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.

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

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.

Forty-five nations had not submitted a plan known as a nationally determined contribution (NDC), according to the Paris Agreement Implementation and Compliance Committee’s (PAICC) newly-published report of its 7-10 July 2026 meeting. One, Oman, has published it since the meeting.

Twelve countries ignored the committee’s repeated attempts to find out why they had not yet produced a climate plan, the report said. They will be invited to the committee’s next meeting, from September 1-4, so it can identify the challenges and constraints they face.

Members of the committee are divided, as they were at their last meeting, on whether to name those countries publicly and will debate the question again in September.

The PAICC does not have any power to punish governments, as building these powers into the Paris Agreement was thought to be so controversial that it could have stopped some governments from joining, experts have previously told Climate Home News.

A key requirement of the landmark 2015 Paris Agreement is that governments publish a more ambitious NDC every five years, setting targets to reduce their planet-heating emissions and outlining their policies to adapt to climate change, in order to meet the accord’s goals on limiting global warming and protecting people from its effects.

The latest set – the third round of plans, with new targets for 2035 – was due in 2025.

Some medium-sized emitters

Countries without an updated NDC include Egypt, Vietnam, Argentina and the Phillippines, all of which rank among the world’s 40 largest greenhouse gas emitters. The rest of the countries are smaller, poorer nations, with many in Africa or the Caribbean.

Some nations have argued that they cannot put together an NDC – which requires a significant amount of work in tracking emissions and consulting on how to curb them across the economy – because of exceptional circumstances. For example, a letter from a Sudanese official to the PAICC committee, seen by Climate Home News, says that the country’s civil war has led to the suspension of its NDC preparation.

The US and Iran are not signed up to the Paris Agreement, although the US submitted a 2035 NDC under the Biden administration before Donald Trump pulled the US out of the UN climate accords.

The committee also expressed concern that the UN’s NDC registry continued to label the climate plans of countries that are no longer party to the Paris Agreement as “active”, according to its report. The US submission has since been archived.

Since the last PAICC meeting in March, ten countries have published NDCs. The committee did not name them but they include India, Algeria, Cameroon and Guyana.

The post Quarter of countries still missing UN climate plans 18 months after deadline appeared first on Climate Home News.

The world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter brought 30 gigawatts (GW) of new coal power capacity into operation in the six months to June and coal-fired generation rose 3% after falling last year, according to a report by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA) and Global Energy Monitor (GEM). Only 2.7GW of coal power was retired in the same period. 

The coal expansion stems from a surge in power plant approvals that followed power shortages caused primarily by high coal prices in 2021, when blackouts and factory shutdowns hit roughly 20 Chinese provinces. Local governments responded by fast-tracking new coal projects as insurance against future outages.

A further 274 GW of coal capacity – equivalent to roughly a fifth of China’s existing coal fleet – is already either under construction or has permits to be built, meaning much of the sector’s expansion is locked in for years, the report says.

“Climate concern”

Qi Qin, the report’s author, said the coal lock-in is a “climate concern”. “After coal power plants are built, they will seek revenue and operating hours for decades and that can crowd out clean power and slow the retirement of the older coal power units,” she added. 

The coal buildout is happening at the same time as Beijing signals a gradual shift in its energy rhetoric. In a document published last April, the Chinese government called for the country to “reasonably control” both China’s capacity to generate electricity from coal and, for the first time, how much electricity it actually generates from coal.

China has also pledged in its latest five-year plan to cut carbon emissions per unit of gross domestic product – known as carbon intensity – by 17% between 2026 and 2030. It plans to reach net zero by 2060.

But, according to Qi, there is still a real gap between the direction of national policy and what is happening on the ground.

Growing renewables curtailments

While China generated less than half of its electricity from coal for the first time in the six months to last June, growing demand for electricity meant coal power generation still rose 3.4%, reversing a roughly 1% decline recorded in 2025, the report said. 

Available clean electricity from solar and wind, which have seen a record expansion in China, would have been more than enough to meet the extra demand and drive coal power down if it had been fully used, the report said. Instead, the amount of clean electricity wasted kept growing.

Estimated rates of curtailment, the intentional reduction of electricity from a source, for wind and solar were up by about a half in the six-month period compared to last year, wasting the equivalent of Indonesia’s annual electricity output. 

Coal’s protected status

Researchers said that was caused by the Chinese grid’s inability to absorb the additional clean electricity, in addition to energy contracts and pricing mechanisms skewed in favour of coal power. 

Chinese coal generators are required to sign long-term contracts covering a fixed share of the previous year’s output, now standing at 70%. Qi said that, out of fear of electricity shortages, regulators introduced these arrangements to protect coal power plants by guaranteeing them predictable prices and utilisation rates.

Additionally, China has also begun paying coal plants to stand ready to generate electricity, rather than for actually running, through new capacity payments introduced this year.

China unveils underwhelming emissions-cutting target for 2035

Qi said that, while each of these mechanisms has a legitimate purpose on its own, they now combine to give coal power excessive protections. “When renewables are abundant, they [coal operators] don’t have the incentive and are not required to ramp down,” she added. 

The report suggested lowering, or even suspending, coal-specific contract minimums in provinces that are experiencing clean energy being wasted or prolonged periods of zero or negative electricity prices. That would help coal transition to a more flexible backup role and facilitate the integration of renewables, the researchers argued.

They also urged the Chinese authorities to halt permits for new coal power projects and reassess those that have already been permitted, while favouring grid expansion, energy trade across provinces and storage as ways to boost energy reliability.

The post China’s coal power rebounds as record clean energy goes to waste appeared first on Climate Home News.

We are entering an age of permanent volatility.

Climate change is making extreme weather more destructive. Geopolitical tensions are disrupting energy markets and supply chains. Governments are expected not only to decarbonise their economies, but to protect them against an increasingly unpredictable world. That requires sustained public investment at precisely the moment repeated shocks are placing ever greater pressure on public finances.

Governments are rightly debating how to mobilise the trillions needed for the energy transition. Yet one of the largest untapped sources of climate finance requires neither higher corporate tax rates nor new international funds. It lies in correcting one of the oldest assumptions underpinning the international corporate tax system.

One of the stranger features of the modern economy is that we no longer disagree about what a multinational corporation is—until the conversation turns to tax.

Investors value Apple as a single global business. Consumers experience it as a single company. Its executives manage it as an integrated enterprise, allocating capital, production and marketing across continents according to commercial strategy rather than national borders. Nobody seriously believes its subsidiaries are independent businesses negotiating with one another as though they were unrelated companies.

Yet this is precisely the legal fiction upon which the international corporate tax system was built—and continues to rest.

That legal fiction does more than misdescribe how multinational businesses operate. It enables profits to be shifted away from the places where real economic activity takes place and into jurisdictions where little or no tax is paid. This not only erodes public revenues, but also undermines the level playing field by giving multinational corporations tax advantages that purely domestic businesses cannot replicate.

$500 billion a year

Taxing multinational corporations as the integrated businesses they actually are could generate around $500 billion in additional corporate tax revenues every year. That’s almost 40% of the $1.3 trillion in annual climate finance that, two years ago, governments agreed should be mobilised by 2035. That is exactly what governments are negotiating this week under the United Nations Framework Convention on International Tax Cooperation in New York.

Imagine Apple sold one million iPhones in Kenya. Few people would dispute that those sales depend on the Kenyan economy. Every iPhone arrives through Kenyan ports, travels on Kenyan roads, is sold by Kenyan workers, connects through Kenyan telecommunications infrastructure and is protected by Kenyan courts. Apple’s success depends not only on its own innovation, but on the public investments and institutions that make economic activity possible.

The negotiations underway under the United Nations Framework Convention on International Tax Cooperation would replace this legal fiction with a system known as unitary taxation with formulary apportionment. Rather than allowing multinational corporations to pay tax where they say their profits arise, it would allocate taxing rights according to where they undertake genuine economic activity—where they employ workers, manufacture goods, provide services and sell to customers. It would replace today’s pay where you say model with one based on pay where you play

This is not about increasing corporate tax rates. It is about deciding where multinational corporations should pay tax on the profits they already earn. Allocating taxing rights in this way would benefit countries across the income spectrum. While higher-income countries would gain the most in absolute terms, lower-income countries would see the largest proportional increases.

France, for example, would collect an additional US$25.5 billion each year, while Kenya would increase its corporate tax revenues by 406%. At a time of mounting climate costs, those revenues could help governments drive the transition to clean energy while investing in the resilience needed to withstand future shocks.

An overdue correction

The strongest argument for reform, however, is not the scale of the projected revenue gains. It is that the proposal corrects a century-old foundational error by bringing international tax rules into closer alignment with how the modern economy actually works.

Every successful market depends on foundations that no company creates alone: public investment, functioning institutions and the participation of millions of workers and consumers. If multinational profits are generated collectively across many countries, the rules governing where those profits are taxed should recognise that reality rather than the legal and accounting artifices that determine where profits appear on paper.

The international tax system remains an outlier. Every other area of economic governance has long since recognised multinational corporations as integrated global businesses. Tax rules remain the last custodian of the legal fiction that multinational corporations are not, in fact, multinational.

The debate taking place in New York is therefore about much more than tax. It is about whether the rules underpinning the global economy still reflect the economy they are meant to govern—and whether they equip governments with the fiscal capacity to confront the defining challenges of the twenty-first century.

Energy sovereignty without fiscal sovereignty is an unfinished transition. Countries cannot build a more secure and resilient future if the wealth generated within their economies continues to escape taxation where it is created.

Recovering those revenues would strengthen public finances, giving governments not only the resources to accelerate the energy transition but also the fiscal capacity to plan, coordinate and sustain it over the long term. In an age of permanent volatility, that capacity may prove to be every country’s most important climate adaptation strategy.

The post A legal fiction blocking billions in climate finance will be challenged this week appeared first on Climate Home News.

In April, Colombia hosted 57 governments in the Caribbean city of Santa Marta for the first conference on transitioning away from fossil fuels – a voluntary meeting outside of official UN climate talks. In June, far-right candidate Abelardo de la Espriella won a general election, and is set to take office on Friday.

De la Espriella has pledged to ramp up coal exports and begin fracking for methane gas, reversing a ban on all new hydrocarbon exploration enacted by the current government of Gustavo Petro since 2022. The soon to be environment minister Fabio Arjona said the Santa Marta conference was an “absolute waste of time and money”.

He will replace Irene Vélez Torres, who co-chairs the Santa Marta coalition. Torres told a press briefing last week that the initiative was created in a way that made sure “it could live without Colombia because we knew [a change in government] was a risk”.

“It’s a coalition of countries but also subnational governments, civil society, scientists… so there is a lot more than just Colombia. It’s a shame that Colombia cannot continue with its international leadership, but it doesn’t mean that what we created as a global legacy will not continue,” she said.

Dutch environment minister Stientje van Veldhoven, also a co-chair in the initiative, told Climate Home News in a statement that “the organization is set-up in a way that progress does not depend on one or two countries”, and highlighted the role of incoming co-chairs Ireland and Tuvalu.

The new co-chairs will officially take the lead after COP31 and are set to host the second Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels in Tuvalu next year. Van Veldhoven said the two countries are already involved in preparing for this transition.

Priorities: roadmaps, debt and trade

After meeting in Santa Marta to kickstart work on phasing out fossil fuels, governments agreed to focus on three priorities: developing national roadmaps to phase out fossil fuels, decoupling trade from coal, oil and gas, and reducing global finance’s dependence on fossil fuels.

At last year’s COP30, a group of around 80 countries led a failed push for the UN to adopt a global roadmap to phase out fossil fuels. To keep talks from collapsing, Brazil proposed to draft a voluntary roadmap instead, which has received suggestions from dozens of countries.

In June, Vélez Torres told journalists that Colombia and the Netherlands would seek for COP31 to reflect the work of the Santa Marta coalition, something the co-presidency of Türkiye and Australia was “open” to consider, she added.

Last week, she stressed that the workstreams are also set up independently from the Dutch and Colombian governments, and that each area of focus will have its own “madrina”, which translates as “godmother”, a contact point that will oversee progress and support countries.

Van Veldhoven noted that, while the coalition is open to new members, the current priority is “setting up the organisation with the current involved countries and stakeholders”. The Dutch government noted that “several countries” have expressed interest, but could not disclosed which ones.

Colombia’s fossil fuel shift

While the coalition is set up to withstand changes in government, Colombia’s shift to a pro-fossil fuel government represents an important blow to global initiatives seeking to phase out fossil fuels, said Andreas Malm, author and professor of human ecology at Lund University.

“The gap that we have after this defeat is charismatic political leadership that makes the necessary links and arguments on the global stage. For the moment, I don’t see who could replace Colombia in that role,” he said. “But who knows… perhaps some miracle will happen somewhere in the world and you will have someone to pick up that mantle that is now on the ground.”

Colombia not only leads the Santa Marta coalition, but is also one of the few fossil fuel producers in the group to actually halt new exploration licenses. Coal and oil derivatives account for about a third of the country’s exports, but both industries have followed a downward trend over the last decade.

De la Espriella’s government will also have to start from scratch, as Petro’s government halted all oil and gas exploration pilots in the key Magdalena and Cesar-Ranchería regions. Both areas are also home to indigenous communities who are likely to challenge any projects in court.

Vélez Torres said that halting all new coal, oil and gas exploration licenses “was not easy” and led to “violent reactions” from national elites, including “violent threats”, but that it came with the deep belief that “it is needed, it is urgent, and it cannot be delayed”.

At an international level, she added that more countries need to show “political bravery” to take similar decisions, and that the global discussion to phase out fossil fuels “cannot be delayed” because the time window for humanity to act is shrinking.

“We decided to go against the current. That has been one of the bravest decisions, and I hope that other governments and particularly civil society can get to lead that conversation forward”, she said.

The post Santa Marta coalition tested as co-chair Colombia turns back to fossil fuels appeared first on Climate Home News.

Failed traffic lights caused chaos on the streets of Medan, one of the country’s biggest cities, and restaurants and shops had to shutter or throw out food after fridges stopped working. Four people were reported to have died from carbon monoxide poisoning from generators.

A power outage caused by damage to cables on a high-voltage transmission line, the first of two to strike Sumatra in a fortnight, highlighted the huge challenge facing Indonesia and much of neighbouring Southeast Asia – the maintenance and upgrading of inadequate grid capacity that industry analysts say is proving an obstacle for billions of dollars in planned clean power investments.

Experts told Climate Home News the Galang–Simangkuk transmission line, which was relatively new and only began operating seven years ago, should have been able to withstand the storms that caused transmission towers to collapse in early June.

“It should not have had these grid failures,” said Wai-Shin Chan, Hong Kong-based head of research at Asia Research & Engagement, a consulting firm, warning that climate change would bring more frequent episodes of extreme weather.

“The grid resilience is really not there,” Chan said.

The Indonesian Air Force helped state-owned utility PT Perusahaan Listrik Negara (PLN) transport emergency power towers to restore electricity supplies within 24 hours, but the two incidents could cause longer-lasting damage to investor confidence – hurting the delivery of much-needed reliable clean electricity supplies.

PLN did not respond to a request for comment.

Grid bottlenecks and projects stuck on hold

With electrification high on the agenda of the COP31 climate talks later this year, there is growing global focus on the need to bolster grid infrastructure to cope with increased electricity use and more renewables in the power mix.

In Southeast Asia, energy experts say inadequate grid capacity and maintenance is already proving a major factor in the region’s stuttering rollout of new clean energy projects.

About 50% to 60% of renewable energy projects in Vietnam, Thailand and Indonesia were cancelled or stalled between 2021 and 2025, according to a recent report by consultancy Bain & Company and Standard Chartered. In Indonesia, 48% of announced projects were subsequently dropped or delayed during that period. 

Progress in the region is also being hampered by issues ranging from unclear power purchase agreement (PPA) structures, a failure of power policies to keep up with investor needs, permitting and licensing approval delays, grid connection constraints, limits to private sector involvement in electricity markets, and policy and tariff uncertainty, energy experts said.

Some renewable energy projects have also faced opposition due to their environmental impact and issues related to land rights.

But Bain researchers found grid infrastructure was the biggest bottleneck for Southeast Asia’s energy transition, with about $18 billion per year needed in investment for modernisation and upgrades.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) has warned that electricity grid and storage investment in the region was higher in 2015 at $15 billion compared with $12 billion in 2025, even as electricity demand and renewable energy growth accelerated.

“It’s a concern for long-term power development in the region,” Chan said. 

“If these risks – grid curtailment, policy uncertainty, permitting and PPA – are not adequately addressed, investors just don’t have the confidence to hit the final investment decision button,” he added. 

A stuttering energy transition

Ramping up progress on solar, wind, hydro and geothermal projects is vital for Southeast Asian nations to hit their targets on cutting planet-heating carbon emissions.

Indonesia has pledged to reduce emissions by 31.9% by 2030 compared with business-as-usual levels, or by 43.2% with international support, on the way to reaching net zero by 2060. 

Renewables accounted for about 18% of Indonesia’s energy mix in April 2026 according to local media reports, falling short of the country’s initial 23% target for 2025, with the majority of its energy needs met by coal, oil and gas. In 2025, a new National Energy Policy postponed achieving the target to 2030. 

“The region carries significant weight in global terms, given its share of world population and energy consumption,” said Joseph Jacobelli, an impact investor and author of Asia’s Energy Revolution and Powering the Unstoppable Green Shift. 

“Every delay in renewable energy deployment extends dependence on fossil fuels and pushes net zero targets further out of reach,” he said. 

There are cost benefits of increasing renewables in the overall power mix, too. 

In many parts of the region, new renewable power – especially solar and onshore wind – is cheaper than building new fossil fuel generation. The global energy shock unleashed by the Iran war has highlighted the energy security benefits of renewables, though it also raised concerns about coal backsliding in countries including Indonesia.

Surging oil prices exposed Southeast Asia’s vulnerability to fossil fuel supply disruptions, causing energy prices to soar and widespread fuel shortages that led the World Bank to downgrade the region’s growth projection. 

“This situation pushes us to accelerate [the energy transition], we must move faster,” Indonesian President  Prabowo Subianto said in March, adding that the government was focused on solar projects that would deliver a total installed capacity of up to 100 GW.

At the same time, progress on moving away from coal has been sluggish. Both Indonesia and Vietnam signed up for Just Energy Transition Partnerships (JETPs) – a funding initiative set up by the G7 to help developing nations shift away from coal – though a lack of favourable financing is holding back these plans.

The US withdrew from its JETP deals with the two countries last year, reflecting President Donald Trump’s wider energy policies, and Indonesia abandoned plans to close a major coal power plant.

Lack of finance, or lack of faith?

But a shortage of financing to bring new renewables projects online is not the cause of foot-dragging in Indonesia, where installed solar capacity reached only about 20% to 30% of the government’s 2020-2025 target, Bain researchers said.

Of an estimated $540 billion in green capital expenditure announced across Southeast Asia’s power and electric vehicle value chains between now and 2030, only about $315 billion is on a credible path towards deployment under current conditions, according to the report. 

Between 2022 and early 2026, more than a quarter of the 452 new solar projects announced in Southeast Asian countries were postponed or cancelled, according to Global Energy Monitor‘s Global Solar Power Tracker.

In Indonesia, the Batam Bintan Karimun solar farm was initially expected to come online by 2024 but was cancelled in 2023 for unknown reasons, Kasandra O’Malia, a project manager at Global Energy Monitor, told Climate Home. The project also included plans for Southeast Asia’s largest associated battery storage facility.

Another high-profile Indonesian development that has stalled is a 3,500 MW solar and storage project proposed on Riau Island to export clean electricity to Singapore. While not formally abandoned, there have been few updates to this project since April 2022. 

“This execution gap is not really to do with money – there is available capital – but the finance is not being deployed effectively because the risks have not been adequately redressed,” Chan said.

In a bid to foster investor certainty, Indonesia’s government approved a new 2025-2034 Electricity Supply Business Plan (RUPTL) for PLN in May 2025, replacing years of delays over the country’s power development roadmap.   

As well as aligning government policy, streamlining permitting, simplifying purchase procedures and targeting 70 GW of new generation, with renewables accounting for the vast majority of additions, the plan includes the construction of about 47,800 kilometres of new transmission lines and substations with a total capacity of 108,000 megavolt-ampere, spread across Indonesia.

The Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources, several domestic and international renewable energy developers, and the Indonesia Renewable Society, did not respond to requests for comment.

Another way to soothe investors’ nerves would be for governments to use public money to de-risk investments, but there is little appetite for this approach in the region, Chan said.

A more effective tool would be ensuring stable, investment-friendly energy market policies and regulations, said Alnie Demoral, a Manila-based energy analyst at climate think-tank Ember who previously worked with solar developers and investors.

Renewable energy developers, investors and authorities can spend years negotiating the project’s costs, permitting and whether grid connection will be available to bring clean power online, she said. 

Often the longest discussions focus on the power pricing tariffs that governments set for renewable energy producers. Changing policies or disagreement on underlying cost assumptions can stall or delay a project before it reaches financial close, she added. 

“Governments have to do their part by making sure the investment environment is stable,” Demoral said.

“But this is a two-way process. The private sector and developers must also ensure that their assessments of the project are based on robust assumptions.”

AI data centres add to the strain

At the same time, rapid growth in power-hungry AI data centres is putting extra strain on the region’s overstretched grids.

AI data centres, which use much more power than regular data centres, are becoming one of the largest drivers of new power demand in Southeast Asia as governments in the region jostle for more multibillion-dollar investment in the sector.

The slow pace of renewable energy deployment and grid modernisation, coupled with ongoing reliance on fossil fuels in the electricity mix, will make it difficult for the region to meet a new, fast-growing source of additional demand without increasing emissions. 

Emissions from data centre power use in Indonesia are expected to quadruple between 2024 and 2030, according to Ember.

AI data centres operate around the clock and will often use any power that is available – be it renewables or fossil fuels, said Chan, urging policymakers to first ensure they can meet the power needs before courting data centres.

Many new AI data centres are planned for areas with insufficient high-voltage transmission capacity, according to the Bain report, suggesting that countries should focus on new high-voltage lines, larger substations and stronger interconnections between regions.    

The researchers note that AI data centres also typically take about one to three years to build, while major electricity transmission lines and grid updates can take five years or more, adding that power grid investments must happen before renewable energy or AI projects.  

“Growth in data centres and AI is already adding pressure to constrained grids,” said Christina Ng, the Kuala Lumpur-based co-founder of Energy Shift Institute, an Asia-focused, independent energy finance think-tank.  

“The risk is that new demand is met through high-emitting electricity if clean power and clean grid investment do not keep pace.” 

Main image: A technician walks next to solar panels that partially provide electrical power to the Grand Mosque of Istiqlal in Jakarta, Indonesia (Photo: REUTERS/Willy Kurniawan)

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Every November, tens of thousands of people descend on the world’s annual UN climate conference. Presidents and prime ministers, negotiators, business executives, campaigners, journalists, celebrities and lobbyists converge on one city for two frenetic weeks, all convinced they need to be there.

Everyone with a stake in climate action feels they must be present. Any suggestion of a smaller, more focused conference is quickly met with concerns about exclusion. But it is time to ask an uncomfortable question: has the fear of missing out (FOMO) become one of the biggest obstacles to effective international climate cooperation?

The story in numbers

When governments first met under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in the 1990s, the annual Conferences of the Parties (COPs) attracted only a few thousand participants. Even the Kyoto conference, which produced the first legally binding emissions agreement, hosted fewer than 10,000 people.

Since then, analysis by ecbi reveals a striking trend: after each major treaty COP, the participation at the next COP approximately doubled (see chart below).

Why?

Part of the answer is success. As climate change has risen up the political and economic agenda, more actors quite rightly want to engage. But our analysis reveals that a less acknowledged force is also driving the spikes in participation: FOMO.

As more heads of state attended, ministers concluded they had to be there too. As ministers arrived in greater numbers, government delegations expanded. Businesses, investors, researchers, campaigners, journalists, city leaders and philanthropies reached the same conclusion: if everyone important is going to COP, we cannot afford to stay away.

The result is a self-reinforcing cycle. The larger COP becomes, the more indispensable attendance appears, because presence signals relevance.

Source: Müller, B., J. Allan, M. Roesti and L. Gomez-Echeverri, 2024 UPDATE Quo Vadis COP? Future Arrangements for Intergovernmental Meetings under the UNFCCC – Settled and Fit for Purpose, Oxford, OCP/ecbi, December 2024

The negotiating community has barely grown

The headline attendance figures tell only part of the story. At COP28, more than 42,000 Party badges were issued to official national delegations. However, only 1,581 delegates had also attended the technical negotiating session in Bonn just five months earlier. Fewer than 4% of Party delegates formed the core negotiating community.

This core negotiating community has remained remarkably stable: across the five COPs since Paris, between roughly 1,300 and 1,600 delegates consistently attended both the June negotiating session and the annual COP.

The negotiating community has not become twenty times larger, but the COP has.

One COP, three different events

Today’s COP has, in fact, evolved into three very different events rolled into one.

The first is the formal negotiating session, where governments agree rules, guidance and decisions under the Convention and the Paris Agreement.

The second is a global political summit, where leaders announce initiatives and demonstrate political commitment.

The third is a vast climate expo, where businesses, cities, researchers, financial institutions and civil society showcase solutions, build partnerships and engage the public.

Each of them serves a valuable purpose, but the problem is that they have become bundled together by historical accident rather than institutional design.

Comment: The UN climate process was built for negotiation – now it must support implementation

Bigger is not always better

The consequences of “mega-COPs” are becoming increasingly difficult to ignore.

The countries most vulnerable to climate change are increasingly less able to host COPs and thus lose the ability to have their voices properly heard. Hosting a modern COP now requires enormous financial resources, extensive security operations and accommodation capacity that many countries simply do not possess. Even wealthier nations have become more reluctant to take on the burden.

Inside the venue, size creates its own inefficiencies. Climate negotiations often advance through informal conversations: a chance meeting in a corridor, a discussion over coffee, an impromptu conversation between delegates who discover common ground. Those opportunities become rarer when participants spend hours navigating enormous venues and crowded security checkpoints.

Comment: COP presidencies should focus less on climate policy, more on global politics

Observer access is constrained by overcrowding. National delegations increasingly include large numbers of non-government participants, sometimes outnumbering officials from government ministries. Meanwhile, businesses, campaigners and journalists compete with negotiators for the same space and attention.

The very scale of the event also creates a reputational problem. A gathering of 60,000 or more people inevitably creates expectations of dramatic political breakthroughs every year. Yet much of today’s climate diplomacy involves steady, technical progress. When those quieter achievements are judged against the expectations generated by a mega-event, disappointment in the UN climate change process becomes almost inevitable.

Time to unbundle

Not everything must happen in the same place at the same time. Negotiations, political leadership and implementation partnerships each deserve their own space. They should become separate events.

Routine governing body sessions, involving the roughly 5,000 participants directly engaged in the formal process, could be held in Bonn, where the UN climate secretariat is based. Political summits could be convened separately when leaders’ intervention is genuinely needed. Climate expos could continue to rotate with the COP Presidency, providing dedicated opportunities for businesses, investors, cities, researchers and civil society to showcase solutions and forge partnerships.

Such an approach would strengthen, not weaken, participation. Negotiators would benefit from a more focused and effective working environment. Host countries would face a far more manageable logistical and financial challenge. Climate-vulnerable countries would once again have a realistic opportunity to host key meetings and shape the global agenda. Businesses, investors, cities and civil society would gain greater visibility by engaging in forums designed for partnership, innovation and implementation, rather than competing with formal negotiations for space and attention.

Comment: Not another COP-out: We must rewrite the rules of the UN climate talks

Today’s mega-COPs evolved incrementally, one seemingly sensible decision at a time, until their sheer scale began to undermine many of the objectives they were intended to serve. The fear of missing out now risks becoming one of the biggest barriers to the reforms needed to make the process more effective.

The greatest fear now is not missing out on the next COP, but missing the opportunity to redesign the process so it can deliver on its ultimate purpose: tackling the climate crisis.

Benito Müller is managing director of Oxford Climate Policy and director of the European Capacity Building Initiative (ecbi).

Anju Sharma is a climate policy specialist with Oxford Climate Policy.

Jen Allan is a senior Lecturer at Cardiff University and strategic advisor at the International Institute for Sustainable Development. 

Matthias Roesti is a postdoctoral researcher studying the political economy of climate change at the University of Pennsylvania’s Environmental Politics Lab.

Luis Gomez-Echeverri is a former senior staff member with UNDP and UNFCCC and currently an emeritus research scholar at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, working at the intersection of climate and development.

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The International Seabed Authority (ISA), the UN body regulating the deep ocean floor, held annual three-week talks ending on Friday. The discussions come as the US – which is not a member country – moved forward in its unilateral deep-sea mining push, and as mining companies applying for American permits fought back a UN inquiry into their behaviour.

The Trump administration and mining frontrunners, among them Canadian firm The Metals Company (TMC), want to mine a huge area of the Pacific Ocean known as the Clarion-Clipperton Zone. Although it holds deposits of mangenese, nickel and rare earths – key for military use and clean energy components – it is also an unexplored ecosystem with thousands of unnamed species.

The meeting, held at ISA headquarters in Jamaica’s capital Kingston, ended with no immediate breakthroughs. Instead, it started long processes that seeks to hold mining firms and the US accountable, according to ocean governance expert Pradeep Singh, from the Oceano Azul Foundation.

“It shows some level of maturity as well as understanding from member states that this is a long process that requires policy discussions that might not be resolved by acting right away without considerate thought” he said.

Countries have begun consultations on whether to request an advisory opinion from the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLOS), which would seek to clarify the legality of the US-issued permits in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone and whether other states should recognise them.

The ISA will also move forward with an inquiry into its contractors, including The Metals Company (TMC). The company tried to prevent this inquiry by suing the ISA at the ITLOS for allegedly acting in bad faith, an argument that the world’s top maritime court rejected.

ISA secretary-general Letícia Carvalho said in her closing remarks that the past year “presented both significant challenges and noteworthy achievements”. Earlier in the talks, she said the agency’s role is “more important than ever” and that resources in the deep seabed are “the common heritage of humankind”.

Advisory opinion on legality of US mining push

Towards the end of the ISA assembly, Carvalho submitted a draft text to countries proposing they request an advisory opinion from the ITLOS, clarifying the legality of the US deep-sea mining push.

The initiative proposed questions to the court, including whether international law backs the principle that the deep seafloor cannot be appropriated by any single country, and whether other governments should avoid recognising any similar effort.

Several nations including the African group, New Zealand, Norway, France, Singapore, Jamaica and Canada argued that while they could back such a proposal, it required careful legal consideration. Some regretted that the note was not sent earlier in the talks.

Russia and China backed the request for an advisory opinion. The Chinese delegation suggested asking whether unilateral actions by non-member states – such as the US – would break international law, and what the consequences of such actions would be.

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

By the end of the talks there was no consensus on this proposal. The assembly decided instead to hold consultations led by Malta, and decide on whether to request an advisory opinion by next year’s meeting.

“They are not rushing into this,” Singh explained. “It also seems that they are not feeling immediately threatened at this stage, and that there are still some things that could be done to find a way forward and perhaps persuading the US from acting unilaterally.”

Growing call for deep-sea mining moratorium

Activists were also critical of the ISA deciding to renew one of TMC’s exploration licenses in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, which expired last month. Haldis Helle, ocean campaigner at Greenpeace, said this was a “reward” for TMC despite “their clear disregard for international law”.

But Singh argued that the renewal was “not an endorsement to act unilaterally” but an effort from countries to make the “whole decision-making including the inquiry process robust”, without showing signs of any bias.

Instead, campaigners highlighted a growing call for a moratorium on deep-sea mining, which seeks to halt all activity until enough scientific evidence can show that it is not harmful for marine wildlife. The initiative is now backed by 46 governments, with Mauritius, Mozamboque and the Republic of Congo becoming the latest supporters.

“The lesson from the past three weeks is clear: only a pause on exploitation, now backed by over a quarter of ISA member states, can deliver the legal certainty this moment demands and rein in a situation being driven out of control by a handful of reckless companies“, said Sofia Tsenikli, global campaign director at the Deep-Sea Conservation Coalition (DSCC).

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With abundant sunshine, swathes of unused desert land and plenty of wind, Egypt is seen as having the potential to become a major force in renewable power generation, helping to cut the planet-heating carbon emissions of Africa’s second-largest economy and beyond.

The conflict in the Middle East has given the government’s clean energy plans more salience, making the case for renewable power to bolster the country’s energy security and help it meet its economic development goals by exporting clean power.  

The government recently announced an accelerated timeline for renewables to reach 45% of the electricity mix within two years – up from a previous target of 42% by 2030 and a huge jump from around 13% in 2025, according to think-tank Ember. 

In June, President Abdel ​Fattah el-Sisi met with government ministers to discuss the faster delivery of solar and energy storage projects as well as upgrades to the electricity grid to deliver on the new goal, including 105 renewable energy projects intended to bolster grid stability. 

Big challenges lie ahead, among them a parallel bet on continued fossil fuel exploration and the need to upgrade electricity infrastructure, a task that could require multibillion-dollar investments, experts say.

“The technical and financial plumbing – the grid, foreign-currency financing and the supply chain – are the real gatekeepers,” Nadia Elmasry, an expert at the Regional Center for Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency, told Climate Home News.

In a speech to the nation in March, President Sisi said $50 billion worth of investment were needed to overhaul the electricity grid and transmission infrastructure. 

During the COP29 climate talks in 2024, Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly warned that Egypt’s targets for renewable power expansion could be missed without more international support for critical infrastructure. 

Multimillion-euro investment

Modernising and expanding power grids has emerged as a central pillar of an intensifying global push for electrification – a key priority of the COP31 UN climate talks taking place in Türkiye in November.  

As dozens of governments led by the European Union and the UK throw their political weight behind a rapid electrification of the global economy, Egypt’s hunt for foreign investment in power infrastructure has found sympathetic ears.

In June, the EU and its European Investment Bank lending arm announced a financing package of up to €690 million ($795 million) to modernise Egypt’s transmission network – widely seen as a weak point in the nation’s clean energy ambitions. 

The project aims to help the grid absorb 22 GW of renewable capacity by 2030, reduce electricity losses and move power from wind and solar zones to consumers and, eventually, foreign markets, including the EU. 

New substations and transmission lines will connect wind and solar zones around the Red Sea and the Gulf of Suez, reducing losses and preparing the network for future cross-Mediterranean trade.

Under the country’s ambitious regional plans, Egypt would supply clean power via existing interconnections with Jordan, Libya and Sudan, as well as a 3 GW link under construction with Saudi Arabia. 

Further ahead, proposals envision the export of renewable electricity to southern Europe via a subsea cable, and Egypt also aims to be a primary source of green hydrogen and ammonia for European markets.

Conflicts, cash among the challenges

Planned investment in electricity and renewables reached 136.3 billion Egyptian pounds ($2.7 billion) for the 2025/26 financial year, up from 72.6 billion pounds ($1.4 million) the year before, with public investment expected to account for about three-quarters of that.

Grid investment is “the cornerstone” of Egypt’s hub strategy, said energy and environmental economy expert Mohammed Abdel Raouf, allowing it to integrate renewables without destabilising the power system and create the smart-grid infrastructure needed to trade electricity with other countries.

But Egypt’s plans face several major challenges, besides the necessary grid upgrades, which are estimated to cost billions of dollars alone, according to a December 2025 study by the Amsterdam-based think-tank Transnational Institute. 

Regional conflicts are disrupting supply chains and discouraging investment, particularly in renewable energy, Abdel Raouf warned. High borrowing costs, financing rules, limited EU-compliant capacity and uncertain long-term buyers of Egypt’s clean power could also slow progress, according to the Transnational Institute study.

The Arab world’s most populous country has been grappling with the aftermath of a steep currency devaluation and economic fallout from the Gaza and Iran wars.

Elmasry pointed to pressures from Egypt’s shortage of foreign currency and the need for concessional finance or guarantees to make long-term projects bankable. Egypt says it has mobilised $4 billion in concessional finance for 4.2 GW of renewable energy projects.

Regulatory coordination and workforce development will be essential, particularly as Egypt seeks to trade across grids governed by different technical and commercial rules, Elmasry added.

In order to generate an exportable surplus of clean electricity at a time of rising domestic power needs, Egypt also needs to give a bigger role to decentralised minigrid systems such as rooftop solar projects, said Cairo-based solar entrepreneur Hatem Tawfik.

“We will [only] be a hub in 2040 after we produce more than we need,” said Tawfik, co-founder and managing director of Cairo Solar, a solar engineering, procurement and construction company, calling for cheaper loans and simpler permitting and grid-connection rules. 

For Tawfik, such small-scale projects are also fundamental to the government’s goal of shoring up energy security to avert crises like that of 2023/2024, when Egypt’s falling gas output contributed to rolling blackouts during sweltering heatwaves. 

At a time of heightened geopolitical uncertainty in the Middle East, this is even more urgent. 

“In the event of war, or if a country such as Israel, which supplies 40-60% of Egypt’s [imported] gas, suddenly cut off supplies [again], Egypt would be less vulnerable,” he told Climate Home News. 

Home-grown batteries

Storage could determine whether Egypt’s renewable power is merely abundant at midday or commercially valuable around the clock.

“Storage is what turns intermittent renewables into firm, exportable power,” said Elmasry.

In January, Norwegian developer Scatec signed a 25-year power purchase agreement with the Egyptian Electricity Transmission Company for 1.95 GW of solar and 3.9 GWh of battery storage.

Demand for more storage has also raised the prospect of Egypt developing a domestic battery industry.

Chinese company Sungrow plans to build a battery-storage-system factory in Ain Sokhna, its first in the Middle East, with annual production capacity of 10 GWh and operations scheduled to begin in April 2027. It will provide the batteries for Scatec’s energy storage project. 

Egypt has also granted licences for two battery-storage projects in Aswan and Suez worth a combined $800 million. Huawei and Egyptian company AIS have meanwhile signed an agreement to explore local production of grid-forming battery systems.

At the same time, Egypt is conducting an aerial geophysical survey in search of critical minerals across six regions, a first in about half a century. 

Still, Mohamed Gamal Kafafy, president of the World Green Economy Council, said competing directly with China would be unrealistic, suggesting Egypt should instead manufacture under Chinese licences or through joint ventures, reducing imports while building local skills.

The Ministry of Electricity did not respond to Climate Home News’ request for comment. 

Mixed messages?

The government’s climate investment programme aims to add 10 GW of renewable capacity and retire 5 GW of inefficient fossil-fuel generation by 2028, but Egypt is not turning its back on oil and gas.

President Sisi told energy companies attending the Egypt Energy Show in March to pursue a double strategy – intensifying efforts to explore and increase oil and gas production while also accelerating investment in renewable energy. The Petroleum Ministry plans to drill about 480 exploratory oil wells over five years.

The risk, Tawfik said, is that a large oil or gas discovery reduces the incentive to focus on investment in renewables.

“When a major oil or gas discovery, such as the Zohr gas field, leads to overconfidence, it reduces the focus on renewable energy,” he said, noting that renewable project rollouts largely stagnated after the completion of the giant Benban solar park in 2019. 

But major developments such as the El Dabaa nuclear plant and the Abydos solar and energy-storage project demonstrate that significant work is already under way to meet Egypt’s clean energy hub ambitions, Tawfik said.

“Simply implementing the existing plans would be an excellent outcome,” he added.

Main image: The Sharm El Sheikh solar power plant in Egypt (Photo:
Hassan Allam Utilities)

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António Guterres told journalists on Friday that the “climate crisis is in overdrive”, adding that global heat seen so far is just a “warm up act” as a phenomenon known as El Niño intensifies “adding fuel to a planet already on fire”.

A new World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) report published on Friday predicts that the weather pattern will grow into a “strong event” between now and October, increasing the risk of higher than normal temperatures across much of the world and disrupted rainfalls.

“That risks shattering every seasonal record – and driving even more severe effects worldwide,” Guterres said.

El Niño builds on top of an already warming world, driven primarily by the burning of fossil fuels. A WMO scientist, who did not want to be named, told journalists that all the heatwaves and other climate impacts seen so far this year are “before the effects of El Niño are really kicking in at a global scale”.

Fossil fuellling the fires

Fires have broken out across much of Europe but are threatening the most people in the south-west of France near Bordeaux and in Central Spain near Madrid. Nearly a quarter of a million people have been evacuated in France with hundreds of homes destroyed while in Spain 80,000 people have had to leave their homes and at least 13 died in one village.

A scientific study published on Friday by the World Weather Attribution group found that man-made climate change made deadly fires in France twice as likely and those in Spain twenty times more likely. Smaller fires in the UK were not analysed by the study.

UN Climate Change leader Simon Stiell blamed fossil fuels for the fires, as well as storms in Chile and heatwaves in North America and Japan in recent weeks. “The climate alarm is blaring”, he said on Wednesday.

Guterres criticised new fossil fuel production projects and fossil fuel subsidies for causing hardship across the world. Discussing his speech, a senior UN official – who did not want to be named – said the subsidies amounted to trillions of US dollars a year and criticised pension funds and institutional investors, including insurance companies, for continuing to invest in fossil fuel projects.

Asked why world leaders and the public are not prioritising climate action, Guterres said they are distracted by wars in Ukraine, the Middle East, Sudan and elsewhere and sometimes forget “other aspects that are a sometimes even more dangerous threat”.

Also the fossil fuel industry and “some countries” are campaigning to pretend that climate change does not exist, he said, adding that the UN should be more active in “naming the situations as they are and the responsibilties as they are and mobilising the public opinion”.

After meetings in Paris and Madrid earlier in the week, the UK’s new foreign minister Ed Miliband issued joint statements with his French and Spanish counterparts – Jean-Noël Barrot and José Manuel Albares Bueno – calling on the world to reduce its dependence on fossil fuels.

They promised to do more to reduce emissions and protect their people and encouraged other governments to do the same. 

The UK-French statement called on governments to publish UN climate plans, known as nationally determined contributions (NDCs), which are aligned with the Paris Agreement’s goal to limit global average temperatures to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.

According to Climate Action Tracker, only three countries – the UK, Nigeria and Norway – have submitted NDCs with 2035 emissions reduction targets which are compatible with 1.5C. Fifty-two countries – including Egypt, Vietnam and Argentina – have yet to submit an NDC at all.

Defending science

Beyond action on emissions, the ministers also intervened in an ongoing dispute over the timing of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC)’s next flagship assessment.

Miliband and Barrot’s statement said they “underline the importance” of that scientific report feeding into governments’ next global stocktake of progress on climate action in two years’ time, calling it a “critical input” to that process.

The timing of this report has been a contentious issue in government negotiations at the IPCC and at June’s climate talks in Bonn. While a group of nations calling themselves the “friends of science” want the report before the stocktake, others like Saudi Arabia and India have argued that this would make the report of a worse quality and less inclusive of developing countries’ scientists.

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

The UK-Spanish statement weighed in less explicitly on this issue but said that they “recall the importance of scientific evidence and acknowledge the work of the IPCC in this respect.”

The British and French ministers said they would seek to accelerate reductions of emissions in methane, a particularly potent greenhouse gas, at COP31 in November. They encouraged governments “to work jointly to develop a marketplace for fossil fuels with near-zero methane intensity.” 

Methane leaks from oil, gas and coal production are a major contributor to global warming. Over a 20-year period, methane traps around 80 times more heat than carbon dioxide.

The UK and Spanish statement emphasised the importance of supporting the Global South and underlined the need to mobilise sustainable financing “at scale with the challenge we face”. The previous UK government, in which Miliband was energy minister, cut climate finance to developing countries to pay for increases in military spending.

The UK government led by new Prime Minister Andy Burnham has yet to outline any major changes to climate finance in its two weeks in power but has announced it will convert some finance from grants to loans in order to free up money to subsidise bus travel in England.

More adaptation needed

Guterres said that “it is time to stop treating each disaster as an isolated tragedy and recognise the systemic risk that is unfolding before our eyes.” A recent study found that three-quarters of UK media reports about the British June heatwave did not mention climate change.

As well as reducing emissions, the UN Secretary-General called for measures to adapt vulnerable people to extreme heat. Specifically, he said that buildings should be built and retrofitted for extreme heat and that every city and country should have heat-health action plans and early warning systems. Over 250 cities have joined the UN’s ‘beat the heat’ initiative, he said.

The Portuguese diplomat called for governments and employers to do more to protect their workers from heat, criticising global fashion brands for not setting heat standards for the factories that supply them. “No one should have to risk their life to earn a living,” he said.

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The IEA’s latest update on the market for electric cars said sales increased by 4% in the second quarter, after the war between the US, Israel and Iran disrupted oil supplies around the world and caused oil prices to jump at the end of February.

The increase in electric car sales was achieved despite customers buying fewer vehicles in total due to economic problems and, in China, a reduction in government subsidies for cheap cars. Total car sales fell 5% globally in the first half of 2026.

“While a lag in consumer responses and policy implementation means the full effects will take time to materialise, the crisis has clearly reinforced the case for [electric vehicles] as a way to address energy security and fuel cost concerns,” the IEA’s report said.

The IEA predicts that sales of electric cars will speed up in the second half of the year, increasing by 10% for 2026 in total compared to 2025. Electric car sales will be 29% of total car sales over the full year, it forecasts, up from 24% in the first half.

The IEA expects sales of fossil fuel-reliant internal combustion engine vehicles to continue declining, as they have been doing for a decade because of economic shocks like the COVID-19 pandemic and, since around 2020, the rise of electric cars.

Road transport – which also includes two- and three-wheeled vehicles like scooters and rickshaws – currently accounts for half of global oil use. The oil industry has been trying to expand markets in newer, growing sectors like plastic to replace its declining business in petrol and diesel for road transport.

Pro-EV policies

As well as the higher oil price, the IEA said this year’s electric car boom is being driven in some countries – particularly in Europe and Southeast Asia – by government policies that have been put in place since the Iran war blocked shipping of oil and other commodities through the Strait of Hormuz.

It highlighted the Netherlands and Ireland, which have both announced subsidies for scrapping old internal combustion engine cars and replacing them with electric ones.

Australia, Spain, Chile, Vietnam and the US state of California have introduced, or are introducing, tax benefits for electric cars.

Australia, the UK and Hungary have announced funding or support for charging infrastructure, while Cambodia, Brazil and Kenya have reduced taxes on imports of electric vehicles.

Growth in electric car sales was particularly strong in Europe, Brazil, Australia, India, South Korea, Vietnam, Colombia, South Africa and New Zealand.

On the other hand, electric car sales fell 16% in China – the world’s biggest electric car-buying country – in the second quarter. This was driven by a decline in total car sales, which was more extreme for internal combustion engine cars than electric ones.

In the US, electric car sales rose 20% in the second quarter compared with the first quarter of 2026. But this was about 25% less than in the same period of 2025, when Americans were taking advantage of expiring Biden-era federal tax credits.

These statistics back up Climate Home News’ reporting from the ground since the oil price spiked. As we reported from Yemen in May, the IEA data shows Chinese electric car companies are having success in the Middle East.

And as our correspondents found in Nepal and Bangladesh, there has been a surge of interest in electric vehicles across Asian countries outside of China. Yet while EV adoption in Nepal has been enabled by investments in charging and import subsidies, drivers in Bangladesh have been put off by a lack of chargers and high prices for electric two-wheelers.

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The company has been accused by campaigners of cutting and running by selling its controversial oil infrastructure to African firms without the resources to deal with the pollution or decommission the pipelines, leaving Nigeria’s oil-rich southern region worse off.

Climate Home News has previously revealed that highly-polluting gas flaring in the Niger Delta has soared since the sell-off, while Shell avoids responsibility and continues to profit from the oil assets it sold.

The documents – which were cited in UK court proceedings and featured in a new Amnesty International report released on Wednesday – show that in June 2013 a Shell presentation to a policy forum on Nigeria considered options for “handling potential liabilities related to [Shell] past oil spills”.

The presentation identified 375 square kilometres of mangrove forests – an area the size of a large city – which had been affected by oil spills and asked “do we have the appetite to take on this open-ended problem?”

The next year, in 2014, Shell’s then CEO Ben van Beurden was warned by colleagues that closing down the company’s pipelines in the south of Nigeria would cost billions of dollars and take several decades.

The year after that, in 2015, Shell began to divest its Niger Delta oil businesses by selling its stake in a pipeline to Nigerian oil company Aiteo for $1.7 billion.

“Well aware” of the costs

At the time of this divestment, Amnesty International’s report says Shell “appears to have been well aware of the massive costs of decommissioning the entirety of its aged and decaying infrastructure. Rather than cover these costs, it appears that Shell decided to sell.”

The process continued, with Shell selling all its remaining onshore oil operations to a local consortium called Renaissance. At the time, Shell said its divestment “aligns with its intent to simplify its presence in Nigeria” and focus investment on offshore oil.

UN experts accuse top oil firms of rights violations over Nigerian asset sales

Despite calls for the sale to be blocked, Nigeria’s oil regulator gave it fast-track approval. Mark Dummett, deputy director and head of business and human rights at Amnesty International, told Climate Home News that this allowed Shell to “cut and run”, while communities remained trapped with polluted land, poisoned water and no justice. 

Some of the affected Niger Delta communities have since taken the oil giant to local and international courts. In 2015, the Ogale and Bille communities filed a UK legal action against Shell and its Nigerian subsidiary over serious oil pollution which is scheduled to be heard in March 2027.

Shell had not responded to a Climate Home News request for comment by the time of publication. But in a statement included in the Amnesty report, the company rejected “the characterisation and portrayal of Shell” presented by the rights group findings, which it said did not reflect the “challenging operating environment in the Niger Delta at the time, including large-scale oil theft, sabotage and illegal refining carried out by organised criminal gangs”.

For blighted Niger Delta communities, oil spill clean-ups are another broken promise

The oil major added that it is “committed to honesty, integrity and respect for people, and to conducting business in an ethical and transparent manner”, noting that it had worked with Nigerian authorities, the state-owned partner and communities to clean up spills. Decontamination and restoration efforts continue in the delta under a government-led programme.

Olanrewaju Suraju, chairman of the Nigeria-based HEDA Resource Centre, an environmental justice NGO which partnered with Amnesty on the report, criticised Shell for taking oil and profits from the region and leaving pollution behind. “Communities in the Niger Delta deserve truth, justice, clean-up and full remedy,” he said in a statement.

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As countries weigh in on the “Belém Mission to 1.5”, a new process launched at COP30 last year to address the global shortfall in climate ambition, submissions show that small island nations and least developed countries (LDCs) want the initiative to help speed up a shift away from fossil fuels. Their calls for a focus on emissions-cutting measures in the energy sector are supported by the EU and the UK.

But the “like-minded developing countries” (LMDC) bloc – which includes China, India – and Arab states led by Saudi Arabia have warned against singling out specific energy sources or using the mission to assess how individual countries are performing on emissions cuts. Instead, they want its scope narrowed to identifying primarily what rich countries should do to cut their own emissions and provide more climate cash to developing nations.

Keeping 1.5C “within reach”

The split hints at a fight to come at COP31 in November over what the work programme’s findings should say and how much weight they should carry in the summit’s outcome.

Governments launched the Belém Mission to 1.5 at last year’s UN climate summit in the Brazilian Amazon city, after the latest round of national climate plans left the world set to shoot past the Paris Agreement temperature goals. Full implementation of current pledges is expected to limit global warming to only around 2.3-2.5 C by 2100, according to the UN. 

Comment: The case for making polluters pay has moved into the mainstream

The current and two preceding COP presidencies – Türkiye, Brazil and Azerbaijan – are gathering views from governments on how to raise the ambition of national climate plans (NDCs) and adaptation plans (NAPs).

The initiative will culminate in a report at COP31 outlining priority actions for keeping the 1.5C goal “within reach”. But the proposals submitted by individual governments and negotiating blocs representing nearly four-fifths of all countries point to wildly diverging visions of what the Belém Mission should achieve, especially on the transition away from fossil fuels. 

Tracking COP28 commitments

The Marshall Islands has proposed an ambitious package of concrete actions that would enable deep emissions reductions, led by a global commitment to build no new oil, coal and gas infrastructure. Together with its fellow Pacific island of Vanuatu, it also calls for a formal process to monitor progress towards the COP28 energy commitments, map fossil fuel subsidies and help countries phase them out.

The EU also said in its submission that the Mission to 1.5C is “well placed” to provide updates on how countries’ national climate plans have incorporated the COP28 agreement, including the commitment to accelerate a transition from fossil fuels in energy systems. 

Countries wanting to build on the COP28 Dubai agreement have struggled to find a dedicated space for those discussions in the face of opposition from fossil fuel producers and big emerging economies.

The COP28 outcomes in response to the first stocktake of global climate action represent “one package… and not a pick-and-choose menu”, the European Commission emphasised in a thinly veiled reference to comments made by the Saudi energy minister in 2024 that the Dubai deal was an “à la carte menu” allowing nations to choose their own priority. 

Push to boost NDC ambition

The Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) also advocated in its submission for “high-level approaches” towards developed countries and other major emitters ahead of COP31 to spur them to produce updated NDCs with additional emissions-cutting measures. 

Vanuatu called on the COP presidencies overseeing the Mission to 1.5C to “exhibit leadership” by taking steps at home to phase out fossil fuels and reduce their “inefficient” fossil fuel subsidies. 

Azerbaijan and Türkiye continue to rely heavily on fossil fuels in their energy systems, while Azerbaijan and Brazil remain significant oil and gas producers with plans to expand output.

In its submission, the LDC group of the world’s poorest nations says the failure to align global climate commitments with a pathway to keep warming under 1.5C is driven primarily by insufficient ambition from major emitters. 

The Mission to 1.5C should focus its efforts on the “highest-impact” and “most feasible” solutions to curb emissions such as phasing out fossil fuels, it added. 

Both the island nations and the LDCs, as well as the African group of nations, stress that significantly scaling up financial resources, and making it easier to access them, are necessary steps to enable the global energy transition. 

Focus on “emissions”, not energy sources

Fossil fuel producers and several large developing economies, however, argue that the mission risks straying beyond its mandate if it singles out particular fuels or evaluates countries’ climate plans.

The Arab group, which is led by Saudi Arabia and includes the UAE, Qatar and Egypt, wrote that it should maintain a focus on “emissions management” rather than targeting specific sectors or energy sources. 

Their submission says investments in fossil fuels “must increase” both to better manage the emissions associated with their production and to meet growing energy demand.

The LMDCs, a negotiating bloc that includes China and India, similarly argue that climate action should address emissions regardless of how they are produced, warning that energy sources should not be traded off against the need for growth. “Poverty eradication and sustainable development remain a key challenge for developing countries, which cannot be compromised in the name of 1.5°C,” the group’s submission says.

No “parallel” processes

For both Arab states and LMDCs, the mission’s primary goal should be to identify how rich countries that are historically responsible for the bulk of emissions can be required to further cut their greenhouse gases and channel more money to developing countries. 

Both groups also caution against allowing the initiative to evolve into what they describe as a “parallel process” that could assess countries’ climate plans or create new expectations for what developing countries should do. Instead, they argue, it should simply produce a report identifying options for international cooperation.

The two sides disagree just as sharply on what should happen to the mission’s report once it lands. AOSIS and the LDC group explicitly want its findings carried forward into the COP31 outcome decision text and used to inform future negotiating rounds. The LMDC bloc, on the other hand, wants a guarantee that the report will not be used to support other processes.

The post UN bid to keep 1.5C alive exposes deepening divisions over fossil fuels appeared first on Climate Home News.

This coming week, as record-breaking heat has morphed into killer wildfires, major oil and gas companies will report their second-quarter earnings and are widely expected to announce profits that have doubled or even quadrupled in the last three months. The obscenity of that contradiction is impossible to ignore. 

Oxfam analysis, released as the Q2 earnings season gets underway, shows that the world’s six largest fossil fuel corporations – BP, Chevron, Eni, ExxonMobil, Shell and TotalEnergies – are on course to nearly double their combined net income compared with the first quarter of the year, from $23 billion to around $45 billion.

Their projected full-year profits of $147 billion would exceed everything the six firms made combined over the previous 21 months. Chevron’s profits alone are expected to have quadrupled to $1,200 a second over the last three months; ExxonMobil’s have roughly tripled to $1,800 a second. The juxtaposition of profit on that scale, arriving in the same weeks that communities are counting the cost of deadly heatwaves, forest fires and high energy bills, is increasingly difficult to ignore.

Covering the cost of climate damage

Not long ago, the idea that fossil fuel companies should contribute directly towards the cost of climate damage was dismissed as activist rhetoric. Today it is reflected in legislation, litigation and mainstream policy debate.

Several US states have passed “Climate Superfund” laws requiring major fossil fuel companies to help fund climate adaptation and disaster recovery. Courts are hearing cases seeking compensation for climate harms, while governments across Europe continue to debate the future of windfall taxes on outsized energy profits.

Comment: Major emitting countries knew of climate risks decades earlier than claimed

These developments may appear disconnected, but they reflect a broader shift in public thinking: if societies are paying an ever higher price as our climate warms, should the excessively profitable fossil fuel companies whose products have substantially caused those costs not bear more of the burden of paying for them?

Europe’s heatwaves fuelled by emissions

The events of this summer have only sharpened that question. Europe has experienced repeated heatwaves, with temperatures exceeding 40°C across parts of Spain, Portugal, France and Germany. England recorded its hottest June on record, while wildfires have affected communities across southern Europe and, increasingly, parts of the UK.

According to researchers at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and Imperial College London, more than 2,300 heat-related deaths occurred across twelve European cities during one recent ten-day heatwave alone, with climate change estimated to have roughly tripled the number of deaths.

Separate Oxfam analysis of academic data published in Nature goes further, finding that the emissions of just five of these corporations – BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, Shell and TotalEnergies – were sufficient to cause around one in four of the heatwaves reported globally between 2000 and 2023: heatwaves that would have been virtually impossible without human-made climate change. 

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

Nor is Europe unique. There is looming famine in Uganda and India endured prolonged pre-monsoon temperatures above 48°C earlier this year. North America has faced successive heat domes, while smoke from hundreds of Canadian wildfires has periodically produced some of the world’s worst urban air quality, affecting millions of people across Canada and the United States.

Scientists have become increasingly confident in attributing many of these extremes to human-caused climate change. Rapid attribution studies, pioneered over the past decade, now routinely assess how much more likely or more intense individual weather events have become because of greenhouse gas emissions.

‘Polluter pays’ principle in law

Against this backdrop, the “polluter pays” principle is a basic standard of responsible behaviour: if you cause damage, it is on you to pay for it. It is a longstanding concept in environmental law and economics  that those responsible for creating pollution should bear a proportionate share of the costs it imposes on society.

In 2025 a survey found that 81% of people supported increased fossil fuel taxes being directed to help communities most impacted by extreme weather. And it is no longer just a hypothetical prospect.

A mandatory surtax on highly polluting industries is gaining support as part of the UN Convention on International Tax Cooperation, alongside robust measures to prevent jurisdiction-shopping and anchor taxing rights in real economic activity. Governments meeting in New York next month to negotiate the framework convention should seize the moment to get behind both.

The stakes are high because the economics of the energy transition are increasingly clear. Renewable electricity is now among the cheapest forms of new power generation in much of the world. Yet many countries with abundant renewable resources continue to face prohibitively expensive borrowing costs, limiting their ability to invest at the speed required. Meanwhile, massive fossil fuel profits remain only lightly taxed or entirely avoided in many jurisdictions.

Analysis by the Global Alliance for Tax Justice and partners estimated that a 20% surtax on the profits of the world’s 100 largest oil and gas companies could have generated more than US$1 trillion since the Paris Agreement was signed in 2015.

Time to design mechanisms for justice

Whether governments choose that particular mechanism is ultimately a political decision. But the analysis illustrates a broader point: claims that public investment in climate resilience or clean energy is unaffordable sit uneasily alongside the scale of profits regularly generated by the fossil fuel industry, profits that, this quarter, are on course to nearly double in three months.

There are legitimate debates about the design of windfall taxes, competitiveness, investment incentives and international coordination. But the wider principle – that those who have benefited most from fossil fuel extraction should pay more towards managing its consequences – is no longer confined to campaign groups.

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

It is increasingly part of mainstream discussions among policymakers, economists and legal scholars and, if well designed, such mechanisms will incentivise investment where it’s needed and strengthen international coordination.

This summer has made that conversation harder to avoid. The question is no longer whether fossil fuel giants should pay for the enormous economic and human costs being suffered by communities every day due to our rapidly warming climate. It is when will governments step up and make them pay, for the damage already done and to build the resilience we need going forward?

The post The case for making polluters pay has moved into the mainstream appeared first on Climate Home News.

Former Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham took over from Keir Starmer as Labour Party leader and prime minister on Monday, appointing climate advocates Ed Miliband as foreign and development minister and Miatta Fahnbulleh as climate and energy minister.

On Tuesday, Burnham said his government would cut the value added tax (VAT) households and some small businesses pay on their electricity bills from 5% to zero from October 1, saving households £45 ($60) a year.

On Wednesday, he said the maximum fare bus companies in England can charge for a single journey will be reduced from £3 ($4) to £2 from January 1, 2027. The government said the subsidies to achieve this would be mostly funded by switching money set aside for overseas climate finance projects from grants to loans. It did not give further information in its announcement, while the UK’s transport minister told Sky News the plan was still being worked out.

Climate Home News has since learned that the money will come from a change in the form of a contribution to a new international fund to protect rainforests. The British government is expected soon to announce £400 million (about $533m) for the Tropical Forest Forever Facility (TFFF) that was launched by Brazil late last year.

The UK’s finance ministry had initially planned to provide this sum as a grant, but it will now be offered as a loan instead. The TFFF aims to invest its seed capital in financial markets and then reimburse wealthy donor governments while paying forest countries to keep their trees standing.

The floated changes to the climate finance budget were immediately criticised by groups working on climate justice for developing countries, including Bond, the UK network for NGOs, which described the decision as “disappointing”.

“Robbing Peter to pay Paul is not the answer and pitches marginalised communities in the UK against marginalised communities in lower-income and climate-vulnerable countries,” BOND CEO Romilly Greenhill said in a statement. “Climate finance must not worsen the debt burden of countries that are already suffering the worst – and most costly – impacts of a climate crisis they did not cause.”

Hunt for money

Burnham promoted both policies as measures to combat the rising cost of living and “give people breathing space”, with climate campaigners and industry groups noting they are also likely to reduce the UK’s climate-heating emissions by encouraging bus travel and the use of electric vehicles and heating.

But the hurried policy announcements sparked thorny questions remain over how they will be paid for. The government said Tuesday’s VAT cut for electricity would be funded by scrapping the previous government’s digital ID programme, but Darren Jones, a former minister involved with that policy, said it had been “unfunded” – a statement that dominated media coverage.

A day later, the government said the new bus fare cap would cost £454 million ($606m). Transport minister Heidi Alexander told Sky News that £54 million would be taken from an under-spend in the budget of the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) and £400 million would come from changing unspecified international climate finance from grants to loans. The details “still need to be worked through”, she said, adding that the government “had wanted to make an announcement today”.

Mohamed Adow, director of Nairobi-based think-tank Power Shift Africa, said “climate finance was never meant to be a pot of money that governments raid when they need to pay for domestic spending”.

Speaking on television, minister Alexander added, “We’re not wanting to fleece anyone here, and we actually want to maximise the development potential of this money that is available.”

Aside from the controversy over their funding, the policies themselves were widely welcomed by climate campaigners. Jess Ralston, energy lead at the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU), said the tax cut on electricity bills “could help households to switch to electric heat pumps, protecting UK homes from becoming ever more exposed to the whims of Putin and Trump when turning on their gas boiler”.

The last few months have seen global momentum build behind electrification, spurred by the US-Iran war disrupting oil and gas supplies and driving up prices. The Turkish and Australian COP31 presidencies have announced a global target to boost electrification, backed by the European Union, Canada, Philippines, UK and others.

Campaigners call for lower power prices

While reaction to the VAT cut was supportive, some questioned whether £45 a year of savings per household is enough and called for more measures to cut electricity bills.

Friends of the Earth’s energy lead Imogen Dow said those on the lowest incomes should be given cheaper electricity through a “social tariff” and the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) think-tank – which is close to the Labour Party – said levies on energy bills should be shifted to general taxation.

Matthew Paterson, a politics professor at Manchester University, told Climate Home News that the most effective way to reduce electricity bills is to take on the UK’s private electricity companies, while consumer-oriented measures like the VAT cut are “tinkering around the edges”.

Jarrod Birch, head of policy and public affairs for the EV charging industry association Charge UK, said that while the policy would make home-charging cheaper, people who charge their vehicles at public points will still have to pay 20% VAT. The UK’s tax authority is fighting a court ruling that ordered it to reduce the tax motorists pay on public chargers to the current household rate of 5%.

Further measures will be the responsibility of Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero Miatta Fahnbulleh, who is relatively new to politics after a career at left-wing, pro-climate think tanks the IPPR and the New Economics Foundation.

Michael Jacobs, political economy professor at Sheffield University and former adviser to UK Labour prime minister Gordon Brown, said Fahnbulleh would be a “climate advocate” who would continue the “progressive climate agenda” of her predecessor Ed Miliband.

“She’s a very creative policy wonk so I expect there to be lots of policy innovation under her,” he said, “I think she will be looking at new ways to encourage take-up of heat pumps and domestic batteries.”

Aid budget in Miliband’s hands

Despite reports he could be made finance minister, Miliband has been appointed Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs. Miliband has attended many climate COP meetings over several decades, most recently representing the UK at COP29 and COP30, and has been targeted by the right-wing media for his support for climate action and opposition to new oil and gas drilling in the UK’s part of the North Sea.

In his new role, Miliband will be responsible for the UK’s overseas aid budget including its international climate finance, which the Starmer government had slashed to fund increases in defence spending.

UK cuts support for climate action abroad to fund military instead

Jacobs said he expected Miliband to prioritise climate and development in the UK’s foreign policy and to push Burnham and new finance minister John Healey to reverse Starmer’s aid cuts.

But there are fears Healey could try to cut the aid budget further to fund the military. Healey was a surprise pick for Chancellor of the Exchequer and grabbed headlines when he resigned as Starmer’s defence minister in June over what he saw as insufficient defence spending.

This article was updated after publication on July 24, clarifying how the UK plans to free up $400 million from its climate finance budget.

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The number of recorded allegations of harm at projects tied to Chinese firms have increased every year since 2021, rising to 148 in 2025, according to the Business and Human Rights Centre (BHRC). On Wednesday it released new data showing that a total of 434 allegations of abuse were made against Chinese-backed projects over the five-year period in projects across the world.

The world’s top cleantech manufacturer, China is also the leading financier of critical minerals projects worldwide. The country has committed more than $120 billion in foreign direct investment into mineral mining and processing since 2023, Australian think-tank Climate Energy Finance recently found.

“China plays a central role in global transition mineral supply chains, and as such has a unique opportunity to raise the bar on human rights and community engagement at every stage of mining,” said Michael Clements, BHRC’s executive director.  

“While there have been encouraging developments, from stronger regulations to more company engagement, there remains a gap between human rights commitment and action,” he said.

The report comes as communities affected by Chinese-backed mineral projects have filed the first two cases to a Beijing-based mediation mechanism intended to bring willing Chinese companies to the discussion table with affected communities.

Allegations of harms on the rise

BHRC’s latest analysis – including data for the period 2023-2025 – covered mining, smelting and refining projects for 11 minerals considered key to manufacturing clean energy technologies such as batteries, EVs and solar panels needed to move away from climate-heating fossil fuels.

The highest number of abuses was recorded in Indonesia, the world’s largest producer of nickel, which is used to make EV batteries. After the Indonesian government banned exports of raw nickel, Chinese firms invested billions of dollars to develop a large-scale nickel smelting and processing industry in the Southeast Asian country, largely powered by coal.  

Other countries with a high number of recorded harms include the Democratic Republic of Congo, where Chinese firms dominate cobalt and copper production; Myanmar, where unregulated rare earths mining has caused widespread environmental destruction; Serbia, where Chinese-backed mining of some of Europe’s most significant copper and gold deposits is swallowing land and homes, and Zimbabwe, where Chinese investments have turned the nation into Africa’s top lithium producer.

Growing risks for people and nature

Allegations tracked by BHRC included negative impacts on local livelihoods, health and land rights, workers’ health and safety and work-related deaths, as well as water pollution and environmental contamination. In addition, 18 people were attacked for raising concerns about Chinese transition mineral projects between 2023 and 2025.

The report shows that 10 Chinese companies, including Zijin Mining, Tsingshan Group and Zhejiang Huayou Cobalt, accounted for nearly two-thirds of all allegations recorded in the last five years. It found that some Chinese companies “still appear to turn a blind eye to these issues” but noted that several others have been more responsive to allegations of abuse. However, even among companies with human rights policies, implementation remains a challenge, BHRC warned.

Zijin Mining and Zhejiang Huayou Cobalt repeatedly responded to the allegations of harm by saying they take environmental and social risks seriously and adhere to international standards. Tsingshan Group never responded to BHRC’s requests for comment.

Platform for dialogue between communities and Chinese firms

At the same time, Chinese authorities have made “significant progress” on introducing a more specific framework for managing environmental and social risks in overseas investment, BHRC said.

This includes global consultation on a draft Sustainable Mining Code, adherence to UN guiding principles on business and human rights, and greater emphasis on oversight of companies operating overseas.  

The China Chamber of Commerce of Metals, Minerals & Chemicals Importers & Exporters (CCCMC) set up a mediation and consultation mechanism intended to provide a platform for dialogue between affected communities or civil society groups that have raised concerns and Chinese companies.

More than three years since its launch, the mechanism has now received its first two complaints from local communities and many more are considering filing a case, Margaux Day, executive director at the nonprofit Accountability Counsel, told an event hosted by Climate Home News last month.

“This is incredibly exciting in that it fills a governance and accountability gap where often communities who are seeking to protect their rights and the environment can’t reach someone who will respond to them,” she told the panel discussion at London Climate Action Week.

Climate Home News understands that the complaints were filed by communities in Latin America and Southeast Asia over labour rights and resettlement issues. No information about the cases has yet been made public. The mechanism’s secretariat did not respond to Climate Home News’ questions.

The mechanism was set up after the Chinese regulator for banks and insurers called on investor-level institutions to establish complaints bodies to hear from communities outside of China. But whether the new initiative will prove effective in tackling grievances remains an open question.  

“Real potential” for better mining practices

Participation in the mechanism is voluntary for Chinese firms and it doesn’t have a fact-finding function, nor can it impose provisions for compensation or compliance with human rights standards.

But Day told Climate Home News that, if successful, it could bring companies to negotiate an outcome that is better for people and the planet and leads to more sustainable mining practice.

Chen Yu, an independent China advisor for campaign group Global Witness, agreed that the mechanism holds “real potential”.

“There exists nothing else at a similar level to promote dialogue between communities and Chinese mining companies in particular,” she said.

For companies, the mechanism opens “a channel for problem-solving and dialogue with communities”, she added, as “Chinese companies often remain cautious of approaching affected communities directly, afraid of making the problem bigger”.

However, Chen said the mechanism remains at an early stage of development, faces resourcing challenges and is not yet sufficiently understood by communities in mining areas or Chinese firms.

To help it address some of these challenges, the secretariat is currently seeking technical support from a range of organisations, including civil society groups. But, Chen said, “it will take time for the mechanism to show its value”.

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From the US abduction of Venezuela’s president at the start of this year to the Iran war which rumbles on, disruption is the new normal for global geopolitics, more often than not linked to conflict over supplies of oil and gas. 

Events so far in 2026 – driven largely by the desire of the Trump administration to grab control of fossil fuels around the world – show that the climate community’s approach to energy diplomacy will have to evolve if we are to operate effectively and push for climate action in such a volatile landscape. 

Today’s climate and energy governance must be able to cope with trade wars, genocide, fascism, spiralling inequality and challenges to multilateralism. The increasingly dominant paradigms of economic competitiveness, energy security and green industrialisation can help drive the transition but they also challenge our collective mission to deliver an equitable green shift. 

US-China rivalry dominates

Longer-term geopolitical trends that are seeing power move from West to East and North to South have fuelled a US–China “superpower rivalry”, which is pulling the global economy apart and reining in trade. 

A key question will be how the fracture “lines” are drawn: by the US and China, or also by other countries or blocs? Many governments will try to remain “in the middle” between the two giants to capture economic gains from both sides. Yet despite the language of “strategic autonomy”, Washington and Beijing may be in a position to force choices via market access, export controls and sanctions.

At first glance, this may not seem particularly relevant for climate and energy politics. But Huawei’s exclusion from 5G operations across the political West and India following the so-called Clean Network Campaign by the US government serves as a warning of what could happen to climate green tech. 

And the recent debate to cut out Chinese inverters from European markets follows the same pattern – US security forces perceive a risk and start encouraging their allies to drop Chinese technology.

The new drivers: competition and security

Despite this fracturing geopolitical and economic context, energy transition is still happening. To ensure it is effective and equitable, we need to understand what is driving it and how to adapt climate politics so that it better responds to these drivers.

Put simply, China is supplying the world with low-cost renewables (roughly 60% of critical wind and 80% of solar components), batteries, EVs and other key elements. Other countries now also want their piece of the green tech pie and are forming industrial policies to get it.

It is this new competitiveness-driven logic that will shape the quest for decarbonisation, which has shifted from cooperating around the cost of tackling climate change to rivalry for the benefits of climate action. 

Over 90% of new renewables projects are now cheaper than fossil alternatives. Gas-fired power is 3–4 times more expensive than solar and wind. In 2015, most decarbonisation policies were “traditional” emissions-cutting strategies like carbon pricing or net zero dates, whereas green industrial policies now underpin the majority.

Iran war could boost fossil fuel phase-out push, says Colombian minister

Meanwhile, security has become a central driver of energy politics. We are living through the second major fossil fuel crisis in just four years. Elevated oil and gas prices will impose up to $1 trillion in additional costs on the global economy by the end of the year if disruption continues in the Strait of Hormuz. Fossil fuel supply chains have exposed countries to conflict, coercion and brutal price shocks.

Fossil fuel volatility destabilises whole economies – higher fuel costs drive up food prices, increase political instability, and push millions into poverty and hunger. This incentivises governments to shield themselves from global shocks, especially in countries that are net fossil fuel importers and home to roughly three-quarters of the world’s population. 

Yet security fears can cut both ways. The same instability that makes fossil fuel dependence untenable is also sharpening concern over China’s dominance of critical clean technologies and supply chains.

Equity, cooperation and the opportunity for change

Developing countries benefit from the rapid uptake of renewables enabled by low-cost Chinese technologies. But significant fiscal space and public investment is needed for the electricity grids and infrastructure required to fully unleash the energy transition, as well as for green industrialisation to diversify revenue streams.

Despite this, industrial-scale domestic production and ownership often remain out of reach for too many countries that lack the fiscal space to allow green supply chains to flourish and compete with their traditional industrial base. But more just and diversified green tech supply chains could be achieved with concomitant support.

Can giant batteries unlock Africa’s green industrial future?

For the first time in decades, the international order is being substantially reshaped. If within this context, decarbonisation is increasingly driven by green industrial policy, energy security and competitiveness, the climate policy community must better anticipate where these debates are moving. We must speak the same language, and enter the forums where decisions are made,  including security, trade and bilateral or trilateral spaces. 

We should build on an enlightened self interest recognising that cooperation remains essential and beneficial. This includes using the UN climate process differently: less as an ever-expanding negotiation machine, and more as a space for norm-setting, political alignment and deal-making. In an age of fragmentation, effective cooperation must not only be framed as necessary but thought of as a strategically compelling source of resilience and shared advantage. 

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The International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), a London-based think-tank, worked with local organisations to survey around 540 households of informal workers in three Indian cities: Ajmer, Delhi and Agra. Most had migrated from rural areas to find work in industries such as construction, brick-making, garment manufacturing and food packaging.

The survey found them struggling through long working days with little access to shade, cooling, rest or water, as well as few toilets for women. And even when they go home, many live in makeshift shelters or airless cramped rooms with barely a single fan, bringing almost no respite.

Outdoor workers are losing about 24 days of work a year due to heat, costing them nearly a tenth of their annual earnings, while indoor workers sacrifice roughly 15 days. On top of losing income, they are also bearing the cost of health problems like heat exhaustion, psychological stress and kidney damage brought on by repeated dehydration.

If the survey’s findings are extrapolated to a national level, the IIED researchers estimate that the decline in productivity and effects of kidney disease combined add up to lost wages of $78 billion each year.

Vishram Meena, 45, from Alwar in Rajasthan, has worked on construction sites in Ajmer for more than a decade, toiling for 10 to 12 hours a day carrying materials and mixing cement in the full sun.

In May 2024, on one of the hottest days, he collapsed after feeling dizzy and suffering a nosebleed. His wife and colleagues managed to get him to hospital where he was diagnosed with heat stroke. He has since returned to the same building work because the family needs the money.

“I went back because what else could I do? We are not machines. We are human beings. The heat is killing us slowly,” he was quoted as saying in a report on the survey’s findings.

“Victorian-era” conditions

Ritu Bharadwaj, IIED’s director of climate resilience, finance and loss and damage, described some of the stories from workers about their experiences of extreme heat as “genuinely horrifying”.

Kusum, a tailor at a garment manufacturing and export unit in Kapashera, Delhi, recounted how the machines for ironing finished garments are in the same tiny room where workers are making the clothes, with steam and hot air building up through her shift.

Fans are too far apart to move the air and nothing has changed in over a decade, she said, adding that “in summer, the unit feels like a furnace”.

“These are Victorian-era working conditions and they’re completely unacceptable in the 21^st century,” said Bharadwaj. She called for stepped-up social protection from the government to pay people for days they are unable work due to heat, as well as micro-insurance schemes with payouts triggered by temperature measurements.   

This money would help families buy food and pay medical bills when their income dips if they fall ill or cannot work their usual hours due to soaring temperatures.

Climate change-driven heatwaves hit Delhi’s Red Fort market traders

The aim of the IIED study, Bharadwaj added, is to get policy-makers’ attention by showing the scale of damage extreme heat is doing to India’s GDP in an economy whose growth relies on service-led industries. “If the workers within them start falling sick, you know it’s the economic growth which is going to get impacted,” she told a webinar to present the research.

“Whether [policymakers] care about the workers or not, at least they would care about the GDP, and therefore then invest in the care that is needed for them,” she explained.

Labour code leaves out heat

However, Bharadwaj noted that a 2026 reform to India’s labour law bringing a range of regulations together in one code does not include heat-related protections for workers and only applies to businesses above a certain size. She urged the government to introduce a temperature threshold above which all workers would be able to stop their activities.

IIED and its partners have also carried out a similar study in Bangladesh which will be published later this month, showing that extreme heat is costing its workforce the equivalent of nearly 1.4% of GDP.

Shakirul Islam, chairperson of the Ovibashi Karmi Unnayan Program (OKUP) in Bangladesh, said the government had introduced stricter safety policies for garment-making companies after the Rana Plaza complex collapsed in 2013. But, he said, these rules are rarely followed by manufacturers, especially at the level of smaller subcontractors.

The workers’ welfare centres that do exist are open mainly during work hours so they are difficult to visit. Some companies also make saline water available for heat stress, which is no good for those with high blood pressure, he noted.

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

Archana Shukla Mukherjee, CEO of India’s Change Alliance, which also partnered with IIED on the survey, said it was time to hold both the government and businesses accountable for finding solutions to the intensifying problem of extreme heat’s effects on workers.

She said that employee state insurance schemes should identify heat stroke as an occupational disease while companies along the whole supply chain should start putting in place heat protection measures, including for informal workers and migrants.

If the tools and mechanisms available to help workers do not reach the most vulnerable and marginalised people, “then I think we are not doing something right,” she said.

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In two orders issued on Saturday, the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLOS) declined to halt an inquiry launched by the International Seabed Authority (ISA) into whether permit holders, including Tonga Offshore Mining Ltd (TOML) and Nauru Ocean Resources Inc (NORI), have breached their obligations under UN exploration contracts.

The two companies are subsidiaries of Canadian firm The Metals Company (TMC), which earlier this year sought permits from the United States to commercially mine the deep seabed in an area already covered by its UN exploration licences, bypassing the ISA’s regulatory process.

The inquiry was opened after TMC’s move raised questions over whether its subsidiaries had complied with their contractual obligations to the ISA, which regulates mining in international waters under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. TOML and NORI sued the ISA last June for allegedly targeting them “in breach of due process” and without “good faith”.

While allowing the inquiry to proceed, the court ordered the ISA to ensure the companies receive due process. Judges said the regulator must explain the factual and legal basis of its inquiry, clarify the procedures being followed and provide TOML and NORI with a meaningful opportunity to respond.

The companies seek to mine an area called the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, which holds vast reserves of critical minerals like nickel, manganese and rare earths but is also home to a little-studied deep ocean ecosystem with thousands of unnamed species.

In response to the court’s ruling, the ISA welcomed the decision, saying the inquiry “remains in effect” and would continue “with due regard to all applicable legal requirements”.

Last week, during an annual meeting of its member governments, ISA secretary-general Leticia Carvalho said the resources in the ocean floor are “the common heritage of humankind” and upheld the agency’s role as “more important than ever”.

TMC also welcomed the court decision in a statement and claimed that judges ruled to “protect the rights of TMC subsidiaries”.

“Contractors like NORI and TOML, who have together spent hundreds of millions of dollars on the promise of a fair regulatory framework, should be informed of the factual and legal basis of any non-compliance inquiries, understand the procedure being applied, and receive a meaningful opportunity to respond,” said Gerard Barron, CEO of The Metals Company.

Environmental groups said the ruling allows scrutiny of the companies’ actions to continue.

Louisa Casson, deep-sea mining campaigner with Greenpeace, said the “entire litigation has been an egregious waste of time and money”, which was part of the industry’s “textbook distraction tactic” meant to delay the consequences of the inquiry.

“If the inquiry confirms that TMC’s subsidiaries are breaching their contracts, governments must send the strongest possible signal that complicity in unlawful deep sea mining will not be tolerated,” she said.

While the investigation is ongoing, NORI’s contract is set to expire this week and is up for review. Governments asked the ISA to report back and make “make appropriate recommendations” by the next ISA assembly, its main decision-making body, set to take place next week from July 27-31.

The court ordered both the ISA and TMC to submit a report on how they have complied with the ruling by August 31, and called on both to “cooperate and refrain from any action that might lead to aggravating the dispute”.

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A report from the World Weather Attribution (WWA) group highlighted how the floods hit some of West Africa’s most densely populated coastal regions, where rapid urbanisation has pushed formal and informal settlements dangerously into floodplains, while converting land into farms has reduced drainage.

Since May, West African countries including Ghana, Togo, Côte d’Ivoire and Nigeria have experienced weeks of torrential rain and deadly flash floods. Homes have been submerged, thousands of people displaced and over 70 people killed.

WWA scientists said climate models showed that human-induced climate change increased the intensity of the rainfall, with what was once a rare amount of rain falling in just three days – a downpour that can now be expected every two to four years.

“The event is not rare already today and therefore the flood risk is certainly not going away but will increase in particular with additional pressures from growing populations and urbanisation,” said Friederike Otto, a professor of climate science at Imperial College London.

Impact made worse by informal settlements 

On top of climate change, scientists said urbanisation, inadequate drainage, poor waste management and the expansion of informal settlements into floodplains have left millions more people exposed to flooding.

Informal settlements are neighbourhoods which develop without authorisation from government authorities. More commonly known as slums or shanty towns, they often lack land tenure and services like running water and electricity and tend to be home to poorer communities.

Across West Africa and much of the developing world, as people have moved from rural areas to cities in search of work, these settlements have expanded into wetlands, flood-retention areas and riverbanks. This has further heightened flood risks across West African cities.

Kiswendsida Guigma, technical advisor at the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre, said West Africa’s coastal cities are being “squeezed between repeated flooding and rapid urban growth”, pushing infrastructure beyond its limits and making it harder for communities to recover.

Roussel Teguia, a post-doctoral research fellow at Canada’s Université Laval, said the recent floods have exposed longstanding failures in urban planning across West Africa’s fast-growing coastal cities where much of the region’s economy is concentrated.

Campaigners oppose Dangote’s planned Kenya refinery over climate and ecological risks

Teguia said the floods are deadlier due to factors including rapid urbanisation in low-lying areas, lack of affordable housing alternatives and the long-standing marginalisation of poor communities. He also condemned the destruction of wetlands, mangroves and floodplains for roads and buildings when instead these natural bodies “should be treated as critical public safety infrastructure”.

“These floods should not be understood only as natural disasters,” he said. Residents of informal settlements must stop being treated as the problem, since they are often the first victims of “an urban model that exposes them to risk and then blames them for being exposed”, he added.

Short-sighted approach to relocation

Cote d’Ivoire’s capital Abidjan recorded 59 of the deaths, with about 20 dying in the densely-settled slope neighbourhood of Mossikro. Local media reported that authorities had previously relocated residents from this area due to fears about vulnerability to deadly landslides and flooding, but some people had returned to previously evacuated sites and died when the hillside collapsed due to the rain.

Local authorities have since started demolishing houses in the area, to the anger of many locals who say they were not consulted or warned about the demolitions, which are costing them their properties and livelihoods. “If you destroy this place, where am I supposed to go?” one unnamed resident told Al Jazeera.

The government says many of the structures were built illegally in flood and landslide-risk zones and it plans to move 3,000 people first and 2,000 more later. Municipal official Yue Hilaire told the TV channel the municipality has been trying to persuade them to leave for a long time. “Frankly we are tired,” he said. “The mayor instructed us to evict them because we don’t want to witness another tragedy every year.”

Loss and damage fund delays first project approvals as needs dwarf resources

Guigma said that to avoid people returning, the government should ensure that “where people are relocated they also have relatively good economic opportunities for them to stay”.

Demolishing poor people’s homes without offering real alternatives is not prevention, Teguia argued, calling on governments to provide safe, serviced and affordable land close to jobs and transport, stop the occupation of wetlands and regulate powerful land owners and users.

Relocation programmes often fail because they are designed as land-clearing or security operations rather than social processes, he explained.

Governments must move from reactive crisis management measures to a long-term comprehensive approach to risk, Teguia said. Relocation policies need to be just, fairly compensated, include affected communities and encompass economic and social networks – otherwise they “simply move the vulnerability elsewhere”, he warned.

Finance gap limits flood response

The WWA scientists said deadly floods will continue unless governments do more to reduce people’s exposure and vulnerability, calling for investments in safe and affordable housing, improved drainage and sanitation, stronger enforcement of building regulations, more effective early warning systems and greater involvement of at-risk communities in planning.

A supercharged El Niño is coming – are we ready?

Joyce Kimutai, research associate in extreme weather and climate change at Imperial College London, said the study is a clear example of “the need for international cooperation on climate justice”, adding that developed countries have a responsibility to help nations like Togo, Cote d’Ivoire and Ghana to adapt to a worsening problem that, as low emitters of greenhouse gas, they did not cause.

But significant financial support for countries grappling with increasing climate disasters may still be some way off. Earlier this month, the UN’s fledgling Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage (FRLD) postponed approving its first round of projects after requests for support far exceeded the money available.

One of the roughly 180 submissions the fund received was a Nigerian recovery and resilience project to address flood losses and damage in Lagos which is prone to yearly flooding. 

Otto of Imperial College London said such situations where the role of climate change is certain “should be the kinds of events where this fund should pay and help, but of course, that would require first money to be in the fund”. 

Ghana and Togo have also identified increasingly frequent flooding as a major climate risk in their national adaptation plans, prioritising investments in drainage, resilient infrastructure, flood management, early warning systems and climate-resilient urban planning. 

Most “zombie credits” locked out of new UN carbon market after China and India snub

But while these adaptation plans acknowledge that delivering the proposed measures requires more international aid, wealthy nations are likely to have missed their 2025 goal of doubling adaptation finance for developing countries. Funding reached just over $30 billion in 2024, far below the target of $40 billion by 2025.

The WWA findings underscore the urgent need to speed up support for vulnerable communities who have done little to cause climate change, said UN Climate Change Executive Secretary Simon Stiell, adding that “all climate finance commitments must be delivered in full”.

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Only 415 out of more than 1,500 projects and programmes hoping to move from the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) to the new carbon market set up under Article 6.4 of the Paris Agreement won the approval of their host governments by the 30 June deadline – a crucial step in transitioning them.

The two Asian giants, home to two-thirds of all applicants, account for the bulk of the exclusions. Brazil, the other heavyweight of the CDM era, took the opposite path, approving nearly all of its projects in a last-minute rush that leaves it with the largest number of activities still in the running to sell credits under the new mechanism.

Carbon market watchers have long regarded the CDM, set up under the Kyoto Protocol which has now been largely replaced by the Paris Agreement, as largely discredited for failing to drive real emission cuts. They also warned that letting its projects live on could dent confidence in the mechanism’s successor.

If all projects seeking transition had been successful, they could have flooded the market with up to more than 900 million credits generated with largely outdated rules, according to UN estimates. One credit is equivalent to one tonne of carbon dioxide (CO2) and 900 million tonnes is similar to Japan’s annual emissions. 

‘New era’

Injy Johnstone, senior research fellow at the Munich-based Max Planck Institute, said the failure of most projects to clear the hurdle sent a significant signal that carbon trading had entered a new era. “The system is trying to remove some of the hot air that had inflated it in the past,” she told Climate Home News.

“The lack of transition is the biggest contribution that Article 6 has made to climate yet,” she added, arguing that leaving “zombie credits” in the market creates confusion, especially for buyers that might not realise these units have lost their value.

Among the schemes that failed to win government approval are nine programmes promoted by fossil fuel companies over a decade ago to subsidise the construction of gas plants in the Global South, which Climate Home News has previously reported on.

Fossil fuel firms seek UN carbon market cash for old gas plants

But one of them, supporting the Ressano Garcia gas plant in Mozambique, could still profit from the new market after the country’s government granted its approval on deadline day itself. 

Brazil leads projects transition

Established in 1997 under the Kyoto Protocol, the CDM allowed rich countries to meet part of their climate obligations by financing emission-cutting projects in poorer ones. It drew widespread criticism over its patchy human rights record and for failing to deliver promised climate benefits. Backers of the Article 6.4 market say it is a higher-integrity successor.

CDM projects were given a route back into the new mechanism under certain conditions at COP26 in Glasgow in November 2021, when governments agreed the rules for the Paris Agreement market. 

Project developers had until the end of 2023 to apply and host governments were originally given until the end of 2025 to grant approval. But, after requests from many developing countries for an extension, at COP30 in Belém countries agreed to push the deadline back six months to the end of June.

Brazil was the single largest beneficiary of the decision, with all of its 92 approvals coming during the extension window. Hydropower plants, landfill gas schemes and wind farms make up the bulk of the South American country’s surviving portfolio, and hydro is the single most common project type in the global transition pipeline.

Peru greenlit the move of nearly a dozen hydropower plants, Thailand backed a batch of biogas and waste-to-energy schemes, and Mexico squeezed all of its approvals – including a controversial industrial gas project – into the final week. African nations including Zambia, Malawi and Ethiopia backed programmes aiming to switch households to cleaner cooking stoves, which have the potential to generate millions of offsets and are set to be the biggest source of credits among the surviving projects.

Long way from selling credits

Securing government support does not mean a scheme can now automatically sell credits under the Article 6 mechanism. Developers are required to submit additional documentation by the end of 2026 demonstrating that their programmes respect the mechanism’s stricter rules on environmental and social safeguards and on the risk of emission cuts being reversed. The Article 6.4 Supervisory Body, the mechanism’s regulator, has the final say on which projects are allowed into the market.

Those that make it through can sell credits for emission reductions achieved between 2021 and 2025 under the old CDM methodologies, with some adjustments aimed at preventing the creation of excess credits not backed by real emission cuts. For reductions achieved from 2026 onwards, projects will need to switch to new methodologies, which the regulator is currently developing.

So far, 30 programmes have completed the process, and only two cookstove projects in Myanmar have been formally approved to issue credits.

Civil society groups have called for an investigation into the activities in Myanmar over its ties to Myanmar’s military junta – which the UN says is guilty of human rights abuses – and allegations of “massively” overstating its climate impact.

The company behind the scheme said its engagement with authorities “should not be interpreted as political endorsement” of the junta, while disputing the calculations underpinning the claim that too many credits had been issued.

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At London Climate Action Week, electrification moved from the margins of climate policy to the centre of the road to COP31. The launch of the Electrify Now campaign gave fresh momentum to a target floated at the Bonn climate talks: by 2035, electricity should provide 35% of the world’s final energy consumption, up from just over 20% today.

That makes electrification one of the defining tests for this year’s climate summit in Türkiye. If COP31 is to be more than another exercise in negotiating text, it must show how the world can replace fossil fuels in transport, heating, industry and everyday life with clean electricity.

For Africa, this agenda presents both an extraordinary opportunity and an immense challenge.

For decades, the continent has been viewed primarily through the lens of energy poverty. More than 600 million Africans still lack access to electricity. Yet that very deficit also means many African countries are not locked into ageing fossil-fuel infrastructure in the way industrialised economies are. They have the chance to build cleaner energy systems from the outset.

The case for electrification is compelling. Transport, industry and heating account for much of the world’s fossil-fuel consumption. Replacing combustion engines with electric vehicles, diesel generators with renewable power and fossil-fuel heating with electric alternatives is one of the fastest ways to cut emissions while improving energy security. Electric technologies are also far more efficient, and renewable electricity is now the cheapest source of new power across much of the world.

Africa also possesses one of the greatest renewable energy endowments on Earth. The continent possesses some of the world’s best solar resources. Vast wind corridors stretch across North, East and Southern Africa. Geothermal energy is already powering much of Kenya’s electricity system. Hydropower resources remain significant in several regions.

But potential is not the same as progress.

The biggest obstacle is not a lack of sunshine or wind. It is a shortage of investment.

Financial barriers

African countries pay some of the highest borrowing costs in the world despite contributing the least to climate change. Projects that would be commercially viable elsewhere become prohibitively expensive because of high interest rates and perceptions of financial risk. Until the cost of capital falls, many countries will struggle to build the renewable power stations, transmission lines and battery storage needed to electrify their economies.

The electricity itself is another challenge. It is difficult to persuade people to buy electric vehicles or industries to electrify production if power supplies remain unreliable. Many national grids require major investment to expand access, improve reliability and accommodate growing volumes of renewable energy. In rural areas, decentralised solar and battery systems will often provide the quickest route to universal electricity access, but they too require finance and supportive policy frameworks.

Industrial policy matters just as much.

Africa is rich in many of the minerals needed for batteries and clean technologies, yet too often it exports raw materials and imports finished products. If electrification simply creates new markets for imported batteries, electric vehicles and solar equipment, much of the economic opportunity will be lost. The transition should also become a strategy for building African manufacturing, creating skilled jobs and capturing more value from the continent’s own resources.

There are encouraging signs. Ethiopia has pushed aggressively to promote electric mobility while seeking to reduce its dependence on imported oil. Kenya has become a global leader in geothermal electricity and is seeing rapid growth in electric motorcycles. Morocco is building an industrial base around renewable energy and battery supply chains.

Electrification is happening

These examples show that electrification is no longer a distant prospect. But they also remain outliers rather than the norm. For most African countries, unreliable grids, high borrowing costs and limited access to finance still stand in the way of a much broader transformation. That is precisely why the emerging electrification agenda matters.

If the world wants electricity to account for 35% of final energy demand by 2035, then success cannot be measured simply by announcing a global target. It must be measured by whether developing countries have the finance, technology and policy support to make that transition possible.

For Africa, electrification is not only about reducing emissions. It is about determining what kind of development path the world’s youngest and fastest-growing continent will follow.

More than a billion people live in Africa today. By mid-century, that number will be closer to 2.5 billion. This is a continent on the cusp of sweeping economic transformation, with cities expanding, industries growing and hundreds of millions of people rightly demanding the energy, mobility and prosperity long enjoyed elsewhere.

Campaigners oppose Dangote’s planned Kenya refinery over climate and ecological risks

That development will require vast amounts of power. The question is whether it will be delivered through the old fossil-fuel model of imported oil, gas infrastructure and polluting combustion, or through clean electricity generated from Africa’s own renewable resources.

This matters for Africa. But it also matters for the world. A global transition to electrification cannot succeed if a continent of this scale is locked into a new generation of fossil-fuel dependence. Nor can it be just if Africa is told to decarbonise without being given the finance and technology to build something better.

The choice facing COP31 is therefore not simply whether electrification will happen. It is whether Africa is helped to become an electro-state continent, powering its development through clean electricity, or pushed by neglect into repeating the fossil-fuel pathway that has already destabilised the climate.

For the age of electrification to be a success, COP31 needs to ensure Africa is equipped to shape and accelerate it. If Africa is left behind, the global energy transition will fall behind with it.

The post Africa can lead the Age of Electrification appeared first on Climate Home News.

The refinery, which is planned to be situated in Lamu County on Kenya’s northern coast, will be East Africa’s largest refining project and is expected to take up to three years to build. Once finished, it would supply refined petroleum products to Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania and Rwanda, among others, helping to reduce the region’s dependence on imported fuels.

Campaigners are questioning the viability of such a large refinery at a time when renewable energy and electric transportation are expanding rapidly. 

Mohamed Adow, director of a Kenya-based climate and energy think-tank Power Shift Africa, said the decision to give Dangote the green light for the refinery is “an extraordinary act of environmental recklessness and economic short-sightedness”, arguing it would tie Kenya to “yesterday’s energy system” just as global demand for petroleum products faces increasing uncertainty. 

Campaigners argue the refinery risks coming online just as transport – the largest market for petrol and diesel – is beginning to electrify across the continent.

Kenya launched a National Electric Mobility Policy earlier this year to speed up the uptake of electric vehicles (EVs) and reduce the country’s roughly $5 billion annual fuel import bill. Ethiopia has already banned imports of non-electric vehicles and now has more than 100,000 EVs on its roads, while Rwanda is expanding its electric mobility programme with plans to convert its fleet of around 100,000 motorcycles to electric.

Adow said the project risks billions of dollars in investment in infrastructure that could become obsolete as the world moves away from oil.

“Building a refinery today assumes decades of robust demand for fuels that much of the world is actively trying to phase out,” he said in a statement. 

Ecological concerns

Lamu – the proposed site for the project – is home to the UNESCO World Heritage-listed Lamu Old Town and an archipelago containing extensive mangrove forests, coral reefs and seagrass beds that support fisheries, tourism and coastal livelihoods.

Locating the refinery in Lamu would “place one of Africa’s largest fossil fuel developments in one of the continent’s most ecologically sensitive and culturally significant coastal regions,” Power Shift Africa said.

Major emitting countries knew of climate risks decades earlier than claimed

Sherelee Odayar, oil and gas campaigner at Greenpeace Africa, warned that a refinery of this scale could increase the risk of habitat destruction, marine pollution, oil spills and air pollution in one of East Africa’s most fragile coastal ecosystems.

She said the risks stem not only from the refinery itself – including storage tanks, pipelines and fuel handling facilities – but also from the large volumes of crude oil that would need to be shipped into Lamu and refined products exported by sea. Increased tanker traffic and fuel transfers, she said, would raise the likelihood of accidents in ecologically sensitive coastal waters.

Odayar added that Lamu’s low-lying, flood-prone coastline could compound those risks by damaging infrastructure and carrying contaminants from storage facilities into nearby fishing grounds and marine ecosystems.

“Lamu’s mangroves, coral reefs and seagrass beds are not expendable; they support fisheries, livelihoods and coastal protection,” Odayar added. 

She said Kenyan authorities should suspend any approvals until an independent environmental and social impact assessment is completed, with genuine public participation and transparent scrutiny of the long-term economic, health and ecological risks.

“Any review must assess cumulative impacts on Lamu’s mangroves, coral reefs, seagrass beds and fishing livelihoods, alongside the wider economic risk of locking Kenya into costly fossil fuel infrastructure as the global energy transition accelerates”.

Dangote Group declined to answer questions from Climate Home News when contacted by phone.

Technological change threaten project’s future

The Kenya refinery would replicate Dangote’s 650,000-barrel-per-day refinery in Lagos, currently Africa’s largest, which has plans to more than double capacity to 1.4 million barrels per day by 2028.

Adow of Power Shift Africa said projects like this represent “a breathtaking failure to recognise where the global economy is heading”, pointing out that the East African refinery risks arriving when Africa is experiencing an unprecedented clean energy boom. 

Referencing Africa’s solar boom, global electric vehicles uptake and the International Energy Agency’s projection that global oil demand is set to enter a decline later this decade, the think-tank founder said African governments risk anchoring the continent’s future to an industry facing mounting economic uncertainty.

Loss and damage fund delays first project approvals as needs dwarf resources

The organisation said the project faces a bigger threat aside from environmental opposition and that is technological change. “The danger is not simply that the refinery will pollute, it is that it will become obsolete long before it has paid for itself,” he added.

Kenyan President William Ruto said the project will create about 60,000 jobs for Kenyans and supply refined fuel to eight East and Central African countries.

GreenPeace Africa’s Odayar said the promise of ‘thousands of jobs’ cannot be used to hide the true cost of the investment which is that large fossil fuel projects often create temporary jobs while undermining existing livelihoods in fishing, tourism and small-scale local economies.

“The enormous capital required for a project of this scale could instead help accelerate Kenya’s renewable energy future through solar, wind, geothermal, storage and better energy access,” she added.

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Much has been written about when fossil fuel companies knew their products cause harm to the climate, public health, and the environment. Less attention has been paid to just how long governments have known, too, and what they did or failed to do with that knowledge. That information is not just a matter of historical record – it’s a matter of legal responsibility. 

A year ago this month, the world’s highest court affirmed that countries have been under an obligation to curb climate change since they knew about the foreseeable risks it posed and to remedy its harms. This historic advisory opinion opened the door for States to be held accountable not only for failing to act on climate change, but also for making it worse by perpetuating its primary cause: fossil fuel production and use.

While the ruling is clear about the content of climate duties under international law, it is silent on when those duties first applied to specific countries or how long they have been breaching them. The earlier governments knew about the drivers and dangers of climate change, the longer they have been under an obligation to prevent it, and the greater their potential liability for the resulting harms.

Once they were informed of the risks fossil fuels posed to the climate, States had a duty to do everything in their power to prevent those risks from materializing – and at a minimum, to refrain from exacerbating them. But, as trends in fossil fuel dependence and climate destruction make clear, they did not.

Early knowledge

A new report from the Center for International Environmental Law shows that the governments of many major emitting countries have known since at least the 1960s that fossil fuel use was warming the planet and, if continued, could lead to dire impacts –  including melting of the polar ice caps, catastrophic sea level rise, and extreme heat.

Yet some of the countries responsible for the largest cumulative shares of carbon emissions have claimed that global awareness of climate change emerged only in the late 1980s, around the time the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was established and negotiations of a climate convention began.

Loss and damage fund delays first project approvals as needs dwarf resources

Why? Because admitting that they have known about the chief causes and foreseeable consequences of climate change for the better part of a century would mean they had a duty to prevent it that they’ve been flouting for decades.

Drawing  on a wide range of publicly available government records and scientific studies, CIEL’s research exposes when knowledge of climate change made its way onto policymakers’ desks and into public discourse. The report synthesizes some of the groundbreaking research by scholars such as Naomi Oreskes on the history of American climate science, putting their findings into a legal context and broadening the discussion to other countries.

First findings in 19th century

The origins of the climate harms the world is experiencing today – more extreme storms, deadly heat waves, floods, and sea level rise – stem from around 1850, when industry began burning so much fossil fuel that the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere began to rise.

Scientists figured out quite quickly that the release of these ancient carbon stores could warm Earth. The first paper that modeled the potential warming impact of fossil fuel use, for example, came out in 1896, while the first studies that confirmed global temperatures were rising came out before World War II. 

Government records show international cooperation on climate change research picking up around 1957, when countries worldwide coordinated funding for thousands of research projects as part of the International Geophysical Year (IGY).

The IGY spawned the world’s first program to monitor atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, and the 69 participating governments were apprised of the results. By this time, governmental scientific organizations in most of the world knew that continued fossil fuel use could heat the planet dramatically, with potentially significant adverse impacts. Many countries also became aware of industry research on climate change during this decade through their state-owned oil companies.

Big emitters knew

In the 1960s, the world’s top atmospheric scientists, chemists, and geophysicists concluded that fossil fuel emissions not only could warm the earth, but they were already doing so. They also concluded that continuing to release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere was likely to cause serious harm to food systems, ecosystems, human health, and communities, including through sea level rise and deadly extreme weather events. By the 1960s and 1970s, many governments had ample warning that continued reliance on fossil fuels could have profoundly dangerous global consequences. 

Evidence indicates that this information reached public officials —  in some cases at the highest echelons of government. In the United States –  the largest historic emitter of carbon dioxide –  White House officials exchanged memos over what to do about the “carbon dioxide problem” during the 1960s and a presidential report published in 1965 unequivocally attributed warming to fossil fuels and warned about catastrophic levels of temperature and sea level rise if trends continued. 

In the United Kingdom, the greenhouse effect was first raised in a parliamentary debate in 1969, and in France, a state-owned oil company published a magazine article about the dangers of atmospheric carbon dioxide in 1971, while the Canadian environment ministry regularly published articles about climate change in its employee magazine throughout the 1970s and 80s. 

Even the most generous reading of this information shows that many of the world’s largest contributors to climate change, including the United States, Canada, Germany, and Australia,  knew enough to change course over two decades before the first meeting of the IPCC  in 1988, if not far earlier. 

The story does not end there. As an illustrative compilation of publicly available, English-language evidence, CIEL’s report is not a complete survey of what all major emitters knew.  And facts about what a given country knew are not, on their own, sufficient to secure accountability. But, together with evidence about how that knowledge was subsequently acted upon –  or, as was often the case, denied, dismissed, and distorted – and about how climate impacts have unfolded, they solidify foundations for climate justice and repair. 

The post Major emitting countries knew of climate risks decades earlier than claimed appeared first on Climate Home News.

Speaking at the International Seabed Authority’s (ISA) annual meeting in Kingston on Monday, secretary-general Leticia Carvalho said the regulator’s role “matters more than ever” as governments grapple with growing pressure to exploit the deep seabed for minerals needed for the energy transition.

“The deep seabed belongs to no single country and no corporation; it belongs to all of us,” Carvalho said, describing its resources as “the common heritage of humankind”.

“If we lose sight of this,” she added, “we risk repeating on the ocean floor the same injustices and destruction we still strive to remedy on land.”

The conflict stems from TMC’s attempt to bypass the UN process by applying for US-sponsored ocean mining permits offered last year by the Trump administration. The Canadian firm aims to become the first company to mine the seabed for minerals like nickel, rare earths and manganese used in the production of both clean energy technologies and military equipment.

Several governments, including China, condemned the move as a “violation of international law”. In response, ISA member states agreed to open an inquiry into its licence-holders – among them two of TMC’s subsidiaries – to make sure they have complied with international law. If they are ultimately found to have breached those obligations, their exploration contracts could be revoked.

In June, the two TMC subsidiaries – Tonga Offshore Mining Ltd (TOML) and Nauru Ocean Resources Inc (NORI) – filed claims against the ISA at the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLOS), asking the court to suspend the inquiry while the case proceeds. The companies argue they are being targeted “without lawful procedural basis”, “in breach of due process”, and without “good faith”.

Environmental groups have accused The Metals Company of using legal tactics to block the investigation into its subsidiaries.

“We find ourselves in this Orwellian situation where these companies are trying to effectively get an injunction against the ISA from continuing its inquiry,” said Louisa Casson, who leads Greenpeace’s global campaign against deep-sea mining.

“The stakes are so high and that’s why we’re seeing this pretty extraordinary move to try to get an injunction against the ISA,” she added.

Mining the deep ocean floor

The ISA has been negotiating a mining code for the deep ocean floor for over 12 years without success. Nearly 40 governments, including the UK, France and Germany, have called for a moratorium or precautionary pause on deep-sea mining until there is sufficient scientific evidence that it can proceed without causing serious harm to marine ecosystems.

Rather than wait for the UN process, industry frontrunner, The Metals Company, decided to apply for US permits offered by the Trump administration last year. In May, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) certified TMC’s application to explore 120,000 square kilometers of sea floor.

The firm wants to mine an area in the Pacific known as the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, which holds critical minerals inside potato-sized rocks found in the deep ocean floor known as polymetallic nodules. The minerals like manganese, nickel and rare earths are used in clean energy technologies like batteries and wind turbines.

But the area is also a little-understood ecosystem inhabited by thousands of unnamed species. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the world’s largest environmental network, says mining this area would threaten the existence of over half of all molluscs reliant on deep-sea vents.

Governments launch inquiry

Seeking to discourage companies from bypassing the UN process, the ISA’s member states unanimously agreed to open an inquiry into whether holders of its exploration licences complied with their contractual obligations under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS).

“The stage we’re at now is countries grappling with what they can do about this. What tools do they have to constrain this pathway that would go against international law,” Casson said.

Both NORI and TOML continue to hold ISA exploration contracts in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone. NORI’s license, however, expires later this month on July 21st and is up for review.

The inquiry is currently ongoing, but Casson said that if governments decide to cancel NORI’s license, other firms could apply for the ISA permit and compete for mining rights in the area.

“If that happens, it could really put into jeopardy TMC USA’s application (for US permits) because then suddenly that area could be open for a competing claim,” she explained. “At the moment, TMC is trying to kind of play both sides and shore up the area so that there will be no competition.”

Deep-sea mining firms push back

The cases before ITLOS are the first contentious disputes over deep-sea mining to reach the court designed for maritime disputes and the first brought directly by private contractors against the ISA. Among the companies’ legal advisers is former ISA secretary-general Michael Lodge.

Both NORI and TOML claimed that, unless the inquiry is suspended, there is a “real
and imminent risk of prejudice” that “may have significant legal and practical consequences” for
their activities.

The claim was backed by the Pacific island nation of Nauru, which has sponsored TMC’s push to mine the Clarion-Clipperton Zone and would benefit from the economic activity. The country raised “concerns on the adherence of due process with respect to the treatment of NORI”.

The mining companies allege that the ISA has singled them out among other applicants by requesting additional documentation, and that the UN auditors did not give them an opportunity to “meaningfully respond” to their concerns.

The ISA rejected those allegations as “wholly unsupported assertions”. It added that, given TMC’s application for US mining permits, it had done “what any reasonable regulator would do”: with the unanimous support of member states, it opened an inquiry simply to establish the facts.

Delay tactics

A decision from the maritime court is now expected by July 18, which has added to a “climate of significant regulatory uncertainty”, according to global law firm HSF Kramer.

As ISA countries meet in Kingston this week, the court’s president asked them “not to act in any way that could hinder any order” the court may make.

At the hearing representing the ISA, renowned human rights lawyer Philippe Sands said the deep-sea mining firms were engaging in “strategic litigation” meant to delay the inquiry and send the ISA into a years-long legal process.

“It’s a delaying tactic, and nothing would make them happier than for you to kick this into the long grass for two years while you sort out the merits. That is what they want this Tribunal, the Chamber, to do. You are being instrumentalized in this process,” Sands told the judges.

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The Philippines is caught in an extreme weather trap. Here, forecasts for a strong El Niño in the months ahead do not just indicate a period of drought – they also point to torrential rain and flooding.

It could hardly come at a worse time, threatening communities that are still struggling to recover from previous typhoons, such as last year’s Typhoon Tino, as well as two strong earthquakes – in Cebu in September 2025 and last month’s 7.8-magnitude quake in Mindanao.

Forecasts point to the arrival of one of the most intense El Niños in recent history this year and into 2027, with the United Nations warning that it could be the strongest in decades around the world.

The peak of the El Niño is expected towards the end of the year, but the weather phenomenon is already estimated to have caused agricultural losses of nearly €30 million (£25.9 million), potentially affecting the livelihoods of 4 million farmers.

On the climate frontline

For many, El Niño is a figure in a report or a distant headline, but for those of us who live and work on the ground, it is a reality that is already hitting the most vulnerable families.

When I travel through the communities of the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region – in the south – or speak with families on the island of Siargao or in the Zamboanga region, I do not see data or graphs.

I see a father looking at his cracked rice field, wondering how he will pay off the debts from a harvest that is already lost before it has even begun. I see a mother walking under a relentless sun because her village’s well has dried up, carrying the water that sustains the health of her children and her entire community.

And what we are seeing today – 26 provinces experiencing drought and millions of dollars in agricultural losses – is only the beginning.

Loss and damage fund delays first project approvals as needs dwarf resources

Many Filipino families are still trying to rebuild and recover after last year’s typhoons and the two earthquakes. In Mindanao, where the recent magnitude 7.8 earthquake displaced more than 90,000 people and destroyed over 19,000 houses, uncertainty remains about when the people will be able to fully recover and return home. 

Today, they are trying to protect the meagre possessions they have and, if they are lucky enough to have their home unscathed by typhoons and earthquakes, their homes from flooding; tomorrow, they will have to survive the hardship and impact of drought.

The effects of El Niño threaten to exacerbate their troubles.

Struggle for basic needs

Many low-income Filipino families already face significant challenges to meet their basic needs.

In our daily visits, we see how life is becoming increasingly difficult for millions of people. Rising fuel and transport costs are driving up the price of basic foodstuffs, making them unaffordable for many families. At the same time, crop failures and income losses are leaving households without livelihoods, while disasters contribute to further suffering.

But we are not just talking about hunger. We are talking about health, safety and dignity. Water shortages are forcing many people to resort to unsafe sources, increasing the risk of disease. And, as is the case in so many crises, it is the most vulnerable who bear the heaviest burden: walking long distances every day to fetch water or food, enduring enormous physical strain and facing risks of violence and insecurity.

Building resilience

Faced with this reality, our response is based on a simple idea: to be there before the crisis reaches its most critical point. At Action Against Hunger, we work alongside communities to anticipate the situation, assessing the impact of the drought and activating early response mechanisms to protect their livelihoods and access to water.

We translate climate forecasts into concrete action plans: from support for farmers to programmes ensuring safe water. All of this is done in coordination with local authorities and international partners, because we know that what we do today will make the difference tomorrow.

A supercharged El Niño is coming – are we ready?

The hardest months are yet to come. But the question is not just what will happen, but what we are doing now to prevent it. How many tables will remain empty and how many children will see their health compromised will depend on our ability to act in time.

We cannot stop El Niño. But we can prevent it from becoming a crisis of human dignity. We cannot afford to look the other way whilst the earth cracks and opportunities disappear. Because behind every statistic, there is a family struggling to get by. And that is a reality we cannot ignore.

The post A strong El Niño spells more climate pain for the Philippines appeared first on Climate Home News.

The fund faces a substantial dilemma about how to select projects to receive its limited resources after its first call for proposals saw nearly 180 submissions requiring around $2.8 billion. It currently has only $250 million available to allocate, although the board agreed on Friday to release $100 million more in the face of overwhelming demand.

Much of the three-day board meeting in Manila was held behind closed doors, making it difficult for civil society experts present to know what was happening. Draft decisions were projected on a screen and finalised at the end of the meeting before being adopted on Friday.

During the closing session, government board members and observers alike expressed frustration at the huge gap between the growing needs of communities struggling with worsening climate change disasters and the paltry amounts on offer to help them recover.

At an initial pledging session at COP28 in 2023, wealthy governments offered around $820 million to the fund, of which only 55% has been delivered into its coffers.

“Every proposal represents real people,” who are expecting in good faith to receive resources from the fund, said Milagro Matus from Belize, calling for its ambition to be strengthened.

Mismatch between needs and contributions

Several other board members, especially from developing countries, as well as climate justice advocates expressed disappointment over the fact that the fund has so little to spend and called for efforts to increase contributions from rich nations. 

The fund will consider how to mobilise more resources in the short term, as well as a longer-term replenishment process, at its December meeting. 

Richard Sherman of South Africa, the board’s former co-chair and now a board member, had proposed a high-level pledging session for the FRLD to take place before the COP31 climate summit in November but this now seems unlikely to happen as it was not included in Friday’s decisions.

Adao Soares Barbosa of Timor-Leste said this week’s board meeting – its ninth – should show the world that more financial contributions are required as collective needs to tackle loss and damage are far higher. 

Iran war fuel shocks threaten Africa’s clean cooking push, IEA says

He called for enough extra money to be found so that at least one project can be approved for each least-developed country and small island developing state, which have so far submitted 72 proposals between them. Half of the fund’s resources are meant to be reserved for those two groups of especially vulnerable nations.

Brandon Wu, ActionAid USA’s director of policy and campaigns, said the board’s decision not to opt for quick approval of the first four projects presented “is the most obvious example of how developed countries’ failure to adequately resource the FRLD is constraining a fund that was meant to be the central flagship institution responding to climate impacts across the Global South”.

More time to consider proposals

Other board members spoke about the uncomfortable situation the fund faces in having to select projects from such a huge number, introducing “unhelpful competition” into the process. Isaac Glassie-Ryan of the Cook Islands said he was concerned that the approval process pits “the vulnerable against the vulnerable” and argued that each project should have “a fair shot at equal treatment”.

The FRLD’s secretariat checks project documentation and ensures they qualify for funding, but it remains unclear exactly how projects will then be chosen for the board to approve and in what order. The next meeting has been postponed from October to mid-December to allow more time for a first set of proposals to be prepared for the board to examine.

The extent of FRLD resources available means that only around 15-20 projects are likely to be approved at that meeting, as there is a limit of $20 million per proposal.

Friday’s decision noted the “need for the fair and equal treatment of all funding requests” under review by the secretariat and requested that the initial set of projects backed by the FRLD should test diverse approaches and ways of providing its money.

Civil society frustration

At the end of the Manila meeting, civil society observers said they were dissatisfied with both the slow speed of approvals and their exclusion from a large part of the discussions. Harjeet Singh, global convenor of the Fill the Fund campaign and founding director of India’s Satat Sampada Climate Foundation, called the meeting “deeply disappointing and frustrating”, saying it had been non-transparent and non-inclusive. 

A number of board members supported that complaint, saying the issue needed to be addressed and a policy for civil society participation in board meetings agreed.

As blue economy gathers pace, communities must benefit from ocean boom, activists say

Board co-chair Camila Rodríguez Tavárez said the issue would be considered. She described the meeting as “productive” yet “challenging”, adding that a lot of progress had been made and the board had been able to arrive at “a balanced set of decisions”.

Singh nonetheless lamented that the FRLD has not yet “been able to provide a single penny to people who are suffering right now”.

The post Loss and damage fund delays first project approvals as needs dwarf resources appeared first on Climate Home News.

Although a fossil fuel, liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) stoves are generally regarded as a cleaner and healthier alternative to using smoky wood or charcoal, which about 1 billion people in sub-Saharan Africa still rely on, according to IEA estimates. Cooking with these inefficient biofuels generates annual carbon emissions comparable to those from the aviation and shipping sectors combined.

Speaking on Thursday at a high-level online event on clean cooking in Africa, Fatih Birol, the IEA’s executive director, said LPG supply had been “disproportionately affected” by the Strait of Hormuz crisis.

“Our numbers show that 3.4 billion people around the world, most of them in Africa, have been negatively affected as a result of the LPG crisis,” Birol said.

With around 30% of global seaborne trade in LPG passing through the key shipping route off the coast of Iran, supply disruptions and price shocks led to fuel rationing and sharp price hikes in Asia and Africa this year, putting LPG beyond the reach of many households, according to an IEA progress report released at the event.

The report found that most emerging nations have thin fuel reserves to buffer the impacts of the crisis. “Many countries now have less than 15 days of fuel storage,” Birol said, adding that several countries, including Uganda and Bangladesh, had approached the IEA for support to deal with the crisis.

Prioritise LPG security

In response, the agency is developing a new clean cooking security programme aimed at expanding LPG storage, strengthening supply chains, and improving cooperation between producing and consuming countries.

Birol said the IEA’s energy security strategy has spanned oil, natural gas and electricity, “but we think LPG security is also very important”. He added that the agency is working closely with LPG companies around the world to find ways to keep supplies stable.

Speaking at the event, US Energy Secretary Chris Wright highlighted the US’s position as the biggest producer and exporter of LPG, and said that expanding access to clean cooking fuels had become the Trump administration’s top international energy priority.

He called for greater collaboration to build global supply chains, including gas distribution networks, LPG storage capacity and, “most critically”, fuel delivery systems to reduce costs for the 2 billion people worldwide who still lack access to clean cooking.

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

Funding grows but still falls short

Alongside its new fuel security programme, the IEA announced $900 million in new commitments for clean cooking in Africa, adding to the $2.2 billion pledged at the inaugural Africa Clean Cooking Summit in Paris in 2024.

Around $750 million of those earlier commitments have already been deployed across 22 African countries, supporting projects ranging from LPG storage in Tanzania and electric cooking in Kenya to new stove factories in Nigeria and stove distribution in Senegal.

The IEA said clean cooking access in sub-Saharan Africa is now expanding three times faster than in 2010, reaching nearly 12 million people in 2024. But population growth continues to outpace progress, with the number of people still cooking with more polluting fuels rising by around 14 million last year.

Kenyan President William Ruto said financing remains the biggest hurdle, noting that Kenya alone requires around $1 billion to achieve its clean cooking goals.

“Closing the continent’s clean cooking access gap will require scaled-up investment, yet annual financing remains far below what is needed,” he said.

In 2024, the IEA said investments of $4 billion a year would be needed for the rest of this decade to close the clean cooking gap in Africa, but levels remain far below what is needed to provide universal access.

Paris summit unlocks cash for clean cooking in Africa, side-stepping concerns over gas

Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre described clean cooking as “one of the most underfunded opportunities in global development and climate policy”, despite causing around 850,000 premature deaths across Africa every year, mostly among women and children.

He called on governments, international partners and the private sector to work together to ensure rapid progress on what he described as “one of the most cost-effective climate mitigation strategies available to us”, adding that “carbon finance, climate finance and development finance must align”.

Localising the supply chain

Clean cooking in Africa is not only about energy access, said Lerato Mataboge, the African Union (AU) Commissioner for Infrastructure and Energy, explaining that it has the power to reshape livelihoods and markets across the continent.

But this will only be possible if the clean cooking value chain is localised, she said, adding that the AU aims “to avoid Africa remaining a consumer and not a producer of transformation interventions that are required by our people”.

Mataboge said the recent LPG supply disruptions underscore the need for Africa to build more resilient clean cooking supply chains, warning that the roughly 13 million people who gained access to clean cooking annually in the past five years could revert to traditional fuels if LPG prices continue to surge.

She called for greater investment in manufacturing, distribution and infrastructure, saying Africa must “create local value chains” and strengthen private-sector participation.

Moving the value chain for clean cooking closer to the people that need it most and improving infrastructure, she said, would not only support a just energy transition but also “insulate communities from external shocks, thereby guaranteeing security of supply”.

The post Iran war fuel shocks threaten Africa’s clean cooking push, IEA says appeared first on Climate Home News.

This week, the Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage (FRLD) faces a significant decision that will determine its ability to address the harms being done by climate change.

Discussions on the Fund’s Resource Mobilisation Strategy must get the scale and accessibility of the Fund right. Failure to do so would risk undermining its role to channel finance to countries ex­periencing loss and damage, and undermine obligations to climate justice and human rights.

This discussion could not come at a more pressing time. As loss and damage (L&D) continues to escalate globally, and as the world teeters perilously close to the Paris Agreement’s critical 1.5C warming limit, the FRLD also faces the very real danger of running out of funding in 2027.

As Nigeria rails at loss and damage “mirage”, fund boss assures money is coming

Experts calculate that in 2025, L&D finance needs for climate-vulnerable countries may have reached USD$937 billion. Last year’s major impacts included a series of extremely destructive cyclones that hit the Philippines, estimated to have caused over $5 billion in losses, while in Jamaica, the losses and damage caused by Hurricane Melissa were estimated at $12.2 billion.

The bill for just one of these disasters would exhaust the Fund’s existing resources many times over. While the costs and human rights violations rack up, almost four years after being agreed at COP27, the FRLD remains critically underfunded.

Pledges to the Fund ($822 million) are just a fraction of 1% of annual loss and damage needs, and only around half of those pledges ($448 million) have been paid into the Fund so far.

Meanwhile, those who have done nothing to cause the climate crisis are facing its worst – and intensifying – impacts and are being left to foot the bill for the damages already incurred, not to mention the severe non-economic costs to communities. It is therefore crucial that the FRLD’s Resource Mobilisation Strategy urgently brings in far more L&D finance.

Contributor conundrum

Many developed states will claim that additional countries should provide L&D finance. This, however, is a distraction – particularly considering the deep abyss between the contributions of developed states that are obligated to pay and their fair share as calculated according to their wealth and historical emissions. Furthermore, some states and regions that are currently not obligated to contribute are already doing so. 

Analysis reveals that, even in the highly inequitable scenario where all states including those who have contributed nothing to causing the climate crisis were to pay towards L&D finance, wealthy countries would still be responsible for the vast majority of L&D finance.

New loss and damage fund could run out of money next year

The Fund’s Resource Mobilisation Strategy must focus political discussions on the ability of rich and highly polluting states to raise public, grant-based L&D finance that is new and additional to existing climate finance obligations and overseas development assistance.

Developed states have the means to pay and the FRLD should introduce mandatory and progressive mechanisms to make the biggest polluters, including the ultra-rich and fossil fuel corporations, pay for their climate harms. 

African impacts

Increasingly unpredictable seasons and more frequent and extreme events are driving food insecurity, malnutrition, displacement and other human rights risks in climate-vulnerable countries, and communities facing these escalating and compounding impacts must be centred in FRLD policies.

In Ethiopia, 2023 saw 24 million people affected by five back-to-back failed rains leading to severe food and water shortages, including a 90% crop loss in drought-affected areas. Eleven million people required food assistance, and over 500,000 people were displaced. Meanwhile, the 2023–24 floods and the 2024 Gofa landslide disrupted or destroyed health facilities, displaced thousands, and led to outbreaks of cholera, malaria, and measles.

Comment: Let’s tax luxury air travel to fund climate adaptation and loss and damage

Today, Somalia is facing one of its most severe drought emergencies in recent history driven by climate extremes. Malnutrition rates continue to exceed projections and previous devastating records, with 1.9 million children in Somalia acutely malnourished.

In Malawi, child stunting had significantly reduced, but climate impacts are now affecting children’s growth and development. Tropical Cyclone Freddy in 2023 was one of the worst on record, causing over 1,200 deaths, displacing half a million people, and causing damages exceeding $500 million. Recovery needs for four major disasters between 2015 and 2023 are estimated at $1.7 billion, equivalent to more than a quarter of Malawi’s 2026-2027 budget. 

Funding for communities

Access to community grants in the southern African country, however, has catalysed local responses to L&D that coordinate around immediate and long-term needs and restoring livelihoods.

Direct access to the FRLD for climate-vulnerable countries and communities, with community-centric planning, is essential to ensure that the Fund can respond to the needs of people experiencing the worst impacts of climate change, through prompt and flexible mechanisms that do not hinder recovery options.

Stepping up to fill the FRLD through an ambitious and needs-based Resource Mobilisation Strategy is the bare minimum that wealthy states can and must do. It is, after all, an obligation that flows from the international duties of cooperation and prevention of harm, and from the obligation to provide reparation when harm occurs. Failure to do so would further erode climate justice and human rights for communities on the frontline of loss and damage.

The post The loss and damage fund needs far more finance to deliver climate justice appeared first on Climate Home News.

“The youth in our village migrate to cities for work. What’s better than to have jobs near home?” Gollo Doni, a farmer and secretary of the local youth association, told Climate Home News as he and other members in their 20s discussed the latest meetings between locals and representatives of Oil India Limited (OIL), a state company exploring graphite and vanadium reserves in Arunachal Pradesh.

The mining plans in the state, which is home to more than one-third of India’s graphite reserves and the subject of a sovereignty dispute with China, reflect a push by the Indian government to position itself as a leading producer of battery-grade graphite as the mass rollout of batteries for electric vehicles (EVs) and power storage drives demand for the mineral.

An average electric car contains about 60 kg of graphite anode materials, according to the International Energy Agency, and the graphite supply chain is heavily dominated by China, which produces about 80% of the world’s natural graphite and controls more than 90% of global refining.

As Western countries seek to reduce their dependency on China, India’s reserves of graphite and other minerals vital for the switch to clean energy have caught governments’ attention, with Germany signing a critical minerals partnership agreement in January.

Ambitious plans

But hurdles remain to India’s ambitious plans to ramp up critical minerals output, both to position itself as an alternative to China and to meet its own fast-growing needs.

India has a target for 30% of new vehicle sales to be electric by 2030, and demand for EV lithium batteries looks set to surge close to 35-fold between 2023 and 2035, according to S&P Global Mobility, driven by growth in two- and three-wheelers in the country of 1.4 billion people.

Although domestic manufacturing of EV batteries is expanding, the sector remains at an early stage and India depends heavily on imports from China, South Korea and Japan.

At the same time, it wants to get graphite processing off the ground, aiming to turn its reserves of the mineral – which rank among the world’s 10 biggest – into higher value battery-grade supplies.

The energy transition has a rare earth problem: These startups are solving it

With exploration already underway, the next step should be starting discussions about developing processing facilities – including support from foreign partners, said Kaira Rakheja, South Asia energy analyst at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA).

“These exploration and extraction projects have a long gestation period. So even if discussions on processing start now, it will still take a while,” she said, noting India’s simultaneous push to create “rare earth corridors” encompassing every step of production.

Hurdles ahead

India’s graphite reserves are mainly of a lower grade, however, making processing for use in battery anodes more complex, while the country is a late entrant.

“We are not a big player in the market and have missed the bus,” said Aditya Ramji, director of the Global South Clean Transportation Centre at the University of California, Davis.

While exploration work is already underway at several sites in Arunachal Pradesh, and at some places in eastern and southern India, production will take at least two years to start, said Tana Tage, director at the Centre for the Earth Sciences and Himalayan Studies, OIL’s local partner and holder of a 10% stake in the Phop project. 

A mine would create about 300 jobs and the project’s partners are discussing options for processing the site’s medium- to high-grade graphite locally, Tage added, despite voicing concern about a lack of technological know-how. 

“India does not have the large-scale, advanced processing capabilities to achieve the ultra-high purity levels required for EV batteries and clean technologies,” he told Climate Home News.

Diversification drive

Despite such challenges, industry experts say India could benefit from the push to find sources of battery graphite other than China.

“We can’t beat China in this space, but we can still create a space for ourselves in buying and selling, as everyone is looking for a space to diversify,” said Rishabh Jain, fellow at the Council on Energy, Environment  and Water, a New Delhi-based think-tank.

India’s government hopes the bilateral memorandum of understanding (MoU) signed with Germany could help.

As well as pledging cooperation on critical minerals exploration, the declaration envisions the exchange of know-how to add value through processing and recycling, facilitating investment and building the supply chain resilience of both countries. That could include identifying joint research projects and facilitating cooperation between industry players.

“India and Germany will work together to mutually strengthen supply chains in the field of critical minerals,” a spokesperson for the German government’s energy strategy said. “We will encourage companies to build strong ties in terms of knowledge sharing, offtake agreements and investments.”

Germany is already supporting several domestic projects focused on converting graphite into battery anode material – valuable experience that could potentially be shared with India, said Rakheja. In return for shared technical expertise, India offers a strong pool of workforce talent and a big market.

“This way, both partners can look beyond China,” she said.

India sets achievable green electricity and emissions intensity targets

The MoU, which is non-binding, is “a good start”, said Svenja Schöneich, a senior advisor at the NGO Germanwatch, adding that it was thin on details, including on how to add value to India’s critical mineral resources.

“The partnership document should figure out the problem of local value creation. It should also consider that it can’t really skip processing through China,” Schöneich said.

An official at India’s Mining Ministry did not respond to requests for comment.

Trade deals and tax breaks

Beyond the five-year German accord, India has implemented numerous policy measures aimed at securing its own supplies of critical minerals and adding value to its mineral exports, for example by signing favourable trade deals. Last year, India’s graphite was granted zero-duty access to the US, just as the tariffs on Chinese graphite imports climbed to a high 160%. 

When the government announced the national budget in February, it included a raft of financial measures aimed at kickstarting a plan to process minerals domestically – the details of which are expected to be announced in the coming months.

They included zero customs duty on critical mineral inputs and enhanced tax deductions for exploration, while the government’s production-linked incentive (PLI) scheme allocated the equivalent of $1.87 billion to build domestic battery cell manufacturing.

Before that can happen, progress on new mining – such as the Arunachal Pradesh graphite projects – is vital, Jain said.

“We are in 2026, and looking to move towards a cleaner world. This is the future,” he said.

The state government in Arunachal Pradesh agrees. It called last year for fast-tracked environmental permitting for graphite projects, new infrastructure around mine sites and reforms to avoid legal disputes that could hold the sector back. 

Back in the village of Phop, youth association secretary Doni said that while reluctant residents did not raise an objection to OIL’s preliminary exploration licence, he fears a bigger fight ahead.

Tage said up to 3,000 people could ultimately be displaced if the project proceeds, raising questions about whether economic benefits would outweigh the social and environmental costs.

“It has been difficult to make the elders agree to actual mining,” Doni said, as he and other young villagers sipped on sweet tea in a thatched mountain house. “We are trying to convince our elders that mining will not only bring resources for the nation, but bring us jobs here.”

This article was produced as part of the India-Germany Climate and Energy Journalism Programme organised by Clean Energy Wire, supported by Heinrich Böll Stiftung.

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But civil society groups warn that the push to expand the “blue economy” may reproduce familiar inequalities unless coastal communities have a greater say in how projects are designed, financed and governed. 

Neville van Rooy from The Green Connection in South Africa, which works with coastal communities who rely directly on the ocean for their livelihoods, said local people were frequently unaware of proposed developments until civil society groups alerted them. 

“Communities need to be taken seriously,” van Rooy told delegates at the Mombasa conference held on the shores of the Indian Ocean. 

“Just because they are often struggling does not mean they do not have a vision of development. Inclusivity needs to be at the centre and development pathways must build on communities’ own experience, including indigenous knowledge systems rooted in harmony with nature.” 

Ocean investment flowing in

The value of the blue economy—the sustainable use and protection of marine resources—doubled from $1.3 trillion in 1995 to $2.6 trillion in 2020 and is projected to quadruple by 2050, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

The scale of ambition in Mombasa was clear, with governments, institutions, companies and civil society groups announcing 320 commitments worth $6.4 billion.

The largest share went to sustainable blue economy projects, with 86 commitments worth $2.86 billion, followed by sustainable fisheries with $1.75 billion and ocean-climate action with $1.18 billion.  

The pledges included support for ocean startups in Africa, coastal ecosystem restoration across the Indian Ocean, marine research and policy, recycling discarded fishing nets, sustainable livelihoods in Timor-Leste and planning tools for offshore wind.  

Cynthia Barzuna, global deputy director of the Ocean Program at the World Resources Institute, said there are signs that blue finance and ocean planning are moving closer to coastal communities, particularly through the development of sustainable ocean plans.  

In 2020, a group of 14 countries – co-led by Australia and Chile – pledged to manage their oceans sustainably, by jointly drawing up plans with coastal communities to shape how marine resources are managed and where investments should go.

“Once communities are involved in the planning, bring in their knowledge, and participate in designing, developing and implementing a sustainable ocean plan, it puts us on the right path,” Barzuna told Climate Home News on the sidelines of the conference. 

Yet some of those countries – including Kenya, Australia and Mexico – have embarked on a new wave of offshore oil and gas projects, threatening key biodiversity hotspots, according to a recent report by a group of environmental NGOs.

When projects go wrong

Civil society groups say lessons need to be learnt from failed blue economy projects too. 

In Kenya, a proposed coal-fired power plant at Lamu Port – a fragile coastal ecosystem and a UNESCO World Heritage site – was challenged by residents and campaigners who cited little consultation and threats to fishing, tourism, culture and public health. 

In 2019, Kenya’s National Environment Tribunal revoked its environmental licence, citing inadequate public participation and flaws in the environmental assessment – a decision later upheld by the courts.  

“It is not enough to say that whatever you are doing is in the name of the communities, their livelihoods and whatever else you want to improve”, but that they should be directly involved in projects from the start, said Omar Elmawi, a Kenyan climate activist and Convenor of the Africa Movement of Movements. 

He said another lesson learnt was that environmental impact assessments must not only be completed, but “must be done rigorously” and that the process has to be transparent so that people feel involved and that their views are being counted. 

Blue transition

Blue carbon schemes can also attract finance, but campaigners said communities that have long protected mangroves, seagrasses and salt marshes must be treated as rights-holders, not just beneficiaries. In some past projects, they said, communities were asked to provide labour, attend consultations or receive small payments, while outside developers retained control over carbon revenues and decisions over how ecosystems were managed.

Similarly, offshore wind and marine protected areas can bring climate and conservation gains, but if poorly planned, they can disrupt fishing grounds, marine species and small-scale fishers’ access to the sea, added campaigners. 

Farida Aliwa, executive director of Natural Justice, said the answer was not to halt ocean-based development, but to put in place stronger safeguards before projects are approved, financed and expanded. 

Aliwa said legal frameworks across Africa were evolving, with strategic litigation increasingly being used to hold governments accountable for environmental, climate and human rights impacts related to new projects.  

But she warned that communities and coastal defenders still face shrinking civic space, and said any shift to renewable energy must be designed responsibly. 

“As we work on alternatives, we need to ensure that renewable projects benefit communities,” she said. 

The post As blue economy gathers pace, communities must benefit from ocean boom, activists say appeared first on Climate Home News.

Not only has nature been absent from discussions on the environmental impacts of AI data centres, which focus mainly on carbon emissions and water use, there has also been no consideration of how AI deployment by industry could gobble up more natural resources, activists warned.

Brian O’Donnell, director of the Campaign for Nature, said that while AI can help protect wildlife and forests, the broader boost it will give to economic growth poses a far bigger threat than expected benefits.

“We’ve seen over $250 billion of private capital go into AI in 2024 alone – and almost all of that is seeking an economic return, and the money follows commercial value,” he told journalists. “Extraction, industrial farming, resource logistics, and the engines that drive ever more consumption are all activities that contribute to biodiversity loss.”

The leading conservationist added that the policy documents produced by leading AI companies do not address the downstream effects of their technology for nature and biodiversity, focusing more on employment and other social issues.

Some have firms have put small sums towards projects that support conservation, he noted, but none are addressing the issue in a serious way or have included nature in the safety rules for their models.

“The living world that all of this rests upon – nature being the foundation of our economies, our societies, all life on earth – is not a primary concern in the governance of AI, as proposed by the corporates of AI,” O’Donnell said.

Positive uses steal the show

Last month, UN chief António Guterres launched an initiative to hold major AI firms accountable for their exploding environmental impacts, including carbon emissions, the amount of water and land used for data centres, and the energy they consume.

The UN boss also wants big players to commit to power all data centres with renewable energy by 2030. On Monday in Geneva, in a wide-ranging speech, he again raised his proposed “AI Environmental Transparency Initiative”. But nature has not featured in his comments on the issue.

UN asks AI companies to reveal full environmental impacts

In addition, the preliminary report of the newly formed Independent International Scientific Panel on AI – which assesses the opportunities, risks and impacts of AI – mentions environmental concerns only briefly.

The report, which examines available scientific evidence and was presented to governments at the Geneva dialogue, does not highlight any threats to nature and biodiversity but cites a study showing how AI has been used to track and reduce conflict between humans and wildlife.

O’Donnell pointed to “some really important technological uses of AI for biodiversity” such as monitoring species, forest damage and tree cover and using camera traps to see what kind of wildlife migrates in a particular area. But, he added, these get a disproportionate amount of attention compared with the threat from more rapacious resource extraction which he perceives as far greater.

By making commercial operations cheaper, quicker and more efficient, and opening access to untapped areas of land and sea, AI could drive biodiversity loss through increased over-exploitation of fish, wildlife and timber, worsening pollution and spreading invasive species on faster trade networks, he added.

Indigenous concerns

Indigenous peoples are also worried that their lands, critical mineral reserves and knowledge will be appropriated by AI and the accelerated economic development it fuels, said Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim, a leading global environmental activist and Indigenous leader from Chad.

Ibrahim, who produced a report on Indigenous peoples and AI for the UN in April, told journalists that before Indigenous peoples share their know-how on managing forests and stewarding nature, companies and governments must put in place principles to ensure this can happen in a fair way that prevents it being abused by bad actors.

Warning against ‘consumer club’ as G7 forms critical minerals alliance

Her report also points to positive ways that AI can support Indigenous culture and rights, such as tackling their lack of access to digital tools, preserving their languages and knowledge and mapping their territories to detect threats and better protect biodiversity.

Efforts such as those by the UN to shape the future of AI governance should look not only at what AI can do, but also ask who benefits and how it safeguards the planet, Ibrahim said.

“If we answer those questions together with Indigenous peoples as equal partners, we can build AI that serves humanity, protects biodiversity and help restore the balance between peoples and planet in an equitable and just way,” she added.

Policy processes lag AI development

Both O’Donnell and Ibrahim said they would lobby countries, the UN and AI firms themselves to put nature and biodiversity on the political agenda, including at the UN biodiversity summit in Armenia in October.

O’Donnell told Climate Home News that when the Global Biodiversity Framework, the world’s main treaty to protect nature, was agreed in 2022, AI was still nascent but has since exploded in terms of investment and its influence on economies.

The vote that stopped a data center: US communities query resource-hungry AI

He pointed to the mismatch between the timeline of the UN’s efforts to develop governance guidelines and the speed with which AI is being developed in the real world.

“Nature can’t be sidelined in these discussions,” he said, calling for a faster and more comprehensive response from policymakers, business and the environmental community.

“We have a very short window to embed nature both into the governance constitutions of the companies themselves and into the formal regulatory [system] going forward,” he added.

The post AI governance debate silent on risks to nature, campaigners warn appeared first on Climate Home News.

The controversial 1,443-kilometre (897-mile) pipeline, majority-owned by French energy company ​TotalEnergies, aims to carry crude from Ugandan fields for export through neighbouring Tanzania. About 80% has been built so far, according to its developers.

The pipeline’s first oil exports are expected as soon as October, according to its developers, and the campaign group Avaaz, which is backing the farmers’ crowdfunded lawsuit, called it “one final chance to stop one of the worst oil pipelines on the planet”.

The claim, filed by London law firm Leigh Day, argues that EACOP Ltd’s role in developing and operating the pipeline breaches Ugandan laws that protect citizens’ right to a clean and healthy environment.

One of the claimants, Racheal Tugume, told a press conference she had been displaced from her land due to the pipeline’s construction, which she said had damaged local rivers, wildlife and ecosystems that communities depend on for their livelihoods just as erratic weather linked to climate change takes an increasing toll. 

“I am very happy that there are people in countries like the UK who are listening to us, who are behind us and who have come to support us,” Tugume said, adding that she hoped the case would bring justice to communities affected by the pipeline.

Ugandan law in UK court

While the pipeline is a joint venture led by TotalEnergies, with smaller stakes owned by Ugandan, Tanzanian and Chinese national oil firms, it is operated by EACOP Ltd, a company registered to an office in London’s Canary Wharf financial district.  

EACOP Ltd did not respond to a request for comment. 

The claim appears to be the first attempt to have Uganda’s climate and environmental protections enforced in a foreign court, partly reflecting concerns over whether cases challenging the multibillion-dollar pipeline would get a fair trial in Uganda.

Ugandans living near new oil pipeline let down by compensation programmes

Concerns about access to a fair hearing are among the issues the court will consider when deciding if it should take on the case, said Matthew Renshaw, partner at Leigh Day.

Renshaw said that precedents including the Nigerian oil pollution case against Shell have shown that claims against British-registered companies for harms overseas can be successfully fought in UK courts. 

“We are proud to represent the four brave principled individuals,” Renshaw said.

Constitutional protections

The pipeline project has already been subject to repeated lawsuits in several countries, none of which have succeeded. A climate lawsuit filed in Uganda more than a decade ago by a group of young people has yet to conclude. Another at the East African Court of Justice, brought by campaign groups against Uganda and Tanzania, was rejected on procedural grounds last November. 

A separate ongoing lawsuit in TotalEnergies’ home country of France – a refiled version of an earlier failed claim – cannot stop EACOP going ahead, but it does seek damages from TotalEnergies for affected communities.

With the newly launched case, Leigh Day’s legal adviser Marc Willers said the claim draws on specific Ugandan laws in a bid to stop EACOP’s operations. 

Uganda may see lower oil revenues than expected as costs rise and demand falls

These include the Ugandan constitution, a 2019 environmental law and the National Climate Change Act 2021, which gives Ugandans the right to bring a case before a court in circumstances where anyone or any entity threatens the country’s ability to mitigate climate change.  

In response to the legal case in Britain, the African Energy Chamber – which represents and promotes the continent’s oil and gas industry – said Ugandans should decide the energy future of their country rather than the UK courts.

“This is colonialism 2.0,” said the chamber’s executive chairman NJ Ayuk. “For generations, Africa was told what resources it could exploit and how it should develop. Today, some of those same pressures are being repackaged through foreign-funded litigation and ideological campaigns that seek to dictate Africa’s energy choices from thousands of kilometres away.”

Stopping a “carbon bomb”

The pipeline, which will link Uganda’s Lake Albert oil fields to Africa’s east coast in Tanzania, has already displaced thousands of people and cuts through the Lake Victoria basin, one of East Africa’s major freshwater systems and a critical water source for around 40 million people. 

According to the BankTrack non-profit, when the pipeline is at peak production, it will carry 216,000 barrels of crude oil per day and release over 33 million tonnes of carbon emissions each year. Over its full lifetime of 25 years, it is estimated to release about 379 million tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions across its value chain including construction, refining and product use.

A May 2026 report from Earth Insight also warns that the pipeline and related infrastructure could affect 158 wetlands in Uganda, 11 rivers, 44 protected areas and seven key biodiversity areas while disrupting about 2,000 square km of protected wildlife habitats. 

This is why the primary focus of the UK court case is to stop the operation of the pipeline in its tracks, Leigh Day’s Willers said, calling it a “carbon bomb” that would worsen the world’s climate crisis.

Long wait for first hearing 

While the purpose of the case is to stop the pipeline from launching operations, Renshaw said it could take about 12 months before the case gets a first hearing and about 18 months before it goes to trial. 

Billions unlocked as Green Climate Fund agrees to spend more and save less

The farmers are, however, seeking an injunction to stop EACOP Ltd from proceeding with operations. In the event that shipments begin, the lawsuit will still seek to stop the pipeline from then on, Renshaw said.

“We will be doing what we can to expedite matters but it is possible that EACOP will have started operating the pipeline before the claim is heard. If that is the case, the claim would intend to halt operations from that point. For example, the pipeline may operate for just one year rather than 30-plus, resulting in far less harm,” he said.

This story was updated after publication to include comment from the African Energy Chamber, an oil and gas lobby group.

The post Ugandan farmers launch UK court case against East African oil pipeline appeared first on Climate Home News.

“Adapt or perish, now as ever, is nature’s inexorable imperative.” A century later, H.G. Wells’s warning reads less like philosophy and more like a prediction for the near future.

Last week, the World Meteorological Organization forecast that a powerful El Niño – a naturally occurring climate pattern marked by unusually warm ocean temperatures in the Pacific – will develop in 2026, becoming potentially one of the strongest on record, capable of triggering floods, droughts and extreme heat across the globe.

This warning should make one thing crystal clear: we need to move faster to adapt to the rapidly changing climate.

Scientists warn El Niño could intensify climate extremes in 2026

What does it mean to take climate change adaptation seriously? It means recognising that building resilience to increasing hazards must inform planning and policy-making efforts that go beyond trying to reduce climate emissions.

Rising climate risks like extended heatwaves or massive bursts of rainfall should guide decisions about where homes are built, which crops are grown, and how natural resources are managed. We need to invest in systems that withstand and recover from climate-driven shocks rather than collapse under them.

Impacts arriving ahead of schedule

For decades, climate action has been anchored in mitigation – reducing emissions to prevent future harm. That work remains essential. But it is operating on a slower timeline than the impacts we are now experiencing in real time and ahead of schedule. The strengthening 2026 El Niño makes that mismatch impossible to ignore.

In the first few months of 2026 more than 600 thousand square miles of forest land burned globally – the equivalent of 81 million football fields – the highest on record for this point in the year. Ocean surface temperatures are at historic highs, Arctic sea ice has hit record lows, and multiple regions have experienced extreme, out-of-season heat.

The strengthening of El Niño later this year could push these conditions even further, potentially making 2026 one of the hottest years ever recorded.

El Niño expected to bring next record-hot year as soon as 2027

The climate today is fundamentally different than the one that shaped past El Niño events. Heatwaves run hotter. Droughts last longer. Rainfall increasingly comes in destructive bursts. Even historically cooler periods no longer offer relief.

El Niño’s counterpart, La Niña, now occurs in a warmer world with ocean temperatures during cooler La Niña phases exceeding those seen during past “super” El Niño events like 1998 and 2016. Yesterday’s extremes have become today’s baselines, and this new level of turbulence will test the limits of preparedness across the country.

Pragmatic preparations to build resilience

When it comes to policy-making, the focus should be on strengthening the health and resilience of communities facing growing climate risks. Across the United States, communities are already feeling the impacts of the quickly changing climate. Preparing for and withstanding what’s ahead is not ideological; it’s pragmatic.

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

Planning that prioritises resilience, modernises infrastructure and invests in adaptation helps safeguard food systems, protect homes and supply chains, and reinforce critical infrastructure. Keeping the strength and stability of local communities at the centre of decision-making is essential to building a more secure and resilient future.

Conservation organisations have long emphasised that adapting to climate change is not just about reacting to disasters, but about building resilience in ways that support people and nature. That means working with communities, governments and businesses to reduce vulnerability to natural hazards, strengthen local capacity, and deploy solutions that improve nature’s ability to protect us.

Adaptation rooted in nature

In coastal regions, for example, mangrove forests act as natural defences – absorbing storm surge, stabilising shorelines and protecting nearby communities.

In Mexico, World Wildlife Fund and its partners are using networks of sensors, drones and artificial intelligence to monitor mangrove health and weather in real time. The project analyses how these ecosystems respond to storms, heat and changing water conditions, helping communities and policymakers adapt their conservation strategies accordingly. It is a glimpse of what climate change adaptation looks like at its best: locally grounded, data-driven and rooted in nature.

Climate risk is not a single problem to solve but a system to manage. Addressing it requires rethinking and integrating conservation, economic development and disaster risk reduction into a single, yet multi-dimensional, agenda focused on resilience.

It will also expose vulnerabilities in infrastructure, stress-test disaster response systems and challenge assumptions about what constitutes a “normal” climate year. And it will remind us that even the best forecasts cannot reduce impacts – only preparation can.

The problem is not that we have ignored climate change. It is that we have misjudged its timeline. These hazards are no longer a future risk to be avoided; they are a present reality to be managed. H.G. Wells’ warning remains. We need to adapt or perish, now as ever.

The post A supercharged El Niño is coming – are we ready? appeared first on Climate Home News.

The numbers are stark. According to the 2026 Global Report on Food Crises, 266 million people across 47 countries experienced high levels of acute food insecurity last year, nearly double the figure recorded a decade ago. 

Meanwhile, disruptions to oil, gas and fertiliser flows through the Strait of Hormuz drove a 46% month-on-month spike in urea prices early this year, sending agricultural price indices up 8% and raising the spectre of a global affordability crisis.

This is not a blip. It is a new baseline. The EAT-Lancet Commission concluded that food systems now account for roughly 30% of total greenhouse gas emissions and are the largest single contributor to the climate crisis. The science has been clear for years. 

Now some of the solutions to the problem are becoming socially acceptable too. 

Earlier this year, people from more than 60 countries and territories, selected not by vested interest, but by lottery, spent seven weeks examining the evidence on food and climate for the latest Global Citizens’ Assembly. They heard from scientists, farmers and industry. They worked through 42 hours of structured deliberation, engaging with some difficult trade-offs. 

They were not asked to endorse a predetermined conclusion. They were asked an open question: what changes, if any, should we make to how we grow, share and eat food, so that everyone has enough to nourish themselves while tackling the causes and impacts of climate change?

Phase down industrial animal farming

Their answer was unambiguous. They voted to protect forests. They voted to phase down industrial animal food production. They voted for supply chain reform and corporate accountability, explicitly rejecting the idea that the burden of change should fall on individual consumers. All 22 of their Calls to Action passed with over 85% support, a super-majority of randomly selected people from every region of the world, in agreement. 

Consider what the assembly was actually being asked to decide. Industrial animal food production is the primary driver of tropical deforestation. Protecting more land as forest and ecosystem means less land available for the expansion of industrial production. That is a real trade-off, with real consequences for real livelihoods. Politicians have spent years avoiding it. 

Food systems are the missing ingredient from the COP30 menu 

These randomly selected people looked at the evidence, deliberated across time zones and cultures, and chose the forests, with 64% in strong support and a further 20% in favour. People from livestock farming communities voted for change. Not because they were told to. Because deliberation led them there.

We estimate there have now been more than 7,000 citizen participation initiatives worldwide in the last decade. They have been organised because, as our 2025 report: People in the Lead demonstrated, people are now consistently and significantly ahead of politicians on issues ranging from climate to AI governance.

The people know best

What the research consistently shows is that ordinary people, given proper evidence and time, produce recommendations that are more effective and more aligned with public values than what emerges from elected legislatures. The gap in global governance is no longer primarily between science and the public. It is between citizens and their political leaders.

That gap matters for more than procedural reasons. When policy treats people as passive recipients rather than active participants, it leaves out the very actors whose behaviour, trust and consent the transition depends on. Institutions that speak only to other institutions, and negotiate only with state actors and industry lobbies, are missing out on the trust and energy of the people they are supposed to serve.

Governments, left to their own devices, are not moving fast enough to prove that argument wrong. At COP30 in Belém last November, countries failed to agree on a fossil fuel phaseout roadmap, and even full implementation of every submitted national climate plan still leaves the world on course for 2.3 to 2.8C of warming. 

Citizens’ track at COP

But the Brazilian presidency grasped something important. Among the conference’s more significant outcomes was the formal launch of a Citizens’ Track within the UNFCCC process, a mechanism for connecting the global participation field to intergovernmental climate negotiations. Türkiye and Australia, who together hold the COP31 presidency in Antalya this November, now have the opportunity to strengthen and institutionalise what Brazil began.

In Guatemala, Indigenous women build climate resilience with old and new farming methods

The question before us is no longer whether citizens can contribute to solving these problems. Across the world, in local food networks, in community assemblies and in participatory planning processes, they already are, quietly generating more ambitious and more legitimate solutions than those emerging from formal diplomatic channels.

What is required now is the political courage to connect people to power. Not to consult citizens and file the results. Not to invite them to observe while the real decisions are made elsewhere. But to recognise the public as partners in perhaps the most consequential governance challenge of our time.

The post As food shocks spread, citizens are showing more leadership than governments  appeared first on Climate Home News.

At a meeting in Tajikistan this week, the government representatives who make up the fund’s board endorsed the proposal to revise its financial rules so that it no longer has to set aside one dollar for every dollar it spends.

Instead, the buffer amount will be decided based on a new, looser methodology. The GCF’s chief financial officer, Darren Tan, told board members that the old rules had led to too much cash building up in the fund’s reserves and “constrained the resources that we could deploy”.

The fund has a portfolio of 360 projects to which it has allocated $20.5 billion, but it has struggled to collect all the pledges made by donors as the US has failed to deliver billions and other wealthy nations are now making cuts to their funding for climate work in developing countries.

The new system has been independently validated and is supported by the GCF’s trustee, the World Bank. Tan said the approach is still prudent enough that the fund will remain “financially resilient even under adverse conditions”.

The change “allows the fund to do more with the same resources”, Tan concluded, adding that “this translates directly into greater climate impact”. The shift leaves the fund with $5.65 billion to put into projects instead of around $1 billion under the previous rules.

The reforms follow wider moves to get funders of climate action to do more with their money. In 2023 and 2024, the World Bank lowered its equity-to-loans ratio from 20% to 19% and then 18%, freeing up around $7 billion a year for it to invest.

At their meeting in Dushanbe, GCF board members broadly welcomed the proposal, although several complained they had not been given enough time to consider reforms of such importance.

“No brainer”

While developed countries were all supportive, developing nations’ responses were more mixed. Some called for the new system to be implemented immediately but others urged a slower roll-out and raised concerns that the changes would lead the fund to give out more loans and fewer grants.

Canada’s representative said the approach is “considered standard practice across the climate finance architecture”, the UK said it “seems sensible”, France called it a “no-brainer” and New Zealand said it would “grow the funding pie”.

Germany’s Annette Windmeisser said it “responds to the COP29 decision to triple outflows from the mutilateral climate funds”. This goal was agreed after a push from small island and least developed countries but – with funding from wealthy governments faltering – the GCF is looking at controversial options like borrowing from banks to meet it.

Japan’s Kazuho Taguchi hinted at similar motivations for supporting these reforms. “Efficient use of limited public resources” is essential, he said, because “it is unrealistic to expect public finance from developed countries alone to meet the full scale of need”.

Bigger share for loans?

Some developing countries strongly supported the reforms too, including Gambia representing the least developed nations, Costa Rica and Uruguay.

Others urged caution. Georgia’s Nino Tandilashvili said the “outside world… want more projects from us” but also “financial sustainability of this fund”.

Botswana’s Balisi Gopolang echoed this and Ghana’s Antwi Boasiako-Amoah said the fund’s models should be tested against performance and the changes should be implemented slowly and piloted first.

Boasiako-Amoah also said he was concerned that the new methodology would be used to increase the proportion of the fund’s money that is loaned out to developing countries rather than distributed as grants. As the money is intended to be returned, loans are less financially risky to the GCF than grants.

The board’s decision approving the reform incorporated this concern by noting that the “risk appetite or financial instrument mix” of board spending decisions should not be influenced by the new policy.

Liane Schalatek, who monitored the meeting for the Heinrich Böll Foundation, told Climate Home News that the reforms give the GCF “some breathing room” for the next year or two, after the Trump administration reneged on US pledges and the UK halved the contribution it had promised for 2024-2027.

But, Schalatek added, “it does not solve the fundamental question of whether developed countries are willing to stick to their obligations under the Paris Agreement and the [UN climate regime] that still requires them to provide substantial inputs into the GCF for the next replenishment period from 2028-2031.”

The post Billions unlocked as Green Climate Fund agrees to spend more and save less appeared first on Climate Home News.

The Tropical Forest Forever Facility (TFFF) was launched on the sidelines of last November’s UN climate summit as an innovative mechanism to fund rainforest protection. Instead of relying on grants, it seeks to raise public and private money, invest it in financial markets, and then pay rainforest countries a share of the returns.

The facility has so far raised $6.8 billion but needs to mobilise at least $10 billion by the end of 2026, under conditions set by Norway to unlock its pledge. If the fund falls short of this goal, the Norwegian contribution of up to $3 billion in loans over 10 years will not be disbursed.

At a gathering of ministers from rainforest-rich countries at London’s Kew Botanic Gardens last Tuesday in searing heat, UK climate minister Katie White praised the TFFF and said she had held a “robust conversation in government over the last few weeks” about the importance of forests and climate action.

She had argued, she said, that “this is not a nice to have – this is absolutely vital for our security and our prosperity”. She told the small crowd of visiting ministers, officials and forest campaigners at Kew that the TFFF was an “innovative and impactful development”.

But despite climate campaigners’ hopes, the British minister did not follow Norway, Germany, France, Brazil, Indonesia and Luxembourg in pledging to the fund, whose aim is to use returns on the capital it invests in bond markets to financially reward countries who keep their tropical forests standing.

Ed Davey, UK lead for the World Resources Institute who was in the room for White’s speech, told Climate Home News afterwards that as the UK was involved in inventing the idea and the British public care about rainforests, it is “incredibly important” that the government invests in the TFFF “as soon as possible”.

“The TFFF is at a very important stage of its gestation, and if a few other critically important sovereign governments don’t come on board quite soon, there is a risk that the idea will lose momentum,” he said.

Anders Haug Larsen, advocacy director for the Rainforest Foundation Norway, was also disappointed at the lack of a British pledge during London Climate Action Week (LCAW).

The UK government’s money and its power to mobilise private sector investment are crucial to the TFFF’s success, he said, adding that “saving tropical rainforest is a key component in solving climate change and preserving life on this planet”.

Political divisions?

British newspaper The Times later reported that White’s boss – energy and climate minister Ed Miliband – had been poised to announce a £400-million ($528m) investment pledge to the TFFF but had been opposed by UK finance minister Rachel Reeves.

According to The Times, Reeves was concerned an announcement would be unpopular, as the government was being criticised by its former defence minister for not spending enough on the military, and had pushed for the announcement to be shelved.

Climate Home News understands, however, that the UK Treasury had given the climate ministry approval to tell Brazil and Norway it would invest in the TFFF, but the administrative procedures needed to make the pledge had not been completed in time to announce a contribution during LCAW.

The UK has been cutting the amount it spends on foreign aid, including on climate projects, in order to deliver what its foreign minister called “the biggest increase in defence spending since the Cold War”.

Projects affected include rainforest protection schemes like the Congo Basin Forest Action Programme, which has had its budget slashed by nearly 80%.

Despite these moves to shrink overseas assistance, defence secretary John Healey resigned a few weeks ago, calling for even more spending for his department.

Last Monday, the first day of LCAW, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced he would soon resign following bad local election results, with his fellow Labour parliamentarian Andy Burnham highly likely to replace him by the end of July. Reeves is looks set to be replaced as finance minister, with Miliband reportedly a leading candidate to succeed her.

Norwegian test looms

If the UK does not invest in the TFFF by the end of the year, along with other government donors, the initiative’s chances of reversing the destruction of tropical forests will be diminished, experts say.

With the US under Donald Trump unlikely to pledge and the two biggest European Union nations France and Germany already having done so, forest campaigners were hoping that the UK could fill some of the roughly $3.2 billion in new pledges needed to meet the minimum goal set by Norway.

Asked by Climate Home News if France would increase its $0.6 billion pledge, its minister for international partnerships Eleonore Caroit said last week, “I don’t have any specific information of any increase.” She added that France supports the TFFF but is also “focusing on other similar projects to achieve the same results”.

The Brazilian finance ministry has courted investments into the fund from Japan, South Korea and China. Last Friday, Brazilian finance minister Dario Durigan met Chinese finance minister Lan Fo’an and afterwards told Valor Econômico that he had raised the possibility of an investment in the TFFF.

“I think today, for the first time, China gave a stronger, firmer indication that it understands the TFFF model and is comfortable with it,” Durigan was quoted as saying. “There has been a positive signal,” he added. “Now we will work with his team to turn that into concrete commitments.”

Larsen of the Rainforest Foundation Norway said there is also hope that Middle Eastern countries, more European nations and the European Union could contribute. The UAE has expressed interest in the fund, and has provided technical assistance for its development.

Consolidating the fund

João Paulo de Resende, TFFF leader at Brazil’s Ministry of Finance, told Climate Home News that Brazil’s priority for 2026, as co-chairs of the fund with Norway, is to consolidate its governing structure. This includes developing an operations manual, a Facility charter and a secretariat hosted at the World Bank.

“The transition from a Brazil-led proposal to a shared international platform is already well underway and is reflected in the initiative’s governance structure and growing coalition of supporters,” he said, adding that the focus is now on building “collective leadership” that can last in the long term.

One the financing side, he said Brazil will “continue engaging bilaterally with sponsor countries” to help reach the $10 billion target by the end of 2026.

Following a recent investor retreat in Rotterdam attended by government officials and private investors, a group of 12 financial institutions – including UK-based Ashmore Group and Dutch firm Robeco – endorsed the fund as an “opportunity to support the protection of up to a billion hectares of tropical forests”.

They added that the fund’s seed capital from governments is “building momentum” and that the TFFF has put in place a “robust institutional governance” that can deliver results in the long term.

Economic value for standing forests

Details of how the TFFF will work are being finalised in an attempt to encourage investment.

Earlier this month, it was announced that its investment arm (the Tropical Forest Investment Fund – TFIF) would be based in Luxembourg. The European financial hub said it will provide €50 million ($57m) to the TFIF through its Climate and Energy Fund between 2026 and 2030, after which it will “maintain a long-term annual contribution”.

The Norwegian government has tasked a veteran of its sovereign wealth fund, Knut N. Kjaer, with reviewing the TFFF’s financial model.

At Kew Gardens last week, the head of the Brazilian forest service Garo Batmanian said the TFFF and other measures are needed so that standing forests are economically valued and therefore protected.

“There is no chainsaw-wielding maniac out there cutting down trees out of pleasure,” he said. “He’s cutting down trees because he thinks he can get more money using the land for something else, so it’s not only about stopping deforestation but also promoting that the standing forest has value.”

This story was edited to add comments by João Paulo de Resende

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Lake Atitlán is one of Central America’s most critical local sources of drinking water, and is surrounded by volcanoes, a thriving tourism industry and an ancient Mayan culture. The Sololá region has long been home to Indigenous communities who have been attracted to its fertile land and pristine natural resources. 

But in recent years, this site of natural beauty in Guatemala’s highlands has had to contend with the growing impacts of the climate and nature crises. Climate change is disrupting the rain cycle and significant areas of land show signs of erosion and loss of soil fertility. These changes are threatening crop production and pushing local people into food insecurity. 

Elena Wason, co-executive director at Natün, a local non-profit supporting Indigenous people, told Climate Home News that community leaders have “identified deforestation and the effects of climate change in their communities as among their greatest concerns”. Forest cover declined by an estimated 12% in the past two years alone.

Women are often the social group most exposed to these changes and Natün has focused its efforts on reviving Indigenous agriculture techniques in a bid to improve climate resilience and empower female farmers.

How to fight drought

The impacts of climate change on Indigenous communities can often lead to further environmental damage as farmers are forced to rely on unsustainable practices, such as cutting down trees to clear more land. This can accelerate water scarcity, soil erosion and ultimately food insecurity. 

Giving nature breathing room builds climate resilience

An ongoing adaptation project led by Natün has sought to reverse these impacts, working with local people to combine modern climate-smart agriculture and ancestral knowledge. The approach involves the use of drought-resistant crops, organic pest management and soil conservation techniques. This is increasingly recognised as an effective way to strengthen climate resilience. 

“Our approach is based on soil analysis and the use of locally resilient, endemic tree species, significantly increasing survival rates and ensuring sustainable water availability despite changing rainfall patterns,” Wason explained.

A US$170,000 grant from the Adaptation Fund-UNDP innovation platform (through the AFCIA programme) also allowed it to scale. For example, Natün established over 300 family food gardens – small spaces with shared resources that focus on growing nutrient-rich crops.

The project was built for the long-term by embedding innovation within Indigenous knowledge systems, organic farming and Mayan land stewardship rather than imposing external solutions. In this way, it ensures that communities remain the architects of their own resilience. Diversified revenue streams, including carbon credits and replicable learning kits, further support its longevity.

Nearly all of the typical Mayan gardens are managed by women, with the project training up to 30 women in climate-resilient practices, such as seed bank management. The approach has paid dividends by bolstering local food security and providing almost 19,000 people with sustainable food sources.

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“The project uses locally led innovation by helping to restore sustainable Indigenous Mayan practices, while empowering vulnerable communities and women to build resilience and adapt to climate change and bolster food security,” said Mikko Ollikainen, head of the Adaptation Fund. 

“Community-led approaches like these can have profound positive impacts on the directly affected communities and beyond by creating practical scalable solutions,” he added.

Growing incomes

The programme was expanded in 2025 with the creation of over 260 small poultry farms, further diversifying family incomes. The early results have been positive: two-thirds of families with both a garden and poultry now have surplus produce and incomes that have grown by an estimated $61 per month.

“These impacts especially benefit women, who not only make up 75% of programme participants and have taken leadership roles in managing community gardens, but also generally take on the responsibility of providing nutritious food for their families,” said Wason. 

The project follows an earlier $5.4 million activity in Guatemala, also funded by the Adaptation Fund, that focused on honey bee production, forest conservation and ancestral knowledge across Suchitepéquez and Sololá. The aim was to empower vulnerable communities and Indigenous populations to adapt to floods and landslides, while enhancing diverse production landscapes and livelihoods. 

Advancing women’s rights and empowerment in climate adaptation

That project resulted in 6,093 hectares under forest management and conservation, nearly 1,500 beehives in operation, and 328 family gardens with the purpose of helping women adapt. Utilising such ancestral practices have helped to increase agricultural resilience in the Nahualate River basin, benefiting some 1,125 people.

Enduring benefits

The long-term benefits of the Lake Atitlán project will be in providing communities, especially women, with practical tools to respond to the environmental challenges of drought, storms and deforestation in the Sololá region. These challenges are becoming more pronounced as the climate becomes more extreme and unpredictable.

Guatemala is ranked among the most exposed countries to climate risk. The World Bank estimates that up to 83% of its GDP is generated in areas prone to disasters. As such, it is not only the people around Lake Atitlán who stand to benefit from sustainable farming techniques.

The Natün project is easily replicable by harnessing local knowledge and offering a practical model that can be adapted across Indigenous communities facing similar climate pressures. In a country with an Indigenous population of over 6 million people, this approach will be of importance to many other communities as they face similar existential crises in a warming world.

Adam Wentworth is a freelance journalist based in Brighton, UK.

The post In Guatemala, Indigenous women build climate resilience with old and new farming methods appeared first on Climate Home News.

Following tense negotiations between its government shareholders, the global lender announced this week it would extend its Climate Change Action Plan (CCAP) while “retiring” its commitment to direct 45% of its financing to projects with climate benefits – a target it has already met.

“It could have been a lot worse,” said Danny Scull, a senior policy advisor at think-tank E3G. “I would have loved to see the most ambitious outcome possible, but it is far less likely we’ll see a scenario where the bank all of a sudden reverses its current trajectory and starts delivering less on climate,” he added. 

Introduced in 2021, the CCAP has been credited with overhauling the World Bank’s approach to climate finance after years of criticism over the development finance institution’s lukewarm support for cutting planet-heating emissions and building resilience to extreme weather and rising seas.

Since the CCAP began, the World Bank’s climate finance nearly doubled to $39.2 billion in 2025, with 48% of its financing showing climate “co-benefits” and exceeding the target first set at COP28. 

US attack partially rebuffed

With the CCAP due to lapse at the end of June, the US – the World Bank’s largest shareholder – mounted a campaign for the lender to axe the programme entirely. Last April, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent publicly welcomed the plan’s upcoming expiration, urging the bank to “shift its myopic focus on climate” and abandon its “distortionary” 45% climate finance target. 

But Washington was left increasingly isolated during protracted negotiations in recent months as both European governments and a wide-ranging coalition of developing countries held firm on the plan’s extension, sources with knowledge of the discussions told Climate Home News.

In May, executive directors representing a bloc of nearly 100 countries, including China, Brazil, Saudi Arabia and Russia, sent a letter to the World Bank’s board requesting the CCAP be extended and calling for an independent review of the programme.

While the US had previously seemed unwilling to compromise with its European counterparts, that intervention got it to “back off from its most extreme positions”, E3G’s Scull said.

Focus on “outcomes”

In its statement on Monday, the World Bank Group said it would place less weight on the amount of money flowing into projects with climate benefits and shift its focus to “outcomes”, including indicators such as greenhouse gas emissions avoided and the number of people better shielded from climate risks.

The UK’s international development minister, Jenny Chapman, said in a post on LinkedIn this week that the extension of the CCAP is “a critical step forward”, adding that the stronger emphasis on results “is essential to ensure maximum impact, and the UK will hold the Bank to account to ensure delivery”.

Despite ditching its headline goal, the international lender is still expected to keep counting the volumes of climate finance for the vast majority of its activities. That’s because the individual entities belonging to the group continue to have their own climate targets embedded in their current mandates. 

World Bank climate funding greens African hotels while fishermen sink

For example, the International Development Association (IDA), which supports the world’s poorest nations, has committed to providing 45% of its funding to climate-related activities until 2028. And its larger lending arm, the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), should keep aiming for 30% of its financing to have climate benefits. 

Joe Thwaites, a climate finance expert at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), said these targets “can be a backstop against the bottom falling out”. “Client countries are emphasising that they want to see more investments in clean energy and resilience,” he added. 

No major change expected

The World Bank’s provision of climate finance is also crucial for wealthy countries’ efforts to meet a commitment to provide $300 billion a year for developing countries by 2035 under the new UN climate goal agreed at COP29 in 2024. 

That year, multilateral development banks (MDBs) accounted for around half of all climate finance provided by developed countries under the previous $100-billion-a-year goal, according to calculations by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. 

UK development minister Chapman said this week that the bank “must continue to meet the expectations of the wider international community, including those set out at COP29”. There, MDBs said that by 2030, their annual joint climate financing for low- and middle-income countries would reach an estimated $120 billion.

Fractious COP29 lands $300bn climate finance goal, dashing hopes of the poorest

Rajneesh Bhuee, just transition lead at campaign group Recourse, said it was a “blow” that the World Bank’s headline target had been dropped, but she doesn’t expect to see climate financing reducing – at least in the short term. 

“This is the [bank] management’s way of alleviating pressure from the US and ensuring they can have some sort of calm internally,” she told Climate Home News.

Thwaites said shareholder countries should hold the bank’s leadership accountable for delivering what countries have “agreed and need” on climate action.

“If World Bank climate finance does start to fall, donors should focus their support on other international financial institutions that continue to prioritise climate,” he added.

IMF also steps back from climate focus

Regional development banks outside of the Americas may be under less pressure to water down their climate mission. But the World Bank’s sister institution – the International Monetary Fund (IMF) – has seen its enthusiasm for climate action ebb, according to a report released in June by its official watchdog, the Independent Evaluation Office.

The report said that in 2021, the fund placed great emphasis on tackling climate change, as shown by its flagship climate strategy published that year and the establishment of the Resilience and Security Trust in 2022.

But in the last year or so, it found “decreasing emphasis on climate-related issues” which coincided with IMF cost-cutting, “emerging geopolitical challenges” and reduced support for climate action from some unnamed IMF member countries.

Last year, US finance minister Bessent accused the IMF of “mission creep”, accusing it of spending too much time on climate action, gender and social issues. 

As Nigeria rails at loss and damage “mirage”, fund boss assures money is coming

The evaluation report found that the focus on climate change among the IMF’s management and executive board has weakened, and its flagship reports have not included any climate-related chapters since 2023. IMF head Kristalina Georgieva and other managers mentioned climate-related terms in speeches and statements to the board far less in 2025 than the preceding years, it noted. 

While most of the nearly 700 IMF’s staff surveyed welcomed the swing away from climate work, others bemoaned it and felt “self censored” when working to promote awareness of the risks of climate change to the global economy – which the IMF is tasked with protecting.

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