policy at the nonprofit Ocean Conservancy, said that even an informal “multi-year” plan, instead of a negotiated roadmap, could help guide the ocean dialogues series in the UN climate process towards more concrete results.

“If this plan informed the following dialogues and made sure they were aligned with the Paris [Agreement] ambition cycle, including opportunities like the Global Stocktake, we’d have such a strengthened opportunity for ocean integration,” she said.

The upcoming stocktake – an international assessment of countries’ climate policies that takes place every five years and will culminate at COP33 in 2028 – presents a “huge opportunity” to turn fragmented actions into a “globally recognised evidence base” that can inform the next round of climate plans, Berry added.

Addressing rocketing ocean temperatures

Influenced by this year’s projected “super El Niño” on top of climate heating, the world’s oceans have experienced the warmest July on record, according to both EU and US monitoring data. Scientists are warning of severe mass die-offs of key species like corals, sponges and macro-algae.

John Bruno, a marine ecologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, told journalists in a briefing that some organisms like coral reefs can only tolerate an increase of about 1 degree Celsius before they start experiencing heath declines. In some seas like the Mediterranean, marine heatwaves have caused temperature increases of up to 6C.

As climate pressure mounts on ocean systems, a group of more than 150 top scientists has called on the COP31 Turkish and Australian presidencies to urgently “integrate ocean priorities into negotiation texts on mitigation, adaptation, and finance”.

They also urged world leaders to issue a “clear political declaration and finance outcomes” on ocean-based climate solutions at the World Leaders Summit, a two-day event during COP where heads of states give speeches laying out their climate priorities.

Measures to protect marine ecosystems have gathered more attention in recent years, as 90% of national climate plans submitted last year included at least one ocean-based target, compared to 62% in 2015. But countries have faced challenges implementing these commitments due to finance and governance constraints, according to a paper published in June by the World Resources Institute (WRI).

Most of the current targets focus on protecting marine areas, but have so far lacked commitments to reduce emissions produced at sea, for example through offshore wind or cleaner maritime transport.

Will the world’s drying lands get relief from COP17 in Mongolia?

Rethinking ocean negotiations at COP

At COP26 in Glasgow in 2021, countries agreed to “integrate and strengthen ocean-based action” across climate negotiations, which led to the creation of a yearly informal Ocean and Climate Dialogue. This dialogue does not produce a negotiated agreement like other parts of the COP.

The dialogue’s informal nature is both an advantage and a challenge, said Jonathan Baines, ocean programme manager at WRI. It provides a more flexible space than formal negotiations and has helped raise the ambition of countries’ climate plans, but COP presidencies have not fully incorporated its outcomes into the official climate talks, he said.

After five years of holding this dialogue at the mid-year climate negotiations in Bonn, countries called for more tangible outcomes in their submissions to this year’s Ocean and Climate Change Dialogue in June. Some proposed the creation of a roadmap to guide discussions on specific topics and feed them into the formal COP negotiations.

In their submission, the African Group of Negotiators called for a “structured, multi-year roadmap” aligned with the next Global Stocktake. The EU also backed this roadmap proposal, while Pacific islands and some Latin American countries supported incorporating the dialogue outcomes into the negotiations without specifically endorsing the roadmap initiative.

As part of a preparatory event before COP31 focused on oceans, Türkiye has confirmed to Climate Home News plans for a Blue COP31 roadmap, which will be discussed by the ministers attending the gathering in September.

“In essence, this programme is designed to ensure that the ocean is no longer the missing link in climate action, but rather the driving force behind a more resilient, sustainable, and prosperous future for all coastal communities,” Türkiye’s COP31 presidency said in a written comment.

Opposition emerges to “additional burdens”

Some regional groups have already started presenting their priorities publicly, with small island nations calling for more finance, ocean-based renewable energy and bolstering regional research institutes.

African diplomats said “the core problem remains translating these paper commitments into real-world, on-the-ground implementation” and noted that while countries in the region have strengthened their climate plans, “the support required to implement these commitments has not kept pace”.

“The truth is that ambition without implementation is an illusion,” the African submission reads, adding that nearly half of all ocean-related commitments in national climate plans are “strictly conditional on external support”.

This year’s Ocean and Climate Dialogue, chaired by Fiji and Belgium, urged countries to discuss ways of “transitioning away from fossil fuels”, which generated pushback from big fossil fuel-producing and consuming countries who said they would not accept this as a negotiated agreement.

Both the group of Arab nations and India, meanwhile, warned against “imposing additional burdens” on developing countries and rejected a dialogue with “prescriptive expectations”.

The Arab group submission said its members oppose “any report that explicitly or implicitly targets specific energy sources, advocates sectoral restrictions, or fails to adequately reflect different national circumstances, development priorities, and energy security considerations”. This is a thinly veiled reference to singling out fossil fuels within the discussions.

New coal mine openings slow as East Asian demand plateaus

Climate finance constraints

While developing countries are already seeking more funding to implement ocean-based conservation, carbon storage and clean energy measures, experts said this will be a “difficult discussion” at COP31, as developed countries will arrive in Antalya with shrinking aid budgets.

Historically, ocean-related finance has accounted for only a small share of overseas development assistance (ODA), fluctuating between 0.8% and 1.4% of the total, according to data from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

Berry of the Ocean Conservancy said one opportunity to “grow the pie” of available climate funds will come at a meeting of the UN climate convention’s Standing Committee on Finance, which this year will be held in September in Sydney and will concentrate on financing water systems and the ocean.

“We haven’t had a focused conversation on ocean climate finance before from the UN climate process,” she said. “If they can clarify those financing pathways specific to ocean climate action and help provide the necessary support for countries to translate commitments into projects, that will be a real benefit.”

The post As marine heat breaks records, countries seek ocean roadmap at COP31 appeared first on Climate Home News.

Cambodia has made impressive strides in transitioning from dirty coal and imported electricity to homegrown renewable energy that now accounts for nearly half of the electricity mix. The kingdom has a target to source 70% of its total power capacity from renewables by 2030. This is achievable but requires global support and cooperation.

The recent momentum on developing a formal process to assist countries in transitioning away from fossil fuels (TAFF) is very encouraging. The roadmap process championed by the COP30 Brazil presidency and at the Santa Marta conference in Colombia shows a clear appetite among countries to invest in a just and orderly transition. 

The current energy crisis provides a stark reminder of how relying on imported fossil fuels, like oil and gas, puts at risk our economic competitiveness and energy security. The impact on families, particularly poorer households, has been devastating as they struggle to pay for transport, food and electricity. 

Even as Cambodia has been able to shield itself from the worst impacts, thanks to its renewable investments, this moment is still a wake-up call for all of Southeast Asia, which has experienced a devastating oil shock twice in a decade. 

Given the turbulent times ahead, the region cannot afford a return to the status quo of high dependence on foreign fuel supplies. As a clean energy leader, Cambodia can play a critical role in elevating the importance of clean energy transition at the regional level. 

Cambodia cannot go it alone 

A new international governance framework and coordinated transition plans are essential for Cambodia and the rest of Southeast Asia to achieve a just and orderly transition. There are structural barriers that need to be overcome swiftly. 

However, to reach Cambodia’s 70% renewables target, the government plans to overcome structural hurdles – upgrading grid infrastructure, managing limited fiscal space, and addressing the high upfront capital costs of renewable energy – that require more than local effort. 

Concessional loans and grants similar to the $110-million World Bank credit to Cambodia for the Sustainable Energy Transition Project, approved in June 2026, are crucial to help build smart grids, high-voltage transmission lines and large-scale battery energy storage systems, needed to make the most of the new renewables coming online.

Global initiatives like the COP31 Türkiye presidency’s plans to champion electrification and a global target for electricity to provide 35% of final energy consumption by 2035 are commendable. But they still need to be understood in terms of what opportunities and support this could offer for countries like Cambodia.

Cambodia has seen progress on electrification, recording a 127% increase in year-on-year electric vehicle registrations in 2025. And, to sustain the renewable energy momentum, the government eliminated import taxes and duties on solar and energy storage technologies in April, which analysts predict will slash total renewable project costs by an estimated 7% to 30%.

Energy think-tank Ember has also noted a trend across Asia in which countries that built the skills to make electronics then moved into electric technologies, manufacturing solar panels, heat pumps and electric vehicles. This suggests Cambodia could follow with the right government financial and policy support.

However, for these trends to continue and even accelerate, continued international financial and technical support for countries like Cambodia is also essential. 

COP31 can enhance cooperation and support

At COP30 last November, Brazil agreed to develop a global roadmap on transitioning away from fossil fuels, and several countries made it clear this was a priority for them. 

The Brazil COP30 presidency previewed its roadmap at the Bonn climate talks in June, championing the roadmap as a flexible implementation tool adaptable to national circumstances. This guide can be used by countries like Cambodia to structure its transition and tackle technical barriers. 

Southeast Asia’s fragile grids threaten billions in clean energy investment

The Turkish and Australian COP31 presidencies this year have the opportunity to transform the roadmap and prevent the issue from being sidelined at the summit in Antalya. The world needs a coordinated process that can sustain deliberate planning, technology transfer and adequate public investment. 

For regions like Southeast Asia and Africa, the transition is not just a climate obligation; it is an economic necessity that requires the world to stop talking and start building. 

The post Collective global roadmap can boost Cambodia’s energy transition goals appeared first on Climate Home News.

Project Titan aims to tap Indonesia’s vast nickel reserves in East Halmahera – the epicentre for mining the sought-after metal – before shipping refined and processed material to make batteries for electric vehicles (EVs) more than 2,000 kilometres away in a factory in West Java.

Even before South Korean battery firm LG Energy Solution scrapped its planned $8.45 billion investment in Project Titan, citing “various factors” including market conditions, years of stalled feasibility studies had cast doubt on the initiative – a pillar of Indonesia’s goal to use its nickel riches to become a global battery manufacturing hub and a base for EV production in the region. 

The $6-billion investment and cooperation framework struck earlier this year between state companies and a Chinese consortium keeps Project Titan alive, but it also highlights Indonesia’s heavy dependence on China for capital, technology and materials in battery manufacturing.

“We get cash but there is no tech transfer or skilled labour jobs,” Zulfikar Rakhmat, director of the China-Indonesia Desk at the Jakarta-based Center of Economic and Law Studies, told Climate Home News. Indonesia’s dependence on China for funding, nickel smelting and processing capacity is “almost total”, he added. 

And at a time when cheaper nickel-free battery alternatives are winning over the EV market, China’s outsized role could bring additional commercial risks for Indonesia’s emerging battery industry.

“If Indonesia’s battery chain is seen as entirely Chinese-owned and coal-powered, its product will struggle to enter the Western markets,” Rakhmat added, referring to efforts by countries, including the European Union, to break their dependence on Chinese cleantech and reduce imports of carbon-intensive goods.

A Chinese tale of two halves: steel and batteries

Chinese investment in industrial projects to develop Indonesia’s nickel reserves – the world’s largest – is not new.

China was “the main engine” behind the country’s successful push to refine its nickel domestically after the government banned the export of raw ore in 2020, said Berlin Syahputra Situmorang, a researcher at the Indonesian Initiative for Sustainable Mining.

China, which imported most of Indonesia’s raw nickel ore prior to the ban, invested billions of dollars in building the country’s refining capacity. 

Large, mostly coal-powered industrial parks sprang up near mines to refine nickel, some of which have been associated with extensive environmental and human rights abuses.

By 2025, Indonesia produced two-thirds of the world’s raw nickel supply and boasted 43% of nickel refining capacity. Yet three-quarters of the country’s refining capacity is controlled by Chinese firms, according to research by the Washington-based research organisation C4ADS. 

And while the Indonesian government talked about developing its mineral wealth to power the batteries needed for the energy transition, Indonesia’s real success was to develop a stainless steel industry, the biggest consumer of nickel globally.

More than 80% of Indonesia’s nickel supplied the stainless steel sector in 2025, with only 17% going into the EV battery supply chain, according to analysis by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA). 

“It’s a tale of two different parts,” said Lloyd Hain, managing director of Xenith Market Services, an Australian mining and supply chain consultancy. “Indonesian stainless steel goes all over the world. The battery side, however, has been a completely different story.”

An emerging battery ecosystem

Developing a battery industry has proved a lot more difficult. Several plants to process nickel into battery-grade materials are planned or under construction across the country, but many remain at early stages of development.  

Still, Indonesia’s battery exports exceeded $1 billion in 2025, according to data from the UN Comtrade Database. By 2028, CREA estimates that 30% of Indonesia’s nickel production will go towards making battery materials. 

The nation’s first battery cell plant in Karawang, West Java, began operating in 2024. It was developed by South Korean car maker Hyundai and LG Energy Solution, which continues to operate the facility despite withdrawing from Project Titan.

Project Titan, the flagship integrated battery project, aims to develop 20 gigawatt hours (GWh) of capacity to produce nickel-based EV batteries as well as energy storage batteries to support the country’s goal of rolling out 100 GW of solar capacity in the next four years. 

Under the deal agreed this year, it will be operated by Indonesian state companies and a consortium including China’s Zhejiang Huayou Cobalt and battery manufacturer EVE Energy. 

Another $5.9-billion joint venture between state firms and a consortium led by Chinese battery giant CATL will develop nickel mining, processing and a battery-recycling factory in East Halmahera as well as a 6.9 GWh battery facility in Karawang, with plans to scale. 

Collaboration with Chinese firms “is expected to encourage technology transfer so that national companies can become leaders in their own country”, Minister of Energy and Mineral Resources Bahlil Lahadalia said in a statement about Project Titan. 

Foreign companies investing in Indonesia are required to partner with the Indonesia Battery Corporation (IBC), a state-owned enterprise made up of state mining and energy firms, tasked with establishing the capabilities for developing a battery and EV ecosystem. 

It is the complexity of making batteries that underlies Indonesia’s dependence on Chinese know-how, said Situmorang of the Indonesian Initiative for Sustainable Mining. 

Without a transfer of technology, Indonesia “risks remaining dependent on external players for the most advanced parts of the value chain”, Situmorang told Climate Home News.

Forging a path of its own

Indonesia’s reliance on China does not stop at money and technical knowledge. It also relies on Chinese imports of key battery materials, such as lithium and graphite. 

That means Indonesia should aim to diversify its investment partners by working more closely with South Korean companies and seek long-term lithium and graphite supply deals with major producers such as Australia, said Rakhmat of the Center of Economic and Law Studies.

It must also invest in domestic research and development as well as nurturing its own engineering talent, he added.

Eventually, however, the Indonesian government will need to decide whether it wants to integrate its battery ecosystem “completely and unconditionally” into China’s EV supply chain “or go its own way”, said Shen Wei, a research fellow at the UK-based Institute of Development Studies.

He warned that it would be “inherently difficult” for Indonesia to continue to learn from China while simultaneously trying to compete with it.

In a sign of tension between Indonesia’s efforts to capture more value from its resources and the Chinese firms that have bankrolled the industry’s expansion, the Chinese Chamber of Commerce wrote to President Prabowo Subianto in May warning that recent policies, including a sharp reduction in nickel ore production quotas to push up prices, could undermine existing projects and future investment. 

The Chinese Chamber of Commerce in Indonesia did not respond to a request for comment, nor did Indonesia’s Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources or the Ministry of Investment and Downstream Industry. 

A damaging myth: “Nickel is everything, forever”

The rapid shift towards nickel-free EV batteries poses another threat to Indonesia’s plans.

China is driving global adoption of lithium iron phosphate (LFP) batteries, a battery chemistry which relies on more common materials, is cheaper to produce and is better suited for frequent charge and discharge, making it an attractive alternative to power electric two- and three-wheelers, urban EVs and stationary power storage. 

LFP batteries accounted for more than 55% of EV batteries deployed globally last year, driven by China and imports of Chinese-made vehicles by emerging market countries, according to the International Energy Agency. They also accounted for about 90% of battery storage deployment.

“If Indonesia stays too fixed on a ‘nickel equals EV future’ mindset, there’s a risk of missing where the bulk of the market is actually going,” Situmorang said, noting that in Indonesia, most of the EVs sold in 2025 used LFP batteries.

Nickel-based batteries, which can pack more energy in each battery, are still in demand for long-range and premium EVs popular in the US, Europe and upper-end Asian markets. Outside China, almost 80% of EV batteries used nickel-containing types in 2025. 

Rakhmat said Indonesia is adapting its manufacturing strategy, targeting its nickel-based batteries for the export market and boosting production of LFP batteries to meet domestic demand. 

Several Chinese firms are already investing to manufacture LFP batteries in Indonesia. 

But Rakhmat said the realisation of changes in the market “came very late” and that many local officials still incorrectly believe that “nickel is everything and forever”. 

Without a robust industrial policy and a strategy to create sustained domestic demand for “Made in Indonesia” batteries, “there is a possibility that we will be left behind,” he warned.

Main image: A view over the PT Virtue Dragon nickel industrial complex in Konawe, Southeast Sulawesi, Indonesia (Photo: Ulet Ifansasti/Getty Images)

The post China keeps Indonesia’s battery dream afloat but future less certain appeared first on Climate Home News.

The case for global energy transition has rarely been clearer. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz earlier this year exposed the cost of unplanned, fossil-dependent systems, while the falling cost of renewables, the rising penetration of electric vehicles, and the growing value of demand flexibility have made the direction of travel obvious. The benefits of a clean, secure, integrated system are no longer in dispute. What remains unclear is how to build it.

Countries around the world have called for faster renewable energy deployment and alternative energy arrangements. A secure, affordable, resilient, decarbonised system requires specific investments in specific places in a specific sequence, optimised across sectors and borders. But very few governments have the analytical foundation to translate those imperatives into investment.

The two instruments that are supposed to determine investment priorities for decarbonisation – Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) and country platforms – cannot answer the most basic question facing any country undertaking an energy transition: what should the energy system look like?

To close this gap, every country needs a bankable, economy-wide optimisation model for its energy system. A model is not a plan, but it can help answer the critical question of what the future energy system should look like. It shows how optimal scenarios vary as assumptions and policies are adjusted, calculates investment requirements and sequencing, and quantifies how system costs are affected by assumptions, policies, and exogenous variables like trade policy and financing terms.

Tool for efficient investment

Optimisation is a simplified way of simulating an energy system, but it can be an extremely powerful tool for moving energy planning from reactive (how do we manage the disparate actions in the energy system?) to intentional (what energy system underpins our national objectives?). A model can show how optimal scenarios vary as assumptions and policies are adjusted, and how investment requirements are quantified and sequenced.

Optimisation models can treat the energy system and the sectors it serves as an integrated whole, optimising across sectors and projects in ways that can be mutually reinforcing. If considered independently, growth in industrial demand, transport electrification, and digital infrastructure can add stress to the energy system. But an optimised plan can arrange these and other changes in an efficient, synergistic way.

Two to tango: How governments can unlock private investment for national climate goals

New load can be added where low-cost power is available; industrial customers can ensure the viability of investments in energy supply; electric vehicle charging policy can smooth load curves and reduce costs for all consumers.

Additionally, optimisation modeling can also change the financeability of investments. Taken alone, each project faces uncertainty about the rest of the system, which raises the cost of capital and causes projects to stall or unwind after contracts are signed. A coherent, optimised plan makes visible the coordination that private capital would otherwise have to bet on: identified offtake, sequenced and committed transmission, contracted power supply, and so on.

What COP31 and COP32 should do

The upcoming COPs in Turkey and Ethiopia can shift the center of gravity of international climate cooperation from fragmented commitments to planning. Three moves are urgently needed.

First, optimised, economy-wide, long-term energy system planning must be the foundation on which any meaningful NDC, country platform, or finance commitment rests. NDCs are typically drafted by environment or single-line ministries, with limited cross-sectoral input from ministries of energy, finance, and planning. They contain targets, derived from sectoral strategies or national commitments, not from an analytically grounded picture of what the energy system should look like and what investments would make it work. Country platforms are generally a portfolio of investments assembled from existing project pipelines, rather than derived from a system-level analysis of what an optimised, decarbonised energy system would require.

Second, recognise regions as a key planning unit. Modern integrated energy systems are inherently regional. Renewable endowments are unevenly distributed; balancing variable supply across borders lowers aggregate cost, reduces redundant backup capacity, and unlocks economies of scale no individual nation can achieve. Many energy investments in Southeast Asia, East Africa, Southern Africa and Central Asia may only be financeable in a regional context. Assessing domestic infrastructure without regional optimisation perpetuates the perception that decarbonisation is more expensive than it is.

COP31 leaders unveil global targets, with spotlight on electrification

Third, finance the planning capacity. A coordinated commitment by multilateral development banks, bilateral donors, and philanthropic partners to help every region and its constituent countries develop and maintain their own modelling capability, with open-source tools and regional analytical hubs, would close the most consequential gap in the current architecture. The cost is small relative to current spending on country platforms, failed project preparation, and misallocated infrastructure investment.

This includes supporting regional institutions such as the ASEAN Centre for Energy, the African Energy Commission, regional power pools, and the Latin American and Caribbean Energy Organization to determine what optimised regional systems require. Country-by-country pledging, repeated at every COP, will not deliver what meaningfully integrated systems can.

The 2026 energy crisis made the cost of unplanned, fossil-dependent systems newly visible. That window of clarity will close. The international community should seize the moment to build the planning foundation that has been missing for thirty years, rather than commissioning another round of NDCs or pledges, striving for outcomes neither was designed to deliver.

The post Every country needs a model to help optimise its energy transition appeared first on Climate Home News.

Their electricity use is growing so fast that by 2030, it’s projected to be nearly three times more than the combined annual consumption of Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nigeria. With the explosion in the construction of data centres driving new investment in fossil fuels, especially in the US, greenhouse gas emissions generated by data centres – now standing at less than 1% of the global total – are set to soar.

But this narrow focus on electricity has let AI’s supporters and the International Energy Agency (IEA) make a convenient case: that rising emissions can be more than offset by the technology’s green applications, like optimising renewables or boosting efficiency. That story conceals how AI’s real climate danger lies elsewhere: in the oil fields, where it’s helping fossil fuel companies extract planet-heating oil and gas faster and more cheaply.

As a senior manager at Microsoft, Holly Alpine was shocked by this blind spot. In 2024, she and her husband Will – also a Microsoft manager – quit their jobs and launched a campaign to hold Big Tech accountable for the emissions its technology enables.

Over the past two years, they have teamed up with two researchers to quantify just how deep the fossil fuel industry’s embrace of AI tools runs.

Their peer-reviewed study, published last week, found that when AI is adopted at similar rates across the fossil fuel and renewable energy sectors, the net effect is a rise in emissions of 0.47–1.8 gigatonnes of CO2 annually. That’s equivalent to Mexico’s annual emissions at the low end, and to Russia’s – the world’s fourth-largest emitter – at the high end. It is also 3.3 to 13.3 times higher than the emissions currently generated by powering AI data centres.

We spoke with Alpine about the risks of overlooking this side of the AI climate story and what can be done to shift the focus.

Q: Why has the climate conversation focused so heavily on data-centre power use when your modelling suggests that’s the smaller part of the AI emissions story?

A: It’s been quite unfortunate that it has been framed that way and that it has stuck so much because that framing is wholly incomplete, very misleading and is leading to very dangerous consequences. 

It’s in the fossil fuel industry and the technology companies’ favour to frame the equation in this way because it leaves out any responsibility and accountability of the tech’s use by fossil fuel companies, which is a large part of their business. They’re some of their largest customers and they have teams of engineers and sales folks who are dedicated to the fossil fuel industry. 

Simply comparing the power needed to run the technology and its [clean energy] applications is also kind of apples to oranges. On the one hand, you have real-world actual emissions and, on the other, hypothetical future avoidance of emissions as a result of potential future use cases for renewables.

What we are saying is that we need to look at both sides of the ledger for AI applications, renewables versus fossil fuels, and then also add the emissions generated by running data centers on top of it.

Q: How do AI applications help fossil fuel companies in a way that drives up emissions?

A: It’s everything from finding more oil and gas underground by processing hundreds of terabytes of seismic and well data that would otherwise have to be done manually. These AI models can process this data extremely quickly and create high-resolution images of what is underground. It helps companies pinpoint the oil and gas reserves that are most likely to be commercially recoverable.

Fossil fuel companies can identify and develop fossil fuel deposits with a lot more certainty, allowing them to move forward with projects that would otherwise have been too risky or too slow to pursue. AI makes them viable.

We’ve seen that rig counts [number of active drilling rigs] have dropped dramatically, so they need fewer resources to get out even more fossil fuels. Their costs are decreasing, while their production is increasing.

Q: How deep do these relationships run between Big Tech and fossil fuel companies? How do they compare with equivalent relationships with renewable energy companies?

A: I have to caveat that I have not worked for Microsoft for about two years. But what we saw at the time was that the fossil fuel-dedicated teams were much larger in terms of the number of employees, the size of the contracts, and the long-standing relationships.

This is not new. Microsoft has worked with the fossil fuel industry for many years and has deep partnerships, starting with the humble machine-learning going back many years. AI is just the latest wave of technology being applied in this way. 

UN asks AI companies to reveal full environmental impacts

There are also relationships between the tech companies and renewables companies [and] battery storage developers. There are definitely sustainability-related applications of the technology.

One of the recommendations that we had given the company [Microsoft] was to shift the ratio of engineering resources from fossil to low and no-carbon energy sectors within the company. When they came out with their principles for engagement with the fossil fuel industry in 2023, they committed to shifting engineering resources. But then we did not see any actual change in business practices.

Q: Tech companies are now quietly scaling back some of their climate commitments, but there was a point, not long ago, when they wanted to be seen as climate leaders. Was there ever a genuine commitment to do that, or was it just an image they were projecting?

A: It depends on how you evaluate a company for its climate impact. If all we are looking is its own operational emissions, then in that case, Microsoft was and, still is to some extent, a climate leader.

But if we evaluate a company based on what it is producing, then I would say it’s a very different story. Back in 2019, ExxonMobil said it was able to produce an extra 50,000 barrels [of oil] per day purely thanks to Microsoft technology. There was also another public and quantified deal with Chevron.

We calculated that those emissions alone from just two deals among dozens were 300% of Microsoft’s entire operational emissions, including data centres. So, how do you want to evaluate your company?

If you look at other sectors and, say, evaluate a weapons manufacturer on its violence footprint, you don’t just look at their supply chain and the violence within it to create the weapons. You look at the real-world impact of the weapons they’re manufacturing. Yet we completely left technology companies off the hook.

Q: You make some recommendations as well in the paper. They include the idea of putting some supply-side constraints on this AI-enabled productivity for fossil fuel companies. What would that look like in practice? 

A: Ultimately, our goal would be to have disclosure and governance measures that limit AI’s role in increasing fossil fuel productivity. The first thing would be a recognition of “enabled emissions” even as a measurable category because, at the moment, they are not included in any emissions disclosure or accountability frameworks.

Then we should require transparency around these fossil fuel contracts and constrain some of these specific mechanisms that the research identifies. 

We are not trying to have a blanket ban on AI or even a blanket ban on AI use in the fossil fuel industry. There are some great applications, like methane leak detection, for example. But we just want to align applications with climate science and ensure that any contracts that move forward have been evaluated against a 1.5C future.

AI governance debate silent on risks to nature, campaigners warn

The easy thing would be for companies to voluntarily put guardrails on how their tech can be used, which is not new. There just currently are none for climate. But we do think that… policy is what needs to be implemented.

We also think that if we can change the market structure and incentives, then this kind of restriction will follow. If we look at ESG investing and how sustainable investing is defined, if we include what these companies are doing into that evaluation, then that can move capital flows.

Q: What do you think are the most promising avenues where you can shift the AI narrative and drive the change you are seeking to achieve?

A: We are now building off the study and there are various governance frameworks that we are attempting to incorporate this sort of evaluation into like the Greenhouse Gas Protocol or the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi)

Luckily, we have seen some very promising drafts for the future of those frameworks that do include evaluations and disclosures of this work, which is really exciting.

The vote that stopped a data center: US communities query resource-hungry AI

We also need to look at companies for impacts in order to evaluate their sustainability metrics, and there could be potential greenwashing concerns that we could address on the legal side of things. 

And then [there are] different policy workstreams. In the EU, we were quite hopeful about the AI Act,and the various use cases that were classified as high risk and would go through additional scrutiny. Unfortunately, with the Omnibus passing [in July], that opportunity is a little restrained.

But now with the Cloud and AI Development Act (CADA) coming out with various European frameworks around evaluating tech’s impacts, we hope to inform those discussions with this research.

The post “Dangerous consequences” – how AI’s climate framing lets Big Tech off the hook appeared first on Climate Home News.

“Today’s judgment makes me feel very happy and proud that the ocean is not for profit for mining companies,” said East Coast resident and environmental campaigner Siyabonga Ndovela. 

The verdict concludes a years-long process in which nonprofits Sustaining the Wild Coast, Natural Justice, Greenpeace Africa, and others took legal action against Shell, Impact Africa and the South African government for failing to consult affected communities – a legal requirement in the country.

South Africa’s offshore oil push meets grassroots resistance in court

The Constitutional Court ruled that Shell and Impact Africa had not complied with resource governance law, had failed to meaningfully conduct public consultation and had omitted to consider the impact on climate change, cultural rights, livelihoods and ecological harm. 

The ruling references last year’s landmark advisory opinion by the International Court of Justice, which states that countries have a legal duty to prevent and repair damage to the climate system. The South African judges argued that climate change “transcends borders” and states’ obligations “must be understood within the broader framework of international law”.

“This case must also be understood against the backdrop of well-documented struggles by coastal communities to protect their land, marine resources and ways of life in the face of extractive activities that they believe threaten their very existence,” wrote Justice Narandran Kollapen.     

The Constitutional Court found that the exploration right had been unlawfully granted by the Department of Mineral and Petroleum Resources. The ruling upholds a 2022 regional court decision against Shell and overturns a 2024 appeal that allowed the company to conduct fresh public consultations under the original exploration right. Friday’s decision means the right, initially granted in 2014, must be set aside.

Celebrating the ruling, Sherelee Odyar, oil and gas campaigner at Greenpeace Africa, told Climate Home News that the court confirmed “serious failures” in the awarding of exploration rights to Shell and Impact Africa, which “cannot simply be corrected later”.

The Wild Coast is a biodiversity hotspot that has been conserved over generations by coastal communities who rely on the ocean and land. “Our land and sea are central to our livelihoods and our way of life. Over generations we have conserved them, and they have conserved us,” reads the founding statement in the case. 

A Shell spokesperson said it noted the ruling, adding that “we are committed to responsible offshore exploration, meaningful stakeholder engagement and environmental stewardship.”

The Department of Mineral and Petroleum Resources had not responded to requests for comment at the time of publication.

“Renewed strength” for communities

The ruling adds to a series of legal challenges brought by civil society groups against oil companies and the government as South Africa has expanded oil and gas development since 2014 under Operation Phakisa, a plan aimed at “unlocking the economic potential of the oceans”.

On the West Coast, Walter Steenkamp, chairperson of Aukotowa Fisheries Cooperative, which is involved in a separate ongoing legal action against TotalEnergies, said that “today’s court case gave me renewed strength”.

The case could also set a precedent for future oil developments, said Alessandro Mazzi, legal governance researcher at the University of Wageningen. He added that the verdict “sends a strong signal to investors that where projects affect people’s land, livelihoods and environment, meaningful consultation and genuine ecological assessment are an integral part of responsible investment”.

Janet Solomon, coordinator of advocacy group Oceans not Oil, said that the court’s emphasis on democratic participation, culture, livelihoods and the health of future generations in handing down the verdict signals a shift in jurisprudence on environmental governance, saying that this focus “may prove to be the judgment’s most enduring legacy”.

The post South Africa’s top court blocks Shell’s offshore oil exploration right appeared first on Climate Home News.

A report by Global Energy Monitor (GEM) found that new coal mine capacity declined by nearly 40% from 2024, the second consecutive year new mine capacity has hit a decade low. This represents an acceleration of a steady decline that began in 2019.

The slowdown in new coal mine openings was driven by China and Australia, where new additions fell by 44% and 96%, respectively. In China, the report said this was partly due to solar and wind displacing coal for electricity generation – although coal rebounded in the first half of 2026 – and the National Energy Administration implementing new rules to curb new mine openings.

In Australia, a 96% reduction in new coal mine capacity was driven by shrinking demand from the countries that import Australian coal for electricity, like Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, the report said.

This trend is likely to continue, according to GEM, as the Australian state of New South Wales recently banned new coal mines on undeveloped greenfield land. South Korea has promised to stop building coal-fired power plants that cannot capture and store the emissions produced. Meanwhile, Japan is pushing for a post-Fukushima nuclear revival to displace coal.

This Australian coal community is co-designing its own green future

Globally, growth in coal demand has slowed over the last few years and the International Energy Agency expects it to plateau through to 2030 because of increases in renewable energy, nuclear and fossil gas.

Openings down, pipeline up

But while new coal mine openings fell, the amount of global coal mine capacity proposed increased by 11%. This was almost entirely driven by a spate of projects in the eastern Indian states of Jharkhand and Odisha.

“If built,” the GEM report says, “the projects would commit India – a country with no formal coal phaseout timeline – to years of coal expansion and would put a 1.5C-aligned transition away from fossil fuels farther out of reach”.

The Indian government says it needs to increase coal production to meet growing electricity demand from economic growth and from dealing with heatwaves. It plans to open more than 20 new coal mines to meet its coal production targets.

Because of energy security concerns, India is also aiming to produce chemicals with Indian coal rather than imported gas. China is also pursuing this strategy, although the Global Energy Monitor report said that Indian coal’s high ash content means the South Asian nation will find it harder to make chemicals from coal.

Nations agreed at COP26 five years ago to “phase down” coal power – a commitment that China and India successfully pushed to weaken from “phase out”. At COP28 in 2023, governments agreed to transition away from all fossil fuels in energy systems.

Since then, wealthy nations have partnered with coal-producing countries like South Africa, Vietnam and Indonesia on plans to transition from coal to clean energy. But, after preliminary talks, India and these donor governments did not agree a JETP.

The post New coal mine openings slow as East Asian demand plateaus appeared first on Climate Home News.

Drought is currently sweeping much of the Northern hemisphere, leaving normally green urban parks looking like dry savannah, causing crops to fail, food prices to rise and billions to be shaved off economic output. 

On Wednesday, Britain’s prime minister chaired an emergency meeting of the government’s Cobra committee. These are usually reserved for wars, terrorist attacks, riots and pandemics – but this one was on the extreme heat and drought the UK has been suffering since May. 

With many countries facing far worse with fewer resources than the UK, the issues to be discussed at the UN’s COP17 summit in Mongolia – often overlooked – should be nearer the top of policy-makers minds.

But what is COP17?  What will be decided and announced there over the next two weeks? How does it relate to climate change and how will it help restore the lands on which we all rely for our food, water and other essential resources? Climate Home News explains all below.

What is COP17?

It is the conference of parties (COP) to the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD). The parties are 196 governments, which includes all of the countries recognised by the UN.

The convention was conceived at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, at the same time as the other two larger “Rio trio” conventions on climate and biodiversity. 

While the climate convention’s COP takes place every year, the UNCCD COP happens only once every two years. COP17 will be its seventeenth gathering.

What is desertification?

It is the process by which land degrades and becomes more like a desert, making it harder – and sometimes impossible – to grow crops or graze livestock there.

Climate change and other human activities – like excessive irrigation which depletes ground water – are making this process worse, causing poverty, hunger, health problems, forced migration and loss of species.

It’s a widespread problem. The UN estimates that half a billion people live within areas that have experienced desertification since the 1980s and that two-fifths of the world’s land is degraded.

What has it got to do with climate change?

The planet’s climate is heating up, mainly due to humans burning fossil fuels, and drying out its land. This kills plants and exposes the soil which can then be blown away by wind and washed away by water.

Without a top layer of soil, plants struggle to grow again and the land gets closer to being a desert. So combating desertification is a way of adapting to climate change.

It is also a way of lessening the pace of climate change, as land degradation releases carbon dioxide previously stored in healthy soils and plants.

What will be negotiated at COP17?

The main issue is what form a new initiative to tackle drought could take. The last COP saw Africa push hard for this to be a protocol – a kind of binding sub-treaty to the UNCCD.

But the US, Europe, Argentina and others argued that would take too long to set up, cost too much and take money away from what can be spent on the ground. They prefer a legally weaker alternative – a framework instead of a protocol. 

Negotiations went late into the last night of talks in Riyadh, with the Saudis hosting informal consultations, but eventually governments had to agree to disagree and pick up talks again in Ulaanbaatar. 

As Earth dries out, countries fail to reach drought agreement

Governments will also negotiate a new policy on protecting rangelands and pastoralists from degradation. Rangelands are areas where animals graze. They cover around half the Earth’s land and include almost everything other than forest, deserts, farms, glaciers and cities. Pastoralists are people who herd animals on these rangelands, often moving from place to place to find fresh pasture. 

COP17 host country Mongolia has a lot of both – and pushed successfully for the UN to declare 2026 the International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralists. It is keen to agree a decision at COP17 bringing those issues more to the forefront of the UNCCD.

Negotiators will also debate the UNCCD’s post-2030 strategic framework, which they hope to adopt at COP18 in 2028. Campaign groups like the World Wildlife Fund want a stronger focus on biodiversity and nature-positive food systems.

What will happen when?

The COP will formally open with a ceremony on Monday August 17, followed by opening statements by governments and the adoption of the agenda.

Negotiations will begin, mostly behind closed doors for two weeks until the closing plenaries on Friday August 28.

While talks rumble on in the background, the second week will see senior government representatives including ministers get involved, with a “high-level segment” running from August 24-26.

They will discuss issues like drought resilience, finance and pastoralist communities. This is likely to be when any announcements – of new funding, for instance – are made.

On Monday August 24, there will also be an open dialogue between government officials and civil society members. Here, local practitioners are likely to share stories of how they are helping their communities reverse land degradation. UNCCD prides itself on being a bottom-up convention.

Unlike climate COPs, which often end a day or two over time, UNCCD COPs usually finish on the evening of their last day and – while they have gone late into the night – have never run into the next day.

What else should we watch out for?

At the last COP two years ago, host Saudi Arabia led the creation of an initiative called the Riyadh Global Drought Resilience Partnership to help 80 of the poorest nations deal with drought. 

It received $12 billion in pledges, mainly from Gulf-based development finance institutions. Saudi Arabia is expected to report back on whether these pledges have been delivered and how the money will reach those in need now.

There are also hopes that governments will announce financial support for Mongolia’s Rangelands Flagship Initiative, which aims to mobilise investment in projects to fight land degradation.

Who will preside over COP17?

While the last five and the next two climate COPs have been or will be presided over by men, COP17 will be woman-led with Mongolia’s foreign minister, Battsetseg Batmunkh, as president.

This will also be the first COP for the UNCCD’s new executive director Yasmin Fouad. Before being appointed environment minister in her native Egypt, Fouad was a scientist and lead author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s special report on desertification. She played a key role at the COP27 climate summit in Egypt in 2022.

Although Saudi Arabia’s UNCCD COP presidency is ending, the Gulf power house will likely continue to be influential. It has supported the COP financially as part of the Riyadh-Ulaanbaatar action agenda and will be following up on initiatives announced two years ago.

While Saudi Arabia is often blamed for obstructing progress at climate talks, as a desert nation it is generally thought to have played a constructive role at UNCCD COPs.

What are the negotiating dynamics?

The UNCCD has six main negotiating groups: Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, the Northern Mediterranean, Central and Eastern Europe, and developed donor countries. Governments can also speak in their own capacities.

While divisions between the Global North and Global South do exist at UNCCD COPs, they are not as stark as at climate COPs. The Global South’s umbrella group – the G77 and China – usually only speaks on finance issues, on which developing countries tend to be united.

Civil society groups are present but not as vocal or as confrontational as at climate COPs. There are generally no protests and campaigners tend to try to hold governments accountable more quietly. There are likely to be far fewer journalists than at climate COPs too.

What role will the US play?

While the US has left the UN’s climate convention, it remains in the UNCCD and is expected to bring a delegation of officials from its departments of agriculture and state. It is likely to resist any renewed push from Africa for a drought protocol.

The post Will the world’s drying lands get relief from COP17 in Mongolia? appeared first on Climate Home News.

Helen Phillips’ book, ‘Hum’, is set in a dystopian near future, in a city suffering the effects of climate breakdown and with dire air quality. Robots (the Hums) press advertising messages during conversations, meetings and even as they carry out medical procedures.

The Hums are vehicles for these ads, which are often for products like cosmetics, sweets or anything that might be relevant during interactions with humans. This advertising is poorly disguised, and merges with sentiments that lean towards concerns of well-being, convincing people how much better off they’ll be if they make a purchase.

While the novel is futuristic, the insidious way advertising permeates daily life is resonant of how adverts show up in our world today. And these ads are directly contributing to the worsening future climate Phillips describes in her book.

Already by the summer of 2026, Europe had seen a 57% increase in wildfires in just four years with western Europe recording the hottest ever June and July on record. We’re facing droughts and floods, as well as predicted hikes in food costs or even chronic food shortages – and that’s before the expected additional effects of a strong El Niño later this year.

Frequent flying and bigger burgers

A portion of this climate breakdown is fuelled by over-consumption in richer countries, particularly of products that are high carbon – for which advertising can take some of the blame. Research shows that adverts drive citizens to consume about a third more goods and services in general, over and above what they might have purchased.

Yet despite a clear link between promoting high-carbon behaviours and climate breakdown, little advertising regulation exists in the UK. Take frequent flying for instance, one of the most carbon-intensive activities we can partake in.

EasyJet’s latest ad campaign is called “Drop Everything”. It encourages consumers to book cheap flights departing within the next 48 hours for presumably short or weekend getaways. Rather than a specific destination, “Drop Everything” promotes a mindset that encourages indiscriminate consumption of flying. The ads were shown on billboards with clever creative slogans, as well as on digital media and through influencer campaigns.

Airlines risk legal challenges by advertising jet fuel as “sustainable”, NGO warns

Overall, flight numbers are increasing. The UK Civil Aviation Authority reported the highest number of UK passengers in the first quarter of 2026 (more than 61 million, breaking previous records for travel between January and March). It seems we’re still not joining the dots between flying and a worsening climate.

And how about meat consumption? Scientists advocate for less meat-eating, especially beef which has the highest carbon footprint of nearly all foods. Yet adverts from McDonald’s proliferate, helping make it one of the highest-volume sellers of fast-food chain beef burgers. In 2024, the outdoor advertising budget for McDonald’s UK rose to £86 million, an increase of 71% on previous years.

Small share for sustainability

While over half of UK ad professionals feel increasingly queasy about their profession and its effects on the climate crisis, the people running the show – the UK trade bodies – prefer to focus on the growth advertising brings.

In the first three months of 2026, they stated that UK advertising spend increased by 9.3%, reaching a total of £11.7 billion for that quarter, fuelling consumption and market growth.

But how many of those adverts actually promote low carbon goods and services? Kantar’s Sustainable Ads Tracker shows the percentage of ads featuring sustainability messaging in 2026 is around 4.3%. That’s woefully low, and much of this is made up of messaging that promotes recycling.

PR firm working for Shell wins COP30 media contract

Additionally, the industry continues to happily produce adverts for the large oil and gas corporations that are fuelling climate breakdown. These adverts only narrowly pass the Advertising Standards Authorities’ advertising codes, allowing the continued greenwashing of the world’s most polluting brands.

There is essentially no leadership from the UK trade bodies, likely because they are directly funded by the brands and advertisers themselves. They are essentially ‘ad shushing’ – pushing for indiscriminate growth and directing attention to their sustainability awards, while confusingly denying that adverts drive higher consumption overall.

Let’s ‘un-shush’

Where does this leave us as we are subjected to hundreds, if not thousands, of persuasive advertising messages every day that support high-carbon lifestyles? Most ad professionals are unable to push back against this agenda at work, often due to the threat of job loss. The advertising trade bodies won’t take the lead as they work in service to big brands and advertisers.

NGOs urge Brazil to prevent fossil fuel capture of COP30 climate summit

So, who can push for the changes we need? Members of the public.

Through pressuring our city officials and governments, we can force through restrictions, such as the watershed bans on unhealthy foods on TV before 9pm in the UK. Through supporting the efforts of organisations such as Ad Free Cities and others, we can help achieve bans on outdoor advertising for fossil fuels, aviation, meat and even single-use plastics in cities and regions such as Amsterdam, The Hague, Edinburgh, Florence, Uppsala and many more.

If we’re serious about climate change and stopping big global brands pushing their high-carbon products onto us, then advertising restrictions are one of the best ways to achieve this. If we don’t want a world like the one Phillips describes in her book, we need to make our voices heard above the advertising noise.

The post Pushing the climate crisis: How advertising fuels high-carbon lifestyles appeared first on Climate Home News.

After diplomats met in Nairobi early in July for the first time since negotiations fell apart a year ago, Chilean ambassador Julio Cordano, who is chairing the talks, released a first document last weekend, setting out elements of a possible treaty to tackle plastic pollution.

Cordano stressed this is an “informal reference document” rather than a negotiated text. But its structure is similar to a draft treaty and closely resembles the previous version rejected by governments during the last round of formal negotiations in Geneva.

The new text recognises the world’s “unsustainable” levels of plastic production and consumption, both of which are projected to nearly triple by 2060. But it contains no measures to stem that growth, critics say, pointing to what they see as a broader weakening of ambition.

They argue the document is increasingly aligned with the demands of fossil fuel-producing countries, including Gulf states, the US and Russia, which have pushed for the treaty to focus on managing plastic waste rather than limiting production.

“When you leave the countries that have the most vested interests in delaying meaningful action to shape the agenda, you end up with a text that does nothing to end plastic pollution,” said David Azoulay, environmental health programme director at the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL).

France disappointed with production omission

“We’ve gone backwards rather than forwards,” Christina Dixon, a campaigner at the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA), told Climate Home News. “A text that was rejected by the majority of countries in Geneva as being too weak and not ambitious enough has been repackaged one year later with some key elements removed and put out as a kind of sign of progress.”

A French diplomatic source told Climate Home News it was “disappointing” that the text lacked any concrete provisions on tackling “unsustainable” levels of plastics production and consumption. That is despite a majority of countries repeatedly advocating for curbs and scientists saying the world cannot put an end to plastic pollution without tackling the issue at source, they added.

Governments across Europe, Latin America, Africa and the Pacific islands have previously called for efforts to limit the manufacturing of plastics to “sustainable levels”, but their efforts have been frustrated by strong and persistent opposition from a small group of fossil fuel producers, who see plastics as a growing market for oil and gas.

Weakening of production ambition

Cordano told Climate Home News that the “concept” of sustainable production is still reflected in different parts of the new document.

But measures aimed at achieving that objective have progressively weakened over time. Initial versions of the draft treaty, dating back to 2024, included a standalone article with the option of setting a global target to reduce the production and consumption of primary plastics.

That disappeared from successive drafts published in Geneva last year. The last version nevertheless said data on plastic production could be considered in future assessments of whether the treaty was meeting its objectives. Observers saw this as an important provision that could have strengthened the pact over time and potentially kept the door open for a global production target.

The new text only mentions “sustainable production” in the preamble and includes an article saying that countries could improve the design of plastic products in order to contribute to “sustainable production”.

“There’s a war of attrition element,” said Dennis Clare, a negotiator for the Pacific island nation of Micronesia. “The countries that want to do less are dragging out discussions and gradually pressuring the more ambitious to compromise towards a lower common denominator.”

Little space for thorny discussions

Countries have twice failed to agree on a global plastics treaty at what were meant to be final rounds of negotiations in December 2024 and August 2025. After being selected as the new chair earlier this year, Cordano has been working to steer the process back on track through a series of informal meetings, hoping diplomats can find common ground ahead of the next formal negotiations scheduled for early 2027.

But he has been criticised for sidelining discussions on some of the thorniest issues. Cordano kept plastic production off the official agenda for the Nairobi meeting a few weeks ago. He said beforehand that countries could bring any issue to the table, but production did not feature in the summary of discussions subsequently published by the chair.

Clare said discussions on fundamental elements of the treaty, including production, had been “constrained” and that there was little space for them in Nairobi.

Cordano told Climate Home News the Nairobi talks had provided space both for “reaffirming positions and expressing new ideas”, adding that countries “remain free to raise all issues they consider important”.

Informal talks between negotiators are held behind closed doors and neither the media nor external observers can take part.

Campaigners have accused the chair of making political calculations to reach an agreement at any cost. “He has clearly identified that the only way to achieve an agreement by consensus is to do away with the more complex elements of the treaty like those that deal with sustainable production and consumption of plastics,” the EIA’s Dixon said.

Cordano said he continues to be guided by countries as “they develop their own exchanges and continue working towards possible landing zones”.

Push for more ambition

Governments will debate the new text at another meeting of chief negotiators in Bangkok, Thailand, at the end of September, and a new version of the document is expected after that meeting.

The French diplomatic source said the current text should not be viewed as “an end-product”, but as a starting point that “can and should be improved”.

France, together with the EU and members of the High Ambition Coalition (HAC), will continue pushing for stronger provisions, including measures to address plastic production, the source said.

China’s coal power rebounds as record clean energy goes to waste

The HAC group includes over 70 countries, primarily from across Europe, Latin America, Africa and the Pacific.

Micronesian negotiator Clare said countries on the frontline of the plastics crisis may decide to reject a really weak treaty that puts the burden on them to clean up somebody else’s waste, while producers can keep churning out plastics unrestrained.

“If the treaty does not include essential elements of the solution, even an initial, apparent diplomatic success – an agreement – can come to be seen over time as an environmental failure,” Clare warned.

The post “We’ve gone backwards” – new plastics treaty text dims hopes for production curbs appeared first on Climate Home News.

Since 2014 South Africa has developed a strategy for taking “full advantage” of its marine resources, known as Operation Phakisa. It has resulted in more than 95% of the ocean off South Africa’s nearly 3,000-kilometre coastline being mapped for oil and gas exploration.

The plan seeks to “drill 30 exploration wells in 10 years”, which it estimates could lead to the production of an average of 370,000 barrels of oil and gas per day over 20 years, with Saldanha Bay earmarked as a key logistics hub. It also aims to develop other marine sectors like aquaculture, maritime transport and ocean tourism.

However, two major court cases against the government and oil giants Shell and TotalEnergies have challenged those plans, as coastal residents, allied with national civil society groups, have pushed back against oil concessions held by the multinationals, arguing they were not consulted, and that towns like Saldanha Bay could face social and environmental harms from the fossil fuel extraction.

Melissa Groenink-Groves, programme manager at legal nonprofit Natural Justice, said the cases in South Africa could set a precedent for the whole region. “When communities win in the courts, the successes serve as inspiration for other communities to advocate [for] their rights in their own contexts,” she explained.

She added that the legal challenges to Operation Phakisa also develop climate litigation in South Africa, and could impact how environmental impact assessments are conducted going forward.

Globally, as the oil and gas industry sets its sights on the ocean, with over 85% of new discoveries in 2024 made offshore, scientists and activists warn it could threaten marine life and coastal communities, and weaken the ocean’s ability to trap excess heat from the atmosphere, fuelling planetary warming further.

Taking oil companies to court 

About 400 kilometres north of Saldanha Bay, the Aukotowa Fisheries Cooperative, backed by nonprofits The Green Connection and Natural Justice, has taken TotalEnergies to court over its plans to drill for oil and gas in a 30,000-square-kilometre block off South Africa’s west coast.

The oil exploration block is in a biodiverse marine area bordering Namibia and South Africa known as the Orange Basin, which is a “highly relevant” sanctuary for endangered species, according to Nelson Mandela University’s Institute for Coastal and Marine Research.

Among other grievances, the cooperative maintains that the company’s environmental impact assessment was flawed, failing to consider the project’s contribution to climate change, and that the government “placed the profits of a multinational corporation above the livelihoods of vulnerable coastal communities”. The Western Cape High Court concluded hearings in late March and is expected to deliver a ruling later this year.

Ugandan farmers launch UK court case against East African oil pipeline

Walter Steenkamp, chairperson of the Aukotowa Cooperative, is concerned that the oil and gas drilling will lead to increased inequality, asking “for whom is the development? Definitely not for us.”

In a written statement, TotalEnergies told Climate Home News that it “is a responsible operator fully committed to complying with all applicable South African legislation”.

Communities and climate impacts at stake

On the other side of the country, along South Africa’s eastern coastline, community-based nonprofit Sustaining the Wild Coast and partner organisations have since 2021 challenged Shell and Impact Africa’s exploration permit, arguing that the firms had failed to consult impacted communities – a legal requirement under South African law.

Co-plaintiff Sinegugu Zukulu also said in 2022 that “oil and gas will lead to more emissions, and in the face of climate change, this is wholly irresponsible”.

Following two rulings against the companies by lower courts, the case is now before South Africa’s highest Constitutional Court, which has reserved judgment since September 2025. A ruling against the companies would be final, effectively ending the exploration permit.

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Legal expert Groenink-Groves said oil exploration applications under Operation Phakisa have been “granted largely without properly assessing the devastating impact an oil spill could have on small-scale fishers, the risks of drilling in ultra-deep waters, [and] without accounting for climate change impacts associated with oil and gas exploitation”.

She added that exploration applications have often failed to consider coastal management laws and in some cases, cross-border and regional environmental risks.

Shell and South Africa’s Department of Mineral and Petroleum Resources did not respond to written requests for comment.

South Africa’s offshore oil ambitions

Fishers around South Africa, many of whom have for generations relied on marine resources for survival, say the country’s offshore oil and gas push is sacrificing their livelihoods for profit.

“Why do they want to destroy our heritage? We can’t afford to say yes to oil and gas because the ocean is our source of life,” said Carmelita Mostert, a member of advocacy group Coastal Links and third-generation Saldanha Bay fisher. 

Yet with unemployment above 30%, alongside high levels of poverty and wealth inequality, the government sees Operation Phakisa as a vehicle for socioeconomic development.

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South Africa’s Minister of Mineral and Petroleum Resources Gwede Mantashe has described the court cases as “anti-development”, and claimed that the environmental organisations are funded by the CIA.

Sifiso Dladla, a campaigner with human rights organisation groundWork, argued that the close relationship between the government and the fossil fuel industry – including its more than 3% contribution to gross tax revenue – limits the potential success of movements pushing for an inclusive energy system. Politicians “need money to win elections. Mining companies need the government to protect them,” he said.

Patrick Bond, a political economist and sociology professor at the University of Johannesburg, said Operation Phakisa only makes economic sense if its social and environmental harms are ignored, adding that “if a genuine social cost of carbon analysis were done in any African fossil fuel project, there would be few – if any – able to justify the projects economically”. 

Bond added that efforts by South African communities to oppose oil projects are undermined by public and private financial support for oil companies, including the French government’s $2.8 billion stake in TotalEnergies. 

For Saldanha Bay fisher Mostert, the fight is about protecting the livelihoods of coastal communities. “It is my hope that we can stand strong and protest,” she said. “If oil and gas is not allowed, our lives will be much easier and better – but if oil and gas goes ahead we will be in absolute agony.”

This piece was edited to clarify Patrick Bond’s comment on the international support for oil corporations.

The post South Africa’s offshore oil push meets grassroots resistance in court appeared first on Climate Home News.

In 1934, American economist Simon Kuznets presented a paper to Congress advocating for a new way of measuring economic performance.

The United States was reeling from the Great Depression, and Kuznets – a future Novel prize winner – wanted to gauge just how badly the country’s economy had been dented.

His metric, which would come to be known as gross domestic product (GDP), was a breakthrough. But as pioneering as it was, Kuznets saw its limitations.

“The welfare of a nation can scarcely be inferred from a measure of national income,” he wrote in the 1934 paper.

Some nine decades on, we have largely forgotten that message. GDP has become a barometer of economic progress, a kind of one-number-that-rules-them-all upon which national policies turn and governments rise and fall.

With the climate crisis deepening by the day – as evidenced by the heatwaves and wildfires now searing Europe – our attachment to GDP is looking like a problem.

In a single-minded pursuit of GDP growth, humanity is inadvertently feeding several environmental crises that, over the long run, threaten to make most of us poorer, sicker and more miserable. Climate change alone could slice 20 per cent off global GDP by 2100 – a staggering number.

Clear-cutting boosts GDP not wealth

We need to broaden our vision and definition of economic success before it’s too late.

I grew up in the 1970s and 80s surrounded by the mixed hardwood forests of the northeastern United States. For me, the trees were a refuge, a place to run, discover and savor the history and mystery of the land and its people.

Those experiences with my friends were more important than the amount of money in my pocket. And they led to a realization early on in my career as an economist: that wealth is about more than just income.

This is one of GDP’s most significant oversights. 

With every forest we clear cut and every ounce of fossil fuel we burn, GDP rises. But through those actions, we are whittling away at the natural world, which supplies us with food, water, medicine, clean air and countless other essentials. 

By focusing only on GDP, we’re ignoring what’s happening to the natural assets on which our prosperity ultimately depends. It’s like we’re driving a car and only looking at the speedometer, not the energy remaining in the battery. 

That is the difference between measuring income versus measuring wealth.

The answer to this dilemma lies in looking beyond GDP. We must start considering a broader range of indicators when making policy decisions. 

From an environmental perspective, that means measuring and valuing natural assets like forests, water, soil, biodiversity and clean air. By assigning a value to nature, decision-makers can better understand the economic consequences of, say, strip-mining a mountain top or letting plastic waste overwhelm a river. 

There is still some debate over how exactly to do this kind of natural capital accounting. But that’s not a reason to dismiss it, as many have done. It took years of refinement to end up with the GDP formula we have today.

Costa Rica’s example

The idea of looking beyond GDP isn’t only a theoretical debate. Countries and communities around the world have started to make economic decisions based on their natural assets. A prime example is Costa Rica, a biodiversity hotspot where a years-long effort to conserve land and seascapes has led to a boom in tourism. That in part helped elevate the country into the club of high-income nations.

This kind of environmentally focused economic decision making can pay huge dividends. By stabilizing the climate, ending pollution and halting the loss of the natural world, humanity could save millions of lives a year and create US$20 trillion in economic benefits annually by 2070, found the Global Environment Outlook 7, a 2025 report from the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). The report was funded by the European Union among others.

I began my career as an economist before moving to UNEP, which focuses on solving the world’s thorniest environmental problems. During that time, I’ve come to appreciate that “wealth” means more than simply “income.” True prosperity means being able to provide for ourselves now and into the future. Anything short of that is an empty kind of affluence – and ultimately doomed to be short-lived.

As deadly heat blankets our cities, species slip into extinction and the planet struggles with rising toxicity and pollution, I am convinced that we can do better at measuring what matters. And that means updating and expanding how we measure economic progress.

The post As fires burn and temperatures soar, it’s time to imagine a world beyond GDP appeared first on Climate Home News.

El Niño, likely to be one of the strongest in modern history, has arrived on Caribbean shores. 

Drought is slowly creeping up on our islands. But unlike the fiery wildfires ravaging parts of Europe, there’s no smoke signalling the damage being done, no sirens to warn of the danger. Only announcements from public health officials to stay indoors and remain hydrated — as if outdoor workers and farming communities have the luxury to heed such advice.

During El Niño, strong atmospheric winds alter rain patterns and trap heat across the Caribbean. But while we have experienced El Niño many times before, it has become very visible in recent years how climate change is making this natural phenomenon worse.

Across the Greater Antilles, temperatures are soaring past 38°C (100°F), with real-feel indexes reaching a gruelling 43°C in parts of Puerto Rico where I live. Cuba has it worse. Widespread power outages mean that methods for cooling down are unavailable for most of the day, leaving millions of vulnerable people at risk of heat stroke when temperatures hit 38°C.

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During the last strong drought a decade ago, I had water only two days a week in my home. Today, there are many families whose taps are about to run completely dry. Water authorities have already begun strict rationing in some municipalities, with more on the list scheduled for rationing if conditions don’t change. 

Water rationing is far more than an inconvenience; it is an immediate health risk. This means thousands of people need to constantly haul heavy buckets up flights of stairs just so they could bathe, cook, stay hydrated – the basics of survival. 

Heat causes health problems

Puerto Rico is home to roughly 300,000 elderly residents. Many live alone, isolated and without support. They risk severe physical injury when carrying heavy water containers, and are wont to suffer from silent heat exhaustion in unventilated rooms.

Furthermore, when water shortages force residents to store water in open household containers, it inadvertently creates breeding grounds for Aedes aegypti mosquitoes. Paired with scorching temperatures that tend to shorten the mosquito breeding cycle, the region is facing explosive outbreaks of dengue fever that endanger our most vulnerable: children and the elderly.

The economic fallout is equally devastating. Dry fields mean millions of dollars in lost crops, forcing small agricultural businesses to collapse, needing urgent government relief to survive. Extreme fuel shortages have already paralyzed Cuba’s agricultural sector, cutting food output by 60% – the El Niño dry spell threatens to decimate it.

At sea, warmer ocean waters fuel massive influxes of sargassum seaweed. Rotting sargassum chokes our beaches, destroying the local tourism industry that so many working families rely on. Tangled seaweed also damages nets and boat engines, slashing fish catches and driving up equipment costs for local fishers.

In the south of Puerto Rico, the coastal town of La Parguera is currently witnessing a historic amount of sargassum on its shores. This has halted most of the boating activity in the area, which is the seaside town’s main tourist draw and economic driver.

All over the Caribbean, from town halls to local group gatherings, the story I hear is always the same: constant headaches, lost work hours, failing health, and a sense that quality of life is silently being stolen. The compounding effects of heatwaves, drought, and marine destruction are exhausting our people, our islands.

Climate change to blame

Climate change makes each El Niño year hotter and more damaging. Higher baseline global temperatures increase the energy and moisture available for extreme weather. Latest projections show that El Niño may push the monthly global average temperature past 2°C of warming for the first time in early 2027. In the Caribbean islands, that will not just be breaking records – it’ll be breaking lives.

Recently, I had the opportunity to share a panel with climate scientists behind what is known as the field of “attribution science” – or the science that compares today’s climate conditions to what the Earth’s climate would be like without human activity, particularly burning fossil fuels. They’re unequivocal: it’s no longer a question of whether extreme weather is caused by climate change, it’s just a question of how much. 

Attribution science recently got a boost from the U.S.’ top scientific advisory body. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine recognized that researchers’ methods have advanced considerably in recent years, resulting in better assessments on how much extreme weather can be attributed to human-caused climate change. It noted that attribution findings could be relevant in some types of legal cases, including those seeking damages from oil companies for climate impacts.

This crisis, which is already taking a heavy toll on our communities’ survival, needs real, urgent, and structural action that goes beyond aid. With similar droughts now gripping parts of Asia and Africa, we’re falling into the familiar narrative of treating the looming humanitarian crisis as if no one was to blame, as if it is being caused solely by a natural phenomenon we can’t control.

It’s not. The world was already on fire before its regular visitor, El Niño, came. While we need humanitarian action, we need climate action too, in order to permanently put out the flames.

The post When taps run dry in the Caribbean, it’s not enough to blame El Niño appeared first on Climate Home News.