Monday’s approval follows similar green lights for airport expansion given by the previous centre-right government – and goes against the firm advice of the UK’s official climate change advisory body, as well as opposition from climate campaigners and East Londoners concerned about noise and carbon pollution.

The Climate Change Committee said last June that “there should be no net airport expansion across the UK” and “no airport expansions should proceed until a UK-wide capacity management framework is in place”. A spokesperson told Climate Home this remains the committee’s position.

But, approving the London City expansion, Labour ministers Angela Rayner and Louise Haigh said in a statement that the lifting of the cap from 6.5 million to 9 million passengers a year would bring more jobs and tourists to London and boost business productivity. They added that the expansion would not conflict with the government’s “Jet Zero Strategy” – to clean up aviation – nor prevent the UK from meeting its 2050 net zero target because the additional emissions would not be significant.

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Climate campaigners said the move highlights the flaws of the UK’s airport planning policy and its Jet Zero Strategy, which aims to cut emissions from aviation with cleaner fuels, carbon offsets and carbon dioxide (CO2) removal machines while passenger numbers increase by about half between 2018 and 2050.

Other bigger London airports – including Heathrow, Gatwick, Luton and Stansted – are also considering expansion or seeking permission to expand.

For the London City decision, ministers relied heavily on advice from two planning inspectors – Claire Searson and Johanna Ayres. The inspectors concluded that, according to the Jet Zero Strategy, the emissions from airport expansions can be “accommodated within the planned trajectory for achieving net zero emissions by 2050” and therefore “our planning policy frameworks remain compatible with the UK’s climate change obligations”.

The Jet Zero Strategy was published by the last Conservative government in July 2022. It aims to reach net zero in the aviation sector by 2050 – a goal it says is “hugely challenging”.

In a world first, Grenada activates debt pause after Hurricane Beryl destruction

Alethia Warrington, a climate campaigner at an NGO called Possible, told Climate Home the UK was “ahead of the curve” compared to other countries in setting this target but that its projections for passenger growth were “incredibly dangerous”. Possible is challenging the strategy in court. Greenpeace campaigner Paul Morozzo said the strategy was built on “false hope”.

The plan does not include any measures to limit the number of flights or the capacity of airports, allowing planning inspectors and ministers to conclude that airport expansions are not counter to the strategy.

Instead, it plans to achieve just under half of the sector’s emissions reductions by buying carbon offsets. But many carbon offsets – where the buyer pays someone else to reduce emissions on their behalf – have been found not to deliver the emissions savings they claim.

The Jet Zero Strategy plans to get about a quarter of the emissions cuts needed from fuel efficiency improvements, another quarter from “sustainable aviation fuels” (SAFs) and a small amount from zero-emission aircraft.

Many airlines are buying more fuel-efficient aircraft, shaving a chunk off their planet-heating pollution. But the viability and sustainability of SAFs has been challenged by campaigners, regulators and even airline executives.

Currently, the only non-fossil fuel commercially available for planes is made from biomass, turning crops like corn, soy and oil palm, or used cooking oil, into jet fuel.

But there is nowhere near enough of this being produced to meet demand. Ryanair CEO Michael O’Leary said in December “there isn’t enough cooking oil in the world to power more than one day’s aviation”. As a result, SAF is currently more than four times as expensive as regular oil-based jet fuel.

Biofuels also often compete with food crops, worsening hunger and encouraging deforestation. The UK’s advertising regulator recently ruled that airline Virgin Atlantic should not have told customers it flew a plane on “100% sustainable aviation fuel” because it gave the misleading impression that the fuel was entirely green.

Andrew Symes is the CEO of a company called OXCCU which has just started producing tiny test quantities of SAF in a container next to Oxford Airport in England. Earlier this month, he told journalists visiting the site that SAFs based on biofuel alone would not be sufficient, so his company is developing a SAF that mixes carbon dioxide and green hydrogen.

OXCCU CEO Andrew Symes holds up his company’s catalyst and SAF at its new test plant in Oxford (Photo: OXCCU)

But Symes acknowledged that the fuel is “not perfect”, as the CO2 will be bought from industry – and burning it will damage the planet. But, he said, it still offers a “huge emission saving” compared to conventional jet fuel, and could be made carbon neutral by capturing the emitted CO2 from the atmosphere.

Producing it in this carbon-neutral way, however, would require huge numbers of CO2 removal machines, as well as solar panels and wind turbines to produce the renewable electricity needed to make green hydrogen, he noted.

He predicted this kind of fuel would be used in planes in small quantities towards the end of the decade and could be scaled up from there. But Possible’s Warrington disputed that assertion.

“The idea that we can magic up this gigantic renewable capacity to produce e-fuel so a small group of wealthy frequent flyers never have to take the train – it’s just not doable,” she said. Warrington predicted it would be a “fairly sizable number of decades” before zero-carbon flights are common.

Even if all the emissions reduction measures outlined in the UK Jet Zero Strategy’s high-ambition scenario are successful, it still envisions aviation producing 19 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent a year in 2050 – about half the current level.

It plans to address these left-over emissions through CO2 removals, but Warrington is sceptical. “There’s no payment mechanism for this. It would be horrendously expensive. It would be extremely resource-intensive,” she said. “It just doesn’t stack up at all.”

(Reporting by Joe Lo; editing by Megan Rowling)

The post London airport expansion spotlights danger of “false hope” Jet Zero strategy appeared first on Climate Home News.

Winds of up to 240 kilometres per hour flattened entire neighbourhoods and toppled power and communication lines, causing damage equivalent to a third of the country’s annual economic output, according to early government estimates.

Many Grenadians cast their minds back 20 years when a similarly powerful storm – Hurricane Ivan – brought the island state to its knees, triggering a vicious circle of financial distress that eventually led to a debt default.

But, unlike in 2004, officials this time could deploy a tool that has been widely discussed in climate circles to provide financial help in the wake of fierce storms: hurricane clauses built into its agreements with international creditors.

Grenada last week became the first country in the world to use such a provision in a government bond which will allow it to postpone debt repayments to private investors, including US investment firms Franklin Templeton and T. Rowe Price.

Switzerland and Canada propose ways to expand climate finance donors

The move will save the Caribbean island nation a total of around $30 million in payments due this November and in May next year. While the money owed will be added to future bills, in the meantime the cash injection will help fund immediate recovery efforts and keep essential services like healthcare and education running, a senior official in Grenada’s Ministry of Finance told Climate Home.

The government is now “in talks” about triggering similar clauses with other creditors.

Fighting the debt trap

Grenada’s use of debt suspension clauses will be seen as a litmus test for their effectiveness in shoring up disaster-hit economies, as major international financial institutions like the World Bank promise to offer them more widely to climate-vulnerable countries.

Mike Sylvester, permanent secretary at Grenada’s Ministry of Finance, told Climate Home the debt repayment pause can have a “significant” impact in the short term, giving “some breathing space to the government to be able to properly and adequately respond to the crisis”.

Without this option and other relief measures, the government may have struggled to meet basic needs without making painful cuts to services, he added.

Simon Stiell, the head of the UN Climate Change body (UNFCCC), told Climate Home that “mechanisms such as this will be increasingly important as the scale, frequency and impacts of climate disasters continue to worsen”. Last month Stiell saw first hand the scale the devastation Hurricane Beryl inflicted on his home island of Carriacou – part of Grenada – where 98% of homes and buildings had been destroyed or severely damaged.

Like Grenada, many developing nations are finding it hard to deal with the combined effect of rising debt and worsening climate impacts.

Nearly half of low-income countries currently experiencing or at high risk of debt distress are also highly vulnerable to the effects of climate change, according to a March 2023 report by the UN Trade and Development agency (UNCTAD).

A separate analysis by charity Debt Justice found that debt payments for the most climate-vulnerable countries have reached their highest level in at least 30 years.

Emily Wilkinson, a senior research fellow at think-tank ODI, said that when a natural disaster hits a highly debt-distressed country, the impact on the economy is likely to prompt a default unless there are safeguards in place or the debt can be renegotiated quickly.

Disaster clauses in spotlight

Debt suspension clauses have risen to the top of the agenda since they were featured among the key recommendations put forward by Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley in her Bridgetown Agenda, a vision for reforming the global financial architecture and making it fit for a world grappling with rising climate pressures.

The World Bank expanded the scope of its climate-resilient debt clauses last year. Pauses on repayments of all new and existing loans, and related interest payments, are now being offered to 45 states it classes as “small” including island nations.

Other international development lenders, like the African Development Bank, the Inter American Development Bank and the UK Export Finance, have introduced similar options.

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For Marina Zucker-Marques, an economist and senior researcher with the Boston University Global Development Policy Center, temporary debt suspensions are an important tool that gives disaster-hit countries “some breathing space, allowing them to prioritise social spending, which is critical in the immediate aftermath of a natural disaster”.

But while these clauses have become more popular, they are still “a tiny fraction of debt contracts,” she added.

The lesson of 2004

Grenada is among a handful of countries that have pioneered the inclusion of hurricane clauses in their loan agreements dating back nearly a decade.

After the devastating experience of Hurricane Ivan in 2004 and a subsequent default, the island nation insisted on including such provisions in 2015 when it restructured debt with its main creditors, international private bondholders and the Exim Bank of the Republic of China (Taiwan).

One of the main challenges during the extended negotiations was to settle on specific parameters that would allow Grenada to trigger the clause in the event of a severe storm. These could be the wind-speed or the size of the economic losses caused by the disaster.

In the end, Grenada and its creditors agreed that a payout from the Caribbean Catastrophe Risk Insurance Facility (CCRIF), a regional disaster insurance fund Grenada is part of, for losses over $15 million would be the trigger.

After the passage of Hurricane Beryl, CCRIF has made a record $44 million insurance payout to Grenada as a result of the extensive damages to the islands. This enabled the government to activate its debt suspension clauses.

The aftermath of the devastating passage of Hurricane Beryl on the island of Petite Martinique, Grenada in July 2024. REUTERS/Arthur Daniel

Sylvester from Grenada’s Ministry of Finance said the country is now much better prepared to deal with the financial aftershocks of a hurricane, having learned the lesson of the events in 2004 – but more needs to be done.

“The money that we’ve received so far is still a drop in the bucket, given our significant needs,” he added. “We need to continue to build our resilience with the right financial tools, because we don’t want to pile up our debt just to reconstruct damaged infrastructure.”

Grants and debt relief

To that end, the government has set up a disaster relief fund, while looking to repurpose some of its loans and obtain new financial help from multilateral banks.

Boston University’s Zucker-Marques said support from rich countries, which are major contributors to climate change through their historically high greenhouse gas emissions, is fundamental to prevent financial crisis in developing countries on the frontline of extreme weather.

“Climate vulnerable countries need access to more grants and affordable long-term finance to invest in resilient infrastructure and economies,” she said. “Otherwise, the vicious cycle of natural disasters and financial instability will only worsen in the years to come.”

ODI’s Wilkinson said pausing countries’ debt is helpful, but she called for further action from creditors. “In the case of a qualifying disaster, they should offer some form of debt relief on repayments rather than just delaying them – which only kicks the can down the road,” she added.

The article was updated on 23/8 to add a comment from UNFCCC chief Simon Stiell received after publication.

(Reporting by Matteo Civillini; editing by Megan Rowling)

The post In a world first, Grenada activates debt pause after Hurricane Beryl destruction appeared first on Climate Home News.

Most developing countries offer a straightforward answer: keep the status quo, meaning only the countries classified as industrialised when the UN climate treaty was adopted in 1992.

But this club of developed nations, vocally led by the European Union and the United States, argues that the world has changed dramatically over the past three decades.

They now want other countries that have become wealthier – and more polluting – to pitch in for the post-2025 New Collective Quantified Goal (NCQG), set to be agreed at the COP29 climate summit in Baku this November.

China targeted

The EU wrote this week, in a document submitted as part of the NCQG negotiations, that “the collective goal can only be reached if parties with high [greenhouse gas]-emissions and economic capabilities join the effort”.

The US echoed that position in its latest submission, arguing that “those with the capacity to support others” in pursuing action to cut emissions and boost climate resilience “must also be accountable” for delivering on the climate finance target.

But, as governments polish their arguments ahead of the next round of talks in mid-September, climate finance experts warn of an uphill battle to get everyone to agree to a fair and accurate way to broaden the donor base.

FAO draft report backs growth of livestock industry despite emissions

For instance, as the world’s top polluter and the second-largest economy, China is the primary target of the finger-pointing. But, when the country’s emissions and wealth are divided by its enormous population, China does not rank among the main candidates for an expanded contributors’ pool, according to climate finance studies.

At annual climate talks in the German city of Bonn in June, China’s negotiator reacted angrily at suggestions his country should become a donor. “We have no intention to make your number look good or be part of your responsibility as we are doing all we can to save the world,” he said.

Who pays?

Switzerland and Canada have been the first nations to propose precise criteria to expand the list of contributors beyond developed countries.

The Swiss negotiators pitched two detailed metrics in their latest submission early this month.

The first would target the ten largest current emitters of carbon dioxide that also have a gross national income (GNI) per capita – adjusted for purchasing power parity – of more than $22,000.

Under this measure, Saudi Arabia and Russia would be included. China would too if it is calculated based on current international dollars, which Climate Home understands would be the Swiss intention, even though the proposal does not specify.

But China would be excluded if GNI per capita were based on constant 2021 international dollars, highlighting the ambiguity of the proposals at this point.

Populous nations with large absolute emissions like India, Indonesia, Brazil and Iran would be left out because the average wealth of their residents falls below the threshold, according to World Bank data.

Similarly, Canada’s proposal – released last Friday after this article was first published – singles out the top ten emitters but with a slightly lower GNI per capita threshold of $20,000. In this case, China would be included whichever GNI calculation is used.

The second category in the Swiss proposal targets countries that have cumulative past and current CO2 emissions per capita of at least 250 tonnes and a purchasing power parity-adjusted gross national income per capita of more than $40,000.

Assuming the Swiss proposal means emissions starting in 1990, then fossil fuel-producers in the Gulf like Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain would be included, alongside South Korea, Singapore, Israel, Czechia and Poland.

But climate finance experts told Climate Home they are sceptical such strict criteria will work at the negotiating table and make it into a final decision.

“Discussing thresholds and indicators is a technical and politically charged issue, and it will be very difficult to get everyone to agree on them,” Laetitia Pettinotti, a research fellow at ODI, told Climate Home. She added that countries need to be encouraged to consider whether their emissions and GNI per capita are similar to those of developed countries, while also taking into account their climate vulnerability.

Pieter Pauw, assistant professor at the Eindhoven University of Technology, said the current system is “outdated and increasingly dysfunctional”, but the focus should be on making it less rigid rather than finding “arbitrary” ways to add more countries to a list.

Pauw is the co-author of a new study looking at options to increase the number of climate finance providers.

New “net recipients” category

The paper found that several developing countries, including China, Saudi Arabia and Russia, have shown appetite to finance multilateral development funds, such as the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, but not those dedicated to climate action.

“It’s because the climate discourse is so politicised now,” Pauw said. “They are afraid that agreeing to contribute to a climate finance goal would set a precedent and burden them with more responsibilities.”

“It is important to find a way to have them join the ‘contributors club’ without putting a stamp on them and saying ‘OK, now you’re on the same level as developed countries’,” he added.

The study suggests one way out of the deadlock: instead of labelling countries rigidly as pure providers or recipients of climate aid, a third category of “net recipients” could be created. These would be nations that make financial contributions of any amount, while also being able to receive money at the same time.

“This compromise would allow countries to maintain their ‘developing’ status that gives them a right to receive finance where it is needed,” said Pauw. “But it also incentivises them to play a more proactive role that better reflects their new capabilities and responsibilities.”

Better transparency

A separate study by UK think-tank ODI suggests that many developing countries are voluntarily providing climate aid to fellow developing states, but their contributions go unrecognised at the moment because of a lack of transparency.

For example, China contributed over $10 billion in climate finance through its contributions to multilateral development banks and funds between 2015 and 2022, according to a newly updated ODI analysis shared with Climate Home and due to be released in early September.

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Pettinotti thinks that the donor base could be expanded by recognising these contributions and bringing them to the surface through a better reporting system.

“There is not going to be coercion – that is just not going to work,” she told Climate Home. “Making space for a bottom-up, self-determined position is all we can do to encourage more countries to contribute.”

Developing-world opposition

Many developing countries have opposed any official discussion over an expansion of the donor base in the talks so far, claiming that is not part of the NCQG working group’s mandate. They have also complained that, while fixating on this issue, developed countries have failed to put forward proposals on other key elements of the NCQG, such as the size of the funding target.

Avantika Goswami, climate lead at the Delhi-based Centre for Science and Environment, told Climate Home that developed countries have “a moral imperative” to provide climate finance because of their historically high emissions over the past century.

“The contributor-base expansion debate cannot be resolved within the narrow timeline of November 2024 when the NCQG is due to be decided”, she added. “Pushing for this expansion as a bargaining chip will only derail constructive discussions.”

This article was updated on 19/8 to include a proposal by Canada released after the article had been first published. It was also updated to remove a reference to Bermuda as a potential donor, as it is a British overseas territory. 

(Reporting by Matteo Civillini; editing by Joe Lo and Megan Rowling)

The post Switzerland and Canada propose ways to expand climate finance donors appeared first on Climate Home News.

Former and current FAO officials and academics have criticised the document, seen by Climate Home News, for pro-industry bias, cherry-picking data and even “disinformation” about the environmental impacts of animal farming. 

The FAO told Climate Home that a final version of the report – part of an assessment consisting of various documents – would be launched in 2025 and that conclusions should not be drawn from the draft text at this stage. 

Estimates of livestock’s contribution to greenhouse gas emissions vary, ranging from 12%-20% of the global total – mostly in the form of methane from ruminants like cows and sheep, and carbon dioxide (CO2) released when forests are cut down for pasture.  

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Methane, which is emitted in cow burps and manure, is a short-lived greenhouse gas that is 84 times more potent than CO2 over 20 years, making it one of the few available levers to prevent climate tipping points being reached in the near term.   

In a 2024 survey of more than 200 scientists and sustainable agriculture experts, about 78% said livestock numbers should peak globally by 2025 to start bringing down emissions and help keep global warming to internationally agreed limits.   

But the FAO’s draft study offers strong support for growth of the sector, saying livestock’s contributions to food security, nutrition and raw materials for industry make it a “linchpin for human well-being and economic development”.  

It is also described as “critical” for food security, “crucial” for global economies, and “indispensable” for development in sub-Saharan Africa.  

World Bank tiptoes into fiery debate over meat emissions

The report will be submitted to the FAO’s agriculture committee, which has 130 member nations, although the text could change as national representatives thrash out a final version. 

Private-sector lobbyists participating as advisors in national delegations are sometimes also able to influence texts under discussion, according to a July report by the Changing Markets Foundation. 

One FAO insider, who did not want to be named, told Climate Home the draft FAO report had been “biased towards pushing livestock [with] many national interests behind it”.   

The FAO receives around a third of its budget in direct donations from member countries, and the rest in voluntary contributions from the same states and other actors, including businesses and trade associations.   

Tech fixes  

The 491-page draft report, which was overseen by a scientific advisory committee of 23 experts and peer reviewers, does not assess how diets with more plant protein could improve food security.   

One advisory committee member, Professor Frederic Leroy of Vrije Universiteit Brussel, told Climate Home a shift to entirely plant-based diets “would severely compromise the potential for food security worldwide because many of the food nutrients which are already limited in global diets are found in livestock. How much you can move (away from livestock) should be the real investigation.” 

This table from a World Bank report (Recipe for a Livable Planet), published in May 2024, shows that vegan diets are the lowest in emissions (Screenshot/World Bank)

The report’s analysis assumes rising meat production as demand surges among a growing world population with higher incomes. In this context, it proposes “expanding the (livestock) herd size”, increasing production through intensified systems, better use of genetic techniques, and improved land management.   

“Technological innovations” such as feed additives and supplements to suppress methane are another idea backed by the FAO. Those could include experimental methods such as a vaccine announced last week and funded by a $9-million grant from the Bezos Earth Fund that aims to reduce the number and activity of methane-producing microbes in a cow’s stomach.    

Herdsman Musa takes cattle to graze along the Dodowa-Somenya road in Ghana, April 12, 2024. According to environmentalist Kwame Ansah, ‘The unchecked grazing is not only destroying crops but also eroding soil fertility exacerbating land degradation.’ (Photo: Matrix Images/Christian Thompson/via Reuters)

The report’s findings, once approved, will be fed into a three-part roadmap for bringing agricultural emissions in line with the Paris Agreement goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.  

The first instalment, published at the COP28 climate summit, was viewed internally by some FAO experts as a generic placeholder which largely followed an industry-friendly agenda.    

One ex-FAO official, who requested anonymity, told Climate Home the latest draft report on livestock ploughs a similar furrow and would set expectations for part two of the 1.5C roadmap.   

“The reality is that if they do a (nearly) 500-page report and put 23 experts’ names in front of it, it’s to impress you and say: ‘This is what is going to happen. We’re going to defend the sector’,” the former UN official said.  

Making the case for meat 

The expert added that the study’s panel was skewed toward intensified livestock systems and had “cherry picked” evidence to justify recommendations pointing in that direction.  

Several of the report’s advisory committee members have previously advocated for meat-based diets, and 11 of the study’s contributors work for the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), including one of the paper’s committee advisors.

According to the ex-FAO official, ILRI “has been pushing intensified livestock all its life. It’s their identity. It’s what they do.”

The institute co-founded an agribusiness-backed initiative – Pathways to Dairy Net Zero (P2DNZ) – which de-emphasised livestock emissions, framing them as just one of several problems for the industry to tackle.

ILRI did not respond to a request for comment.

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Shelby C. McClelland, of New York University’s Center for Environmental and Animal Protection, told Climate Home she was shocked by a repeated claim in the draft FAO report of “a lack of consensus among scientists regarding the contribution of livestock to global greenhouse gas emissions”.  

“This downplays and outright ignores overwhelming scientific evidence from the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change], high-profile papers, and other recent studies,” McClelland said. “A statement like this in a supposedly scientific and evidenced-based review by the UN FAO is alarming given their influence on agenda-setting for global climate action.”

Advisory committee member Leroy countered that it was “dangerous” to talk about a scientific consensus when the metrics used to measure methane compared to other greenhouse gases are constantly evolving.  

“This should be part of an open and transparent debate,” he added. “I don’t think we have reached consensus on the way we interpret the effects of livestock agriculture on climate change, the degree of it, how we can measure it and how we can deal with it.” 

Scientists at the FAO first alerted the world to the meat industry’s climate footprint when they attributed 18% of global emissions to livestock farming in the seminal 2006 study, Livestock’s Long Shadow. This analysis found that, far from enhancing food security, “livestock actually detract more from total food supply than they provide.”  

However, the paper sparked a backlash felt by key experts in the agency’s Rome headquarters, as the FAO hierarchy, industry lobbyists and state donors to its biannual $1-billion budget exerted pressure for a change of direction.      

By the time of last December’s COP28, the FAO’s stance had shifted so far that two experts cited in another livestock emissions study called publicly for its retraction. They argued it had distorted their work and underestimated the emissions reduction potential from farming less livestock by a factor of between 6 and 40. 

A deforested and burnt area is seen in an indigenous area used as cattle pasture in Areoes, Mato Grosso state, Brazil, September 4, 2019. (Photo: REUTERS/Lucas Landau)

No ‘carte blanche’ 

Guy Pe’er, a conservation ecologist at the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research and the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research, accused the FAO of turning a blind eye to widespread “hyper-intensive grazing practices” and land use change caused by the world’s growing number of mega-farms.

“We’re currently using more land to feed livestock than humans, and that is causing rapid deforestation in Brazil. Ignoring that is outrageous. When an official organisation is producing disinformation like this, I find it extremely irresponsible,” he said.  

Leroy told Climate Home that different types of livestock farming should not be conflated. “If you have over-grazing and the pollution of water sources, that’s clearly wrong, but other types of animal agriculture are also net-positive [for the environment],” he said.  

If the advisory committee “sees advantages in having livestock agriculture as part of the food system, I think there’s a sound scientific basis to assume that,” he added. “It doesn’t mean that it’s carte blanche or ‘anything goes’ at all.” 

(Reporting by Arthur Neslen; editing by Megan Rowling and Joe Lo)

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In a statement, Air New Zealand’s CEO Greg Foran said that because of delays to the delivery of more fuel-efficient aircraft and because “so many levers needed to meet the target are outside our control”, the airline was dropping its target and withdrawing from the Science-Based Targets initiative (SBTi), an influential non-governmental arbiter of corporate climate targets.

As several airlines have made similar targets for 2030 or 2035, the move has cast doubt on whether they can meet them. It has also raised difficult questions about the role of carbon offsets in decarbonising aviation, a sector that accounts for an estimated 2-3% of global emissions.

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Sustainability consultant and offset developer Chris Hocknell told Climate Home that Air New Zealand’s decision to leave SBTi shows that the body’s rules, particularly around offsets, are too harsh. He accused SBTi of “environmental zealotry”, a “lack of realism” and of not engaging with businesses trying to reduce their emissions.

But Thomas Day, a researcher at the New Climate Institute, said weakening SBTi’s rules to accommodate companies that are not aligned with the Paris Agreement goal of limiting global warming to 1.5C would “completely defeat the purpose of 1.5C validations”.

Dutch airline KLM has a similar target to the one Air New Zealand has just abandoned, which it plans to meet with more efficient aircraft and cleaner fuels. Their spokesperson told Climate Home that they “are sticking to that [target]” but “at the same time, we recognise that it is not easy to decarbonise aviation”.

While Air New Zealand’s Foran partly blamed delays to the delivery of more fuel-efficient aircraft for dropping the target, the KLM spokesperson said their deliveries of new aircraft which consume about a quarter less fuel per passenger-kilometre are “currently more or less on schedule”.

But, the spokesperson said, “we recognise the picture Air New Zealand paints regarding the availability and pricing of alternative jet fuel” and “would like to see even more being done from governments to encourage production”.

Not enough biofuels

While fuel-efficiency can shave a chunk off a plane’s emissions, the only way to fly a plane without producing emissions is to stop using fossil fuels to power them.

Currently, the only non-fossil-based fuel commercially available is made from biofuels, turning crops like corn, soy and oil palm or used cooking oil into jet fuel.

But there is not enough of this being produced to meet demand and, as a result, it is currently more than four times as expensive as regular oil-based jet fuel.

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Jonathan Lewis, transport lead at the Clean Air Task Force, told Climate Home that he doubts whether there will ever be enough of these biofuels produced to power the world’s planes. A recent report he co-authored found aviation will need about 40% more energy in 2030 than all the world’s biofuels will be able to supply.

It’s a concern shared by the CEO of RyanAir Michael O’Leary. He told the Guardian in December: ” I don’t see where we will get the supply in the volumes we need. You want everybody running around collecting fucking cooking oil? There isn’t enough cooking oil in the world to power more than one day’s aviation.”

Even if the world could produce enough biofuels, that is likely to come with bad environmental and social side-effects, as the growing of crops to fuel planes displaces crops for food and encourages the chopping down of forests.

Other options for cleanly powering planes are fuels based on green hydrogen and ammonia. But these fuels are in early stages of development and would require big changes to airport infrastructure and, for hydrogen, aircraft design.

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Airlines’ climate targets are all based on emissions per passenger and per kilometre so flying less won’t help them meet them, but it will reduce their and the world’s total emissions.

No airline has said it will reduce flights for climate reasons, so any pressure on that is likely to come from consumers and governments. France recently banned some short-haul domestic flights to howls of protest from the airline industry.

Offsets to fill the gap?

Another way for airlines to meet their climate targets is for them to buy carbon offsets. Lewis said that that was likely to be “a necessary part of decarbonising the aviation sector”.

While many airlines have bought offsets whose claims of emissions reduction are highly questionable, initiatives like the Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market are trying to improve the industry’s integrity.

But on the same day Air New Zealand announced it was leaving, the SBTi released the results of a consultation on the use of carbon offsets to meet climate targets.

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It found that the evidence it had reviewed “suggests that various types of carbon credits are ineffective” and “there could be clear risks to corporate use of carbon credits for the purpose of offsetting”.

This review, published by SBTi’s technical experts, struck a very different note to an earlier statement put out in April by the body’s board which said offsets “could function as an additional tool to tackle climate change” and “consequently, SBTi has decided to extend their use”.

That statement by the board prompted a revolt by staff, many of whom called on CEO Luiz Amaral to resign, which he did in July citing personal reasons.

Too strict or lax?

Hocknell accused SBTi’s technical experts of a “very puritanical approach” and said he hoped that SBTi’s pro-offsets elements won out in what he predicted would be a “big, big fight”.

Hundreds of companies have dropped out of SBTi after failing to follow through on a promise to set sufficiently ambitious climate targets. “If I get my crystal ball out, you’ll see hundreds more companies drop this before the end of the year,” said Hocknell.

Pollution clampdown on Delhi kilns threatens brick workers’ future

But New Climate Institute’s Thomas Day, who has accused SBTi of being too lax, told Climate Home “the purpose of the SBTi is to support the transformation of sectors and to offer a platform for companies who commit to this transformation.”

“It would completely defeat the purpose of 1.5C validations if the rules would be redefined to accommodate companies who are not willing or able to do so,” he added.

“If the technologies do not yet exist to put the aviation or oil and gas sectors on a 1.5C-aligned trajectory, then we need to recognise this and consider as a society how to address this, rather than moving the goalposts to pretend that everyone is on track,” Day said.

Pedro Martins Barata, the Environmental Defense Fund’s carbon markets lead, told Climate Home there were two ways of looking at Air New Zealand’s announcement.

One is that the airline set a target without measuring the consequences and “should get a reputational bad rap”. The other is that “in a voluntary system you need to walk players through how to increase their ambition over time and allow flexibility, or risk alienating corporate players and essentially becoming irrelevant in the process”.

“Are we better served by a small number of incredibly ambitious companies that can commit to far-reaching standards?” he asked, “or by having a much broader movement that can significantly impact climate change?”

“If you’re in the second camp,” he said, “you’d want Air New Zealand to do something even by purchasing good carbon credits, rather than simply walk away from it all.”

This article originally said incorrectly that Denmark had banned some short-haul flights.

(Reporting by Joe Lo; editing by Matteo Civillini)

The post As first airline drops goal, are aviation’s 2030 targets achievable without carbon offsets? appeared first on Climate Home News.

Majnu, 40, started labouring at the brick kiln in Uttar Pradesh’s Gautam Buddha Nagar district this year, when the previous one he worked at shut down after the government rolled out new rules – including a coal ban – to reduce heavy air pollution from the sector.

The green switch has been unaffordable for many kiln owners and has had a domino effect, with kilns closing one after the other in districts around the Indian capital.

“The kiln we were working at shut down and the owner sold his land to a builder,’’ said Majnu, adding that a house will be constructed there instead.

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Majnu had originally found work in the now closed kiln in the Ghaziabad district of Uttar Pradesh through a network of thekedars (contractors) back home, which helped him get his current job too.

“We did not lose a season of work when the kiln shut,” Majnu said. But there are concerns that things may become harder, with many labourers lacking access to social welfare.

Brick-making stops during the monsoon rains – when workers head home to their villages to work on the land, either on their own plots or as farmhands – and restarts at the end of the year.

Measures to ease air pollution

Brick kilns account for 6-7% of Delhi’s emissions of particulate matter, which contains black carbon (soot), according to government officials and researchers with India’s Centre for Science and Environment.

Since 2016, measures have been imposed on the kilns in stages, to cut pollution and help combat the capital’s toxic air. They include shifting the location of some kilns, mandating new, more energy-efficient technology, and last year banning the use of coal to fire the kilns.

Farm fields now line roads that cut through Ghaziabad district, in India’s Uttar Pradesh state, where brick kilns stood even until a few years ago, before many shut down due to new measures to cut air pollution. (Photo: Esha Roy/The Migration Story)

The effort is showing results alongside a range of other measures, with the air quality in Delhi having improved considerably. According to government data, the daily average air quality index in the capital fell from 225 in 2018 to 204 in 2023, showing lower levels of pollution.

But with no proper plans to help brick kiln owners and workers adjust to the changes in how they operate, the sector – which is among the country’s biggest employers, covering some 10 million workers – is floundering, labour rights experts and bosses said.

Unregistered workers

Saniya Anwar of non-profit The Climate Agenda, which advocates for a socially fair shift to clean energy, said most of the brick workers are unskilled, landless and change their phone numbers regularly, making it hard to register them.

“This in turn, means that they often fall outside the safety net of welfare schemes provided by the government for migrant workers,’’ Anwar added.

Like Majnu, Salam Hak, 29, also moved to Gautam Buddha Nagar when the kiln where he worked in Ghaziabad closed.

“We don’t have job cards (for work under the national rural employment guarantee scheme), so while we do daily wage (work) back home, it is not often easy to find,” Hak said.

“It’s the income from the kilns that sustains us through the year. There have been many kilns shutting, and we don’t know what will happen in the future – but we feel that there is no point worrying about it for now,’’ he said.

Hari Chand, 27 (first from left) and Shivam Rai 18 (second from left), hail from Chattarpur in Madhya Pradesh and work at a kiln in Uttar Pradesh’s Baghpat. While kiln owners in Baghpat said the sector is struggling with the new green norms, in this region, kilns have not shut down yet nor has labour been laid off. (Photo: Esha Roy/The Migration Story)

The 22 districts of the Delhi-National Capital Region are home to more than 3,800 brick kilns. Among these, Uttar Pradesh (UP) has the highest concentration of kilns at 2,062.

A state official working on pollution control said Ghaziabad is among the areas most affected by the green transition, with the number of kilns halving in the past six years, but there is no count of, or plan to support the workers who lose their jobs.

Another UP official in the labour department noted that brick kiln workers are seasonal rather than permanent and as such are not entitled to alternative government employment schemes that kick in when a factory shuts down, for example.

Excluded from state benefits

Living off agriculture alone would be tough for workers like Majnu and his family, who cultivate fields belonging to landlords and keep a portion of the crop, mostly rice paddy, as income.

“We are bhag chashis (landless farmers) back home, and we never make enough,’’ said Majnu, stacking the last lot of bricks next to mountains of agricultural waste being used to fire the Dankaur kilns.

“The earnings here (at kilns) are more than what we make back home, where we only get part of the crop to either consume or sell – whereas here, we make 600 rupees (around $7) per 1,000 bricks made and can make up to 1,200 rupees a day,’’ he said.

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The Building and Other Construction Workers (BoCW) Act of 1996 does include social security and welfare benefits for brick kiln workers, including scholarships, maternity benefits, marriage assistance, pensions, financial help for funeral services and food rations.

But labour experts say most brick kiln workers are not registered and therefore cannot access the benefits – neither have they been part of the energy transition conversation so far.

“The isolated nature of seasonal migrant workers at brick kilns is a major factor in preventing access to services, and makes them entirely dependent on the kiln owners,” said Ravi Srivastava, director of the Centre for Employment Studies at the Institute for Human Development.

The cost of going green

In Ghaziabad, a congested, booming industrial township 36 km from the capital, Ravinder Kumar Tewatia, former general secretary of the All India Bricks and Tile Manufacturers Federation, said 200 of 430 brick kilns have shut since 2018.

He closed the last of the four kilns he owned two years ago as norms got stricter and the business less profitable.

In 2016, the Environment Pollution (Prevention & Control) Authority gave all kilns in Ghaziabad a two-year period to switch to “zig zag” technology – an energy-efficient kiln design allowing chimneys to retain heat for longer.

Then, between 2022-2023, the Supreme Court ordered the annual period for manufacturing bricks to be cut from seven to four months and imposed the mandatory use of agricultural waste instead of coal to heat the kilns.

“Now you can’t get coal even if you want to,” Tewatia said, explaining that the main issue with farm waste – mainly wheat and mustard husks – is lower temperatures in the kilns where the clay bricks are hardened.

“As a result of this, the bricks that are being produced are of lower quality and more fragile,” he said.

Workers stack bricks at a kiln in Ghaziabad, Uttar Pradesh, as their shift comes to an end. (Photo: Esha Roy/The Migration Story)

Kiln owners said the shortened brick-baking season has impacted production volumes, hitting overall earnings. At the same time, falling brick quality has led to prices plunging by around half.

“We have been demanding that the government allow us to use a mix of coal and agricultural waste,’’ said Tewatia.

Pollution control board officials said the central government did provide alternatives, including biomass briquettes and compressed natural gas, but these also suffer from lower heat generation and gas is not suitable for use in most traditional kilns.

Farming fails to pay

The kilns have been a second home for Nidesh Kuma, 27, since he was a toddler, accompanying his parents to mould and shape bricks near Delhi, as frequent floods on the Ganges River prevents farming in their village.

For the past five years, Kumar has been “supplying” migrant workers from his Sambhal area of Uttar Pradesh to the Delhi region. This year, he placed 40 families in three kilns there, noting that his network is strong and extensive.

But with more brick kilns closing, the seasonal migration pattern has started to lose its appeal – and could be a sign of things to come, say labour rights campaigners.

“What can we do?” asked 55-year-old Laturi Singh, a brick-maker and labour contractor also from Sambhal.

“When the kilns shut down, most (workers) were absorbed at other kilns, but some have gone back to the villages and are working as daily wage workers earning 300 rupees a day, which is much less.”

(Reporting by Esha Roy; editing by Megan Rowling)

This article was first published by The Migration Story, India’s first newsroom to focus on the country’s vast internal migrant population.

Esha Roy is an independent journalist writing on issues of climate change, social development and government policy. Reporting for this story was supported by Buniyaad, a movement for a just transition in the brick kiln sector.

The post Pollution clampdown on Delhi kilns threatens brick workers’ future appeared first on Climate Home News.

At the COP28 climate summit in Dubai in 2023, nearly 200 countries committed to tripling global renewable energy capacity – measured as the maximum generating capacity of sources like wind, solar and hydro – by 2030, in an effort to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

According to figures published on Thursday by the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), renewables are the fastest-growing source of power worldwide, with new global renewable capacity in 2023 representing a record 14% increase from 2022.

But IRENA’s analysis found that even if renewables continue to be deployed at the current rate over the next seven years, the world will fall 13.5% short of the target to triple renewables to 11.2 terawatts.

A higher annual growth rate of at least 16.4% is required to reach the 2030 goal, IRENA said.

Renewable electricity generation by energy source

Chart courtesy of IRENA

IRENA Director-General Francesco La Camera warned against complacency. “Renewables must grow at higher speed and scale,” he said in a statement, calling for concrete policy action and a massive mobilisation of finance.

The United Arab Emirates’ COP28 President Sultan Al-Jaber called the report “a wake-up call for the entire world” and urged countries to add strong national energy targets to their updated national climate action plans (NDCs) due by early next year.

Geographical disparities

Bruce Douglas, CEO of the Global Renewables Alliance, a coalition of private-sector organisations working on renewable technologies, highlighted imbalances in the global picture of record renewables deployment.

“We shouldn’t be celebrating,” he said. “This growth is nowhere near enough and it’s not in the right places.

Africa saw only incremental growth of 3.5% in new renewables capacity last year compared with around 9% growth in Asia and North America, and 12% growth in South America.

And despite those higher increases in Asia and South America, data released last month by international policy group REN21 shows that less than 18% of renewables capacity added in 2023 was in Asia (excluding China), South America, Africa and the Middle East, despite these regions collectively representing nearly two-thirds of the global population.

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Slow growth in Africa is failing to live up to the huge potential for renewables on the continent, whose leaders last year pledged to scale up renewables more than five-fold by 2030, to 300 gigawatts.

“The justice piece is huge and too often overlooked,” Douglas said, adding that finance is “by far” the biggest challenge to getting renewables off the ground in the Global South.

Africa, for example, has received less than 2% of global investments in renewable energy over the past twenty years, according to IRENA.

“That’s not acceptable in terms of an equitable transition,” Douglas said, noting that when countries miss out on renewables financing, they are also missing out on the development benefits, jobs creation and improved access to affordable energy that clean energy can bring.

Finance not flowing

The scarcity of financing for renewables in developing countries is in large part due to investors being put off by the high borrowing costs and risk profiles of many such markets, Douglas said.

William Brent, chief marketing officer at Husk Power Systems, which installs and runs solar micro-grids in rural communities in Nigeria and Tanzania, explained: “Most sources of big capital in the West seem largely uninterested in Africa.”

“Despite being home to some of the fastest growing economies in the world, Africa is perceived as having a much higher risk profile and returns that cannot match the Americas, Asia or Europe,” Brent said.

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Sonia Dunlop, CEO of the Global Solar Council, a body that represents the solar industry, told Climate Home that financial incentives provided by the public sector could help de-risk renewables projects for private investors.

“We need to get MDBs (multilateral development banks) leaning into big renewables projects and taking on some of the risk, which can then attract private finance,” she said, adding that governments in all countries must also play their part in creating policy environments that support and incentivise investment.

Grids and permitting barriers

Grids and permitting for renewables projects also pose major practical challenges, particularly in developed countries.

According to REN21, the potential renewable capacity that is ‘stuck’ waiting to be connected to grids around the world is equivalent to three times the amount of wind and solar power installed in 2023.

For Dunlop, the solution to grid congestion is more storage – batteries for short-term storage and other technologies for longer-term storage, such as storing electricity as heat or pumping water uphill that can then be released to produce hydroelectricity.

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Complex planning processes can also mean it takes longer to get planning permission for projects, such as wind farms, than it does to build them – if they even get approval at all.

For Douglas, something as simple as hiring more staff to process project applications in grid and planning authorities could begin to unlock thousands of gigawatts of renewable power.

Energy efficiency overlooked

Although renewables are growing faster than any other energy source, companies and governments are boosting investments in fossil fuels at the same time.

The use of fossil fuels for electricity generation continues to grow, while renewables only provide 6.3% of the energy required for heat, which is mainly used in buildings and industrial operations.

Electricity generation by energy source

Chart courtesy of IRENA

“We are not moving fast enough to fully meet the staggering rise in energy demand, let alone replace existing fossil fuels,” said REN21 Executive Director Rana Adib in a statement on the group’s recent statistics.

Another – neglected – solution is energy efficiency, experts said. The Global Renewables Alliance is running a ‘double down, triple up’ campaign, which calls on countries not only to triple renewables by 2030, but also to double the rate of improvement in energy efficiency, to reduce emissions and help stem energy demand – another goal countries signed up to at COP28.

“We absolutely need that doubling of energy efficiency as well,” said Dunlop. “That isn’t discussed enough.”

(Reporting by Daisy Clague; editing by Megan Rowling)

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European investors hold shares worth at least $65 million in major coal firms across China, India, the United States, Indonesia and South Africa within funds designated as “promoting environmental and social” goals under EU rules, an analysis by Climate Home and media partners found.

Taken together, these companies emit around 1,393 million tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere every year, putting them among the world’s top five polluters if they were a country.

The investments are owned by major financial firms including BlackRock, Goldman Sachs and Fideuram, a subsidiary of Italy’s largest bank Intesa Sanpaolo. Most firms analysed are signatories of the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ), whose members pledge to align their portfolios with climate-friendly investment.

The asset managers told Climate Home their coal holdings do not contradict EU green policies or the 2015 Paris Agreement to tackle climate change.

At the COP26 UN climate summit in Glasgow in 2021, countries agreed for the first time to accelerate efforts “towards the phase-down of unabated coal power”. “Unabated” means power produced using coal without any technology to capture, store or use the planet-heating CO2 emitted during the process.

But rather than shrinking, global coal capacity has grown since the signing of the Glasgow Climate Pact with a fleet of new coal plants firing up their boilers, primarily in China, India and Indonesia. Coal miners in those countries have also boosted their operations to keep up with the increasing demand.

European leaders have heavily opposed this, with EU president Ursula von der Leyen saying the bloc is “very worried” about coal expansion in China.

“Light green” funds

The investments analysed by Climate Home have been made by funds classified under Article 8 of the EU’s Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation (SFDR), which the European Commission hoped would discourage greenwashing and promote sustainable investments when it was introduced in 2021.

Article 8 – known as ‘light green’ – refers broadly to a fund that has “environmental and social characteristics”, while the ‘dark green’ Article 9 refers more directly to sustainability.

The rules were also intended to offer members of the public more clarity on where asset managers invest their money and enable them to make an informed decision on whether they want their savings or pension pots to prop up climate-harming activities.

Workers shovel coal onto a truck at a coal yard near a coal mine in Huating, Gansu province, China. REUTERS/Thomas Peter

But a group of European financial market watchdogs warned this month the rules are having the opposite effect and called for an overhaul of the system.

“Status as ‘Article 8’ or ‘Article 9’ products have been used since the outset in marketing material as ‘quality labels’ for sustainability, consequently posing greenwashing and mis-selling risks,” they said in a joint opinion to the European Commission.

“The general public is still being misled when it comes to sustainable funds,” Lara Cuvelier, a sustainable investments campaigner at Reclaim Finance, told Climate Home. “The regulations are very weak and there is no clear criteria as to what can or cannot be included. It’s still in the hands of investors to decide that for themselves.”

Funding coal expansion

Climate Home identified investments in the biggest-polluting companies in the coal sector as part of a wider investigation led by Voxeurope, which tracked holdings by funds that disclose information under the EU’s sustainable finance directive.

These “green” funds include investments in mining companies like Coal India and China Shenhua – the respective countries’ top coal producers – and Indonesia’s Adaro Energy, as well as in giant coal power producers such as NTPC in India and China Resources Power Holdings.

All of these companies are planning large-scale expansions of their coal output, according to the influential Global Coal Exit List compiled by German NGO Urgewald.

No new coal mines, mine extensions or new unabated coal plants are needed if the world is to reach net zero emissions in the energy sector by 2050 and keep the 1.5C warming limit of the Paris Agreement “within reach”, according to projections by the International Energy Agency (IEA).

State-owned Coal India is the world’s largest coal producer, with fast-growing output topping 773 million tonnes in the latest financial year. It is targeting 1 billion tonnes of annual coal production by 2025-26 by opening new mines and expanding dozens of existing ones.

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In its latest annual report, Coal India cited “pressure of international bodies like [the] UN to comply with [the] Paris Agreement” as one of the main threats to its business. Coal India’s share value has more than doubled over the last 12 months on the back of stronger coal demand in the country, as extreme heatwaves have fuelled the use of air-conditioning among other factors.

State-run mining and energy giant China Shenhua plans to invest over $1 billion in 2024 to expand its fleet of coal power stations and build new coal mines. “We will keep a close eye on climate change to improve the clean and efficient use of coal,” its latest annual report said.

Big investors

The funds with stakes in those coal-heavy companies are managed by Fideuram, an arm of Italy’s largest bank Intesa Sanpaolo, US-based AllianceBernstein and Mercer, a subsidiary of the world’s largest insurance broker Marsh McLennan.

Coal investments in Fideuram’s Article 8 funds – worth at least $16 million – also appear to breach the company’s own coal exclusion policy, designed to rule out holding shares in certain coal firms.

Two of its flagship “emerging markets” funds claim to promote environmental and social characteristics including “climate change prevention” and the “reduction of carbon emissions”, according to information disclosed under EU rules. To achieve their ‘green’ objectives, the funds claim to exclude any investment in companies “deriving at least 25% of their revenues” from the extraction, production and distribution of electricity connected with coal.

But Climate Home found the funds include investments in at least six major coal companies exclusively or primarily involved in coal mining or power generation.

A coal-fired power plant under construction in Shenmu, Shaanxi province, China, in November 2023. REUTERS/Ella Cao

Fideuram did not answer Climate Home’s questions about the funds’ apparent breach of their own policy. But a company spokesperson said in a written statement that “investments in sectors with high-carbon emissions do not conflict with the objectives of the SFDR, which concern the transparency of sustainability investments, nor with the Paris Agreement, which promotes a transition to a low-carbon economy”.

A spokesperson for Mercer said its Article 8 fund, which holds shares in NTPC and China Resources Power Holdings. has an exclusion policy to avoid investing in companies that generate more than 1% of their revenue from thermal coal extraction. “Based on the data provided by ISS [a provider of environmental ratings], no groups involved breach the 1% threshold, and therefore, the fund is not in violation of its SFDR commitments,” they added.

AllianceBernstein did not respond to a request for comment.

Coal-hungry steelmaking

While excluding investments in so-called thermal coal used for electricity generation, several ‘green’ funds put their money in companies producing coking coal – or metallurgical (met) coal – which is used to make steel.

Goldman Sachs’ Article 8 funds hold shares worth several million dollars in Jastrzebska Spolka Weglowa, Europe’s largest coking coal producer, and Shanxi Meijin in China. BlackRock offers exchange-traded funds (ETFs) tracking indexes that include investments in SunCoke, a leading met coal producer in the US and Brazil, Alabama-based Warrior Met and Shanxi Meijin.

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Reclaim Finance’s Cuvelier said that, up until recently, the focus has been on pushing thermal coal out of investor portfolios because the alternatives to met coal in steel production were “less developed”.

“There are now increasing calls on financial institutions to cover met coal as well in their exclusion policies as alternatives exist,” she added. “It’s becoming very important because there are new projects under development that should be avoided”.

A spokesperson for BlackRock said: “As a fiduciary, we are focused on providing our clients with choice to meet their investment objectives. Our fund prospectuses and supporting material provide transparency as to the methodology and investment objectives of each fund”.

Goldman Sachs did not reply to a request for comment.

Reforms on the horizon

At the end of 2022, the European Commission began a review of the SFDR’s application with a view to updating its sustainable finance rules.

Future reforms may include changes to the ways funds are categorised. “There are persistent concerns that the current market use of the SFDR as a labelling scheme might lead to risks of greenwashing… partly because the existing concepts and definitions in the regulation were not conceived for that purpose,” the Commission said in a consultation paper released last year.

It also indicated that the existing categories under Articles 8 and 9 could either be better defined or scrapped entirely and replaced with a different system. The new Commission, yet to be formed following last month’s elections, will decide if and how to move forward with the reform process.

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Separately, the EU’s market supervisory authority, ESMA, has recently issued guidelines to prevent funds from misusing words like “sustainability”, “ESG” – environmental, social and governance – or “Paris-aligned” in their names. A handful of the funds with coal investments analysed by Climate Home have used those labels.

Under the new guidelines, asset managers wanting to slap climate-friendly labels on their funds will have to exclude companies that derive more than a certain percentage of revenues from fossil fuels.

Climate Home produced this article with data analysis contributions from Stefano Valentino (Bertha Fellow 2024) and Giorgio Michalopoulos. This article is part of an investigation coordinated by Voxeurop and European Investigative Collaborations with the support of the Bertha Challenge fellowship.

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In a new study quantifying how gender shapes people’s experiences of climate change, scientists at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) found that, by 2050, higher temperatures and changing rainfall patterns could mean women globally spend up to 30% more time collecting water.

PIK guest researcher Robert Carr, the study’s lead author, explained how this results in more physical strain, psychological distress and lost time that could otherwise be spent on education, leisure or employment.

“Even when people talk about gendered climate impacts, there is very little attention on time poverty and how that affects someone’s ability to improve their life,” Carr told Climate Home.

In addition, the cost of lost working time for women affects economies, and is projected to reach tens to hundreds of millions of US dollars per country annually by 2050, the study said.

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Carr noted that the data underpinning PIK’s study only recently became available and is a valuable tool for connecting women’s welfare issues to climate impacts, with more such analysis expected as new datasets emerge.

“But more still needs to be done to act on, and implement, research findings like ours at the local and national levels,” he added.

For that to happen, research like PIK’s has to resonate in government offices and negotiating rooms at UN climate talks, where gender activists see 2024 as a milestone year. Countries are expected to renew key global initiatives for advancing gender-responsive climate action and improving gender balance in official delegations at UN negotiations.

Gendered impacts of climate change

So far progress has been slow. After more than a decade of working towards those aims within the UN climate process, wilder weather and rising seas are still disproportionately affecting women and gender-diverse people, as global warming continues apace.

For example, female-headed rural households experience higher income losses due to extreme weather events like floods and droughts, through impacts on farming and other activities.

Rates of child marriage and violence against women and girls have been shown to increase during and after climate disasters. And studies have identified a positive correlation between drought-induced displacement and hysterectomies among female farm labourers in India.

At the same time, barriers like caring responsibilities, lack of funding, difficulties in obtaining visas and even sexual harassment in UN spaces persist, standing in the way of women’s equal participation in the climate negotiating rooms.

Yet, despite the mounting urgency, governments made little progress in talks on gender issues at the mid-year UN conference in Bonn this month.

Delegates arrive for a workshop on implementing the UNFCCC gender action plan and on future work to be undertaken on gender and climate change, at the Bonn Climate Conference on June 3, 2024. (Photo: IISD/ENB – Kiara Worth)

Advocates had hoped to leave the German city with a new, stronger version of the UN’s flagship gender initiative, known as the Lima Work Programme on Gender (LWP). Instead, discussions were tense and slow, leaving the LWP – which is supposed to be renewed by 2025 – to be finalised in November at the COP29 climate summit in Azerbaijan.

No rise in women negotiators

Claudia Rubio, gender working group lead for the Women and Gender Constituency at the UN, said the LWP has enabled a better understanding of “what is prohibiting women and other genders from being in [UN negotiating] spaces”.

But Mwanahamisi Singano, senior global policy lead at the Women’s Environment and Development Organisation (WEDO), reminded delegates at a workshop in Bonn that “time has not been the magic ingredient in bridging disparities between women and men in participation”, which has “stagnated or even declined when it comes to COPs”.

According to data from WEDO, women made up only 34% of COP28 government delegations overall, the same percentage as 10 years ago. Azerbaijan’s initial men-only COP29 organising committee – to which women were hastily added after an international outcry – and its line-up of negotiators at Bonn were a case in point.

The UN’s own analysis of men and women’s relative speaking times at the negotiations shows that women often – though not always – speak less, and that themes such as technology and finance see consistently lower numbers for women’s participation.

Progress has been gradual even with programmes like WEDO’s Women Delegates Fund, which has financed hundreds of women – primarily from least developed countries and small island developing states – to attend UN climate talks. Since 2012, WEDO has also run ‘Night Schools’, training women in technical language and negotiation skills.

Gender in the NDCs

Increasing the gender diversity of decision-makers in UN negotiations is important in its own right, but it does not necessarily translate into more gender-responsive climate policy, experts said. Not all women negotiators are knowledgeable about the gender-climate nexus, they noted.

But having an international framework to boost gender-sensitive climate action has also “catalysed political will” at the country level, according to Rebecca Heuvelmans, advocacy and campaigning officer at Women Engage for a Common Future (WECF).

Delegates listen to discussions on the UNFCCC Gender Action Plan at the Bonn Climate Conference on June 4, 2024. (Photo: IISD/ENB – Kiara Worth)

This is evidenced by an increase in the number of official National Gender and Climate Change Focal Points – up from 38 in 2017 when UN climate talks first adopted a Gender Action Plan, to 140 across 110 countries today. While the precise role of these focal points depends on country needs, advocates say they have been pivotal in spurring action on national gender priorities.

So far, at least 23 countries have national gender and climate change action plans, and references to gender in national climate plans submitted to the UN, known as NDCs, have increased since the earliest commitments in 2016. Around four-fifths now include gender-related information, according to a UN review of the plans.

In practice, this ranges from including gender-diverse people in the development of national climate plans to legislation that specifically addresses the intersection of climate change and gender.

For example, nine countries – including Sierra Leone and Jordan – have committed to addressing rising gender-based violence in the context of climate change. South Sudan acknowledged that heat exposure and malnutrition can increase infant and maternal mortality, while Côte d’Ivoire recognised that climate change hikes risks to pregnant women and those going through menopause.

Nonetheless, only a third of countries include access to sexual, maternal and newborn health services in their climate commitments, according to a 2023 report by the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) and Queen Mary University of London, showing how much work is yet to be done.

Next year, countries are due to submit updated NDCs, which campaigners see as a crucial opportunity to embed gender equality more deeply, including by involving women and girls in their planning and implementation, and collecting data disaggregated by sex and gender that can help shape policy.

Cross-cutting issue

Ahead of COP29, gender advocates are pushing for a stronger work programme with new language around intersectionality – the recognition that gender interacts with other parts of identity like race, class and Indigeneity to create overlapping systems of discrimination.

Angela Baschieri, technical lead on climate action at UNFPA, said gender commitments in the UN climate process must be more ambitious and include actionable targets for countries to address gender inequality.

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Beyond the gender negotiations themselves, the Women and Gender Constituency wants to boost the integration of gender with other streams of work.

“Whether you’re talking about green hydrogen, climate finance or low-carbon transport, there is always a gender dimension,” said Sascha Gabizon, executive director of WECF International, a network of feminist groups campaigning on environmental issues.

“We have so much evidence now that climate policies just aren’t as efficient if they are not gender-transformative,” she added.

(Reporting by Daisy Clague; editing by Megan Rowling)

The post UN action on gender and climate faces uphill climb as warming hurts women appeared first on Climate Home News.

Cassie Flynn, climate lead for the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), said the results were “undeniable evidence that people everywhere support bold climate action”.

While the top-line global figures are interesting, there’s a lot to be learned from comparing the countries too. You can use our search bars to check responses for the countries you’re interested in, but here are Climate Home’s five takeaways from the data:

1. Climate change is not just a rich-world concern

Concern about climate change is still sometimes presented as a luxury issue that worries only privileged people with nothing more immediate to care about.

But this poll – called the Peoples’ Climate Vote 2024, and conducted for the UNDP with the University of Oxford and GeoPoll – suggests that citizens of wealthier countries dwell on climate change much less often than those in the least developed countries.

Almost two-thirds of people in Uganda say they think about climate change every day while less than one-third of people in the US, Japan, China, France or the UK do the same.

Hamira Kobusingye, a young Ugandan climate activist, told Climate Home that Ugandans are seeing the effects of global warming first-hand. “My grandmother often complains that her land no longer yields enough food,” she said.

“In Uganda, you have to be extremely wealthy to say you’re not affected by the climate crisis,” she added.

2. Saudis back their government’s climate action

When asked how well their countries are doing at addressing climate change, people generally shrug their shoulders. The most popular answers are “somewhat well” followed by “neither well nor badly”.

But the people of Saudi Arabia are by far the most positive about their country’s performance, with almost two-thirds saying it is doing “very well”.

Globally, less than a fifth say the same – and residents of big, developed countries are among the most negative about how they are doing.

3. Russians are most opposed to fast energy transition

Globally, 71% of people say their country should replace fossil fuels with renewable energy either quickly or very quickly.

Support for a fast transition is highest in the South Asian island nation of Sri Lanka, where importing fossil fuels is a huge drain on the economy.

But it’s also popular in fossil fuel producers like Nigeria, South Africa, Iran and Saudi Arabia. On the other hand, it’s low in Russia, which has plentiful supplies of oil and gas, and where concern for climate change is pretty low.

As with many other issues, the US – the world’s biggest oil and gas producer – is divided. A quarter say it should not transition at all, more than any other nation. But a similar amount say it should transition “very quickly”.

4. People in rich, colder countries feel safer from extreme weather

Globally, nearly four-fifths of respondents want more protection from extreme weather. But those figures are lowest mainly in wealthy temperate nations like the US, Germany and Japan and highest in poorer, hotter countries like Benin, Ecuador and Haiti.

Some high- and middle-income countries came near the top of the list wanting “more protection”, including Greece, Mexico and Italy. All are hot during their summer months and frequently suffer from heatwaves and wildfires.

5. Even citizens of rich countries want them to do more to help poorer ones

Globally, nearly four-fifths of citizens say rich nations should give more help to poorer countries to address climate change.

Support for this is unsurprisingly higher among inhabitants of lower-income countries than those of richer ones. But even in wealthy countries, their people want them to do more.

The country with by far the biggest minority saying “less help” is the US – the nation that has proportionately done the least to help through providing climate finance in recent years, in relation to its size, economic power and historical emissions.

The pollsters did not specify whether “help” meant financial support. But Iskander Erzini Vernoit, co-founder of the Morocco-based Imal Initative think-tank, told Climate Home it shows developed countries could give more climate finance without losing domestic support.

“This further demonstrates that there is no leg to stand on for those hiding behind so-called political realism to justify a failure to confront the staggeringly low fiscal ambition from rich countries to support poorer countries with new grant-equivalent climate finance,” he said.

The post Five things we learned from the UN’s climate mega-poll appeared first on Climate Home News.

Sheinbaum, an energy engineer who worked unpaid on two major reports issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), will take control of the world’s 14th biggest economy on December 1, for a term due to last until 2030.

While IPCC climate scientists have been appointed as environment ministers in countries like Chile and Egypt, Climate Home was unable to identify any who have served as a national leader.

As Sheinbaum courted votes across the country of 127 million grappling with a drought, heatwave and smog, she promised to invest nearly $14 billion in clean energy and boost electric buses and trains. 

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

“We have to speed up the promotion of renewable energies,” she told a group of Mexican businessmen in April. “We are working on the national energy plan not only through 2030, but to 2050”.

Deep scepticism

But some fellow Mexican climate scientists and political analysts told Climate Home they were sceptical about whether she will deliver on her green promises.

They criticised her record as mayor of Mexico City, a position she held from 2018 to 2023, and said her climate ambition would be held back by her close ties to current pro-fossil fuel President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (known as AMLO) and her ideological aversion to private-sector energy.

Despite exit, EU seeks to save green reforms to energy investment treaty

Political risk analyst Carlos Ramirez, a partner at Integralia Consultants, told Climate Home that “there is no question that her commitment to climate change is real”, adding “that is a welcome shift from what we have seen so far [under the current government]”.

But, he said, “there will be López Obrador ghosts haunting her – his legacy will mean that she cannot move much from what we are seeing now, and the people who surround him will be watching her closely.”

If she did opt for bigger green changes, “she would have to pay a political price for that,” he noted. “So far she has not given any evidence that she will do so.”

Emissions expert

Sheinbaum grew up in Mexico City with scientists for parents. She signed up to study physics herself, earning undergraduate and masters degrees at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM).

In the early 1990s, she spent four years at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, doing a PhD on energy emissions and environmental problems in Mexico City’s transport sector before joining UNAM’s staff.

Rich nations meet $100bn climate finance goal – two years late

Following a stint as the environment secretary of then Mexico City Mayor López Obrador, she returned to UNAM and helped write the emissions reduction sections of the flagship IPCC assessment reports in 2007 and 2014. Her research on Mexican manufacturing and cement emissions was cited and – like all IPCC authors – she worked long hours unpaid.

Mexico City Mayor

Sheinbaum then went back into politics with López Obrador’s new left-wing party MORENA and was selected as its candidate for mayor of Mexico City in 2018, a position she held until she resigned last year in order to run for the national presidency.

As mayor, she promoted solar power. But UNAM climate scientist Ruth Cerezo-Mota said she had seen no sign of Sheinbaum attempting to solve the city’s serious air pollution problem.

Another UNAM climate scientist, Xochitl Cruz Núñez, who worked with Sheinbaum on the IPCC’s fifth assessment report, told Climate Home that Sheinbaum’s climate work as mayor was “minimal”.

Greenpeace activists protest with mariachi musicians and a cake with bicycle lanes, outside Mayor Sheinbaum’s office in March 14, 2019. (REUTERS/Henry Romero)

Cruz Núñez criticised the city’s diesel-powered bus system, water scarcity and increased urbanisation under Sheinbaum’s leadership, saying it had caused “uncontrolled” construction in surrounding conservation areas.

AMLO’s legacy

Mexico previously enjoyed a reputation as a front-runner on climate action, passing one of the developing world’s earliest climate change laws in 2012. But some of that progress was reversed during López Obrador’s presidency.

The outgoing president dismantled climate policies and institutions and promoted energy sovereignty through domestic fossil fuel production, putting power back into the hands of state-owned companies: electricity utility CFE and oil and gas giant PEMEX.

His government invested billions of dollars into oil and gas infrastructure, and blocked private investment into renewables. Today, Mexico is one of only two G20 countries without a net zero emissions target and has watered down its 2030 emissions reduction goal. 

Sheinbaum became MORENA’s candidate for the presidency largely because of López Obrador’s support for her, winning the national election on Sunday partly thanks to his track record as the country’s most popular modern president.

Lopez Obrador and Sheinbaum before a manifesto presentation on November 20, 2017. (REUTERS/Henry Romero)

Political analyst Ramirez said Sheinbaum’s political alignment with López Obrador hinders the chances of her pursuing more ambitious climate action.

“Sheinbaum is speaking loudly about bringing renewables back into the system but at the same time – and here is where the problems begin – she wants to give continuity to the energy policy of López Obrador,” he said.

“She has a strong ideological view that [state-owned] CFE and PEMEX should lead the energy transition,” he added. “This is a contradiction. I think it will be a very slow process and eventually fail.”

Cruz Núñez noted that Sheinbaum intends to maintain state stewardship over oil and electricity, while mobilising public resources for renewables, but questioned whether this alone could work. “My opinion is that private investment is required if renewable energy is to be introduced at the level needed for Mexico to fulfill its promises under the Paris Agreement,” she added.

Despite her alliance with AMLO, Sheinbaum has disagreed with him in the past. During the Covid-19 pandemic, for example, she promoted mask-wearing, testing and vaccinations in Mexico City while the president played down the risks. 

Cruz Núñez expressed hope that, having won the election, Sheinbaum will take advantage of her new independence from López Obrador to establish a clear programme for cutting Mexico’s emissions and adapting to climate change.

“I believe she knows enough about climate change and the need to solve it,” she added.

(Reporting by Daisy Clague, editing by Joe Lo and Megan Rowling)

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But not everyone has been affected equally, as Climate Home found out when speaking to people living by the Mediterranean Sea, just an hour or two’s drive apart. The Israeli city of Tel Aviv has been largely unscathed by the ongoing war between Israel and the Palestinian militant group Hamas, while Gaza’s urban areas have been bombed heavily, forcing most residents to flee Israeli attacks.

Climate Home spoke to two Palestinian fathers, now living in Gazan refugee camps in Rafah and Deir al-Balah, who have lost children to the recent heatwave. Both had fled their homes before their children died and are living with their surviving families in makeshift wood and nylon tents, fanning themselves with plastic food containers for ventilation.

Boys carry water bottles in Gaza on May 28, 2024. (Photo: Naaman Omar)

Meanwhile, just to the north, on the beach-side promenade of Tel Aviv, Israeli locals told Climate Home they had waited out the heatwave in air-conditioned apartments. Their main concerns were the cost of cooling, the strain it places on the country’s electric grid and drooping house plants.

Not just temperatures

Friederike Otto is one of the scientists who worked on a study issued by the World Weather Attribution group which found that climate change made the April heatwave in the Middle East five times more likely.

She told a press briefing that heatwaves are “not just about the temperatures – it’s what these temperatures mean to people”.

Asked separately about Gaza, she told Climate Home: “If you don’t have access to water, if you don’t have access to shade, if you don’t have access to medication – the extreme heat just compounds so much the challenges that these people are already facing.”

The Gaza Strip, one of two Palestinian territories, is just 25 miles long and about five miles wide. Since a bloody attack by Hamas on Israeli civilians on October 7, the Israeli military has repeatedly bombed and invaded Gaza, killing over 35,000 people.

The attacks have caused 1.9 million people, nearly 85% of the Gazan population, to flee their homes. While air conditioning, electricity and clean water have long been scarcer in Gaza than Israel, the current conflict has worsened that inequality, development agencies have said.

Greenhouse tents

Many refugees are living in nylon tents. Without walls, fans or air conditioning, they told Climate Home they are battling heat by using expensive water to shower as often as they can and stripping children – nearly half of the region’s population – to their underwear.

“It is like living in a green house, and no one can tolerate living inside.”

We are just at the beginning of summer, and the temperatures are already unbearable in #Gaza

Access to fresh water is very limited, making hot weather an even bigger health threat#CeasefireNow pic.twitter.com/6Qtln9XPD0

— UNRWA (@UNRWA) April 25, 2024

Hilmi Basal, 41, and his wife and six children left their home in northern Gaza after Israeli warnings. They fled south, buying a makeshift tent to live in the Deir al-Balah refugee camp. On April 26, Basal said, his three-year-old son fell suddenly to the ground and entered a coma. Five days later, he was pronounced dead in the local hospital.

Basal told Climate Home he “lives a difficult life” after losing his child, feeling “despair, frustration and fear of losing more children”. He said the tents are like greenhouses, so his family spend their days outside, preferably at the seashore where they can swim and shower. 

He and his wife dress their five surviving children in only their undergarments and search for water to cool down. A 20-litre bottle of drinking water costs $1.50, which Basal says “is an amount that many families suffering from extreme poverty do not have”. 

A boy sits in a bombed-out area of the Rafah refugee camp after an attack by Israeli bombers in Gaza – May 27, 2024 (Photo: Hashem Zimmo/TheNews2/Cover Imag)

Ribhi Abu Salem, 39, also lost a child to the heatwave. The three-year-old fainted suddenly while he was inside the family’s tent and died at the hospital. Doctors said the cause of the death was direct exposure to sunlight.

Until Israel’s attack, the family lived in an air-conditioned house in the Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza. This was built for Palestinians fleeing what they call the Nakba (meaning “catastrophe”) in 1948, when Zionist paramilitaries violently removed Palestinians from the newly-declared Israeli state.

Advised by the Israeli government to leave northern Gaza, Salem’s family fled south to the city of Rafah, where they sheltered in a tent. “Despite the scarcity of water, many tent residents resorted to buying large quantities of water to shower more than five times during the day,” Salem said.

After his family left, the Israeli government bombed their home, leaving them with nowhere to return to when the conflict ends. On May 6, Israeli forces began attacking Rafah and have since killed dozens of people sheltering there.

“It’s difficult to convey the scale of the humanitarian situation in Rafah. In every direction you look there are makeshift shelters.”@UNWateridge describes the sense of loss & fear people face in #Gaza as they look for water, food & safety.

Nowhere is safe in the #GazaStrip pic.twitter.com/OpH2YV7avk

— UNRWA (@UNRWA) April 25, 2024

For those with homes still standing, the usefulness of air conditioning and fans has been hindered by Israel’s blocking of fuel supplies to Gaza’s only power plant, leading to shortages of electricity. Solar panels continue to provide power for some, although they are also vulnerable to destruction by Israeli weapons.

AC the key

Across the border, Israelis are coping much better with the heatwave. Although the emergency services say 147 people have been treated for dehydration, fainting or heatstroke, none have been reported dead from the extreme heat.

When Climate Home visited Tel Aviv’s seaside promenade last week, beach-goers were sitting under umbrellas or stretched out on lawns listening to Spanish music blaring from a bar advertising frozen margaritas.

The beach in Tel Aviv on May 23, 2024 (Photo: Jessica Buxbaum)

Twenty-somethings Noam Sophia Samet and Tal Danon spoke to Climate Home still wet from a dip in the Mediterranean Sea. Both said they use air conditioning all the time. “It’s expensive but it’s worth it,” said Samet.

Timna Lalach, 70, said last month’s heatwave didn’t affect her, as she stayed inside her cooled apartment all day. Thirty-nine year old Anna Tarkovsky said she too stayed inside with the air conditioning on – the only problem was her plants died, she added.

Black-outs

While Gazans lack air conditioners, Israel’s main issue is that there are too many for its coal and gas-powered electricity grid to handle peaks in demand when residents all turn their cooling equipment on at the same time, 

During a heatwave last June, Israeli energy authorities imposed rolling black-outs. Last month, Samet and Danon’s electricity cut out once for a few hours while they were trying to work. 

Avner Gross, an environmental science professor at Ben Gurion University, said the Israeli government should plan better for hot days, with measures to store electricity or manage demand for it. “We need to be prepared and we are not even close,” he said.

Both Israel’s national government and Tel Aviv’s authorities want to expand vegetation cover and plant trees to provide shade. Tel Aviv is a member of the ‘cool cities’ network, which aims to tackle urban heatwaves.

Ficus trees provide shade on Dafna Street in Tel Aviv in 2017 (Photos: Avishai Teicher)

But Gaza, and the other Palestinian areas in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, are much further away from becoming more resilient to the same unbearably high temperatures.

The World Bank estimates that rebuilding the Gazan homes destroyed as of January this year will cost $13 billion. Far more have since been razed – and water, health and electrical infrastructure also needs to be restored.

The predicament of Gazans forced to endure sweltering conditions in ill-equipped tents is not an isolated problem. Across the world, climate change and war are forcing more and more people out of their homes and into makeshift camps. More than 75 million people are currently displaced inside their own countries – 50% more than five years ago.

The World Weather Attribution study notes that the recent heatwave made already precarious conditions for internally displaced people and conflict victims worse.

“With limited institutional support and options to adapt, the heat increases health risks and hardship,” the scientists wrote.

(Reporting by Taghreed Ali, Jessica Buxbaum and Joe Lo; editing by Joe Lo and Megan Rowling)

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President Cyril Ramaphosa described the $8.5 billion “Just Energy Transition Partnership” (JETP) as a “watershed moment” – and then British Prime Minister Boris Johnson called it a “game-changing partnership”.

But, as South Africa prepares to head to the polls next Wednesday in an election that could force Ramaphosa’s ruling party to share power for the first time since apartheid ended, there is still little to show for the energy transition deal on the ground.

Africa must reap the benefits of its energy transition minerals

Crispian Olver, executive director of the Presidential Climate Commission which is advising the government on the JETP, told Climate Home: “This is a bit like trying to turn a big container-ship – it’s slow to shift onto a new path, but once it’s on that new course, things will start to move faster.”  

As of last November, just $308 million of grant-funded projects under the JETP had reached the implementation phase, government data shows. Of this, just $30m was categorised as spending on the just transition in the coal-dependent Mpumalanga province.

The government has not published equivalent information on loans – which make up 97% of the donor-backed support. But those following the JETP say progress has been slow partly because South Africa’s state-owned electricity generator Eskom is reluctant to take on more debt.

In addition, South Africa’s energy ministry and the wealthy governments that are providing funding disagree on the role of gas in the country’s energy transition. The donors backing the JETP are the US, Canada, Britain, Switzerland, the European Union, the Netherlands, Germany, France, Denmark and Spain.

Coal plant closures have been delayed by South Africa’s lack of reliable electricity, which has led to rolling power black-outs known as “load-shedding”.

While problems affecting the coal sector are a key cause of unreliable electricity supplies, Eskom has said it will delay the closure of three coal-fired power plants in response to the crisis. 

South Africa’s best wind and solar resources, in the south and west, meanwhile remain under-utilised because the national power grid is already congested in those areas.

Azerbaijan pursues clean energy to export more ‘god-given’ gas to Europe

To transport the clean power, Eskom is trying to build transmission cables but progress has been slow as the utility is deeply in debt and reluctant to take on new loans through the JETP – even if those loans are offered on cheap terms.

An Eskom spokesperson said that “off-balance sheet options” – like allowing the private sector to build cables and substations – are being considered, but the details are still to be finalised. 

Electricity cables at South Africa’s Lethaba power station in 2007 (Photos: World Bank)

Yet not all government departments want a rapid transition to renewables. The Department of Mineral Resources and Energy (DMRE), led by pro-coal minister Gwede Mantashe, recently published an energy planning document that envisages a sharp slowdown in the roll-out of solar and wind power and instead more of a shift from coal to gas power plants.   

This has complicated things for the international partner group behind the JETP. Two people with knowledge of the negotiations told Climate Home that South Africa’s apparent reticence to switch to renewables is slowing the pace of funding flows under the deal. 

On the other hand, South Africa’s parliament recently approved a Climate Change Bill and a Electricity Regulation Amendment Bill, which seeks to create a competitive power market and end Eskom’s century-long, coal-dominated monopoly. The legislation will render the DMRE’s controversial gas-reliant energy plans less relevant, as it paves the way for more electricity to be produced by private companies.

Energy minister Gwede Mantashe (left) speaks to President Cyril Ramaphosa (right) in 2018 (Photos: South African government)

But that has done little to appease anxious workers and residents in the heart of the country’s coal belt. In particular, the town of Komati offers a warning of the electoral damage that can occur if coal-plant repurposing projects don’t go smoothly. 

Eskom’s coal-fired power station in Komati was retired from service in October 2022 after reaching its end-of-life date. It is now being converted into a solar, wind and food farm, a solar microgrid assembly factory and training facility.

Parts of it are now starting to open but for many local people, it is too little too late. “The community is currently facing a pandemic of unemployment and poverty,” said community leader Carlos Vilankulu, who is also a repurposing project liaison officer. 

Eskom says none of its workers lost their jobs when the last coal units were taken offline – many were transferred to other power stations. But local guesthouses and other small businesses in the community say they are struggling as a result of the closure. 

A man selling second-hand tyres waits for customers in Komati village, May 9, 2024 (Photo: REUTERS/Siphiwe Sibeko)

“Everything has come to a standstill. Many people are unemployed,” said Alta de Bruin, a guest-house owner based in Komati village. While the repurposing project has generally been well received, it “could have started a long time ago”, de Bruin told Climate Home.

The decision to close down Komati was made long before South Africa agreed to its climate finance package at COP26, but the local transformation project is intended to serve as a blueprint for other just transition initiatives in the country.  

It has been a cautionary tale, according to Olver. Community consultations on the way forward only took place years after the decision was made to shut Komati – meaning local residents and businesses were left in a state of limbo. “The next [coal power] stations will do it better,“ he said.

Besides South Africa, JETPs have also been signed with Indonesia, Vietnam and Senegal. Leo Roberts, an analyst with climate change think-tank E3G, said South Africa’s delays in closing down its coal plants are concerning.

Indonesia has also postponed coal plant closures after expressing disappointment with rich countries’ support, while Vietnam’s partnership has ground to a halt amid political turmoil.

“We mustn’t lose sight of what the JETPs need to deliver,” Roberts said. “This is ultimately about reducing emissions to avoid catastrophic climate change, dealing with the huge health pollution challenges coal causes, and supporting countries to deliver self-defined low-carbon development pathways.”

(Reporting by Nick Hedley; editing by Joe Lo and Megan Rowling)

The post As South Africa heads to the polls, voters await stalled “just energy transition” appeared first on Climate Home News.

This is Azerbaijan’s first large-scale solar power plant. It opened last October and the Emirati company developing it, Masdar, says it can power 110,000 homes.

Climate Home visited the solar park as part of a media tour organised and sponsored by the Azerbaijan COP29 Presidency, which is arranging the UN climate summit in Baku this November.

At the park’s opening ceremony, in front of Sultan Al-Jaber – Masdar’s CEO who led the COP28 climate summit in Dubai – Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev boasted about his country’s determination in “moving towards a green agenda”. 

“This is our contribution not only to the future development of Azerbaijan but to the issues related to climate change,” he told the assembled dignitaries. 

But despite this rhetoric, climate scientists have questioned Azerbaijan’s climate credentials as it prepares to host the COP29 summit. 

An increase in renewable energy production does not mean Azerbaijan is planning to leave its vast oil and gas reserves in the ground. Aliyev said last month that Azerbaijan will try to sell abroad the gas it saves by not using it in power stations at home. Europe is the main target customer, as it shifts away from Russian gas supplies.

In Nagorno-Karabakh, Azerbaijan’s net zero vision clashes with legacy of war

On top of selling its surplus, Azerbaijan is planning to extract more gas thanks, in part, to fresh investments from foreign fossil fuel giants like Britain’s BP, France’s TotalEnergies and Emirati oil giant ADNOC, which Al-Jaber also heads. 

Bill Hare, CEO of climate science non-profit group Climate Analytics, called Azerbaijan’s plans “a fantasy”. “Ramping up renewables won’t make a dent in emissions unless they displace fossil fuels in the system,” he told Climate Home. “You can’t tackle climate change without getting rid of fossil fuels.” 

A spokesperson for COP29 said gas is “an ideal transition fuel in the production of electricity”. In emailed comments, they added that gas exported to Europe can replace coal power – which currently provides around 15% of the EU’s electricity – in the short to medium-term, thereby reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Azerbaijan is not alone in pursuing both renewable energy and fossil fuel production. Most fossil fuel producers – including wealthy nations like the US, UK and Canada – have no plans to stop producing oil and gas. That’s despite the International Energy Agency (IEA) warning that new fossil fuel extraction projects are not compatible with limiting global warming to 1.5C.

The COP29 spokesperson said Azerbaijan’s strategy does not contradict IEA scenarios, noting those do not exclude continued investment in existing oil and gas assets and approved projects.

A fossil fuel economy

Azerbaijan’s fossil fuel industry is steeped in history. As early as the 13th century, Italian explorer Marco Polo wrote of Baku’s “stream of oil in such abundance that a hundred ships may load there at once”. 

In the 19th century, Azerbaijan gave birth to modern crude refining, and by the 20th century it accounted for around half of the world’s oil production, helping fuel the Soviet Union’s victory in World War Two.

Oil and gas remain omnipresent today. The Flame Towers, Baku’s iconic skyscrapers, are a symbol of fossil fuel wealth. At night, their facades light up to display flickering flames in a reference to the naturally-occurring fires produced by gas leaks that earned Azerbaijan its name, “The Land of Fire”. 

The logo of SOCAR, the state-owned oil and gas firm, emblazons the national football team shirts, while one of the country’s oldest oil fields sits just behind Baku’s Olympic Stadium, the venue for the COP29 climate summit. 

Oil fields on the outskirts of Baku, Azerbaijan, April 2o24. Photo: Matteo Civillini

By global standards, Azerbaijan is no longer a major fossil fuel producer, pumping less than 1% of the world’s oil and gas. But its economy remains heavily dependent on the income they generate. Fossil fuels make up over 90% of all exports and 64% of government revenue.

At the Petersberg Climate Dialogue in Berlin last month, Aliyev said that “having oil and gas deposits is not our fault. It’s a gift from God. We must not be judged by that. He added that “our oil and gas will be needed for many more years, including in European markets”.

A shrinking market?

European countries have historically been the main destination market for Azerbaijani oil and gas, and flows have been rising in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. 

As Europe tried to wean itself off Moscow’s supplies, the European Commission went looking around the world for alternative sources of gas to keep the lights on and curb skyrocketing prices. In Azerbaijan, it struck a new deal to double gas exports by 2027. 

Baku is now scrambling to make good on that pact, while using it as a lever to expand its lucrative gas industry. The country could boost its gas production by more than a third over the next decade, according to data analysis by campaigning group Global Witness. 

“We are largely investing in increasing our gas production,” said Aliyev in Berlin, “because Europe needs more gas from new sources.” 

But energy experts question that reasoning. While looking for new gas supplies in the short term, the war in Ukraine also prompted the EU to fast-track its transition towards renewable sources of energy. Its strategic energy plan, laid out in 2022, would see overall gas demand in the bloc halve by 2030. 

“There will be a lot of supply globally and not that much demand on the European side,” said E3G analyst Maria Pastukhova. “Looking at the amounts alone, the EU will not need any additional gas from Azerbaijan if it delivers on its energy transition policies.”

Clean, cheap or fair – which countries should pump the last oil and gas?

But much will also depend on what kind of gas the block will continue to rely on. Norway, Europe’s top supplier, Algeria and Azerbaijan provide it through pipelines, while the United States and Qatar ship liquefied natural gas (LNG) to the continent. 

“It’s hard to say at the moment [which supplies will remain],” added Pastukhova. “But it isn’t very likely that Azerbaijan can continue to bank on crazy gas revenues from the EU. We don’t see readiness from European buyers to sign long-term contracts beyond 2035.” 

Sell, don’t burn

Meanwhile, Baku also wants to ensure that its gas is channelled towards the lucrative export market not burned at home.

Central to this strategy is the rollout of renewable energy. With strong winds blowing from the Caspian Sea and sun shining for a large part of the year, Azerbaijan boasts significant clean energy prospects.

But that potential has so far been largely untapped. Renewable sources, mainly from three hydro power stations, produced only 7% of Azerbaijan’s electricity in 2023. The government wants to increase that to 30% by 2030. 

If that target is met, Aliyev says that solar and wind will pump 5 gigawatts of clean electricity into the national grid, freeing up “at least” 5 billion cubic metres of gas for the European market.

At Masdar’s sprawling solar park in Garadagh, this plan is being rolled out. The park spans the equivalent of 770 football pitches, but was built in just under two years. It cost $262 million, with multilateral development banks stumping up just under half of that.

Speaking to journalists inside the plant’s control room, Kamran Huseynov, deputy director of the Azerbaijan Renewable Energy Agency, said eight more solar and wind projects are being developed for the coming years. “We are quite sure we can reach the target [of 30% renewables capacity] by 2028,” he added. 

As in Garadagh, foreign energy companies will be at the helm of those eight projects. Masdar will build two more solar parks and one onshore wind farm. Saudi Arabia’s ACWA Power is erecting a wind farm just north of Baku by the Caspian Sea.

Renewables-processed fossil fuels?

Later this year, BP is expected to start building a solar farm in the district of Jabrayil. This is one of the territories Azerbaijan captured after a long-running dispute with Armenia centred on the Nagorno-Karabakh region. 

Baku seized control of these areas in a two-part military offensive that started in 2020 and ended last autumn. As a result, some 136,000 ethnic Armenians who had lived in Nagorno-Karabakh fled in a mass exodus which, according to Armenia and the EU Parliament, amounted to “ethnic cleansing”. Azerbaijan has rejected those accusations. 

In Nagorno-Karabakh, Azerbaijan’s net zero vision clashes with legacy of war

The Azeri government is now promoting a green vision for Nagorno-Karabakh which involves the construction of government-branded “net zero” villages. It has also designated the region as a “green energy zone”, aiming to attract investment in renewable energy.

BP was the first major international energy firm to jump at that opportunity. In 2022, the company’s regional president for Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey, praised Baku’s efforts to turn Karabakh into “the heart of sustainable development”. 

BP wants electricity produced from Jabrayil’s solar power plant to make some of its vast oil and gas operations in Azerbaijan less dirty.

The British energy giant runs the Sangachal terminal, one of the world’s largest oil and gas processing facilities and the starting point for the pipelines transporting gas to Europe. Processing all of this oil and gas requires power, which BP currently gets from burning gas in generators.

The Sangachal oil and gas terminal in Azerbaijan. Photo: Azerbaijan Presidency

According to Elnur Soltanov, Azerbaijan’s deputy energy minister and the COP29 CEO, these are “very inefficient” and produce “some of the dirtiest electricity” in the country. After being electrified, the fossil fuel processing plant will receive the same amount of electricity from the grid as the solar park generates, according to Azernenerji, the country’s grid operator.

The process will also free up “more gas to export to world markets”, BP says.

BP’s project is being developed in partnership with SOCAR, Azerbaijan’s state-owned oil and gas giant. After setting up a “green energy” unit last year, SOCAR says it is working with international companies, like BP, “in order to get the know-how” and “learn in the process” with the goal of transforming into a “comprehensive energy company”.  

“Sooner or later, hydrocarbons will slowly die out – not right away,” Teymur Guliyev, deputy vice president for the energy transition at SOCAR, told reporters including Climate Home. “But we have to start our transformation process when we still have plenty of time to plan accordingly, go through trial and error.” 

The COP29 spokesperson said Azerbaijan “is making significant progress” towards reducing its greenhouse gas emissions. Currently, Azerbaijan has a goal to reduce emissions 40% by 2050 as outlined in its national climate plan (NDC). It has promised to submit a new NDC that is aligned with limiting global warming to 1.5C, which is due by early 2025.

How to move it

While the current priority for Azerbaijan’s renewables push appears to be maximising its gas exports, the government is also wrangling over how to sell its clean energy to Europe, when gas demand falls.

COP29’s Soltanov told Climate Home and other international journalists that he is “very optimistic” about Azerbaijan’s green transition. “Azerbaijan has been at the forefront of the oil revolution, it has been at the forefront of the gas revolution, and it has all the conditions to be at the forefront of the clean energy revolution as well,” he added. 

But the transportation of green electricity remains an obstacle.

The main option being explored is laying an electric cable under the Black Sea, stretching over 1,155 kilometres between Georgia and Romania. Originally the project, under discussion for several years, had the stated intention of linking Georgia to the European transmission network and boosting its energy security. 

But it was recently revamped as a possible route to carry Azerbaijan’s clean energy to the European market. In December 2022, the leaders of Azerbaijan, Georgia, Romania and Hungary formed a partnership to push the project forward, indicating it could be completed by 2029 at a cost of €2.3bn ($2.5bn). A two-year long feasibility study is currently in its final stage, according to President Aliyev. 

The leaders of Azerbaijan, Romania, Hungary and Georgia, and the European Commission President, at the signing of a green energy partnership in December 2022. (Photo: Inquam Photos/Octav Ganea via Reuters)

Implementing the project could be challenging given the fragile geopolitical situation in the region. The cable would run just south of the Crimean Peninsula, under Russian control, and near a theatre of war in Ukraine with the strong presence of military vessels. 

For Climate Analytics’ Bill Hare, “it’s a tricky location to attract investment and get built at the moment, but it would provide a lot of benefits in the long-term”. 

There are also questions over whether Azerbaijan’s current plans to export green energy via the Black Sea cable will yield a high-enough return to compensate for selling less fossil fuel.

“Electricity trade is a stable source of revenue, but it is also capital-intensive and not very high margin,” explained E3G’s Pastukhova. “It will not replace the same amount of export revenue that gas and oil have been contributing.”

“What Azerbaijan is doing right now [on renewables] is not enough and quite alarming because this country is so dependent on oil and gas revenue,” she said.

(Reporting by Matteo Civillini in Azerbaijan; editing by Megan Rowling and Joe Lo)

Matteo Civillini visited Azerbaijan as part of an “energy media tour” organised and sponsored by the COP29 Presidency.

The article was updated on 17 May to include comments from a COP29 spokesperson received after publication. 

The post Azerbaijan pursues clean energy to export more ‘god-given’ gas to Europe appeared first on Climate Home News.

But the money pledged still falls short of the $4 billion a year needed for the rest of this decade to wean poor African households off traditional dirty fuels including charcoal, kerosene and firewood, while climate campaigners criticised efforts to switch them to fossil gas.

Countries such as Brazil, Indonesia and India have made progress in recent years, in line with a global goal to provide clean cooking for all by 2030. Yet four in five Africans still use highly polluting cooking methods – around half of the 2.3 billion people who lack clean options worldwide, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).

IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol told the summit his organisation’s aim of making 2024 “a turning point” for clean cooking was being realised.

“It’s now or never,” he said, adding that the IEA will track the commitments made in Paris and share the results with the international community in a year’s time. “We will follow it as if it is our own money,” he emphasised.

In Nagorno-Karabakh, Azerbaijan’s net zero vision clashes with legacy of war

Separately, the African Development Bank (AfDB) confirmed an earlier pledge, first made at the COP28 climate summit last year, to mobilise around $2 billion for clean cooking over the next 10 years, earmarking 20 percent of its energy finance for that purpose.

Speaking in Paris, AfDB president, Akinwumi A. Adesina, said his own eyesight had been damaged by smoke from cooking fires during his childhood in Nigeria, while a friend and members of her family had died in an accident after she was sold petrol instead of kerosene as cooking fuel.

“Why do we let things like that happen?” Adesina asked, adding that enabling clean cooking is a matter of “human dignity, fairness and justice for women”. “It is about life itself,” he said.

Experts have long pointed to the health damage to women and children from carbon monoxide and black soot emitted by cooking over open fires or with basic stoves. Dirty cooking contributes to 3.7 million premature deaths annually, according to the IEA, with women and children most at risk from respiratory and cardiovascular ailments linked to indoor air pollution.

Ahead of the Summit on Clean Cooking in Africa this week in Paris, some climate and gender activists pointed to the small number of African women represented at the gathering – who they said accounted for less than a fifth of registered participants.

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Janet Milongo, coordinator of renewable energy for Climate Action Network International, said the event was biased “towards the continuation of the colonial, patriarchal representation of the continent”.

Speeches were made largely by male leaders of governments and companies, with the notable exception of Tanzania’s president, Samia Suluhu Hassan, and Damilola Ogunbiyi, the UN Secretary-General’s Special Representative for Sustainable Energy for All.

Fatih Birol, Executive Director of the International Energy Agency (left) with the presidents of Sierra Leone, Tanzania and  Togo, the prime minister of Norway; H.E. Maroš Šefčovič, Executive Vice President of the European Green Deal and Akinwumi A. Adesina, President of the African Development Bank Group at the Clean Cooking Summit for Africa in Paris, May 14, 2024 (Photo: International Energy Agency)

Clean cooking ‘opportunity’ in NDCs

Ogunbiyi, who is Nigerian and has worked on clean energy policy for the government, said her country had made a big effort on solar electrification but had forgotten about clean cooking.

“We can’t make that mistake again,” she said, calling for clean cooking to be a key part of African governments’ investment plans for their energy transition.

UN climate chief Simon Stiell urged more governments to seize the opportunity to include measures to boost clean cooking in the next updates to their national climate action plans (NDCs) due by early next year.

As of December last year, only 60 NDCs included one or more measures that explicitly target clean cooking, such as Nepal’s goal to ensure that by 2030 half of households use electric stoves as their main mode of cooking and Rwanda promising to disseminate modern efficient cookstoves to 80% of its rural population and 50% of people in cities by that date.

Stiell noted that planet-heating emissions from dirty cooking methods are “significant”, amounting to about 2% of the global total – the equivalent of emissions from the aviation and shipping sectors combined.

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He said the world has the technology to shift people onto modern, cleaner sources of energy and cut emissions in the process, calling it “low-hanging fruit”.

Dymphna van der Lans, CEO of the Clean Cooking Alliance, a global partnership of organisations working on the issue, said it was important to raise awareness not just about the scale of the problem – but to ensure people understand it is an issue that can be solved.

“The technologies exist – they are out there, there are fantastic companies providing these fuels and solutions and services to these customers that actually can be deployed immediately… and reach the populations in Africa,” she told Climate Home after the summit.

LPG conundrum

On stage in Paris, companies ranging from fossil fuel giants such as Total and Shell to smaller manufacturers of cookstoves said they would expand their efforts to reach new customers with more efficient stoves running on modern energy, including liquefied petroleum gas (LPG), bioethanol and electricity.

While there is widespread consensus over ending the use of firewood and charcoal – which contribute to deforestation – there is less agreement over which fuels should replace them.

Efforts to build new distribution networks for LPG – a form of fossil fuel gas – are particularly controversial. At the summit on Tuesday, TotalEnergies CEO Patrick Pouyanné said his company wants to increase its 40 million African LPG customers to 100 million and will invest more to boost its LPG production capacity in East Africa.

Pouyanné said there is a need to make LPG cooking affordable – noting that the $30 upfront investment required for a stove and gas canister is too high for most people – which could be done through “pay as you cook” loans.

Some international development agencies that work on the ground to help poor households access clean cooking – including Practical Action – support the use of LPG as a “transitional step” towards clean cooking where options like electricity or ethanol are not available.

“Our primary objective is to ensure people, especially women and children, have access to the best possible solutions which don’t compromise their health and that in the long term aren’t contributing to the worsening climate crisis,” said Practical Action CEO Sarah Roberts.

In the IEA’s “least-cost, realistic scenario” to reach universal clean cooking this decade, LPG remains the primary solution, representing nearly half of households gaining access, while electric cooking is the main option for just one in eight homes.

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The IEA’s analysis shows that this strategy, centred on LPG, would drive up emissions by 0.1 gigatonnes (Gt) in 2030. But that would be more than offset by reductions in greenhouse gas emissions from switching away from firewood, charcoal and inefficient stoves, resulting in a net reduction of 1.5Gt of CO2 equivalent by 2030.

Net greenhouse gas emissions annual savings from clean cooking access in the IEA Access for All scenario by 2030 (in Mt CO2-eq) (Source: IEA)

Red = Combustion; Orange = Avoided combustion; Yellow = Unsustainable harvesting; Green = Net savings          

At the summit, Togo’s president Faure Gnassingbé described LPG as “really the way forward” for clean cooking, and said more production capacity was needed in Africa. He added that ESG investors – which normally apply green and ethical standards – should adjust their environmental criteria so they can back LPG cooking projects despite it being a fossil fuel.

“We should be clear-headed and not open up to sterile debates on this issue,” Gnassingbé told the summit.

Some climate justice activists disagreed, criticising high-level backing for fossil gas as a clean cooking solution.

Mohamed Adow, director of Power Shift Africa, a Nairobi-based energy and climate think-tank, said on social media platform X that the need for clean cooking alternatives “is used by many African politicians as an excuse for building gas infrastructure” which is intended to develop an export industry and never reaches poorer households.

Here’s my response to yesterday’s summit on Clean Cooking in Africa & the declaration issued by #IEA.

“This declaration is a lazy & misguided statement which seems to rely on the private sector to use gas as a solution to this problem.

However, there’s no evidence that will…

— Mohamed Adow (@mohadow) May 15, 2024

He said the money raised at the summit should be channelled instead into high-efficiency, low-cost electric cookers for African women, which could be powered by renewable energy.

Carbon finance principles

Another controversial way of promoting clean cooking, backed by the IEA-hosted summit, is by developing and selling carbon credits for the emissions savings from new technologies and fuels.

The IEA said that around 15% of the total amount pledged in Paris would come via carbon finance, with the proceeds from selling offsets helping subsidise customers’ access to clean cooking.

But Climate Home found in an investigation last year that the methodologies used to calculate emissions reductions from more efficient cookstoves in India had overstated their greenhouse gas savings.

To counter such problems, the Clean Cooking Alliance announced a new set of “Principles for Responsible Carbon Finance in Clean Cooking” in Paris, backed by 100 organisations working in the space.

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The voluntary principles, which aim to build confidence in carbon markets for clean cooking, say project claims should be evidence-based, case-specific and substantiated, and their benefits should be transparent. The alliance is also working with the UN climate secretariat on a new methodology for clean cooking carbon credits which it hopes will be ready this year.

Van der Lans said the goal was to strengthen the quality and integrity of clean-cooking carbon credits in line with the latest science, to achieve a higher, fairer price that fully reflects the work being done to protect forests by moving away from charcoal and firewood.

“Everybody within the clean cooking ecosystem is signing up to these principles,” she noted – from banks to carbon credit verification agencies and companies selling the technology.

“That is a good signal that we’re doing the right things and we’re moving this market in the right direction,” she added.

(Reporting by Megan Rowling; editing by Joe Lo)

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Aghali is a pioneering example of Azerbaijan’s plan for “green” reconstruction of the territories it captured after a long, bloody conflict with Armenia, centred on the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh mountainous enclave.

Hundreds of Azeris displaced from the region in the early 1990s have moved back to Aghali, a local government official told Climate Home.

“The emotional link to these territories is very strong even though 30 years have passed,” the official said. “Our people are happy to be back”.

The government says more than 100,000 Azeris will return to populate the 30 or so new towns and villages planned across the area by 2026, which are expected to run mainly on clean energy and aim for “net zero” emissions.

Yet a more troubled story lies beneath the shiny surface presented by the authorities – part of Azerbaijan’s efforts to polish its green credentials before the COP29 UN climate summit it will host in November.

Some 136,000 ethnic Armenians who had called Nagorno-Karabakh their homeland fled in a mass exodus during a two-part military offensive by Azerbaijan that started in 2020 and ended last autumn.

For Armenian authorities and some human rights and legal experts, the drive amounted to “ethnic cleansing” – a phrase used in a European Parliament resolution on the conflict. A spokesperson for COP29 told Climate Home the Azerbaijan authorities “categorically reject this view”.

With the fighting now over, the two sides are engaged in talks to build a lasting peace. They struck an initial agreement to establish border demarcations in April, but hopes of a swift breakthrough on a permanent solution remain slim.

Meanwhile, displaced Armenians have said publicly they fear the heritage sites and homes they hastily left behind will be erased under a giant construction effort. Evidence of this was seen last month by Climate Home on a press trip organised and sponsored by the COP29 Presidency team, which controlled access to locations and sources in the region.

‘Net zero’ vision

Azerbaijan has built its prowess, both on and off the battlefield, on the strength of its vast oil and gas reserves. Around 60 percent of the government’s budget is financed through the sale of fossil fuels, primarily via export to Europe.

Last month, Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev called oil and gas “a gift from God” at the Petersberg Climate Dialogue in Berlin, signalling continued investment in increased gas production. That is despite signing up, like all countries, to a global agreement to transition away from fossil fuels “in keeping with the science” at the COP28 UN climate summit in Dubai last December.

Nonetheless, as its capital Baku gears up to host COP29, Azerbaijan also wants to show off its efforts to adopt clean energy and cut planet-heating emissions to the outside world.

Nagorno-Karabakh, and the surrounding provinces, lie at the centre of this push. The government has declared a “green energy zone” here, adding a dozen hydropower plants, and seeking to attract foreign investment in solar and wind.

Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev in front of a screw turbine hydro power plant in Zangilan, one of the territories recaptured in 2020. Photo: Azerbaijan Presidency

Across the country, the government wants renewables to make up 30 percent of its installed electricity capacity by 2030 – up from 7 percent in 2023. The main motivation is to reduce the use of gas in its own power stations so that more of it can be shipped to Europe, President Aliyev said during an event at ADA University in Baku in April.

Azerbaijan is also planning to achieve “net zero” carbon emissions in Karabakh by 2050, as outlined in its latest national climate action plan (NDC) submitted under the UN climate process. It says that “to revitalise the territories liberated from occupation”, the government will establish “smart” settlements, promote “green” energy zones, agriculture and transport, and reforest “thousands of hectares”.

For Anna Ohanyan, a senior scholar in the Russia and Eurasia programme at the US-based Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, “it’s greenwashing of an ethnic cleansing, pure and simple”.

“Azerbaijan is putting a stamp on the territory as a way to legitimise the conquest of Nagorno-Karabakh and doing so under the pretence of helping fight climate change,” she told Climate Home.

The COP29 spokesperson said in emailed comments that this view “has no basis in fact”, adding that Azerbaijan is rebuilding houses for its citizens who were internally displaced during the conflict, “according to UN sustainability standards”.

Disputed territory

Territorial disputes over the Nagorno-Karabakh region have a long and complex history.

“Azerbaijan and Armenia – both are convinced this is historic patrimony of their people,” said Audrey Altstadt, a professor of history at the University of Massachusetts Amherst who specialises in Azerbaijan.

As the Soviet Union set about governing its far-flung provinces in the 1920s, then Commissar of Nationalities, Joseph Stalin, ruled that the region should be part of Soviet Azerbaijan, even though ethnic Armenians made up 94% of its population at the time.

In the 1980s, alongside the fall of the Soviet Union, tensions began to rise after Nagorno-Karabakh’s governing authorities declared their intention to join Armenia and Azerbaijan reacted by attempting to suppress separatists.

After the two sides gained independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, clashes between them escalated into an all-out war.

By the time fighting stopped three years later, Azerbaijan had suffered a crushing defeat, losing not just Nagorno-Karabakh but also a sizable chunk of territory around it. Ethnic Armenians declared a separatist republic in the region with the backing of Armenia.

Evolution of territorial control over Nagorno-Karabakh, and surrounding districts, from the aftermath of the 1994 war until today. Graphic: Fanis Kollias

Some 870,000 Azeris abandoned their homes in the captured area and Armenia itself, while around 300,000 ethnic Armenians fled Azerbaijan, according to the United Nations’ refugee agency.

For 15 years the conflict remained frozen, while international actors – led by the United States, France and Russia – tried, and failed, to find a peaceful resolution.  

Azerbaijan’s autocratic president, Aliyev, took matters into his own hands in September 2020, mounting a large-scale military offensive on Nagorno-Karabakh. Powered by more sophisticated weaponry, and backed by Türkiye, Azeri forces prevailed during a 44-day war that claimed the lives of at least 7,000 people – including over 100 civilians. 

Under a ceasefire agreement signed in November 2020, Azerbaijan gained a significant proportion of Nagorno-Karabakh, including the coveted town of Shushi – called Shusha by Azeris – as well as winning control of adjacent districts. 

Soon afterwards, Baku announced a colossal programme to rebuild and repopulate the region, establishing “green energy zones” in Nagorno-Karabakh and East Zangezur. 

Rebuilding ‘from scratch’

Deep behind a string of police checkpoints, the plan is proceeding apace. It includes Aghali, one of the “smart” villages created by the government to accommodate Azeri citizens displaced from the area three decades ago.

“Everything we build here, starting from houses to schools, is based on the element of solar,” said Vahid Hajiyev, special representative of the Azerbaijan presidency in Jabrayil, Gubadli and Zangilan districts, addressing a group of international reporters.

“The whole area had been devastated,” added Hajiyev, saying it was largely abandoned and littered with mines after Armenia captured it. “We’re doing everything from scratch and that gives an opportunity to do it right.”

A view of Aghali, a “smart” village created by the Azerbaijani government in the territories retaken from Armenia, in April 2024. Photo: Matteo Civillini

A nearby screw hydro turbine provides electricity for the whole village, while homes are equipped with solar water heating systems, officials told Climate Home.

“Smart agriculture” projects are being developed to give work to the more than 860 people who, according to government figures, have already moved into the village, with hundreds more expected to join them soon, they added.

Climate Home was not able to talk to any of the residents, besides government officials, and was not shown around the homes.

Aghali offers a template for around 30 similar villages the Azeri government plans to erect across the captured regions. They are just one part of the mammoth construction drive in the Karabakh area, bankrolled by Baku to the tune of just under $2.5 billion a year – around 12% of total public spending.

While the official vision projects an eco-paradise, in Baku’s breakneck drive to put it into practice, the landscape currently resembles a sprawling construction site, as seen by Climate Home and shown by satellite images.

Travelling up the windy road to Shusha-Shushi just before midnight, the headlights of dump trucks and cement mixers pierced the near-total darkness.

They are the backbone of a giant effort to lay down thousands of kilometres of roads and railways and throw up brand-new airports, vast conference halls, hotels and apartments.

Globally, construction is among the most polluting industries, contributing around 10% of global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions in 2022, according to the UN Environment Programme (UNEP).

In March 2022, the Azerbaijan government invited observers from UNEP to assess the environmental situation in the territories it had gained, after accusing Armenians of large-scale destruction and contamination of the water and soil.

The UNEP team documented “chemical pollution of water” and “deforestation” as a result of activities in dozens of mines and quarries carried out by the Armenian administration “with inadequate environmental oversight and supervision”.

But it also found that Azerbaijan’s building drive, then still in its infancy, was already putting further strains on the environment, as well as causing climate-heating emissions, thereby “adversely impacting the zero-emission goal for the region”.

The construction of new roads was “having a significant impact on forest cover”, its report stated, while the infrastructure programme “placed a significant burden on finite natural raw materials” extracted from local quarries to make cement or asphalt.

The construction drive is altering the landscape in Nagorno-Karabakh. Photo: Matteo Civillini/April 2024

The COP29 spokesperson said Azerbaijan is following the recommendations of the UNEP report and that “a number of mitigation measures have been undertaken” to curb the environmental footprint of the works.

“We believe that the net impact of the reconstruction effort will actually contribute to Azerbaijan’s climate change and decarbonisation goal,” the spokesperson added.

Nagorno-Karabakh’s net zero target has yet to be extended to the rest of the country. Currently Azerbaijan has a goal to reduce emissions 40% by 2050 and has promised to submit a new NDC that is aligned with limiting global warming to 1.5C, which is due by early 2025.

Environmental blockade

In December 2022, environmental concerns became a weapon in the long-running dispute over Nagorno-Karabakh. Azerbaijani eco-activists blocked the Lachin Corridor, the only road connecting the region to the outside world and a vital supply line for food and medicines.

They were ostensibly demonstrating over the impact of mining in the breakaway region. But, according to close watchers of the conflict, the protesters had been sent there by Baku – a claim denied by the COP29 spokesperson.

At the time, one protester told Climate Home that representatives from the Ministry of the Environment were also present. On many other occasions, the Azerbaijan government has cracked down on political dissent, according to human rights groups.

When, four months later, Azerbaijan erected a permanent checkpoint on the road to “prevent the illegal transportation of manpower and weapons”, the sit-in ended. But the blockade of Nagorno-Karabakh continued with only limited amounts of aid trickling in.

Shortages of food, medications and fuel plunged the region into a humanitarian crisis, according to UN human rights experts.

“In the end, it was hard to even find bread. There were women and kids queuing all night for a piece of bread,” recalled Siranush Sargsyan, an Armenian journalist from Nagorno-Karabakh, in an interview with Climate Home. “Even if they didn’t kill all of us, they were basically starving people.”

On September 19 2023, Azeri forces launched a lightning attack on the parts of Nagorno-Karabakh still controlled by ethnic Armenians in what Baku called “an anti-terrorist operation”. Within 24 hours, the de-facto government of the enclave surrendered and announced the republic would cease to exist the following January.

Fearing violence and persecution, over 100,000 ethnic Armenians – nearly the entire remaining population – fled their homes in Nagorno-Karabakh and sought refuge in Armenia.

Refugees from Nagorno-Karabakh region arrive at the Armenian border in a truck in September 2023. REUTERS/Irakli Gedenidze

“[The] liberation of territories was a main goal of my political life. And I’m proud that these goals have been achieved,” President Aliyev, whose family has ruled over Azerbaijan for the past 31 years, said last December. “I think we brought peace. We brought peace by war.”

Now in full control of Nagorno-Karabakh, Azerbaijan is doubling down on its efforts to reshape the region and move tens of thousands of Azeris there. “We will continue the ‘Great Return’ campaign until all those who were forced from their homes can go home,” the COP29 spokesperson said, referring to internally displaced Azeris.

Government officials told Climate Home that ethnic Armenians are also welcome to go back, but only if they stick to the conditions imposed by Baku.

Journalist Sargsyan said returning to Nagorno-Karabakh under Azeri control is out of the question as she fears for her safety. “I left everything there”, she said. “But I would rather die than end up in a prison in Azerbaijan.”

Heritage destruction

Meanwhile, ethnic Armenians fear the huge Azeri construction drive now underway will erase most, if not all, of their legacy.

Nijat Karimov, a special adviser to Azerbaijan’s presidency, told Climate Home that Baku had destroyed Armenian government buildings in Nagorno-Karabakh for “safety” reasons, without giving specifics. He added that Azerbaijan’s government had since “repaired and rehabilitated” the villages.

A day later, Climate Home travelled past what little remains of Karintak village (known as Dashalti in Azeri). Nestled in a gorge sitting just below Shusha-Shushi, it was home to a few hundred ethnic Armenians until Azeri forces took over at the end of 2020.

Now nearly the entire settlement appears to have been razed to the ground, as Climate Home witnessed. Mounds of disturbed soil surround a large mosque, under construction, and a church, one of the few original buildings left standing.

The village of Karintak (bottom right corner), as seen in April 2024 when Climate Home was taken through the region. Photo: Matteo Civillini

Climate Home asked the COP29 Presidency what had happened to the village. A spokesperson said government experts would need to examine the satellite images, buildings and sites referenced in Climate Home’s question “to get a complete answer”.

The case of Karintak is not an isolated one, according to Caucasus Heritage Watch, a research group led by archaeologists at Cornell and Purdue Universities. They have documented the destruction of at least eight Armenian cultural heritage sites – including churches and a cemetery – in the retaken territories since 2021.

Lucrative contracts

Baku says its grand vision is to repopulate Nagorno-Karabakh and the neighbouring areas, attract foreign business and eventually turn them into tourism destinations. But when Climate Home visited, most of what had been built appeared to be under-used, while access to the region is severely restricted.

Two international airports, completed in just 10-15 months a mere 70 km apart, have very little air traffic, except for the occasional charter flight, tracking data shows. A third airfield is now being erected nearby.

In Shusha-Shushi, a five-star spa hotel complex with sleek marble interiors was inaugurated just over a year ago. When Climate Home walked past last month, there was not a client in sight, with only wandering labourers headed to nearby construction sites.

The 5-star Shusha Hotel appeared empty when Climate Home visited in April 2024. Photo: Matteo Civillini

Historian Altstadt said the reconstruction is being driven by multiple incentives. “Yes, it is to get people back to the land they left over 30 years ago, and it is also to put their stamp on it to show ‘this is our territory and we can do what we want’,” she told Climate Home. “But there is also a lot of money to be made by Azerbaijan’s oligarchs.”

Pasha Holding is a conglomerate controlled by the powerful Pashayev family of First Lady Mehriban Aliyeva. It is heavily involved in the rebuilding of Nagorno-Karabakh. It also manages huge tracts of agricultural land and new hotels, and is opening bank branches and supermarkets.

The vast amount of money – and assets – up for grabs is also attracting considerable foreign interest.

Turkish firm Kalyon – considered to have close ties to Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, according to Reporters Without Borders – has won major construction contracts in the territories. And mining permits in Karabakh have been awarded to a group run by pro-Erdogan businessman Mehmet Cengiz.

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British architects Chapman Taylor are earning at least $2.3 million to map out the redevelopment of Shusha-Shushi – which thousands of ethnic Armenians fled following Azeri attacks in 2020 – and will also work on the urban design of other towns.

BP, meanwhile, is developing a 240-megawatt solar power plant in Jabrayil district, with construction expected to begin later this year. Speaking at Baku Energy Week in 2022, Gary Jones, the energy firm’s regional president for Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey, praised Baku’s efforts to turn Karabakh into “the heart of sustainable development”.

Adopting contested terminology used by Azerbaijan, he said the “liberated territories” are “blessed with some of the country’s best solar and geothermal resources”, creating the “perfect opportunity for a fully net zero system” that “can be built fresh from a new start”.

BP and Chapman Taylor did not respond to Climate Home’s request for comment.

Special presidential representative Hajiyev told Climate Home that many international companies are interested in working in Karabakh. “It’s a huge investment opportunity because a lot of government incentives are provided here,” he said.

(Reporting by Matteo Civillini in Azerbaijan; editing by Megan Rowling and Joe Lo; fact-checking by Sebastian Rodriguez)

Matteo Civillini visited Nagorno-Karabakh, and the surrounding districts, as part of an “energy media tour” organised and sponsored by the COP29 Presidency.

The post In Nagorno-Karabakh, Azerbaijan’s net zero vision clashes with legacy of war appeared first on Climate Home News.

While scientists have long recognised that vegan and vegetarian diets are far better for the climate than typical Western meat-eating ones, governments and international bodies have often shied away from explicit calls for the public to consume fewer animal products.

Experts told Climate Home that diets are an emotive issue. Western politicians and lobbyists opposed to climate action have spread disinformation about green policies that affect food, falsely claiming that governments will limit hamburgers, tax T-bones or make citizens eat low-carbon forms of protein like insects.

Shift subsidies

The bank’s new “Recipe for a Livable Planet” report outlines a “menu of solutions” governments can take to reduce their planet-warming emissions from food production, including using more renewable energy, harvesting food from trees instead of cutting them down, and restoring forests.

It calls on high-income countries, whose diets are most polluting for the planet, to take the lead by providing finance for green measures to low and middle-income nations and by shifting subsidies away from high-emitting food sources like cattle for beef. This “would reveal their full price and help make low-emission food options cheaper in comparison”, the report says.

UN agrees carbon market safeguards to tackle green land grabs

Report author William Sutton, the bank’s lead on climate-smart agriculture, told Climate Home an example of a subsidy that is “not necessarily helpful for the environment” is providing free or cheap land for grazing livestock. While Sutton declined to single out countries, the US government, for example, allows cows to graze on public land for a knock-down price.

If subsidies for meat were reduced in line with its “true cost” to the planet, prices would be 20-60% higher, Sutton said. “Allow the price of meat to more accurately reflect its true cost and let consumers decide whether that’s what they want to consume or whether they would rather consume lower-emissions, lower-cost alternatives,” he added.

Options not prescriptions

Despite its report, the World Bank is not keen to be seen telling people what to eat or arguing for veganism. “The approach that we’ve taken is not to be prescriptive – not to tell people what they should and shouldn’t do – but to provide options on what they could do if they should so choose,” Sutton said.

The report contrasts high-emitting foods like red meat and dairy with “low-emission foods like poultry or fruits or vegetables”. While poultry meat, which is mainly chicken, is much less emissions-intensive than lamb or particularly beef, it is more polluting than plant-based proteins, as the report’s data shows.

This table from the report shows that vegan diets are the lowest emissions (Screenshot/World Bank)

Sutton said that changing to a more sustainable diet “doesn’t mean eliminating meat necessarily. It could be switching from beef or lamb to something like chicken or even pork.” But, he added, people “could also switch to soy or other types of beans… That will reduce emissions even more but we don’t think it’s useful to prescribe that.”

Greenpeace EU food campaigner Sini Eräjää agreed that promoting full vegetarianism or veganism is too “black and white”. But, she added, encouraging poultry consumption gives out the wrong message. “I know that there are different kinds of calculations between different kinds of meats,” she said, but “first and foremost we need to change to more plant-based diets”.

Paul Behrens, an environmental change professor at Leiden University, agreed, telling Climate Home that chicken farms drive zoonotic disease and antimicrobial resistance and pollute rivers and air, while poultry feed causes deforestation.

The World Bank still has investments in the meat and dairy sector. Last year, its International Finance Corporation arm loaned $47.3m for a company to develop a pig-rearing complex in China and invested $32.6m in a Brazilian dairy producer, despite opposition from environmentalists.

Asked about this, Sutton said the organisation had to “walk the talk” and had increased its support for adapting farming to climate change and reducing its emissions.

But, he added, the bank does support some investments in livestock “after careful consideration”, if it thinks it can improve a company’s approach by increasing efficiency, cutting emissions, and providing jobs and nutritious food to the poor.

Political hot-potato

Other international bodies have avoided criticising meat too explicitly. Former officials of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) have said their employers censored them when they tried to criticise livestock. Meanwhile scientists have accused the FAO of misusing their research to underplay the role that changing diets can play in cutting climate-heating emissions.

In 2021, scientists working with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change faced pressure from Brazil and Argentina – two major beef and animal feed producers – to remove from a report a mention of plant-based diets and reduction of meat and dairy consumption as being good for the climate.

Edward Davey, an advisor to the Food and Land Use Coalition, said that national governments in particular “tend to be quite shy about talking about this issue because they fear the political repercussions of being perceived to be telling people what to eat”.

The US government has made no moves to reduce meat consumption but right-wing media outlets like Fox News have falsely claimed that “Biden’s climate requirements” will restrict Americans to “one burger per month”.

The Australian government likewise has no policies to curb meat-eating. But opposition politicians there have spread misinformation that the country signing up to a global methane pledge amounts to a “T-bone tax” and the end of the Australian barbeque.

We heard warnings about an end to the Aussie barbeque, a T-bone tax and so on if Australia joins 120 other countries in signing a pledge to reduce methane emissions.

But for rhetorical flourish – no one was ever going to outdo Barnaby Joyce.#Insiders #auspol pic.twitter.com/ZHYkbS0HJ2

— Insiders ABC (@InsidersABC) October 15, 2022

Greenpeace EU’s Eräjää said she had seen early drafts of European Commission documents that included warnings about red meat’s health impact before those warnings were stripped out of the final version. “Meat is a four-letter word,” she said.

David Powell has researched the issue for Climate Outreach, a group that specialises in communicating effectively on climate change. He said that “what we see as normal to eat is closely linked with our identities and is very personal”.

“For most people, climate arguments alone won’t help persuade them to change what they eat,” he said, adding it is better to talk about the health benefits of eating less meat and dairy in a positive way rather than shaming people.

High-income countries eat more servings of animal-sourced products than the global average

Both Sutton and Davey stressed that the debate over meat-eating is largely a wealthy country concern. People in higher-income regions eat three times as many servings of meat, seafood, eggs and dairy per day than their counterparts in South Asia or Sub-Saharan Africa.

“Many, many people in the world – typically richer people in wealthier societies but also in unequal middle-income countries – need to eat much less meat for the purpose of their health, as well as for the climate, and many of the world’s poorer people need to eat more animal  protein for their health, well-being and nutrition,” said Davey.

(Reporting by Joe Lo; editing by Megan Rowling)

The post World Bank tiptoes into fiery debate over meat emissions appeared first on Climate Home News.

At the fourth – and penultimate – round of talks, negotiators did not agree to continue formal discussions on how to cut plastic production before a final session in the Korean city of Busan set for November, making it less likely that curbs will be included in the pact.

Peru’s negotiator said his country was “disappointed”, while the nonprofit Center for International Environmental Law said governments had sacrificed “ambition for compromise”.

“The pathway to reaching a successful outcome in Busan looks increasingly perilous,” said Christina Dixon, ocean campaign leader at the Environmental Investigation Agency.

Big Oil’s plan B

While some governments led by a self-described “High-Ambition Coalition” have pushed for measures to reduce plastic production – which is expected to nearly double in G20 countries by mid-century – major oil and gas-producing states like the US, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Iran have favoured an emphasis on recycling over producing less.

The members of the self-described “High-Ambition Coalition” are in light blue (Photo credit: CREDIT)

Plastics are made from oil and gas, and their production accounts for 3% of greenhouse gas emissions. Fossil fuel companies are betting that as demand for oil and gas for energy use falls, they can compensate by selling more of their products to plastic manufacturers.

The Ottawa talks were marred by complaints from scientists and campaigners that plastics industry delegates were harassing and intimidating them, while secretively-funded, pro-plastics adverts were placed around the venue by a right-wing Canadian lobby group.

‘Unsustainable’ plastic use

The governments of Rwanda and Peru have been leading the push for a strong global deal to rein in plastic pollution, winning international approval for the talks to craft a treaty at the United Nations Environment Assembly in 2022.

In Ottawa last month, they asked governments to give their backing to formal negotiations on how to reduce the production and use of plastics, with support from the 65 member states of the High-Ambition Coalition.

While recognising that “this is an issue characterised by divergent views”, Rwanda’s negotiator told delegates “there is at least a convergence on the desire to develop an instrument that is fit for purpose guided by science – and to do so, the question we must ask is what are sustainable levels of production and consumption?”

“Science tells us that current and projected levels of plastic consumption and production are unsustainable and far exceed our waste management and recycling capacities. Moreover, these levels of production are also inconsistent with the goal of ending plastic pollution and limiting global warming to 1.5C,” she added.

‘More than a number’: Global plastic talks need community experts

But governments including Russia, Saudi Arabia and India are opposed to focusing on production curbs. The Ecuadorian chair of the talks, Ambassador Luis Vayas Valdivieso, did not include production in the list of topics to be officially discussed further before the final negotiations in South Korea.

Instead, he proposed expert groups on how to fund efforts to tackle plastic pollution and on criteria for identifying types of plastic product “of concern”. Governments accepted this, finishing their discussions at 3am on Tuesday.

Compromise welcomed

Peru expressed disappointment at the decision not to focus on production – but Russia’s negotiator welcomed it, saying that issues like the design of plastics and recycling are the “cornerstone of the future agreement” and so the talks should focus on them.

India’s delegate said the negotiations should be conducted in “a realistic manner and with consensus”, adding that “plastics have played an important role in development of our societies”.

Saudi Arabia’s negotiator praised the talks’ chair for “looking into those topics that bring convergence”, while many countries including China, the US and the European Union said the Ottawa outcome was a good compromise.

Southern Africa drought flags dilemma for loss and damage fund

Late on the last night of the talks, the EU had proposed holding another full session of negotiations before Busan, but that was blocked by Russia, Saudi Arabia and Iran.

David Azoulay, an observer for the Center for International Environmental Law, accused developed countries that style themselves as leaders on plastics of giving up the fight “as soon as the biggest polluters look sideways at them”.

In response to the lack of progress on production curbs, a group of countries led by the Pacific island nation of Micronesia put out a statement promising to continue talking informally about the issue and to keep it on the agenda. Thirty-two countries signed the “Bridge to Busan” initiative, including Nigeria, France and Australia, and more are expected to join later.

Micronesian negotiator Dennis Clare told Climate Home that its signatories “recognise that we cannot achieve our climate goals, or our goal of ending plastic pollution, without limiting plastic production to sustainable levels”.

Delays, intimidation and harassment

The four rounds of talks held since 2022 have been marked by delays, which some observers say are deliberate tactics by countries like Saudi Arabia and Russia.

At the second session in Paris last May, negotiators spent two days discussing voting rules, an issue which many thought had already been resolved.

And the third round in Nairobi in November failed to agree on intersessional work leading to Ottawa, after opposition from Russia and Saudi Arabia.

In Ottawa, the meeting was marred by complaints of intimidation and harassment from campaigners and scientists against some of the 196 lobbyists from the plastic and fossil fuel industry present in the halls.

Tensions rise over who will contribute to new climate finance goal

Bethanie Carney Almroth, a ecotoxicology professor at the University of Gothenburg who co-chairs the Scientists’ Coalition for an Effective Plastics Treaty, wrote a formal complaint to the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), the body that organises the talks.

She said she had been “verbally harassed, yelled at and subjected to unfounded accusations” by a male delegate from a plastics company, who interrupted her remarks to criticise an aspect of scientific research on plastics which he falsely said she was involved in.

In a separate complaint to UNEP, Almroth said plastics industry delegates had eavesdropped on scientists’ conversations, aggressively surrounded them and criticised their work, and “harassed and badgered several of our younger scientists”.

Marcos Orellana, the UN special rapporteur on toxics and human rights, said on X that it was “extremely worrying to hear about intimidation and harassment of scientists by industry”, adding “there should be zero tolerance for industry misconduct”.

Pro-plastic ads

Almroth told Climate Home that delegates were also faced with pro-plastic adverts at Ottawa airport, as well as on buses and taxis. “The entire city of Ottawa has been completely blanket-wallpapered in propaganda and pro-plastic and anti-UN campaigns,” she said.

Photos of these adverts seen by Climate Home show that some do not declare who paid for them, while others say they are sponsored by a right-wing lobby group called the Coalition of Concerned Manufacturers and Businesses of Canada (CCMBC).

I’m at #INC4 in Ottawa, reporting on the #PlasticsTreaty. The conference itself is plastic-free (food sold at the venue is wrapped in paper), but these ads are plastered in the hotel next door where events are being held pic.twitter.com/Bu8b6jawqG

— Lisa Song is @lisalsong.bsky.social (@lisalsong) April 24, 2024

The CCMBC’s president, political activist Catherine Swift, drove a van around the conference centre with pro-plastics adverts on it. In an interview next to the van with Rebel News, she claimed that plastics are “almost infinitely recyclable” and that recycling is the solution to plastic pollution. Passers-by tell Swift and Rebel News in the online clip that the adverts are “kind of weird” and that “plastic is killing the planet”.

The CCMBC does not systematically declare its donors. But videos from its 2023 gala dinner reveal that its sponsors include oil and gas companies like NuVista, TC Energy and plastics company Husky, whose CEO John Galt has appeared on the CCMBC’s Youtube channel.

“This is big money. This is high stakes,” said Almroth. “Plastics is the fossil fuel and the petro-chemical industry’s plan B. As we shift away from fossil fuels as an energy source, they’re putting their bets on plastics and we’re a threat to them.”

(Reporting by Joe Lo; editing by Megan Rowling)

The post Hopes fade for production curbs in new global pact on plastic pollution appeared first on Climate Home News.

Christopher Dabu, a priest in Lusitu parish in southern Zambia, one of the affected regions, said that because of the drought, his parishioners “have nothing”- including their staple food.

“Almost every day, there’s somebody who comes here to knock on this gate asking for mielie meal, [saying] ‘Father, I am dying of hunger’,” Dabu told Climate Home outside his church last month.

The government and some humanitarian agencies were quick to blame the lack of rain on climate change.

Zambia’s green economy minister Collins Nzovu told reporters in March, “there’s a lot of infrastructure damage as a result of climate change”. He added that the new UN-backed loss and damage fund, now being set up to help climate change victims, “must speak to this”.

Reverend Christopher Dabu outside his church in Lusitu, Zambia (Photo: Joe Lo)

But last week, scientists from the World Weather Attribution (WWA) group published a study which found that “climate change did not emerge as the significant driver” of the current drought affecting Zambia, Zimbabwe, Malawi, Angola, Mozambique and Botswana.

Instead, they concluded that the El Niño phenomenon – which occurs every few years with warming of sea surface temperatures in the eastern Pacific Ocean – was the drought’s “key driver”. They said the damage was worsened by the vulnerabilities of the countries affected, including reliance on rain-fed farming rather than irrigation.

Nonetheless, briefing journalists on the study, co-authors Joyce Kimutai and Friederike Otto said climate change does make El Niños stronger and more frequent – and therefore could be playing an indirect role in the southern African drought. Otto noted that climate change “might have a small role but not a big one”.

While WWA studies have often found that disasters like this are driven by climate change, there have been other cases where they have played down that link – as with droughts in Brazil in 2014 and Madagascar in 2021, and floods in Italy in 2023.

The complex nature of the science raises a dilemma for those now designing the fledgling loss and damage fund.

Its board holds its first meeting in Abu Dhabi this week. In three days of talks, the board’s 26 members will discuss the fund’s name and how to decide where it will be hosted and who will lead it. Trickier issues like the role of climate change attribution will be left to future meetings.

Climate Home spoke to several experts and two of the fund’s board members, whose opinions were divided on whether the link between climate change and a particular disaster should have to be proven before funds are dished out to affected communities.

Droughts and climate change

Egyptian climate negotiator Mohamed Nasr, a member of the new fund’s board, said he thought triggers for funding “would include the climate relation to the losses and damages”.

But to judge that connection, he said the board would “rely on confirmed science per the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) rather than individual studies”. He said the IPCC and UNEP “provide the scientific reference needed as they bring all views and assess the credibility and scientific basis”.

Peak COP? UN looks to shrink Baku and Belém climate summits

The IPCC does not do original research, including attribution studies, but every five to seven years it compiles existing research to reach conclusions about climate change, including its impacts. The last IPCC report focused on that topic in 2022 said “increases in drought frequency and duration are projected over large parts of southern Africa”.

UNEP currently does not conduct attribution studies, with a spokesperson saying this was “due to resource constraints” but adding “we hope to do more in the future”.

Another loss and damage fund board member, who wanted to remain anonymous, said the fund should only disburse money for loss and damage caused by climate change. But they asserted that due to the “chicken and egg” link between climate change and El Niño, the current southern African drought is climate-driven and so its victims should be entitled to funding.

‘Theoretical disputes’

Mattias Söderberg, who works for humanitarian organisation DanChurchAid – which has been defining and addressing loss and damage since 2019 – said attribution “is not always easy”.

But, he added, “people facing disasters should not be left behind because of theoretical disputes about attribution”.

Speaking ahead of a visit to a Kenyan refugee camp for people displaced by what he calls “loss and damage and climate-related conflicts”, he said, “I’m pretty sure they will be frustrated if they knew funding to help them cope could be questioned.”

The loss and damage fund, with advice from scientists, should draw up categories of disaster that tend to be driven by climate change – like heatwaves and droughts but excluding earthquakes which are not, he added.

Tensions rise over who will contribute to new climate finance goal

Zoha Shawoo, who researches loss and damage at the Stockholm Environment Institute, said that even if climate change played only a small role in the latest southern Africa drought, previous climate disasters had made the region’s people more vulnerable to the drought.

In addition, the current dry spell leaves them more vulnerable to future climate disasters, she added. “If they don’t receive financial support for recovery, future losses and damages will be a lot worse,” she said.

Gernot Laganda, director for climate and resilience at the UN’s World Food Programme, said that a formal attribution requirement for the loss and damage fund feels like “overkill” for a still relatively small fund. Transaction costs should be kept as low as possible, he added.

Data gaps

Kimutai, who worked on the WWA study, said she was confident the group had enough data to reach its conclusions on this particular drought. But she told a webinar hosted by the CGIAR agricultural research centre last month that a lack of data in many poorer countries means a funding requirement of attribution to global warming would be “detrimental to climate justice”.

In 2022, WWA was unable to work out the role of climate change in a drought in the Sahel region of Africa, partly blaming a lack of data. One of the drought-hit countries was Mali – which is three times the size of Germany. Mali has just 13 active weather stations, while Germany has 200, according to Bloomberg.

Limiting frontline voices in the Loss and Damage Fund is a recipe for disaster

Kimutai added that, besides data, there is a lack of expertise in doing these kinds of studies in the Global South.

Any moves to deny funds to vulnerable people impacted by drought – whatever the causes – are likely to be met with anger. Speaking to journalists about the southern Africa emergency a few days after the WWA study was issued, Chikwe Mbweeda, Zambia director for the aid agency CARE, said that “for us, we definitely understand that [the drought] is coming from the climate change effects”.

(Reporting by Joe Lo; editing by Megan Rowling)

The post Southern Africa drought flags dilemma for loss and damage fund appeared first on Climate Home News.

Now frustrated Indigenous rights groups are trying a new tactic to speed up change: creating their own funds in a push to boost the flow of money to frontline communities and shift away from what some see as an outdated colonial-style model driven by donors in the Global North. 

Since 2020 – and especially last year – more than half a dozen new Indigenous-led funds have sprung up, largely in forest-rich Brazil but also in developing countries from Indonesia to Mexico.  

Many are still in a start-up phase, but a few have already begun pushing money to frontline communities. They include the Mesoamerican Territorial Fund (MTF), which invested $1.3 million in 32 projects – from chocolate production to tourism and protecting traditional knowledge – in communities from Mexico to Panama last year. 

“We are aiming not only to make the funds reach the real guardians of the forest and the real guardians of mitigating and adapting to climate change, but also to support sustainability, democracy and good governance of all these territories,” said María Pía Hernández, a lawyer and regional manager for the MTF. 

World Bank climate funding greens African hotels while fishermen sink

Multilateral funds can take years to approve projects and often struggle to funnel big pots of nature and climate finance into the smaller-scale projects communities need, Indigenous leaders said.  

The new funds aim to fill the gap by gathering large amounts of money, distributing it nimbly and leap-frogging the barriers faced by forest communities in dealing with traditional funds, such as onerous paperwork. 

“We aim to improve not just the condition of the territories and people who live there but also promote global climatic justice,” Hernández said on the sidelines of last week’s Skoll World Forum, a gathering of social innovators.  

Bypassing the giants 

As the World Bank and International Monetary Fund hold their Spring Meetings in Washington this week, focused in part on reshaping lending for climate action, Indigenous communities are already rethinking how to better access the resources they need to protect nature and the climate – and to ensure those on the frontline benefit from changes such as new clean energy infrastructure. 

Along the way, they are setting up new rules and structures in line with their own traditions and beliefs, after years of chafing against constraints imposed by big donors, some of them former colonial powers. 

Fossil fuel debts are illegitimate and must be cancelled

In Canada, for instance, many Indigenous governing bodies now run their own renewable energy utilities, providing a fifth of Canada’s renewables, said Joan Carling, executive director of Indigenous Peoples Rights International. 

“If we transform the business-as-usual and create the enabling environment and conditions to put Indigenous people at the centre of this, then we can have a truly just, equitable renewable energy for all,” she said. 

A new dashboard released last week by the Rights and Resources Initiative and the Rainforest Foundation Norway shows climate finance for indigenous and local communities rose between 2020 and 2023 to about $517 million per year, a 36 percent increase over the previous four years. 

That increase comes after governments and charitable donors promised $1.7 billion back in 2021 to Indigenous and local communities by 2025 for their role in protecting land and forests, which are considered key to protecting both the climate and biodiversity. 

Yet with much new funding still moving through big international environment organisations and other intermediary agencies, rather than directly to communities, “there is no evidence yet indicating a systematic change in funding modalities,” the groups noted in a report.

Connecting communities with cash 

Solange Bandiaky-Badji, coordinator of the Rights and Resources Initiative, said improving direct access to funding is the key issue. At least $10 billion in finance for Indigenous and local communities will be needed to meet a global pledge to protect at least 30 percent of the planet’s land and oceans by 2030, she added. 

Indigenous-led funds believe they can be pivotal to achieving that ramp-up. 

Shandia, established by the Global Alliance of Territorial Communities uniting 35 million people from 24 countries, is still in a start-up phase but aims to serve as a conduit for much larger-scale finance to Indigenous and other frontline groups. 

“Millions of dollars are moving in the world. We want to connect claims on the ground to those millions,” said Juan Carlos Jintiach, a Shuar indigenous leader from Ecuador and the alliance’s executive secretary, who was shortlisted for the Nobel Peace Prize last year for his work on behalf of Indigenous communities. 

Indonesia’s main Indigenous alliance similarly in 2023 helped establish the Nusantara Fund, while in Brazil a range of Indigenous-led vehicles, including the Podáali Indigenous Amazonian Fund, were launched last year.

Guardians of the forest – and finance?  

Anthony Bebbington, who runs the Ford Foundation’s international natural resources and change change programmes, said the last few years had seen the emergence of substantial new funds, with the potential to grow, that are challenging the traditional ways donors have worked.  

“Funds are saying to us, ‘If you trust us to be guardians of the forest – a role for which we are often harassed and sometimes killed – then there is no justification for you to also not trust us to be guardians of the finance’,” he told an event on the sidelines of the Skoll World Forum. 

In projects backed by the Mesoamerican Territorial Fund, for instance, indicators of success are changing from a simple focus on hectares of forest replanted to include things like whether more water is flowing through key rivers, said Hernández, whose fund so far gets 80 percent of its support from philanthropies. 

An Indigenous Ramas man lifts a crayfish trap in the Rio Indio river, San Juan de Nicaragua, Nicaragua on February 16, 2022.(Photo: Reuters/Antoine Boureau/Hans Lucas)

The MTF also actively seeks out and helps prepare applications from Indigenous and local communities that could benefit from its support rather than just accepting grant proposals, as traditional donors often do.  

David Rothschild, senior director of partnerships for Nia Tero, a US non-profit that works with Indigenous groups, said avoiding heavy paperwork was key to enabling the new funds take off. 

“What they don’t want is to become another entity in the system operating in a colonial way. How do they not fall into the same patterns that have been destructive, while still reporting to donors?” he asked. 

Hernández said new ways of working are developing, if sometimes too slowly. “We are not asking for blank cheques,” she emphasised. “But we deserve a little bit of consideration.”

(Reporting by Laurie Goering; editing by Megan Rowling)

The post As donors dither, Indigenous funds seek to decolonise green finance   appeared first on Climate Home News.

Just a few kilometres further south, however, local fishermen in Mbour, the country’s second-largest fishing port, are struggling. The beaches where they keep their boats are being progressively eaten away by rising seas that also threaten their homes.

The stark contrast between the neighbouring coastal areas highlights how global funding for climate projects – largely taxpayers’ money from rich countries – often fails to help those shouldering the burden of warming impacts, especially when it is being used to mobilise more private investment for green aims.

“They prioritise Saly because the hotels are wealthy,” said Saliou Diouf, a retired fisherman who lost his house in Mbour to encroaching waves. “The World Bank should help the most vulnerable.” 

Map showing the location of the neighbouring communities of Saly and Mbour on Senegal’s coast (Graphic: Fanis Kollias)

Le Lamantin is one of a dozen upscale hotels in sub-Saharan Africa acquired by Mauritius-based Kasada Hospitality Fund LP – whose investors are Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund and multinational hotel giant Accor – which it is revamping in accordance with EDGE, a green building certification created by the World Bank.

Kasada was granted over $190 million in guarantees by the World Bank Group’s Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA), and loans of up to $160 million by its private-sector lender, the International Finance Corporation, to help it snap up hotels across Kenya, Nigeria, Ivory Coast, Rwanda, Namibia and Senegal, and spruce them up as Accor brands like Mövenpick.

The Mövenpick Resort Lamantin Saly, where a standard hotel room costs about £220 a night (Photo: Jack Thompson)

MIGA, the little-known insurance arm of the World Bank Group, has counted its backing for the hotels as part of its climate efforts for the past three years, according to annual sustainability reports.

The five-star resort in the West African nation of Senegal, where rooms cost at least £220 a night ($270), is being refurbished to consume at least 20% less energy and water than other comparable buildings by its owner Kasada, which expects it to obtain EDGE certification this year.

Teresa Anderson, global lead on climate justice for ActionAid International, told Climate Home it is “shocking that what little funds there are for climate action are benefiting luxury hotels”.

 

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Una publicación compartida de Mövenpick Resort Lamantin Saly (@movenpicklamantinsaly)

“Climate finance must be used to help those most vulnerable – not to help the world’s wealthiest add a climate hashtag to their Instagram posts by the pool,” she said.

MIGA told Climate Home its support for Kasada is primarily aimed at developing Senegal’s tourism sector and creating jobs, adding that refurbishing hotels can also have beneficial climate impacts and play an important role in decarbonising the hospitality industry.

Mbour, just a few miles from the pristine beaches of Saly, is the second-largest fishing hub in Senegal with 11,000 fishers. (Photo: Jack Thompson)

‘The money is missing’

In nearby Mbour, however, the fishing community feels left behind.

“I was born here, I grew up here – when I was a child, the sea only came up to the last pole,” Diouf told Climate Home, pointing to the remnants of a Portuguese-built pontoon used to moor colonial ships in the 1800s. 

In just one generation, he said, the sea has gobbled up more than 100 metres of beach in Mbour, forcing 30 families to abandon their houses and threatening hundreds more. A quarter of the Senegalese coastline – home to 60% of the population – is at high risk of erosion.

Mbour’s fast-disappearing shore is a crisis for its 11,000 fishers as big swells destroy their boats, crammed into the remaining patch of sand.

But in Saly, it’s a different story. Here, between 2017 and 2022, under a separate project, the World Bank invested $74 million in beach protection, building 19 stone walls, groynes and breakwaters to reclaim 8-9 kilometres of hotel-lined beachfront, popular with tourists.

The World Bank Group said the project helped preserve around 15,000 direct and indirect jobs by saving tourism infrastructure, while also protecting two fishing villages in Saly.

Satellite data shows the changing coastline in Saly (north), where protective infrastructure was developed, and Mbour (south), which has none. (Photo: Modified Copernicus Sentinel data [2024]/Sentinel Hub)

The World Bank Group (WBG) said its units work together to avoid trade-offs. “It’s not to either support hotels and the tourism sector as a driver of development, or to enhance the resilience of local communities – the WBG does both,” it said in a written response to Climate Home.

But fishermen in Mbour – which was outside the scope of the Saly coastal protection infrastructure project – are not benefiting from that approach, and even say the works in Saly have exacerbated erosion in their area. The Mbour artisanal fisheries council has devised a climate adaptation strategy to address the problem. 

One of its coordinators, Moustapha Senghor, said seawalls and breakwaters are needed, but there are no funds for what would amount to “a colossal investment”. “We know exactly what we need to do, but the money is missing,” he said.

Sea level rise is threatening beach-side homes and swallowing coconut trees that protect the coastline in Mbour, Senegal. (Photo: Jack Thompson)

Private-sector trillions

Governments and climate justice activists are putting pressure on the World Bank to significantly step up its role in funding climate projects, especially to help the most vulnerable countries and communities. 

For the past three years, a group of countries led by Barbados’ Prime Minister Mia Mottley has called for reforms so that the bank can better address climate change.

At the same time, wealthy nations have been reluctant to inject more capital into its coffers, while attempts at tinkering with the balance sheet to squeeze out more climate cash only go so far. 

For World Bank Group President Ajay Banga, the real solution lies in greater private-sector involvement, using scarce public money as a lever to help mobilise huge dollar sums for climate and development goals this decade.

“We know that governments and multilateral institutions and philanthropies all working together will still fall short of providing the trillions that we will require annually for climate, for fragility, for inequality in the world. We therefore need the private sector,” Banga told media ahead of this week’s annual Spring Meetings of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

MIGA’s guarantees can be a key driver of climate investments in developing countries. (Graphic: Fanis Kollias)

Following suggestions from a group of CEOs convened by Banga, the World Bank Group announced in February a major overhaul of its guarantee business to enable “improved access and faster execution”. The goal is to triple issuances, including those from MIGA, to $20 billion by 2030, with a significant proportion of that expected to support green projects.

MIGA – as a provider of guarantees aimed at encouraging private capital into developing countries – may not be the obvious choice to help low-income communities like Mbour’s fishers. 

But, in its 2023 sustainability report, the agency wrote: “because the poorest are the most vulnerable to climate change, MIGA is working to mobilize more private finance to scale up climate adaptation, resilience and preparedness”.

Last year, less than one percent of MIGA’s total guarantees directly supported climate adaptation measures, according to its annual report.  

The guarantees generally act as a form of political risk insurance, making an investment less risky and giving companies access to cheaper loans as a result.

MIGA’s 2023 sustainability report showcases the Kasada-owned hotels as an example of its efforts to “rapidly ramp up” private capital for climate action, with the agency providing its highest volume of climate finance last year.

Struggle to fund adaptation

But some experts argue the World Bank Group should be targeting its efforts more closely on communities who are struggling to survive as global warming exacerbates extreme weather and rising seas. 

Vijaya Ramachandran, a director at the Breakthrough Institute, a California-based environmental research centre, said projects like the Kasada-backed hotels are “not where the dollars are best spent from a climate perspective”.

Ramachandran, a former World Bank economist, co-authored a study last year analysing the climate portfolio of the bank’s public-sector lending arms, which exclude MIGA. It found a lack of clarity over what constitutes a climate project and showed that hundreds of projects had been tagged as climate finance despite having little to do with emissions-reduction efforts or adaptation.

Ramachandran told Climate Home that, in the case of MIGA’s backing for the African hotels, Kasada “should just be doing the energy saving itself as part of its own efforts to address climate change”. 

Holidaymakers enjoy a spacious, ocean-side pool at the five-star Le Lamantin resort in Saly, Senegal. (Photo: Jack Thompson)

Olivier Granet and David Damiba, managing partners of Kasada Capital Management, told Climate Home the hotel investment fund had always planned to be “a leader in energy and water efficiency in its properties”. 

But, they added, the financial and technical support of MIGA and the IFC had helped them implement their strategy “further and more easily”, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. Eight Kasada-owned hotels have already been certified under EDGE and the rest are expected to achieve the standard this year, they noted.

Ramachandran said making hotels energy-efficient is a good thing – “but from a public finance perspective, for poorer African countries the focus should be on adaptation and making them more resilient”.

Developing countries need an estimated $387 billion a year to carry out their current adaptation plans, but in 2021 they received only $24.6 billion in international adaptation finance, according to the latest figures published by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

MIGA to miss climate target?

Once regarded by campaigners as the “World Bank’s dirtiest wing” for its support of fossil fuels, MIGA has come under mounting pressure to shift its subsidies in a greener direction, in line with broader institutional goals.

In response, the agency has committed to throw more of its financial weight behind projects that aim to cut greenhouse gas emissions or alleviate the impacts of climate change. 

In 2020, it revealed a plan to dedicate at least 35% of its guarantees to climate projects on average from fiscal year 2021 through 2025, embracing a target set by the wider World Bank Group. 

MIGA conceded at the time this would be “a challenge” – and it now looks likely to fall short of the goal. In 2023, climate finance represented 28% of its guaranteed investments.

According to the agency’s 2023 sustainability report, 31 out of 40 projects it supported with guarantees last year had a climate mitigation or adaptation component, but it did not disclose what percentage of each was counted as climate finance.

Meanwhile, over the last three years, MIGA has backed three gas-fired power plants in Mozambique and Bangladesh, while it is also planning to support an additional one in Togo. 

In monetary terms, MIGA’s annual provision of climate guarantees has risen from just over $1 billion in 2019 to $1.5 billion in 2023, pushing up the total size of its climate portfolio to $8.4 billion. But the headline numbers only paint a partial picture, clouded by a lack of transparency in the data.

MIGA’s portfolio of climate investments has grown in the past six years. (Photo: MIGA Climate Change)

In response to Climate Home’s request for a full list of MIGA’s climate projects, the agency said it could not disclose the information for confidentiality reasons. 

“Our clients are private-sector investors or financiers, and we do not have agreement to release disaggregated information about their investments and financing,” a MIGA spokesperson said.

The only clues about the make-up of MIGA’s climate portfolio come in its glossy annual sustainability reports, which highlight a handful of initiatives. 

Climate Home News reviewed these reports from the last three available years – 2021, 2022 and 2023 – and tracked highlighted projects, which are framed as positive examples of climate finance. 

Motorways and elite universities 

They show that support for renewable energy made up a quarter of MIGA’s climate guarantees in 2023. 

But its track record of climate investments raises questions about the agency’s criteria for designating projects as climate finance and how it allocates those resources to help people most in need, experts said. 

Karen Mathiasen, a former director of the multilateral development bank office in the US Treasury, said MIGA should not be using its resources to expand investment in things like luxury hotels and then counting them as climate finance. 

“There is a real problem in the World Bank Group with greenwashing,” added Mathiasen, who is now a project director with the Center for Global Development.

World Bank approves green reforms, appeals for more money

MIGA said it calculates the climate co-benefits from its projects using the same methodologies as other multilateral development banks, and applies them consistently according to a “rigorous internal consultation and review process”. 

Large infrastructure projects feature heavily in MIGA’s climate portfolio. 

For example, a group of international banks, including JP Morgan, Banco Santander and Credit Agricole, have received a total of €1.4 billion in guarantees to bankroll the construction of a new motorway in Serbia, in an area prone to severe flooding. 

The 112-km dual-carriageway, in the West Morava river valley, is implementing measures to reduce flood risk, including river regulation – and so was counted as climate finance.  

In 2022, MIGA’s largest climate guarantee – worth €570 million ($615 million) – helped finance the construction of a new campus in Morocco’s capital Rabat for the Mohammed VI Polytechnic, a private university owned by mining and fertiliser company OCP Group and frequented by the country’s elite.

According to MIGA, the project would seek to obtain LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) green-building certification “for key facilities”, and include hydraulic structures to enhance the climate resilience of the campus.

Similarly, support for a new hospital in Gaziantep, Turkey, was tagged as 100% climate finance because it features energy efficiency measures and flood drainage works. 

In 2023, just under half of MIGA’s climate guarantees went towards “greening” the financial sector in mainly middle-income countries like Argentina, Colombia, Hungary, Algeria and Botswana. 

These guarantees are intended to help local banks free up more capital and boost loans to climate projects, although in some cases they are only expected to do so on a “best effort basis” involving no strict obligation, according to MIGA’s annual reports.

MIGA said this clause is included for regulatory reasons and requires banks to “take all necessary actions to provide climate loan commitments” as far as is “commercially reasonable”.

UN climate chief calls for “quantum leap in climate finance”

Call for clarity 

Ramachandran of the Breakthrough Institute said MIGA should demonstrate the outcomes of its climate finance projects “in terms of reduced emissions or of improved resilience, (and) what the overarching strategy is to make sure the money is best spent”. 

“Instead the focus is simply on dollar amounts,” she added – a criticism rejected by the World Bank Group. 

MIGA said it supports projects in all sectors that contribute to development and enables the inclusion of emissions-cutting and climate adaptation measures in their design and operation. 

Former U.S. official Mathiasen believes MIGA could be a powerful engine to mobilise more private money for climate action, but said it needs a cultural change to focus more on results rather than numerical targets which give staff an incentive to “pump up the numbers”. 

“A little bit of an add-on – that is not a climate project. There needs to be clear, transparent criteria of what constitutes a climate project,” she said. 

(Reporting by Jack Thompson in Senegal and Matteo Civillini in London; additional reporting by Sebastian Rodriguez; editing by Megan Rowling, Sebastian Rodriguez and Joe Lo; graphics by Fanis Kollias)

This article was amended on April 17 to clarify that the Qatar Investment Authority and Accor are investors in the Kasada Hospitality Fund. It is run by Kasada Capital Management.

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International oil companies, led by US firm ExxonMobil, plan to extract 11 billion barrels of oil from Guyana’s ocean floor and sell it abroad to be burned, thereby worsening global warming. The country pumped its first oil in 2020.

Despite this, late last month Guyanese president Irfaan Ali defended his country’s green credentials in a heated interview with the BBC’s Hardtalk programme, which went viral on social media. “Even with our greatest exploration of the oil and gas resources we have now, we will still be net zero,” he said, referring to the country’s greenhouse gas emissions.

“We have the lowest rate of deforestation in the world… Guyana will still be net zero”

President Irfaan Ali says Guyana won’t take lectures on climate change as it exploits its huge offshore oil and gas reserves

https://t.co/TKxhR6r3ur pic.twitter.com/xIJTgRsfZP

— BBC HARDtalk (@BBCHARDtalk) March 29, 2024

The case of Guyana shows how countries with large forests can use unclear rules on counting national carbon emissions to justify fossil fuel production.

Michael Lazarus, a scientist with the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI), told Climate Home it is “absurd” to claim that capturing and storing carbon dioxide (CO2) in forests offsets the emissions impact of oil production, as “they have nothing to do with each other than geographic proximity”.

Official United Nations carbon accounting rules, drawn up nearly 20 years ago by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), allow Guyana to claim net-zero status because they do not specify which types of forest governments can take credit for preserving – and also because the emissions from oil are counted in the country where it is used and burned, not where it is produced.

Experts said governments are taking advantage of having barely-touched forests on their land that suck up CO2, and argued that fossil fuel-rich nations like Guyana should bear part of the moral responsibility for the emissions of their polluting products.

“The problem is that within the country, you are allowing the emissions to continue or even to rise, and then you are trying to balance that out internally by saying that we have this forest,” said Souparna Lahiri from the Global Forest Coalition.

Carbon-negative club

Around 93% of Guyana is covered in forest – more than any other nation but its neighbour Suriname. The population numbers just 800,000, mostly clustered on its coastline, and those people on average emit slightly less than the global average per capita.

Although the country’s non-forestry emissions are growing steadily, CO2 absorption by its vast forests more than compensates for that.

In its emissions inventory sent to the United Nations, the government claimed: “Guyana is a net carbon sink, with its lush managed forest cover removing up to ten times more than the emissions produced in the country up to the year 2022”.

Other small, sparsely-populated forest-covered nations like Suriname, Panama and Bhutan assert they are carbon-negative too.

While not claiming the same accolade, leaders of bigger forest nations like Russia and Brazil have also used their forests to defend their climate record.

In 2021, Russian President Vladimir Putin told a US-hosted summit: “Russia makes a gigantic contribution to absorbing global emissions – both ours and from elsewhere – owing to the great absorption capacity of our ecosystems.”

Despite rising Brazilian deforestation under Jair Bolsonaro, the former president told the same summit that the Amazon’s carbon absorption was evidence that “Brazil is at the very forefront of efforts to tackle global warming”.

Managed vs unmanaged

International carbon accounting rules essentially leave it up to governments to decide how much credit they claim for CO2 absorption by national forests, with many opting to count it all.

In 2006, scientists working with the IPCC came up with a distinction between “managed” land – where greenhouse gas emissions and removals should be attributed to humans and nations – and “unmanaged” land where forests are natural and governments should neither be credited nor blamed for emissions levels.

The IPCC defined “managed” land as “land where human interventions and practices have been applied to perform production, ecological or social functions”. Those could include planting a commercial forest, protecting a forest from fire, or designating it for conservation.

In its national emissions inventory report, Guyana does not differentiate between “managed” and “unmanaged land” – and claims credit for CO2 sequestration by all of its forests.

Guyanese forestry expert Michelle Kalamandeen told Climate Home the government is doing well at protecting the rainforest but should not classify it all as managed by the state. Much of it – particularly in the south – is inaccessible, so “they’re just relying on remoteness for protection of it”, she explained.

The Global Forest Coalition’s Lahiri agreed, saying that most of Guyana’s forest seems to be intact old-growth forest “so it is not a plantation or managed forest in that sense”.

A global issue

From this perspective, Guyana is by no means the only country that appears to be over-counting its emission sinks. A 2018 study in the journal Carbon Balance and Management found that over fourth-fifths of the 101 countries analysed counted all their land as managed.

Even those countries that make a distinction often counted all of their forest – but not all their land – as managed. Australia is one example.

Even the rare few that consider some of their forests “unmanaged” have drawn the line in different places.

Russia counts most of its forests as managed with a few exceptions, the US counts everything outside of Alaska (and much inside it) as managed, and Canada counts everything it tries to protect from fires.

The USA’s “managed” land (blue) and “unmanaged” land (grey) (Photos: Carbon Balance and Management)

Brazil stands out as the exception, counting just under half of its huge forests as managed and foregoing a carbon accounting boost from the other half.

Oil emissions

The other carbon accounting orthodoxy Guyana relies on is attributing emissions from burning fossil fuels like oil to the countries where they are burned, not where they are produced.

The vast majority of Guyana’s oil will be exported to regions like Europe and Asia or to neighbouring Brazil, meaning that emissions from its use will be counted there.

This way of measuring emissions prevents them from being double-counted – but it lets extracting nations off the hook for the carbon pollution caused by the fossil fuels they sell abroad.

Kalamandeen said oil-producing countries have some responsibility for the emissions created by the consumption of their fossil fuels, while the home nations of fossil fuel companies should also step up. In Guyana’s case, that would be the US and China, as the oil extraction consortium is made up of ExxonMobil, Hess Corporation and the China National Offshore Oil Corporation.

SEI’s Lazarus described the current system as an “essential accountability framework for governments and civil society” – but agreed that producers should be held morally accountable too.

Without that, he said, “we’d turn a blind eye to… the lock-in effects of long-lived fossil fuel supply investments that impede the global clean energy transition”.

The post Forest carbon accounting allows Guyana to stay net zero while pumping oil appeared first on Climate Home News.

Debt-laden growers want an existing government procurement system to be made legally binding and to raise the minimum price for a wider range of crops – which could help them move away from thirsty rice and wheat farming.

But some agricultural analysts argue that bolstering the Minimum Support Price (MSP) for produce would not resolve the wider climate problems farmers face, nor ease demand for scarce water resources.

Expectations mount as loss and damage fund staggers to its feet

Deedar Singh, a 50-year-old farmer from Patiala, joined a march towards Delhi in mid-February and spoke to Climate Home at a camp on the Punjab-Haryana border, 200 km from Delhi. He participated in a similar mobilisation back in 2020 that lasted for just over a year.

With a family of nine to support, he complained that his five-acre landholding and meagre income of 200,000 rupees per year ($2,400) cannot provide a decent quality of life, especially as weather extremes worsen.

“If untimely rain destroys our rice or hot temperatures shrink the wheat grain, our crops are ruined, leaving us unable to even cover the costs of the next cropping season,” said Singh. Most people in his village rely on financial support sent by their children who have migrated abroad, he added.

Farmers gather at the Shambhu border, between Punjab and Haryana, to burn effigies of political leaders and shout slogans in support of the protest, February 27 2024 (Photo: Kanika Gupta)

Globally, India accounts for 10% of agricultural output and is the second-largest producer of rice and wheat. It is also the biggest consumer of groundwater. Its 260 million farmers depend heavily on depleting water reserves to irrigate their crops.

That means they are also struggling with climate change, as about 65% of the country’s cropped area depends on rainwater. Erratic rainfall and shorter winters are harming yields, with heavy downpours causing flooding and a sudden spike in temperatures a year ago causing wheat grain to shrink.

The Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) reports that for every 1C increase in temperature, wheat production suffers a significant decline of 4-5 million tonnes.

Debt drives suicides

Water resources are running low and farmers’ input costs have soared – yet the government-administered minimum support price (MSP) has not risen accordingly, said Ramandeep Singh Mann, an agriculturist and member of Kisan Mazdoor Morcha, an umbrella body spearheading the current protest.

That has left farmers with no money to pay for contingencies and has forced many to take on high levels of debt, he said.

“At some point your back breaks. When that happens, there is no other solution but to take extreme steps,” he added, referring to suicides among indebted farmers.

To boost falling yields, farmers are using more inputs like water and fertilisers, leaving them with higher production costs and lower profit margins.

Some states have provided free or subsidised electricity, as well as loan forgiveness for debt-strapped farmers, but since 2014, only half of the intended waiver recipients have benefited, according to a study by the State Bank of India.

These woes have fuelled a growing wave of protest, as farmers feel they have no other recourse.

Nonetheless, Sardara Singh Johl, a 97-year-old agricultural economist from Ludhiana and former vice-chancellor at Punjab Agricultural University, said the latest mobilisation was unlikely to result in the dialogue required to address the broader problems facing farmers.

“They already have MSP for wheat and rice, and these are high-paying crops. Even if you reduce the price risk with MSP, what can you do about the other uncertainties?” he asked.

In mid-February, at the last round of talks with the government, ministers proposed to purchase five additional crops – moong dal, urad dal, tur dal, maize and cotton – from farmers at an MSP for five years through central agencies, but farmers rejected the offer.

Jagjit Singh Dallewal, leader of the non-political Samyukta Kisan Morcha group, which is also involved in organising the farmers’ protest, said the proposal would mainly benefit farmers willing to switch from paddy or wheat to other crops and would not ensure a stable income.

Farmer leaders give a press conference at Shambhu border, between Punjab and Haryana, on February 27 2024. Photo: Kanika Gupta)

Water reserves shrink amid over-use

Economist Johl argued that, irrespective of its profitability, rice is no longer a suitable crop for Punjab as its water table recedes to a dangerously low level.

A study by Punjab Agricultural University found that between 1998 and 2018, groundwater levels in the region had dropped drastically, from 10 metres below ground to 30 metres, largely due to a shift from traditional canal irrigation to widespread adoption of tube wells for water extraction.

Farmers are aware of Punjab’s dwindling water resources, said Mann, but they need guaranteed price support for more crops in order to shift away from water-intensive rice cultivation.

“They know that if they are able to earn as much as they do from paddy, they will grow other crops. But without fair support of MSP, it is hard to make that switch,” he said.

In Somalia, Green Climate Fund tests new approach for left-out communities

Uday Chandra, a professor of government at the Georgetown University in Qatar, said key food-supplying states like Punjab have struggled to get their problems heard and dealt with by the national government.

“The problem is that what the Punjab farmer wants isn’t sustainable,” he said, referring to the state’s shrinking water supplies. “The best way would be to bring them into discussion and find a solution that is specific to them.”

Trucks lined up at the Shambhu border, 200 km from Delhi, after being stopped by the central government from advancing to the Indian capital, February 27 2024 (Photo: Kanika Gupta)

Thousands of farmers who were initially stopped by heavy police control outside Delhi have now made it to the capital after receiving permission to protest at the Ramlila Maidan ground. They are determined to maintain their mobilisation during the general elections – which will take place over several weeks from late April until the start of June – if their MSP demands go unmet.

In 2021, angry farmers backed down after the government rowed back on laws that had sparked huge protests. But they have now returned to direct action, calling on the government to fulfill its promises, including demands for pensions, debt waivers, penalties for selling counterfeit agricultural inputs, and withdrawal from the World Trade Organization.

Call for high-tech solutions

Mann said climate change is compounding their woes – yet while the government acknowledges the problem, it is doing little to help the sector deal with it.

The Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

However, at the ICAR’s Annual General Meeting last month, Arjun Munda, Union Minister of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare, said the Modi government is committed to bolstering the agricultural sector and supporting farmers, including with high-yielding, resilient seed varieties released by ICAR in the past decade.

It also issues Agromet weather-based crop advisories with the India Meteorological Department to about 60 million farmers twice a week and promotes practices for more efficient use of water and nutrients.

But protesting farmers said the government’s measures are failing to help them adapt adequately to a changing climate and water shortages.

Bhupinder Singh, a farmer in Punjab’s Mohali district, discusses his transition to organic farming methods as a means to prevent the burning of stubble remaining after rice cultivation, November 26 2023. (Photo: Kanika Gupta)

Haranjeet Singh, 53, of Ludhiana in Punjab, said the rice variety farmers are now planting gives smaller harvests, after the government suspended use of a more productive but thirstier variety which also took longer to mature and produced more stubble – a major cause of air pollution when burned.

“Unfortunately, these new seeds don’t give us as much yield,” he said. “We are spending the same amount of money and getting less in return.”

Madhura Swaminathan, daughter of the late MS Swaminathan – the architect of India’s Green Revolution which boosted crop yields and tackled the nation’s food scarcity issues in the 1970s – believes greater use of technology could help.

The professor at the Indian Statistical Institute in Bangalore pointed to an example she encountered in Amritsar a few years ago, where groundwater sensors were connected to mobile apps, enabling users to remotely control water pumps and conserve water.

“We must embrace new technologies, farming practices, and techniques to tackle the challenges brought by climate change,” she said.

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The World Bank – the fund’s expected host – said on its website last week that its own board anticipates approving a formal plan to become the fund’s “financial intermediary” by mid-April, with a final operating deal due to be in place with the fund by the end of July.

But would-be recipients of the loss and damage fund’s resources are already jostling for position in a growing queue of nations hoping for help – and its board faces an unenviable task: figuring out how to fairly divide very little money among too many people in desperate need of it, as climate impacts accelerate in a warming world.

Timetable of steps the World Bank plans to undertake to become host of the new UN loss and damage fund (Source: World Bank)

Pakistan, for instance, is still seeking about $16 billion to rebuild roads, bridges, schools and more, after 2022 floods inundated a third of the country. In southern Africa, Zambia – hit by a severe drought that has ruined half of this season’s staple maize crop – wants support to shore up its dwindling water supplies.

Vulnerable countries – from Pacific and Caribbean island nations to Bangladesh – are looking for money to cover growing losses as warmer seas drive stronger hurricanes and cyclones. And in Senegal, where higher oceans are accelerating coastal erosion, families watching their ancestors’ skeletons float out to sea from flooded graveyards are asking for cash to rebuild crumbling coastal communities.

“The need is for trillions (of dollars) – and what we have is millions, not even billions,” said Ritu Bharadwaj, a climate finance and governance researcher at the UK-based International Institute for Environment and Development who has closely followed the new fund’s evolution. So far, it has garnered about $700 million in pledges.

With the residual costs from loss and damage projected to reach a total of $290 billion to $580 billion by 2030, according to a 2018 study, the loss and damage fund aims to ramp up its resources significantly, largely by persuading donor governments it can use their money effectively.

In partnership with a new taskforce on international taxation, it is also exploring how to harness innovative but politically tricky funding sources such as levies on fossil fuels, aviation, shipping and financial transactions.

UN’s climate body faces “severe financial challenges” which put work at risk

To make limited resources stretch further, fund observers like Bharadwaj have urged the board to consider ways to reach vulnerable people directly, such as cash transfers when a pre-set trigger point is passed – for example, a top-strength hurricane hitting an at-risk zone.

That approach would cut out middleman delivery agencies that critics say now claim too much of climate finance flows and reduce the amounts getting to the frontlines.

Bharadwaj and some others also believe the fund should consider supporting so-far inadequate efforts to build resilience to worsening climate shocks, rather than just responding once they happen – in order to curb future demands for assistance.

That could include helping Zambia’s farmers build community irrigation systems to avoid them coming back to the fund repeatedly to cover crop losses from warming-fuelled drought.

“We need to be more responsive to the comprehensive risks the communities are facing,” said Bharadwaj.

Between relief and resilience

However, Avinash Persaud, a loss and damage fund board member from Barbados representing Latin American and Caribbean nations, said the fund should focus on its core mission – helping the worst-hit communities and countries recover and rebuild after climate impacts – rather than responding to well-intentioned pleas to expand its work.

“This fund is not replacing relief agencies. This is not a resilience-building fund,” he told Climate Home. “This is doing the stuff in the middle – what happens the day after the relief agencies pack up and leave your people fed and watered but under blue tarpaulins.”

The fund could support the reconstruction of devastated towns in a safer location, repairs to roads, bridges and schools – or anything else that “reboots the community”, said Persaud, an economist noted for helping design the Bridgetown Initiative, which aims to reshape international finance flows to help debt-strapped countries boost climate protection.

Damage in a Miskito indigenous community called Wawa Bar, after being the epicenter of Hurricane Eta, on the Caribbean side of Nicaragua. The North Caribbean, one of the poorest regions of Nicaragua, was plunged into uncertainty and despair after the double blow of hurricanes Eta and Iota, which sowed death and destruction in Central America, Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua, November 23, 2020 (Photo: Katlyn Holland/CRS / Latin America News Agency via Reuters)

With the loss and damage fund’s 26-strong board now in place – albeit several weeks late and yet to name one developing-world member with only an alternate from India listed for that seat – it is expected to start work in April to establish its operating rules. 

The board is set to grapple with a range of contentious discussions, including whether a share of support should be given as concessional loans rather than simple grants.

Also up in the air is whether money should move straight to governments and local organisations or also through international partners – including development banks and UN agencies – and how much direct access to the fund vulnerable communities should have.

African dismay at decision to host loss and damage advice hub in Geneva

With the UN-backed Green Climate Fund, for example, about three-quarters of funding has been channeled to countries via international organisations and only a quarter has been delivered directly to developing countries and regions for projects.

Harjeet Singh, who has tracked efforts to establish the fund for more than a decade and is now global engagement director at the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative, said he was hopeful “this fund is going to be different from the ones we’ve had so far”.

Fund with ‘a clean slate’

Michai Robertson, a senior advisor for the Alliance of Small Island States and a research fellow at the UK-based global affairs think-tank ODI, said language in the agreement setting up the fund should help ensure it operates in new ways.

In making allocations, for instance, the board – which aims to disburse money far faster than existing climate funds – will have to balance the needs of countries that have sustained large climate losses with setting aside a basic floor of support for poorer or highly vulnerable nations where the overall bill is smaller but some communities are hit very hard.

Currently, small island developing states get just 2% of international climate finance and least-developed countries, largely in Africa, about 8-10%, Robertson noted.

“You don’t want one country to take up all the scarce resources,” he said.

In Somalia, Green Climate Fund tests new approach for left-out communities

The fund’s agreement also says that vulnerable countries and communities should have a large say in deciding priorities for using its money – and that Indigenous and other community knowledge of local risks should be considered as a valuable source of information, especially when climate risk modelling is lacking in some countries.

The fund will also address some “non-economic” losses and damage – such as the disappearance of nature a community relies on, or cultural institutions – in the form of finance to help rebuild a ruined museum or replant lost mangroves, Singh said.

Bharadwaj said she hoped the fund can act in a way that is catalytic, helping countries fill the gaps in other funding streams – from climate adaptation and resilience, to development and humanitarian aid.

“When an existing institution or organisation does things in a certain way, it takes a lot of effort to change that. But the loss and damage fund is not carrying any baggage behind it. Here we have a chance for a clean slate,” she said.

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In the Danish port city, as dozens of ministers fired the starting gun on the annual climate diplomacy race, the focus was on putting December’s landmark Cop28 decision into practice. In Dubai, governments agreed for the first time to start shifting away from fossil fuels. But officials are now contemplating how to make that work in the real world – and, crucially, who will pay for it.

Meanwhile, in oil and gas-rich Texas, top fossil fuel executives took to the stage at the energy industry conference CERAWeek, where they cast doubt on the transition away from fossil fuels agreed at Cop28, with Saudi Aramco CEO Amin Nasser calling it a “fantasy”.

In the courts, Republican-led US states sued the Biden administration over its recent decision to pause new approvals for fossil gas exports.

Energy transition crossroads

For climate policy observers, these opposing forces are not entirely surprising.

Romain Ioualalen, global policy manager at campaign group Oil Change International, said the Cop28 decision puts the fossil fuel industry at a crossroads: either it pours more investment into renewable energy, or it doubles down on oil, gas and coal in a bid to undermine the green shift as much as possible.

“It seems to have chosen the latter – and unless governments immediately intervene to end fossil fuel expansion, people and planet will pay the price,” he added.

Pushing for faster adoption of clean energy certainly appears to be the intention on the international climate policy stage, where the political machinery is clanking back into gear after what Danish climate minister Dan Jørgensen dubbed “historic progress” in Dubai.

“Important decisions have been made on the action,” he told the start of the Danish summit. “Now, how do we pay for it?”

Cop28 president, Sultan Al Jaber, delivers remarks at the Copenhagen Climate Ministerial, flanked by Cop29 incoming president Mukhtar Babayev. REUTERS/Ali Withers

The question of finding money for the energy transition in developing countries will be front and centre this year as countries need to agree on a “new collective quantified goal” (NCQG) for climate finance at Cop29 in November, which will kick in from next year.

The battle lines are already drawn: developing nations want their richer counterparts to stump up the highest amount of cash with the fewest strings attached. Developed countries want other governments, including China and fossil fuel-rich Gulf nations, to join the list of donors.

The size of the money pot – and the conditions to tap into it – will be particularly important for emerging economies. They want help to finance the costly emission-slashing measures they are being asked to take.

For Mukhtar Babayev, Azerbaijan’s incoming Cop29 president, the negotiations on the new finance goal represent an opportunity to rebuild trust. Unlocking more funds, he told fellow ministers in Denmark, “will empower all parties to raise the ambition” of their upcoming climate plans.

Cop Troika urges “high-ambition” NDCs

The updated nationally determined contributions (NDCs) that all countries have been asked to submit by early 2025 was the other main talking point in Denmark on Thursday and Friday.

The so-called ‘Troika’ of the hosts of Cop28 (UAE), Cop29 (Azerbaijan) and Cop30 (Brazil) has tasked itself with building momentum and prompting countries to get moving.

On the eve of the Danish summit, the Cop presidencies sent a letter to all parties calling for “early submissions of high ambition NDCs that decisively take forward the UAE Consensus [the agreement struck in Dubai]”.

UN’s climate body faces “severe financial challenges” which put work at risk

The Troika “will aim to raise and reframe ambition for the development process” of the national climate action blueprints, pushing for more support, resources and finance, it added.

But the missive did not go down well with developed countries – and, above all, with the United States.

Its deputy special envoy for climate Sue Biniaz said she was “quite surprised” at the Troika’s suggestion that this year’s “focus on NDCs should be all about support” and that the Cop hosts defined a “high ambition NDC” for developed countries as one that includes finance for developing countries. Using that kind of wording could be “highly prejudicial” to climate finance negotiations, she warned.

Do as I say, not as I do

In the letter, the Cop host governments also pledged to demonstrate their own commitment by submitting NDCs that are aligned with the Paris Agreement goal of limiting global warming to 1.5C.

That announcement raised some eyebrows. The UAE and Brazil have some of the world’s biggest plans to expand fossil fuel production between now and 2050, while Azerbaijan’s economy primarily relies on fossil fuel extraction and it is poised to hike gas exports.

African dismay at decision to host loss and damage advice hub in Geneva

Those intentions clash with what the International Energy Agency (IEA) says is required to remain on a 1.5C trajectory: fossil fuel demand needs to fall 80% by 2050, meaning no new upstream oil and gas projects are needed, as of now.

Harjeet Singh of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative said that discrepancy “raises serious questions about the alignment between [the Troika’s] words and their actions”.

“These countries must disentangle themselves from fossil fuel interests and lead climate action by example, pressuring wealthier nations that continue to shirk their historic and moral responsibilities,” he added.

Fossil fuel reality check

The rhetoric coming from the fossil fuel industry assembled at Houston’s CERAWeek suggests strong pressure will be needed.

Saudi Aramco CEO Nasser called for more, not less, investment in oil and gas, as he claimed that the current energy transition strategy is “visibly failing on most fronts”.

President and CEO, Amin Nasser, asserts at #CERAWeek 2024 that energy consumers around the world need lower-carbon energy with minimal disruptions to their daily lives and calls for a new, multi-source, multi-speed, and multi-dimensional road to a realistic transition#aramco pic.twitter.com/OEkQvuK9HD

— aramco (@aramco) March 19, 2024

Meg O’Neill, chief executive of Australian oil and gas firm Woodside Energy, said the shift to clean energy cannot “happen at an unrealistic pace”. The bosses of oil giants Shell, ExxonMobil and Petrobras echoed similar views.

One fossil fuel executive who is equally at home in industry talking shops and climate diplomacy circles is Cop28 president Sultan Al Jaber.

On Tuesday, he told attendees at the oil and gas conference in the US that “there is just no avoiding that the energy transition will take time”.

Two days later, over in Denmark, he emphasised that “governments and all relevant parties” have to be honest about what moving away from fossil fuels will involve.

“We can’t misguide or mislead anyone anymore,” he said, sending out a message that could apply on both sides of the Helsingør-Houston divide. “We must confront the facts very early. Those who are in this room. It is our job, our duty to do that.”

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But oil, gas and coal producers are still closing their ears. In 2023, they continued spewing near record-high amounts of methane into the atmosphere, according to the latest assessment by the International Energy Agency (IEA) released on Wednesday. That is despite a raft of promises to stop doing so.

Now, however, analysts believe the tide may finally be turning. The introduction of stronger regulations in key fossil fuel-producing and consuming countries, coupled with better monitoring and transparency of harmful leaks, gives them cause for optimism.

“While emissions are still very high, 2024 is going to be a watershed moment on action and transparency on methane,” said Christophe McGlade, head of the IEA’s energy supply unit.

Methane role in 1.5C goal

Methane is a major contributor to global warming. Although it remains in the atmosphere for a much shorter time than carbon dioxide, it is 84 times more potent over a 20-year time horizon.

The energy sector represents the second-largest source of methane emissions linked to human activity, after agriculture, and has the biggest potential for reduction, according to analysts.

“If we can’t make real progress in cutting down methane, it is going to be impossible to limit warming to 1.5C,” said McGlade, referring to the most ambitious warming goal in the Paris Agreement.

The IEA estimates that the fossil fuel industry needs to reduce methane emissions 75% by 2030 for the world to reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions in 2050.

But last year methane emissions from fossil fuels remained near a record high first reached in 2019, rising slightly from 2022 to 120 million tonnes, according to the watchdog. The United States and China are by far the largest emitters of the powerful gas from oil and gas operations and the coal sector respectively.

Leaks from old or poorly maintained infrastructure and the practice of flaring – burning of excess gas – at oil and gas wells are the main energy-sector culprits for putting methane in the atmosphere.

Easy-fix

Reining in those emissions does not require rocket science. The IEA says well-known technologies and measures, such as upgraded equipment and more efficient practices, can cut the bulk of methane generated from fossil fuels in a fast and cheap way.

Just less than half of last year’s emissions could have been avoided at no net cost to the producers, with measures paying for themselves thanks to revenues from the additional gas captured. “It was a massive missed opportunity,” McGlade said.

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

If this is such a win-win, it begs the question of why fossil fuel producers are not stepping up to the plate. Lack of awareness over the scale of emissions and longer return on investment from plugging leaks are cited in the report as extenuating circumstances.

For Mark Brownstein, methane expert at the Environmental Defense Fund, up until very recently methane had simply been ignored by the global community as a serious threat.

“Aggressive action on methane is long overdue, but we are unfortunately still at a relatively early stage,” he told Climate Home. “Only now we’re starting to see some coordinated action from companies and countries to address this pollutant.”

Raft of pledges

More than 150 countries have signed up to a commitment first announced at the Cop26 climate summit in Glasgow to reduce global methane emissions by at least 30% from 2020 levels by the end of this decade.

Last year’s Cop28 in Dubai produced a host of new promises. The Global Stocktake assessment of national climate plans called for countries to substantially cut methane emissions. Meanwhile, more than 50 oil and gas companies pledged to speed up emission reduction efforts.

But for Romain Ioualalen from campaign group Oil Change International, the industry’s words only go so far. “The climate arsonists fuelling climate chaos cannot be trusted to put out the fire,” he said. “Government must take action to force the industry to clean up its mess on its way out the door.”

New regulations are now in the pipeline and provide experts with the biggest hope that things will finally move in the right direction.

Rules and satellites

In December 2023, the United States finalised new rules aimed at cracking down on U.S. oil and gas industry releases of methane. These include measures to eliminate routine flaring and force producers to better monitor leaks from equipment. Neighbouring Canada has also announced a new proposal for beefed-up methane-cutting standards.

Across the ocean, the European Union agreed at the end of last year on a new law that will require companies to report emissions, monitor and fix leaks, and limit flaring. Crucially, the rules will also apply to imports of oil, gas and coal into the bloc, effectively forcing overseas producers to improve their standards.

Despite Putin promises, Russia’s emissions keep rising

Alongside policy developments, the ability to track methane emissions is continuously improving – mainly thanks to satellite technologies – leaving polluters with less room to hide.

Advances on this front are expected to continue in 2024. MethaneSAT, a new satellite developed by EDF, was launched into space in early March and will soon provide free, near-real-time access to methane emissions data from wide areas that have so far been overlooked.

“This data will not only assist in the implementation of regulatory requirements, but it will also underpin the commitments made by fossil fuel companies at Cop28,” said Brownstein. “All of this is finally pointing us in the right direction.”

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Early in his rule, Putin joked that 2-3C of warming might be good for Russia as its people would “spend less on fur coats”.

But more recently he has warned against rising temperatures, in 2015 calling planetary heating an “issue that shall affect the future of the entire humankind”.

He has set targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 and get Russia to net zero – balancing any carbon emissions it puts out with CO2 absorption through forests or other solutions – by 2060.

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

But despite these pledges, Russia’s emissions have kept on rising, and its gas-heavy electricity mix has barely changed in Putin’s 24 years in power.

Mikhail Korostikov, a Russian analyst at Climate Bonds Initiative, an organisation that promotes low-carbon investment, told Climate Home that Putin “clearly does not [care about climate change]. It’s absent from his worldview. It’s not part of his agenda.” 

Misleading baseline

Shortly before the world adopted the Paris Agreement to tackle global warming in 2015, Putin announced that Russia would cut emissions by 25-30% below 1990 levels by 2030.

Under the Paris pact, countries are supposed to increase the ambition of their climate plans every five years. So in 2020, Putin raised the goal to a reduction of at least 30%. The next year, he said Russia would reach net zero by 2060.

But the 2030 target is less ambitious than it seems. Like most Soviet countries, Russia’s emissions plummeted in the early 1990s as the  Soviet Union broke up and the economy tanked.

By the late 1990s, when Putin came to power, emissions were already 25% below their 1990 levels.

Emissions then grew slowly during Putin’s time in power, so when he made his 2015 speech, he was only promising either a 1% cut in the 15 years to 2030 or allowing for emissions to actually grow if the effects of forests sucking up carbon are included.

Climate Action Tracker (CAT), a independent scientific project that monitors governments’ climate targets and policies, called Russia’s 2030 goal “highly insufficient” as “it can easily be met with current policies”.

Russia’s emissions continued to rise until the Covid-19 pandemic, which temporarily halted growth there and in other parts of the world.

According to CAT’s analysis, Russia’s economy-wide emissions are expected to continue increasing again to 2030, “when they should be rapidly declining, especially for such a large emitter”.

It also notes that Russia’s Energy Strategy to 2035, adopted in 2021, focuses almost exclusively on promoting fossil fuel extraction, consumption and exports to the rest of the world.

Like most countries, the bulk of Russia’s emissions are from burning fossil fuels for electricity. In Putin’s time in power, Russia’s energy mix has remained largely unchanged, as has its level of emissions. 

Most electricity is generated from Russian gas with smaller amounts from the dirtiest fossil fuel  – coal – and carbon-free sources including nuclear and hydropower.

Russia’s electricity mix has barely changed in 20 years (Photos: IEA/Screenshot)

Yet while power-related emissions have stayed the same, there have been steady rises in other sectors – from transport, industry and homes.

Fossil fuel defender

United Nations carbon accounting rules mean that emissions from burning Russian-produced fossil fuels outside of Russia are not included in its official accounts.

But they do contribute to climate change. Russia is the world’s second-biggest oil and gas producer, after only the United States. Its production of both fossil fuels has risen over the last ten years.

In international climate talks, it has pushed to defend oil and gas. At Cop28, its negotiators fought successfully for what campaigners called a “dangerous loophole” that recognised gas as a “transitional fuel” which “can be used for [emission-cutting] purposes”.

And as the World Bank has sought to go greener, Russia has mounted a rearguard action, teaming up with Saudi Arabia to urge the multilateral financial institution to keep on funding fossil fuels.

China steps away from 2025 energy efficiency goal

Russia is also key to fighting climate change as guardian of a fifth of the world’s forests – home to a bigger share than any other nation.

Here, Global Forest Watch data suggests it has been relatively successful. Whereas farms have spread into forests in countries like Brazil, this has not happened in Russia – although this is likely down to an unsuitable climate rather than policy.

The major threat to Russia’s forests is climate change itself, which is driving hotter summer temperatures, drying the country out and sparking wildfires in its sparsely-populated east and north.

Geopolitical priorities

Since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, climate change has become even less of a priority for the Russian government, and the issue has been absent from the election campaign.

Western governments portray Putin – the longest-serving Kremlin chief since Josef Stalin – as a war criminal and a dictator. But opinion polls in Russia give him approval ratings of 85%, higher than before the invasion of Ukraine.

With military spending soaring and an international boycott of Russia’s fossil fuels over the Ukraine war hitting government revenues, the budget for state environmental programmes was cut this year.

They include the Clean Air Federal Project, which is tasked with reducing air pollution in dozens of industrial cities, and the Clean County Federal Project, which aims to eliminate toxic waste sites.

The upcoming elections will undoubtedly go in Putin’s favour, analysts say, securing him another term in office. “Putin has some competitors. None of them will get more than 1 or 2 percent” of the vote, said Korostikov of Climate Bonds Initiative, adding that global warming is not a concern for most of  the electorate.

“Nobody’s worried about climate change. People care about ecology. But when it comes to climate, people don’t care because climate change is not felt in Russia,” he said.

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At the Cop28 climate summit last December, governments agreed to set up a new global carbon credit market under Article 6.4 of the Paris Agreement – and a host of fossil fuel firms and their middlemen are now trying to cash in by making their projects eligible for trading.

Developers applied for thousands of projects to be transferred over from the old discredited Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) to the new market that will be established, before the deadline of January 1 this year.

Most of these projects are for renewable energy – which, while good for the climate, have stirred debate. Critics argue that they do not need additional funding from selling carbon credits because they are profitable without it.

However, more controversial are ten projects Climate Home News has identified, based largely in Asia, which backed the construction of power plants that run on natural gas, one of the fossil fuels governments agreed to transition away from at Cop28. 

If approved by their host nations, the projects would transfer more than 10 million old gas-linked credits – equivalent to the reduction of 10 million tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions a year – to the new Paris carbon market.

“These projects are entirely inappropriate,” said Carbon Market Watch researcher Jonathan Crook. “Some were registered as far back as 2009. It’s unreasonable to assume they expected to rely on revenue from a new market mechanism in 2024 – not to mention that these projects may lock in fossil fuel emissions and infrastructure for years to come, among other issues.”

Clean, cheap or fair – which countries should pump the last oil and gas?

The Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market was set up in 2021 in a bid to ensure that carbon credits deliver on the emissions reductions they have promised and have a positive impact for the climate. In its categorisation of different types of carbon credit, offsets issued for gas-fired power plants are given the worst ranking.

Similarly, BeZero, a ratings agency for carbon credit projects, looked at three of the CDM gas projects that have applied for transfer to the new market. It gave them a ‘C’ grade, meaning they “provide a very low likelihood” of reducing emissions by as much as they claim. 

It cited the “minimal impact” of carbon credit revenues on the project’s overall financial situation and the risk of methane leaks from gas infrastructure that would make the projects more polluting than asserted.

Chinese gas-fired plant

The biggest project is a gas-fired power plant built by China’s state-owned oil and gas company CNOOC and Japanese conglomerate Mitsubishi in 2010 in the province of Fujian, China, just across the sea from Taiwan.

To fire the plant’s four turbines, CNOOC and Mitsubishi imported gas from an Indonesian gas field called Tangguh, which they both had stakes in, through the CNOOC-owned Fujian gas import terminal.

In addition to the income they received from selling the gas, importing it through the terminal and then selling the electricity it produced, they also submitted an application to the CDM to develop and sell carbon credits linked to the plant.

By their own calculations, the plant would emit 2.3 million tonnes of CO2 a year when fully operational. But if they didn’t build it, they said the electricity would come from coal, emitting over 5.3 million tonnes of CO2 a year. So they claimed credits for reducing the amount of CO2 that would have entered the atmosphere by an annual 3 million tonnes.

Justifying this assumption, they said that oil was too expensive and zero-carbon alternatives were not viable as an alternative. Most of Fujian’s hydropower potential had already been tapped, while wind power was “just start-up” and “of seasonal nature”, they added. They did not even mention solar power  – now the cheapest electricity source.

However, coal’s main competitors in the province are not gas but nuclear and hydro, power sources that do not emit greenhouse gases. Wind power has also grown rapidly in the province since the gas-fired plant was built.

Lauri Myllyvirta, a senior fellow with the Asia Society Policy Institute, told Climate Home: “The premise that power generation growth would come from coal if a new fossil gas plant wasn’t built was never true and certainly is not true today.”

Mitsubishi withdrew from the carbon credit project in 2022. While CNOOC remains involved, the main project participant is now a company called Europe New Energy Investment Capital, run by a Chinese citizen called Dongquan Yang.

A spokesperson for CNOOC said the project “is out of the scope of CNOOC Limited’s business operations”. Asked how that was compatible with CNOOC Fujian Gas Power Co., Ltd being listed as an authorised participant, the spokesperson did not reply. 

Indian carbon-credit developer

Fossil fuel firms are not the only ones trying to monetise carbon offsets from existing gas power plants. Documents show that Indian company EnKing – which has since changed its name to EKI Energy Services Ltd and claims to be the world’s biggest developer of carbon credits – is involved in three of the Indian gas power projects identified.

Last August, Climate Home revealed that EnKing vastly overestimated the benefits of carbon offsets linked to cookstoves in rural India and helped sell those junk credits to oil and gas giant Shell.

Cooking the books: cookstove offsets produce millions of fake emission cuts

Working with fossil fuel companies, EnKing used a methodology (AM0025), under the old Clean Development Mechanism, to derive credits from the building of gas-fired power plants in India.

The successor to this methodology is still technically up and running – but Verra, one of the main international carbon credit verifiers, has declared it inactive due to lack of use.

According to Crook of Carbon Market Watch, it is “extremely unlikely” that this type of methodology will be applicable under Article 6.4, which will govern the new UN carbon market when it launches. EnKing did not reply to a request for comment.

‘Not good practice’

To oversee the new carbon market, governments have agreed to set up an Article 6.4 supervisory body, made up of government climate negotiators. But the rules agreed for it so far offer little power to reject old CDM credits from gas-fired power plants. 

The host countries of those projects – including China and India – could refuse to authorise them, but they could still be sold, branded as “mitigation contribution units” under Article 6.4.

These are a lower class of carbon credit agreed at Cop27 which do not require authorisation by the host country as it does not need to do a “corresponding adjustment” for them, which means wiping the credits’ emissions reductions from its accounts.

Carbon credits talks collapse at Cop28 over integrity concerns

Mitigation contribution units cannot be counted towards national emissions goals set under the UN climate process, but they can be bought by companies and used for other purposes. That means the firms trying to sell carbon credits from old gas power stations just need to find buyers to make a profit.

Crook said such deals “wouldn’t be good practice”. “Retiring these credits paradoxically rewards fossil fuel companies for locking in emissions,” he added.

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But, while lots of countries are trying to reduce their use of planet-heating fossil fuels, only a handful have so far taken measures to produce less – particularly when it comes to oil and gas.

Last year, a United Nations report found that governments plan to produce more than double the amount of fossil fuels in 2030 than they should if global warming is to be limited to 1.5C. So they need to cut back. 

The International Energy Agency (IEA) says no more new fossil fuel production projects are required, yet we will still need fossil fuels for the next few decades to keep economies running. That raises the question of who should get to drill, pump and sell those last supplies – and why?

Indonesia turns traditional Indigenous land into nickel industrial zone

Climate Home looked at three key criteria for the production of oil and gas. Unlike the other dirtiest fossil fuel – coal – they tend to be located together and so are produced in the same regions by the same nations. And the IEA predicts that their use will outlive that of coal.

We’ve looked at whose oil and gas is the cleanest, whose is the cheapest, and whose economy could most handle losing out on oil and gas revenue. Depending on the metric, the results differ wildly.

The cleanest oil and gas comes from Norway and the Arabian Gulf, the cheapest is in the Gulf. But when global economic justice is considered, the fairest is in smaller nations in the developing world – the likes of Libya, Trinidad and Tobago, and Turkmenistan.

Cleanest production?

Given the world will be using oil and gas for some time to come, shouldn’t we use that which causes the least damage to the planet?

While all oil and all gas is equally damaging to burn as fuel, the process of pumping it up from the ground can be more or less harmful to the climate.

Norway and the United Arab Emirates make this argument, arguing their oil and gas is the cleanest – and a November 2023 report by the IEA backs them up. 

It found that Norway’s oil and its gas were the cleanest in the world to produce, measured by emissions intensity, while supplies from the UAE and other Gulf nations like Saudi Arabia and Qatar were also among the least damaging.

Norway’s oil and gas are cleaner because it has strict rules in place, requiring oil and gas producers to capture any methane gas that leaks during the production process. This prevents it from reaching the atmosphere and making climate change worse. 

On top of this, much of the machinery used to produce the oil and gas doesn’t run on fossil fuels itself but on clean electricity.

A handful of Gulf states – including Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait and the UAE – have lower-intensity operations in part because of their “easy to access” reserves. As the oil is nearer the surface, less energy-guzzling machinery is needed to pump it up.

But the emissions from producing the oil and gas need to be put in perspective. It is the use of those fuels that has the biggest consequences. Just 5-20% of oil and gas companies’ total emissions are from production, according to energy consultancy Wood Mackenzie.

Cheapest energy?

Or should we use the cheapest oil and gas? The cheaper those fuels are to produce, the cheaper it should be to use our power plants, polyester and petrol. Those savings should be passed onto consumers around the world when they fill up their vehicles or switch on their lights.

This was an argument deployed by Amin Nasser, the head of oil giant Saudi Aramco, who told reporters at Davos in 2019: “There will continue to be growth in oil demand … We are the lowest-cost producer and the last barrel will come from the region.”

Gulf nations like Saudi Arabia again score well on this. As their oil and gas is near the surface, it’s cheaper to pump.

In the IEA’s “low cost” scenario, in 2040, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Iran increase their oil and gas production the most. More expensive producers like Canada, Australia and China have to cut down how much they pump.

Fairness and capacity?

Or should the governments that cut back on oil and gas output first be the historically large emitters that can most afford to go without the money they get from selling fossil fuels? 

It’s an argument made by many African nations. Ahead of Cop28, African negotiators unsuccessfully proposed a ban on developed countries exploring for fossil fuels “well ahead of 2030, whilst affording developing countries the opportunity to close the global supply gap in the short term”.

Climate Analytics analyst Neil Grant argues we must take “capacity to transition” into account when thinking about who should be the last producers. A Carbon Tracker report found at least 28 oil and gas-reliant economies would lose half of their expected revenues under just a “moderate-paced transition” – so there is a lot at stake.

US trade agency backs oil and gas drilling in Bahrain despite Biden pledge

Greg Muttitt, from the International Institute of Sustainable Development, told Climate Home that if the transition is left to market forces, “a lot of people” in oil and gas-dependent economies will “get hurt”, either by losing their jobs, or experiencing a breakdown in public services. 

At Cop28, a network of civil society groups published a report assessing which countries should be the last to extract fossil fuels, accounting for both economic dependence, and climate equity. 

Using a measure of financial “capacity”, defined as surplus income above “what is required to meet people’s needs”, the report found that Libya, Iraq and South Sudan should be among the last countries extracting oil, while Algeria, Trinidad and Tobago, and Turkmenistan are among the last extracting gas. The likes of Norway, Canada and Qatar should stop first for both, it concluded.

Whichever answer you chose, Michael Lazarus, co-author of the UN report and U.S. director for the Stockholm Environment Institute, told Climate Home he was pleased that “we have finally gotten to the point in the global conversation where folks are asking the question…of what that ultimate transition looks like.”

The post Clean, cheap or fair – which countries should pump the last oil and gas? appeared first on Climate Home News.

With fewer than nine months to go until the UN climate summit in Baku, negotiators are currently staring at a long list of options and no agreed details for the goal that is due to kick in from 2025.

They still need to work out everything from how large the overall sum should be, to what it needs to pay for, over how many years, and the best way to monitor the money.

But nations are at odds over what upcoming negotiations should prioritise.

Most developing countries want to talk about numbers and commit rich nations to stump up the highest amount of cash possible with the fewest strings attached. Meanwhile, developed countries argue it shouldn’t be just them paying and want the focus to be first on broadening the list of contributors.

Moving past contentious $100bn target

Experts say acrimony over the existing $100-billion annual target – which the new goal is set to replace – makes finding common ground more difficult.

Developed countries failed to provide that promised yearly sum to developing nations by the initial 2020 deadline and, again, in 2021. They now “look likely” to have met the goal in 2022, according to an assessment by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) based on preliminary data that is not publicly available.

Comment: Loss and damage must be a focus of IPCC’s next reports

The new collective quantified goal (NCQG) is due to be agreed at this year’s climate summit. The decision will be especially important for vulnerable countries that want to know how much money they are likely to receive as they draft their new climate plans due in 2025.

Two things are certain: It needs to be more than $100 billion a year and take into account the priorities of developing countries. Everything else is still to play for.

After several meetings in the last two years, negotiators produced dozens of options across the main issues at stake. They now need to narrow those down to hand politicians a draft text with the most contentious issues to be fought over in Baku in November.

New submissions made by countries this month give an insight into how they think those discussions should play out.

How big should the goal be?

Determining the exact size of the new goal is one of the thorniest elements to untangle.

The final figure will vary depending on the answers to a series of interconnected, and still unresolved, questions: What is the timeframe? Does it need to fund only emissions-cutting and adaptation measures, or loss and damage too? Will it include private finance?

“The $100 billion was just a political number, while the new goal needs to rely on science and an assessment of actual needs,” said Natalia Alayza, a climate finance expert at WRI, a US-based think-tank.

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The sources used to work that out will play a crucial role. One much-referenced document in negotiations so far is the needs determination report written by the UNFCCC’s standing committee on finance. Published in 2021, it tallied the money required by developing countries to fund actions listed in their climate plans. The report concluded a total of $5.8-5.9 trillion will be needed up to 2030.

India and the Arab group of countries, led by Saudi Arabia, argue this means rich nations have to provide at least $1 trillion a year under the new goal.

Experts say the chances of that are close to zero. “Developed countries would never be able to convince their parliaments to spend those sums,” said Michai Robertson, a research fellow at London-based think-tank ODI and adviser to the group of small island nations. “What’s likely to happen is that, once an overall technical figure is established, there will be a highly political discussion on a fractional amount to be used for the goal.”

Who should pay?

Developing countries lament that their wealthy counterparts have so far shied away from any talk of numbers in the negotiations. The latest submissions from the US, EU, UK, Japan and Australia do not mention figures or possible sources to determine them.

Alpha Kaloga, the lead negotiator for the African group, told Climate Home donor governments should stop coming to the table with “empty pockets”.

“If they are negotiating in good faith, they should say ‘this is the amount that we commit now, the signal we want to give’,” he added. “They should come with ambitious numbers and then push for other countries that are in a position to do so to pitch in.”

Negotiations over the new climate finance goal at Cop28. Photo: IISD/ENB | Mike Muzurakis

But developed countries are pressing for discussions to move in the opposite direction. Before agreeing to any dollar amounts, they want to settle the question of who is going to fill the money box. Spoiler: They think it shouldn’t be just them.

In its submission, the EU says the new goal should take into account “the evolving capacities of countries to contribute to the provision and mobilization of climate finance”. The US laments that options to determine the contributor base “have not been sufficiently discussed or identified” in technical meetings to date.

Japan is more explicit: “Emerging countries with a capacity to do so” should be added to the list of contributors, its submission says. “Now is the time to move away from the binary opposition between developed and developing countries,” it adds.

Legal arguments over contributors

Last year, similar rhetoric animated discussions over who should pay into the nascent loss and damage fund. Rich countries argued that high-emitting nations like China, South Korea, Russia and the Gulf petrostates should contribute. In the end, developing nations were only “encouraged” to do so “on a voluntary basis”. The United Arab Emirates, host of Cop28, pledged $100 million to the new fund.

Most developing countries still strongly oppose any changes to the contributor base. They argue that the 2015 Paris Agreement puts the responsibility of fulfilling the climate finance goal squarely on the shoulders of rich governments.

“It is clear that they are attempting to shift the burden,” said Kaloga.

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But developed countries point the finger at another section of the landmark Paris text. Article 2.1 calls for “making financial flows consistent with a pathway towards low greenhouse gas emissions and climate-resilient development”. They claim this provides cover for their argument that everyone should pay for climate action.

ODI’s Robertson doesn’t see any realistic legal avenue to compel additional countries to stump up the cash for the goal. “Either nations self-declare that they now consider themselves ‘developed’ or all 195 parties agree to amend the Paris Agreement and redefine, top-down, who is and isn’t a developed country,” he said. “Both options seem impossible.”

Tracking delivery of pledges

Heated negotiations are also expected over the transparency arrangements to monitor if and how the money is delivered.

The earlier $100-billion pledge came with no official rules on what activities could be counted. As Reuters discovered, Italy provided money to a retailer opening gelato stores across Asia and Japan financed a new coal plant in Bangladesh. Both projects were included in the countries’ contributions towards the $100-billion goal.

The fundamental issue is that there is no internationally agreed understanding of what climate finance means.

Most developing countries are pushing for a common definition to be included in the new goal to be set at Cop29, alongside strict rules that prevent any accounting tricks.

“Transparency is one of the biggest lessons to learn from the $100-billion goal. Not only we don’t know if it’s been met, but how it’s been met,” said WRI’s Alayza. “We need to ensure that data is comparable, accurate and consistent – and accurately reflects what has been provided.”

The post Countries draw battle lines for talks on new climate finance goal appeared first on Climate Home News.

Climate Home analysis shows that renewable energy investments make up four-fifths of all projects seeking a transfer from the old Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) to the new system under article 6.4 of the Paris Agreement.

Experts have long written off the vast majority of credits produced from renewable energy as junk because they often already provide the cheapest sources of power in most of the world and selling offsets to fund them does not have any additional impact on emissions.

Some of these projects have also been accused of human rights violations such as forced evictions for the construction of large dams.

Harry Fearnehough from New Climate Institute told Climate Home that “it could definitely undermine the credibility of the mechanism because, while there’s still uncertainty over what it will look like, as a starting point you have a huge supply of low-quality offsets that are potentially available at a very low cost”.

Established in 1997 by the Kyoto Protocol, the UN’s CDM allowed rich countries to meet some of their climate obligations by financing emission-cutting projects in poorer ones.

The programme has received widespread criticism for its patchy human rights record and for failing to deliver promised climate benefits. Supporters of a new mechanism currently being developed under article 6.4 of the Paris Agreement say it is an improved, higher-integrity successor to the CDM.

Winning a lifeline

Countries are still wrangling over many aspects of the future market, but one much-debated issue was settled at Cop26 in Glasgow.

Under pressure from Brazil, Russia, China and India, countries agreed that a vast number of projects originally created under the CDM were allowed to migrate to the new mechanism. This handed them the chance to significantly extend their lifespan and their potential credit sales.

Project developers had until the end of December 2023 to fill in a simple two-page form and submit their transition requests.

Azerbaijan appoints fossil fuel execs and scandal-hit officials to all-male Cop29 committee

Of the nearly 3,500 eligible projects, over a third (1,284) seized that opportunity.

In total, the projects that have requested transition by the deadline could supply 1.4 billion tonnes of carbon credits between 2021 – the start year for accounting purposes set by the regulation – and 2035, according to a preliminary analysis by NewClimate Institute shared with Climate Home. That is more than the annual CO2 emissions of Germany.

While a relatively small share of the projects opted in, they account for approximately three-quarters of the potential supply of carbon offsets.

That’s because some of the programmes seeking to move could produce an outsized volume of credits. The two biggest ones – a hydro plant and a nitrous oxide emission reduction scheme, both in Brazil – each have the potential to issue around 6 million tons of offsets a year. That’s similar to the annual emissions of Sierra Leone.

Fearnehough says that “very few, if any, of these credits are genuinely likely to be additional”, going beyond what countries would do anyway without the carbon finance.

“A key reason for this is that the CDM was really only scheduled to run up to the end of 2020,” he added. “No investor would have made a decision purely based on expecting revenues from credits in the 2020s because, quite simply, there was no political indication that the possibility to move over to a new mechanism would exist”.

Climate and social concerns

That is particularly true for the renewable energy projects vastly dominating the list. Experts say they are highly likely to fail the additionality test, meaning their credits do not bring any climate benefit. When used to compensate for real emissions elsewhere, they result in more greenhouse gases entering the atmosphere.

The reason is simple. Many renewable offsets came into existence just as solar and wind power were becoming the cheapest source of energy in most countries. After years in operation, they are likely to be profitable from the sale of the electricity alone, without the need for additional revenues from carbon offsetting.

A 2016 study commissioned by the European Commission concluded that the vast majority of these projects “are not providing real, measurable and additional emission reductions”.

The Jirau hydropower plant is located on the Madeira River, in Brazil. Photo: UHE em Jirau/Flickr

Hydropower projects carry even more concerns as their implementation is often marred by human rights problems. Vulnerable communities relying on rivers for their livelihoods are particularly at risk of forced displacement.

The largest project applying for the transition to the new mechanism – the Jirau mega-plant in Brazil’s Rondonia state – is a case in point.

Over the years the project has faced multiple accusations of stoking tensions, pushing indigenous people away from their territories and breaching the rights of the workers that built it. Engie, the project’s developer, previously rejected any accusations.

Other categories of activities featuring prominently on the transition list have raised major concerns in the past.

Credits from projects which claim to cut or stop the emission of industrial gases such as nitrous oxide (N20) and trifluoromethane (HFC-23) were banned by the EU in 2013 for use in its emission trading system.

That’s because, according to studies, they created “a perverse incentive” to increase the production of gases depleting the ozone layer.

Countries’ authorisation dilemma

While the CDM projects have now made their move and requested transition, they are not automatically through to the new system.

Standing in their way is the need to receive a formal authorisation to proceed from the countries where their activities are located. Governments have until 2025 to make a decision and, experts predict, it won’t be a straightforward one.

“A la carte menu”: Saudi minister claims Cop28 fossil fuel agreement is only optional

“It’s not a guarantee that all host countries will want to approve all of these projects”, according to Jonathan Crook from Carbon Market Watch, who said there would be contrasting forces at play.

“If they authorise them, they have to do corresponding adjustments, which they might not be so keen on since those emission reductions will be deducted from their [NDC climate plans]. But, at the same time, most projects are located in very large countries and it may not make a big difference to their plans”.

The answer to this dilemma will rest primarily in the hands of China, India and Brazil. Between them, the countries host around three-quarters of all projects that are looking to migrate under article 6.4.

Spotlight on three countries

Observers of climate talks said their governments all pushed for rules that would grant a lifeline to as many CDM projects as possible when those negotiations took place at Cop25 in Madrid and Cop26 in Glasgow. But, since then, they have been conspicuously quiet on the topic.

Climate Home approached the respective carbon market authorities in the three countries but did not receive a response at the time of publication.

Trishant Dev is a carbon market expert at the Delhi-based Centre for Science and Environment. He expects there will be “a lot of pressure on the Indian government to let projects through from the carbon industry, which is thriving in the country”.

But, at the same time, he thinks the government will take time to properly understand all the pros and cons of allowing such authorisations. “It’s a chaotic process. Countries want to make sense of what the final outcome of the article 6 discussions will be and how that will interact with domestic carbon markets they are constructing”, he said.

Who will buy the credits?

Article 6 talks collapsed at Cop28 last December after attempts led by the EU to introduce tighter controls and further integrity safeguards had been rebuffed by the US. Negotiators will try again this year to hammer out a deal on many technical issues that need to be resolved before trading of offsets can begin.

Meanwhile, questions also remain on who will be interested in using those credits, once the market is up and running. Countries, corporations and individuals could all be potential buyers.

Comment: High stakes for climate finance in 2024

New Climate Institute’s Fearnehough said there doesn’t seem to be much appetite from countries based on what they are saying in public. “But it’s hard to predict what will happen when suddenly the offsets are available and you have an easy option to meet your NDC targets”, he added.

The credits may gain more interest from polluting companies. Banks, airlines and industrial heavyweights keep buying large volumes of questionable renewable energy offsets despite the known concerns, a Bloomberg investigation found. Dressing them up with the UN stamp of approval may add to the appeal.

Carbon Market Watch’s Crook believes much will depend on the transparency of the system – something still largely unknown. “If there is a very transparent register disclosing who purchased how many credits and for what purpose, that would disincentivize companies from transacting low-quality credits out of reputational fears,” he said. “But if it isn’t transparent, buyers may not be as careful with due diligence or may be even encouraged to buy bad credits since there won’t be scrutiny”.

A previous version of this article stated that projects requesting transition could provide 700 million tonnes of credits until 2035, while the correct figure is 1.4 billion tonnes. That was due to a computational error in the model used by NewClimate Institute for their analysis of which we were informed after publication.

The post Junk offset sellers push to enter new UN carbon market appeared first on Climate Home News.

That was in April 2020, just after the start of the pandemic. He told Climate Home recently that “it seemed like a pretty distant dream” at the time.

In fact, he used to joke that he had “found the only international climate policy job that didn’t require going to Cop because fossil fuels would never be a thing there”.

But become a thing they have. When Cop18 was held in Gulf oil and gas producer Qatar in 2012, the IISD think tank’s 28,000-word summary only mentioned fossil fuels once.

Those two words pop up 46 times in the same report produced after Cop28 where governments agreed for the first time to transition away from all fossil fuels in energy systems.

Asked why fossil fuels had gone from the fringes to the centre of negotiations, experts cited numerous reasons, which all worked together to build momentum over the years.

They referred to the falling cost of renewables, the mounting climate impacts, the interventions from authoritative mainstream voices, the tireless campaigning of the Pacific islands and civil society, and a healthy dose of good fortune.

Fossil fuels weren’t always absent though. Right at the start of climate talks, in 1992, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), mentions them. Although it does not condemn them, it implies they have got to go or, at least, be reduced.

It does this by recognising the “special difficulties of those countries, especially developing countries, whose economies are particularly dependent on fossil fuel production, use and exportation, as a consequence of action taken on limiting greenhouse gas emissions”.

Then Brazilian president Fernando Collor de Mello makes a toast to world leaders at the Rio Earth Summit (Photos: United Nations)

Kept outside

But after governments signed this landmark text, they gathered every year at a Cop for a quarter of a century without any of their agreements mentioning the need to reduce fossil fuels again.

Asked why, Joanna Depledge, who studies climate talks at Cambridge University, said fossil fuels had been actively kept outside the process, predominately by the Opec cartel of oil producers – Saudi Arabia, in particular – and by the USA.

She said Opec, the Saudis and others wanted, as they still do, to talk about emissions in general rather than particular sources of emissions like fossil fuels. 

For a long time “there wasn’t much questioning of that,” she said, “because the so-called comprehensive approach was seen as a good thing”. “There’s also an aversion to policy prescription in the climate change regime,” she added, “apart from the EU and the vulnerables, countries don’t like an international regime telling them what to do in particular sectors”. 

For decades, all the negotiations were focussed on signing an agreement that would commit all countries to take action to limit global warming. After several time and hope-depleting failures, they eventually succeeded in Paris in 2015.

Diplomats celebrate as the Paris Agreement is agreed in 2015 (Photos: UNFCCC)

Having agreed on the headline goal, they could discuss how to go about meeting it. That’s when one particular fossil fuel rose up the agenda – the most polluting one, coal.

Depledge says that it was Poland that unwittingly put coal in the crosshairs. The country is Europe’s biggest defender of coal and hosted the talks in 2008, 2013 and 2018.

In 2018, Cop24 was held in the heart of Poland’s coal country in Katowice, where delegates choked on polluted air and gazed at adverts from the Cop’s partners in the coal industry. 

The next year, the UK was announced as host of Cop26. Its coal record couldn’t be more different to Poland’s. Between 1990 and 2019, it reduced its coal use for electricity by 96% – replacing it mainly with gas and later wind.

Its government was keen to export this strategy to other countries, co-founding the Powering Past Coal Alliance in 2017. The work of launching this alliance “built momentum around having coal as the main outcome of Cop26”, said Center for Climate and Energy Solutions vice-president Kaveh Guilanpour.

A protester covers her mouth as she marches through Katowice during Cop24 (Photos: Greenpeace)

Then UK prime minister Boris Johnson confirmed this focus, saying Cop26 should be about “coal, car, cash and trees” and Cop president Alok Sharma said the summit should “consign coal to history”.

It was not just the UK with coal in the crosshairs though. The head of the United Nations, Antonio Guterres had been calling for an end to new coal power plants since 2019 and in August 2021 said the latest IPCC scientific report must “must sound a death knell for coal and fossil fuels, before they destroy our planet.”

The same year, China, Japan and South Korea all said they would stop financing new foreign coal-fired power plants – a decision most Western nations and multilateral development banks had already taken.

With this momentum, the UK was able to convince governments to agree to “phase down” coal – the first-ever mention of a fossil fuel in a Cop agreement.

Not every country agreed to this enthusiastically though. Between them, China and India use two-thirds of the world’s coal and they teamed up to water down the language at the last minute from “phase out” to “phase down”, sparking tears from Sharma.

India’s environment minister Bhupender Yadav speaks to Sharma at Cop26 (Photos: Kiara Worth/UNFCCC)

The next year, Cop delegates gathered in the Egyptian Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh. For the first week, the Cop looked set to be about one issue only. Not fossil fuels but rich countries paying for the loss and damage poorer ones are suffering from as a result of climate change.

That changed at the end of the first week of negotiations when Bloomberg reported that India had called on the Cop president to target all fossil fuels in the Cop27 agreement. Depledge said India was angered that the fossil fuel the country relies on – coal- was being singled out while the oil and gas that rich nations favour went unchallenged.

By that point, oil and gas had already started to feel some of the heat that coal was under.  Guterres’ rhetoric was broadening to all fossil fuels and Denmark and Costa Rica had co-founded at Cop26 a coalition of countries pledging to stop pumping oil and gas.

Ioualalen, who was involved in the initiative, said that was a “big, big thing” as it “put the notion that you could actually take measures to constrain the development of fossil fuel production on the map”.

So when India made their intervention in Egypt, they were pushing at a more open door. A significant minority of countries – including the European Union, small islands, Chile and Colombia – seized on the proposal.

Ministers from the “high ambition coalition” hold a press conference at Cop27 (Photos: Kiara Worth/UNFCCC)

But oil and gas-reliant states like Saudi Arabia, Iran and Russia voiced their opposition. The Egyptian presidency left it out and, at 4am on the day many negotiators were flying home, governments from the “high-ambition coalition” accepted defeat

After it was agreed, these ministers showed their displeasure. Tuvalu called it a “missed opportunity”, Chile said they were “very disappointed” and the EU said it was “not enough on [emissions reduction]”.

They had lost the battle but sounded determined to win the war and the decision to make Sultan Al-Jaber, the CEO of oil and gas firm Adnoc, the next Cop president only ramped up the focus on fossil fuels.

“The Cop28 presidency, as being a petro state, was initially a major concern”, recalled Harjeet Singh, Climate Action Network’s head of global political strategy. “However, it ironically served as a unique opportunity to exert significant pressure, leading to substantial discussions on curtailing all three fossil fuels.”

Singh said “this momentum transformed what was once a fleeting mention of fossil fuels at Cop26 in 2021 into a robust debate within the UN climate change dialogues” and allowed campaigners to highlight the “hypocrisy of rich nations targeting coal use in the developing world while simultaneously expanding oil and gas production”.

Al Jaber himself responded to criticism by saying that a fossil phase out was both “essential” and “inevitable” despite his company’s plans to increase production. Guilanpour said that the UAE’s status as an oil and gas producer and ally of Saudi Arabia gave them “credibility” with potential opponents of the fossil fuel phase out.

Sultan Al Jaber and Simon Stiell celebrate as the Cop28 agreement is passed (Photos: Cop28/Mahmoud Khaled)

By the time India hosted the G20 summit in Delhi last September, fossil fuels were at the very top of the climate agenda. India tried but failed to get 20 of the world’s biggest economies to agree to phase out fossil fuels.

The battleground was set for Cop28, where fossil fuels came to dominate the talks after the loss and damage fund had been agreed on the first day. But the Saudis and others wouldn’t agree to “phase out” or “phase down”, preferring the eventual compromise of “transitioning away from fossil fuels”.

After Cop28, Saudi Arabia’s energy minister downplayed the significance of this agreement, calling it just an “option” on an “a la carte menu” and stressing the difference from “phase out” – an interpretation that E3G analyst Tom Evans called “incredibly misleading”.

Despite the Saudi dismissal, the head of the UNFCCC Simon Stiell called it the “beginning of the end” for the fossil fuel era. Guilanpour celebrated the decision too, saying that if that had been offered at the start of the year, “most people would have bitten your hand off”.

With that now agreed, fossil fuels are likely to take a back seat in the negotiations. Depledge predicted they would “move away from words and on to hard cash and the dollars”, with a new post-2025 climate finance target set to be agreed at Cop29.

Outside of negotiations, governments’ plans to keep producing fossil fuels are likely to come under ever more scrutiny in the media and public discourse, 

That became clear just hours after the Cop28 agreement was signed. In the room next door, Brazilian environment minister Marina Silva and then German foreign minister Annalena Baerbock held back-to-back press conferences at which they were both grilled on how their governments’ production plans fit with the deal they’d just agreed.

Ioualalen said that how climate leadership is judged has now changed. "You cannot just say that you are going to be a climate leader, that you're going to reach net zero, if you're going to continue increasing your oil and gas production - that's become very clear," he said.

And when governments release their next round of climate plans in 2025, the role of fossil fuels will be closely watched. That year's Cop presidency will be Brazil - whose competing desires to pump more oil and gas and to save the Amazon rainforest and planet are sure to be noted.

While investment into the supply of fossil fuels is still rising, the IEA predicts that demand will soon peak. Whether supply is restrained and whether demand plateaus or falls sharply are two of the key climate questions of the decade.

Climate Home asked Ioualalen whether all the years of work getting fossil fuels on the agenda will help with that. "It's too early to say", he replied. "I'm seeing a lot of debate on the outcomes [of Cop28] on whether it's historic or an absolute catastrophe or greenwash etcetera - the reality is that it's probably a bit of both".

The post How fossil fuels went from sidelines to headlines in climate talks appeared first on Climate Home News.

But not all its people. Because of the USA’s huge emissions, financial power and  electoral system, our hopes lie largely on those in a few swing states – like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Georgia and Arizona.

In 2020, we spoke to grassroots campaigners trying to boost climate voter turnout in Georgia. They were crucial in swinging the Senate then, which allowed a huge climate bill to be passed in 2022. The planet needs the likes of them again.

1.Who will win the US election?

Of all the world’s elections, the USA’s is the one that matters the most for the climate. The policies of the world’s second biggest polluter swing wildly depending on who is in the Oval Office.

The vote on November 5 is likely to pit Joe Biden against Donald Trump. Polls and bookmakers currently suggest Trump is more likely to win.

That would put a major dampener on climate hopes ahead of Cop29, on November 11.

We know where both men stand. As president, Trump withdrew the US from the Paris agreement. Biden re-joined it on his first day in office and pushed through $369bn of green spending.

On the same day as the Presidential election, Americans will also vote for all the seats in the House of Representatives and a third of those in the Senate.

Republican control of the House of Representatives is a big barrier to US climate finance. Given Democratic turnout is usually higher when there’s a Presidential election, there’s a chance Democrats could win control and at least deliver on their $3 billion promise to the Green Climate Fund.

Donald Trump being sworn in as US president in 2016 (Pic: White House photo)

2.What will the new global finance target be?

Compared to fossil fuels, finance was low profile in 2023 – to the anger of developing countries.

But 2024 should be its year, as countries have to negotiate a new finance goal for 2025 onwards by the time they leave Cop29 in Baku in November.

Expect debate over who should pay and who should receive, as well as how much should be given and to what.

Separately, France and Kenya have launched a taskforce on how to get money for climate which isn’t just from governments.

Options include taxes on international shipping, aviation, financial transactions and fossil fuels.

The US, Germany and others will continue their push to squeeze more money out of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund for climate.

3.Will emissions finally start going down?

Almost every year so far, the world’s humans have pumped out more greenhouse gas than any year before, sparking depressing headlines about “record emissions”.

But 2023 could well be the last year of this.  A report by Climate Analytics finds a 70% chance that emissions will peak in 2023 and start falling in 2024.

The International Energy Agency thinks something similar – but the US government’s forecasters are more pessimistic.

Whether emissions peak or not, the amount of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere will keep going up. A bath tub doesn’t empty because you put less water in it each year – you have to pull the plug out.

Climate Analytics says emissions are likely to peak this year but how fast they decline depends on policies (Photos: Climate Analytics)

4.When will the loss and damage fund start spending?

Before rich nations agreed to a loss and damage fund at the end of 2022, they argued that it would take years and years to set up – too long to be useful.

After governments agreed on most of the details in 2023, 2024 may be the year they are proved wrong.

Regional groups are appointing their board members to the fund now.

Then the board needs to meet, agree policies, receive the money it’s been promised and start dishing it out.

What’s for sure is that there will be loss this year and there will be damage – droughts, heatwaves, storms and more. So the victims can’t wait.

5.Will countries firm up adaptation targets?

After two years of talks, at Cop28 this year governments agreed to draw up targets on adapting to climate change in areas like healthcare, food security and protecting nature.

They will now spend two years discussing whether there should be numbers attached to those targets and what those numbers should be.

Developing countries want the numbers – like a target to reduce adverse climate impacts on agricultural production by 50% by 2030.

But developed nations argue numbers can’t show how well you’ve adapted to climate change.

They will hash out this debate at Bonn in June and at Cop29 in Baku in November.

Seaweed farmers in Tanzania are having to move into deeper waters as seaweed-killing bacteria thrives in warming seas (Photo: Natalija Gormalova / Climate Visuals Countdown)

6.Will governments get rid of fossil fuel subsidies?

Since 2009, governments have kept promising to get rid of subsidies for fossil fuels – but not really doing so.

At Cop28, a dozen nations including France and Canada joined a coalition to try and finally turn this promise into action.

They committed to drawing up an inventory of their fossil fuel subsidies by Cop29 in November.

Inventories can lead to action. When a Dutch inventory revealed they were spending $40bn a year subsidising fossil fuels, protesters braved water cannons to block off the country’s parliament, rocketing the issue up the agenda. Will the same happen elsewhere?

7.Will coal-to-clean deals keep disappointing?

Just energy transition partnerships (Jetp) faced a brutal reality check in 2023, as investment blueprints were finally unveiled.

Rich countries are offering most of their money as loans not grants. Ambitious plans to switch off coal plants early in South Africa, Indonesia and Vietnam are now much more uncertain as a result.

As the money starts flowing in 2024, the implementation of the first few projects should give a flavour of how effective and just the transition will be.

The energy transition deal aims to wean Indonesia off coal, which now takes up nearly half of the country’s electricity mix. Photo: Kemal Jufri / Greenpeace

8.Will new treaty target plastic production?

Government negotiators are currently debating a draft of a new plastics treaty, which they hope to finalise by the end of 2024 – after meetings in Ottawa in April and Busan at the end of November.

One option being fiercely debated is whether to set limits on the amount of plastic each country can produce.

While the majority of European and African countries want limits, the US and Saudi Arabia are resistant.

Plastics are made from oil and gas. With electricity systems and vehicles transitioning to renewable electricity, oil and gas companies see plastics as a lifeline which this treaty could take away.

9.How will companies prepare for the EU’s carbon border tax?

Many developing countries have long seen the European Union’s carbon border tax and elements of the USA’s Inflation Reduction Act as unfair protectionist trade measures, dressed up in concern for the environment.

These complaints were high-profile at Cop28 – with China and others trying to get them put on the official agenda. The United Nation’s trade chief – Costa Rica’s Rebecca Grynspan – recently echoed these concerns and they’re likely to keep rising up the agenda in 2024.

The EU’s carbon border tax incentivises companies making certain polluting products outside of the EU to clean up their manufacturing – or at least to say they’re cleaning up. As the 2026 start date for the tax nears, we expect more stories about companies greenwashing to lessen their tax burden and about the impact of the tax on ordinary people in developing countries, aluminium workers in Mozambique for instance.

Bratsk aluminium smelting facility in Russia will be affected by the EU’s border tax (Photo credit: UC Rusal/WikiCommons)

10.Will carbon markets gain integrity?

Carbon markets – and the voluntary one, in particular – are facing a credibility crisis. Scandal after scandal has put the spotlight on the wildly exaggerated claims and environmental and social issues of many projects. Demand has slowed down as a result.

The Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market – a new regulator-like body – is trying to steer buyers away from dodgy offsets and onto quality ones. It is expected to apply its quality label on the first batch of credits at the start of the new year.

After talks collapsed at Cop28 earlier this month, Article 6 negotiations will resume in Bonn in June. The US and EU are at loggerheads. Another bitter battle seems likely.

The post Ten climate questions for 2024 appeared first on Climate Home News.

Like every year, the quick answer is more than nothing but less than enough. To dissect that in more detail, here are our six takeaways from the year in climate.

1. Oil and gas felt the heat

Phasing out or down fossil fuels? Abated or unabated? Scaling up renewables, carbon capture and storage (CCS) and techno solutions. Energy dilemmas, and their buzzwords animated international talks in 2023.

The headline breakthrough came at the end. The Cop28 agreement included for the first time a goal to move away from all fossil fuels in energy systems.

It was the centrepiece of a bigger package that included a call for the tripling of renewables and doubling energy efficiency by 2030.

But it also gave a platform to “transitional fuels” (read gas) and CCS, which some politicians and campaigners regard as “dangerous loopholes” for continued fossil fuel use.

Cop hosts the UAE and most developed countries welcomed the deal as “historic”. For small island states and other vulnerable nations it did not go far enough.

Like most Cop agreements, it was the result of a hard-won compromise struck in overtime – after Saudi-led opposition threatened to leave oil and gas out of the text altogether.

Cop28 president Sultan Al Jaber applauds in the closing plenary (Photo: Flickr/Cop28/Christopher Pike)

The road to Dubai had been equally bumpy. The G7 saw fights over gas and coal with hosts Japan attempting to push controversial strategies like ammonia co-firing.

The G20 in Delhi offered a dress rehearsal of what was to expect at Cop with broad agreement over renewables and bitter disputes over fossil fuels.

In the background, Sultan Al Jaber, oil executive turned Cop president, garnered constant curiosity and scrutiny. He was initially adamant that the focus should be on emissions and not on the fuels themselves, raising more than an eyebrow. But, amid a series of controversies and apparent slip-ups, his position gradually shifted.

Al Jaber contended the Dubai deal would be enough to keep the 1.5C goal in sight. A day later he told the Guardian that Adnoc, the oil firm he runs, would press ahead with a massive oil and gas expansion.

Other rich nations, like the US, keep him company on that front. Such chasms between words and actions will continue to be closely watched.

2. Slow progress on climate cash

The other side of the coin from the fossil fuels debate is finance. When rich countries ask their developing counterparts to sign on to ambitious energy transition plans, many reply: ‘who is going to be paying for that?’

When governments wrangled over targets for adapting to climate change, similar questions were asked.

A clear answer was never forthcoming. We might get more clarity in 2024, with governments set to discuss, and hopefully agree on, a new collective goal at Cop29 in Baku in November.

But a lack of trust has taken root. Rich countries have so far not respected the previous commitment to provide $100 billion a year in climate finance to vulnerable countries.

That was “likely” met in 2022, two years after the original deadline, according to the OECD. We will be looking out for the receipts for confirmation.

Countries were also invited to refill the coffers of the Green Climate Fund. The four-yearly replenishment round got off to a decent start, but an underwhelming pledging summit in October put ambition at risk.

Then the US landed in Dubai in December with a $3 billion funding promise. It brought total pledges to $12.8 billion – setting the GCF on course for a “middling” level of ambition.

But that comes with a gigantic caveat. To deliver the dollars, the Biden administration will have to persuade Republicans in Congress or take control of it by winning elections. Both are tall orders.

Graphic: Joe Thwaites/NRDC

Money talked outside UN diplomacy too. Lots of attention centred on the much-touted reforms of multilateral development banks inspired by the Bridgetown Agenda.

Progress has been slower than many were hoping for. The World Bank lowered its equity-to-loan ratio, freeing up $4 billion a year.

It also installed a new more climate-aware president, officially changed its mission statement and promised pauses in debt repayments for disaster-hit countries. Encouraging steps, but far short of the trillions of dollars developing countries have been calling for.

3.US-China climate talks thawed

Formal diplomatic relations between the world’s biggest polluters suffered an ice-age-like deep freeze in the latter part of 2022 after US Congressional leader Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan. Climate talks were collateral damage.

But 2023 saw a slow but steady thawing. It culminated in a momentous bilateral meeting held in Califonia’s Sunnylands resort a few weeks before Cop28.

The countries’ respective climate envoys, John Kerry and Xie Zhenhua, agreed to revive a climate working group and sketched out the outline of a potential alignment in the upcoming negotiations.

It proved decisive. In particular, their joint support to “accelerate the substitution for coal, oil and gas generation” helped find the right formula to unstick the thorny energy language in Dubai.

U.S. Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry shakes hands with his Chinese counterpart Xie Zhenhua before a meeting in Beijing, China July 17, 2023. (Reuters/Valerie Volcovici/ File Photo)

The special personal relationship between Kerry and Xie was a big factor in these improved relations.

When formal diplomacy was on hold, the two kept talking. Xie even brought his grandson to Dubai because the 8-year-old wanted to say “happy birthday to my good friend Mr. Kerry”, who turned 80 during the summit.

But Cop28 was most likely their last hurrah together. Xie is set to retire soon ending a 16-years on-and-off stint. He is likely to be replaced by Liu Zhenmin, a former vice foreign minister.

Kerry has been vague about his future with US elections looming large on the horizon. He recently told Reuters that he would “continue as long as God gives me the breath and work on it [climate] one way or the other”.

4. Carbon credits terrible year

To say 2023 won’t be remembered as carbon credits’ finest year is an understatement. It began with a now-infamous report pouring cold water on forestry-based offsets and ended with talks over Article 6 falling apart spectacularly in Dubai.

In between, scandal after scandal dented the reputation of carbon markets. From the collapse of the world’s second largest project to the suspension of dozens of schemes over exaggerated claims or alleged human rights violations. The blowback prompted even some of the most enthusiastic corporate credits buyers to cool on the idea.

Co-chairs of negotiations at Cop28 on carbon trading rules
(Photo: Flickr/Cop28/Kiara Worth)

Many carbon market supporters had pinned hopes on Cop28 for a spot of good news. Ahead of the talks, it looked like governments could finally fire the starting gun on the creation of a long-awaited global carbon market under the Paris Agreement.

But those hopes were misplaced. Negotiations ended without an outcome following a bitter disagreement over integrity rules between the US and the EU.

Leaping on the string of failures, some critics have been pushing for the whole concept of carbon offsetting to be chucked into the dustbin of history.

But others claim carbon markets provide an essential source of finance for developing nations, love it or loathe it. They are trying to build them back up from the nadir with more stringent climate provisions and better social safeguards.

5. Coal-to-clean deals reality check

As  promises turned into proper plans, Just energy transition partnerships (Jetp) hit the cold wall of reality in 2023. The three initial deals – with South Africa, Indonesia and Vietnam – have all been beset by issues.

The type of money put on the table by rich nations has been a source of common grievance. Grants make up a very small percentage of the funding packages, fuelling fears over debt. As a result, recipient countries revised climate targets downwards.

The energy transition deal aims to wean Indonesia off coal, which now takes up nearly half of the country’s electricity mix. Photo: Kemal Jufri / Greenpeace

Indonesia has watered down coal retirement plans. It now aims to start shutting down on-grid plants before their scheduled closure no earlier than 2035 – five years later than originally planned.

So-called captive plants, that power specific industries, have also caused a massive headache. Wrong assumptions meant a much lower number of them were baked in the original modelling. Struggling to find a way out, the Indonesian government has so far excluded them – and their emissions – wholesale from the Jetp blueprint.

Vietnam’s investment plan, unveiled during Cop28, has no timeline at all for retiring coal. It expects instead to operate plants “flexibly” and to rely on the controversial co-firing of biomass and ammonia with coal.

The authoritarian Vietnamese government has also all but buried the ‘just’ aspect of the partnership. It has jailed five environmentalists on tax evasion charges, which human rights groups say are trumped-up accusations.

Vietnamese campaigner Hoang Thi Minh Hong was sentenced to three years in prison. Photo: CHANGE/350Vietnam

In South Africa, the transition is meant to be reasonably easier as its Apartheid-era coal plants are nearing retirement. But crippling blackouts prompted President Cyril Ramaphosa to say the timetable “must be relooked at” earlier this year.

The plan is also facing fierce opposition from the powerful coal lobby. Our investigation with Oxpeckers discovered the sector partnered with politicians and even managed to water down or delay key policies in a bid to sink the scheme.

6. Loss and damage fund’s good start

As the Cop27 president gavelled the landmark decision on a loss and damage fund in Sharm-el-Sheik, a question loomed large: will countries manage to agree on how it should work within the following 12 months?

‘Yes, definitely’ was the answer.

Governments adopted the decision on operationalising the fund on the very first day of Cop28. It gave the summit’s president Al Jaber an early win and prevented loss and damage from being used as a bargaining chip in the ensuing negotiations.

The success is down to the painstaking work of a 24-member transitional committee that hashed out the details over five gruelling meetings. At the outset, developed and developing countries were at odds on just about everything: who should benefit from the fund, who is expected to pay into it, where it’s meant to be hosted.

Distances gradually narrowed and a compromise deal was eventually struck a month before the climate summit. The World Bank will initially host the fund for four years, despite strong resistance to its involvement from developing nations.

Campaigners at Cop27 call for a loss and damage fund to be set up (Photo credit: Kiara Worth/UNFCCC)

All developing countries “particularly vulnerable” to the effects of climate change will be eligible to benefit from the mechanism. However, the definition of vulnerability – one of the thorniest issues – has not yet been defined.

The decision “urges” developed countries to provide financial resources to the fund, while other nations are only “encouraged” to do so “on a voluntary basis”. Rich nations have been strongly pushing to broaden the donor pool and will likely keep up their efforts.

Pledges from a slew of countries should inject over $700 million for the start-up of the fund. The UAE won plaudits by committing $100 million. The US was lambasted for offering a paltry $17.5m, despite being the world’s largest economy and biggest historical emitter.

The post Six takeaways from 2023’s climate change news appeared first on Climate Home News.

Then last Saturday in Dubai, a much bigger group of nations signed a similar pledge. Over 120 countries gave the document their signature but G20 nations like China, India and Indonesia were not among them.

That’s despite China dominating the renewables supply chain and the International Energy Agency forecasting that both China and India are already going to double their renewables by 2027, putting them on course to triple capacity by 2030 without any extra effort. So why the reluctance?

Well, the Cop28 pledge came in a package with anti-coal language and a more challenging target to double energy efficiency, with no quantified finance target to match. Experts told Climate Home major emerging economies were concerned about costs and reluctant to make commitments outside the formal UN climate process.

Coal and costs

Unlike the G20 agreement, the Cop28 pledge calls on signatories to “end the continued investment in unabated new coal-fired power plants, which is incompatible with efforts to limit warming to 1.5°C”.

Between them, the four G20 nations that didn’t sign the Cop28 pledge are building over four-fifths of the world’s new unabated coal-fired power plants, according to Global Energy Monitor.

“That could be why large emerging economies are concerned about the renewable energy declaration because it is tied to coal-based power generation,” said Centre for Science and Environment researcher Avantika Goswami.

What is Alterra, the UAE’s $30 billion green investment fund?

While the pledge does not require any individual country to triple their own renewable capacity, a source familiar with the Indonesian government’s position said it feared it will pressure them to do so.

For Indonesia, this could require early closure of coal-fired power plants and investment in grid stability in the Java-Bali area. “Both implies increasing financial burden to [state-owned energy company] PLN and to the government,” they said. “The reason that this pledge doesn’t come with financial and technical support has made Indonesia reluctant to support.”

The Asia Society’s climate lead Li Shuo told Climate Home that China would struggle to meet the target to double energy efficiency by 2030, which was not in the G20 agreement or in the US-China Sunnylands agreement.

Energy efficiency is calculated by dividing the size of an economy by its energy consumption and China’s economic growth has slowed down in recent years, making the target harder to reach.

Negotiating position

Li said that China “has not been a fan of side deals and declarations at the [UN climate talks]. They often feel these deals deviate from the [UN climate convention] and Paris Agreement and may be held against them in the future”.

Joyce Lee, policy director at the Global Wind Energy Council said that, as the pledge was launched at the start of the Cop28 climate talks “there’s a lot of public posturing”.

“In a negotiation dynamic, you don’t put yourself too close to where your ultimate position might be at the outset,” she said.

She added that in these countries “there’s a feeling that they’re doing a lot already on [reducing emissions]” and “may even be doing more than their fair share” given that they’ve contributed less to historic emissions than wealthy nations.

The post Why didn’t China and India sign Cop28 tripling renewables pledge? appeared first on Climate Home News.

This makes up much of the UAE presidency’s estimate Cop28 has “mobilised” over $83 billion, which it is promoting to the press and on social media.

The other big chunk of the total is $31.6bn dedicated to climate projects by multilateral development banks. Governments have pledged smaller sums to funds including the Green Climate Fund ($3.5bn), Adaptation Fund ($134m) and Least Developed Countries Fund ($129.3m).

Unlike these development-focused initiatives, Alterra is primarily a profit-seeking fund. It plans to buy shares in green companies and to make money when their share prices rise and they pay dividends. Of this $30 billion, $5 billion is earmarked for investment in developing countries.

Oil-reliant Azerbaijan chosen to host Cop29 climate talks

The Cop28 presidency said that when other investors see the UAE’s money flowing into these investments, that will build their confidence to invest too. That way, they hope they can attract $250 billion by 2030.

How will it be invested?

The fund will be managed by Lunate, a company headquartered in the UAE city of Abu Dhabi. Lunate is part-owned by Tahnoun bin Zayed, the UAE’s national security chief and brother of its ruler.

The Cop28 presidency said $2 billion will go into the “Global Transition Fund II”, managed by Canadian giant Brookfield and its head of transition investing Mark Carney.

Much of the money will go into polluting businesses which Brookfield thinks are trying to clean up. Commenting on the Global Transition Fund I in Brookfield’s 2021 sustainability report, Carney said “transition doesn’t mean flipping a green switch or investing only in companies that are already green”.

He added: “Financial institutions must go where the emissions are and back companies — including heavy-emitting sectors like steel, cement, and transportation — that have credible plans to transform their business for a net-zero world.”

Some of the $30 billion will be invested in Brookfield's new Catalytic Transition Fund. The Cop28 presidency said this will be "multibillion dollar" and invest only in "emerging and developing" countries.

Another $2 billion will be managed by American company Blackrock. Of this, $1 billion will go to Blackrock's Climate Transition-Oriented Private Debt (CPD) strategy, $650 million will be invested in the Global Infrastructure Fund IV and $350 million will go to infrastructure in the Global South.

The CPD's $650 million will be invested in medium-sized companies, which Blackrock says are "primarily in Europe and the US" and "are committed to reducing their carbon emissions". It uses a private framework to judge whether companies meet this criteria.

Devil in the detail

E3G's sustainable finance lead Kate Levick said this fund is "probably a good thing". It is not purely a profit-seeking fund, she noted, because it's doing things like trying to bring down the cost of borrowing in developing countries.

Levick praised the strategy of investing in high-emitting businesses but only if they have a "solid transition plan". While accepting investments in high-emitters could be controversial, she said "this could be get-your-hands-dirty time".

Action Aid campaigner Teresa Anderson contrasted the $30 billion investment with the UAE's $0.1 billion pledge to the loss and damage fund.

While the $0.1 billion pledge "seemed generous" compared with other countries "paltry" offers, she told Climate Home, it was "chump change when compared to the $30 billion being channeled to the private sector and asset funds".

"This is part of a global trend in which huge amounts of money that could be used as grants to benefit climate-vulnerable communities are going to the pockets of banks and big business," she added.

The post What is Alterra, the UAE’s $30 billion green investment fund? appeared first on Climate Home News.

The Paris Agreement establishes ways for countries to “voluntarily cooperate” to meet their climate targets by allowing emission reductions and removals to be traded.

In Dubai, negotiators will finalise the architecture of a new mechanism allowing countries to sell offsets to other governments, companies and individuals under Article 6.4.

It comes at a pivotal time. The voluntary carbon market has faced more intense scrutiny than ever this year with report after report casting doubt over its integrity. But for many, carbon credits remain a valuable tool to channel much-needed finance to developing countries.

The stakes are high for the new system to get it right and correct problems with existing systems. We outline four critical questions for the outcome from Dubai.

Which activities are eligible?

Deciding which activities can produce credits is an important and fraught question.

If the criteria are too restrictive, countries may struggle to obtain any meaningful financial support from the mechanism. Too broad and projects with questionable climate credentials, or other significant environmental and social concerns, will undermine their credibility.

Over the last year, the UN’s Article 6.4 supervisory body has been evaluating the eligibility of carbon removals: activities that take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and store it. These can be nature-based, such as planting trees, or engineering-based, like machines to suck CO2.

A Direct Air Capture (DAC) plant operated by Climeworks in Iceland. Photo: Climeworks

Tensions emerged last May when an internal briefing note drafted by the UNFCCC secretariat advised against including technological solutions describing them as “unproven” and potentially risky.

While the supervisory body distanced itself from the document, it angered the industry which responded by flooding the consultation process with submissions putting their case forward.

It worked. The final recommendations, agreed upon after several extended meetings, do not directly encourage or discriminate against any type of activity.

Ministers still need to approve the package in Dubai. While a broad agreement is expected, certain groups may still have issues with it.

Papua New Guinea, representing the Coalition for Rainforest Nations, could be a blocker. It has long argued that credits issued for forest conservation under the Redd+ framework should automatically qualify for the new mechanism.

Most countries and experts disagree. “The intention of the Redd+ framework was never to generate credits”, says Pedro Martins Barata, a carbon markets expert at EDF and a former negotiator. “That mechanism is much less stringent. They should go through the same process of methodology submission and independent evaluation as all the other activities.”

Are the reductions additional and permanent?

As credits are used by governments or companies to compensate for their polluting activities, each unit must represent a real emission reduction. This has been a fundamental and long-standing issue with many carbon offsetting projects.

Among other things, rules need to make sure the activities would have not happened anyways without the carbon finance (additionality) and that any CO2 removed does not re-enter the atmosphere in a short amount of time (permanence).

The Supervisory Body has tackled those policy issues in the recommendations sent to Cop28 for approval.

On additionality, the document says that projects will have to take into account all relevant legislation and produce a detailed analysis of investment barriers to demonstrate that emission-cutting activities would have not occurred without the mechanism.

Experts told Climate Home these provisions should be stringent enough.

A community ranger standing in a mangrove forest restored as part of a nature protection project in Kenya. Photo: Anthony Ochieng / Climate Visuals Countdown

On permanence, concerns have been raised.

“The text leaves open the question of for how many years a credit is guaranteed to correspond to an actual removal without giving specific thresholds,” says Martins Barata, adding this should be established in further work.

Another contentious point is the possibility of relieving project developers of the duty to carry out permanence monitoring after they stop issuing credits. The risk is that, for example, protected trees could burn in a fire unleashing the stored carbon into the atmosphere.

The recommendations indicate this exemption can apply when a “negligible” risk of the emission removals being reversed is demonstrated.

Jonathan Crook of Carbon Market Watch argued the text could be tightened. “How do you define negligible risk? What sources will be accepted as evidence? These are all open questions that may cause potential issues,” he added.

What happens if a country wants to take back credits?

Article 6 has a provision to ensure that emission reduction activities are not counted twice, by both the seller and buyer, towards their respective climate plans. When a country transfers a credit to a government or a company it needs to deduct that from its greenhouse gas inventory.

As a result, countries need to strike a balance between attracting revenues and being able to meet their own climate plans.

But a contested rule could give struggling governments a way out. In Dubai, negotiators will be discussing whether countries may be allowed to withdraw any credits that have been previously authorised. This could also apply in cases where the projects are causing environmental and human rights violations.

Carbon Market Watch’s Crook said this provision poses a substantial threat. “If a country can revoke credits that have already been traded, and potentially used, then you have a serious risk of double counting,” he told Climate Home. “If revocations are allowed, at the very least they shouldn’t apply to credits already sold.”

Will the new market rescue the reputation of carbon credits?

A lot is riding on the Article 6.4 mechanism because of the impact it can have on the wider carbon offsetting world.

Crook said it needs to set a “high bar”, sending a strong message to the voluntary market that there needs to be improvements.

The new mechanism is set to include some positive elements that currently don’t exist in carbon markets used by corporations.

Already agreed rules have established that 2% of any credits traded in the new market will be automatically cancelled. This means that offsetting will not just be a zero-sum game, shifting emissions cuts from one place to another.

But when it comes to individual projects, experts said it was too early to say if they will have high integrity.

“You can have the best rules but it all comes down to implementation,” said Martins Barata. “They’re off to a good start. But come back to me when they start approving projects”.

If the recommendations are approved in Dubai, the new mechanism may start issuing credits towards the end of 2024.

Paradoxically, the first batch of credits to be traded may pose some of the biggest integrity risks. A process to transition credits created under the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), the now-defunct UN carbon market established through the Kyoto Protocol, into the new mechanism is well underway.

CDM credits have been widely criticised for failing to contribute to real emissions reductions and causing human rights violations.

The post Four questions for Cop28 to settle about a global carbon market appeared first on Climate Home News.

This year, some big hitters like the US’s Joe Biden and China’s Xi Jinping will stay away. Other influential leaders including Narendra Modi, Emmanuel Macron, Mohamed bin Salman, Mia Mottley, William Ruto and Lula Da Silva are due to attend.

World leader speeches at Cop28 are a chance to show off ambitious policies, bear witness to climate impacts, pledge funding and point fingers. Here are seven things to watch out for.

1. Fossil fuel phase-out

A broad coalition of nations is calling for a phase out, or at least phase down, of fossil fuels. They will face resistance from countries that rely on fossil fuels to generate revenue and keep their people content.

Any deal on a fossil fuel phase out will be struck by negotiators in closed meeting rooms towards the end of Cop28 in two weeks time.

But we will get a good sense of the strength of resistance from the first two speeches on Friday – that of UAE’s Mohamed Bin Zayed and Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman.

Its not just Gulf petrostates that defend fossil fuels though. Several African leaders in particular want to exploit their fossil fuel reserves, they say, to bring wealth and electricity to their people.

Senegal’s Macky Sall and the Democratic Republic of Congo’s Felix Tshisekedi are among them. They may use their speeches to ask why they shouldn’t pump for new oil and gas when the likes of the US and Canada plan to increase production.

2. Tales from the frontline

After a year that had climate scientists reaching for the thesaurus to describe their shock at global temperature spikes, leaders will share how climate disasters hit their people.

In Libya, extreme rainfall overwhelmed decrepit dams and washed away much of the city of Derna in September. 

Leaks reveal how McKinsey drives African climate agenda

Leaders from Iraq and East African nations may tell of extreme drought while South American leaders could address their weird winter heatwave. 

Then there are the slow, creeping climate impacts. In the Pacific, rising seas and intensifying storms are eroding narrow atolls, while expanding desert eats into the fertile land of northern Africa and mountain glaciers retreat.

3. Start-up cash for a loss and damage fund

Negotiators are set to agree at Cop28 on how to set up a global loss and damage fund for victims of the climate crisis.

A handful of pledges are expected from the EU and others to get it started. Don’t get too excited: we’re talking in the region of $0.5-1 billion, not the $100bn a year developing countries ultimately want to see flowing through the fund.

The ‘inevitable’ fossil fuel fight set to dominate Cop28

Avinash Persaud, climate adviser to Barbados’ prime minister, told Climate Home that amounts like that should not be dismissed. “Countries can’t pull billions out of a hat,” he said, “because you have to budget in advance.”

Climate Action Network’s Harjeet Singh took a stronger line. “Recovery costs are soaring into the billions,” he said, “far exceeding the expected pledges of a few hundred million.”

4. Green Climate Fund pledges 

The UN’s flagship climate fund held its four-yearly fundraising round in October. Pledges from wealthy countries totalled a disappointing $9.3bn – less than last time in 2019. 

That’s left the fund’s secretariat looking to have to scale back ambition – help fewer farmers adapt to climate change, conserve less forest, protect fewer countries with early warning systems.

A few late pledges could improve its fortunes. Italy, Sweden and Switzerland have yet to announce contributions. Their leaders are attending.

The US and Australia are not sending leaders but could announce funds elsewhere. Both now claim to be climate leaders. This is the time to prove it with cash. 

In numbers: The state of the climate ahead of Cop28

5. Bridgetown developments

Two years ago, Barbados’ prime minister Mia Mottley got some influential allies together in her capital city Bridgetown to plot how to transform the global financial system to make it work for climate. 

Since then, her speeches have become must-watch verdicts on how that mission is going and where it should go next. We’re expecting her to call for more ambition in reforming banks like the World Bank so that they spend more on climate.

Her speeches often include innovative ideas. Last year, she suggested that oil companies should pay for climate damages. With Barbados’ support, France and Kenya have set up a task force to look into making that happen, which Emmanuel Macron and William Ruto are likely to promote. So what Mottley proposes this year is worth watching.

6. Coal-to-clean updates 

Two years ago in Glasgow, the concept of a Just Energy Transition Partnership was launched. The idea was for rich countries to financially help coal-reliant emerging economies switch to renewables. 

South Africa piloted the idea, while agreements with Indonesia and Vietnam came next. All have been plagued by arguments over the pace of change and the nature of finance. 

President Cyril Ramaphosa will give an update on South Africa’s package on Friday. The most advanced of the partnerships, it nonetheless faces political challenges.

Fearing repression in Dubai, non-binary people stay away from Cop28

Vietnam is due to announce its investment plan at Cop28. Prime minister Chinh Pham Minh will no doubt talk it up, without mentioning that he’s jailed several environmental campaigners. 

The words of Indonesian president Joko Widodo could be interesting as, ahead of February’s elections, he could air his complaints about rich countries’ insistence on mainly loans not grants.

With India uninterested, there are no more in the immediate pipeline but plenty of leaders will emphasise the volume of investment needed to support clean development.

7. Bids to host Cop29

Two years ago, we already knew that we’d be in the United Arab Emirates for Cop28. Similarly, we already know that Cop30 will be in Belém in Brazil in two years time. 

But we don’t know where we’ll be this time next year. It’s up to the UN’s Eastern Europe group to decide. Various EU states have offered but Russia has vetoed them because of EU support for Ukraine.

Russia supports Azerbaijan’s candidacy but Armenia, which is at war with Azerbaijan, opposes that and wants to host itself – which Azerbaijan opposes right back. 

Meet the Italian fugitive advising Emirati start-up Blue Carbon

The various potential hosts could use their speeches to make their case. If there’s no agreement the default is for the UAE to keep the presidency with the physical conference held at the UN climate headquarters in Bonn, Germany.

For Cop31, contenders include Australia, whose leader is not on the speaker list, and Turkiye whose president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan will speak on Friday.

The post Seven things to watch out for in world leader speeches at Cop28 appeared first on Climate Home News.

It’s a measure of how far the discourse has moved since the Paris Agreement that Sultan Al Jaber has taken that line in the run-up to Cop28.

As president of the UN climate summit starting in Dubai on 30 November, Al Jaber could not ignore mounting calls to quit coal, oil and gas.

“We cannot address climate catastrophe without addressing its root cause: fossil fuel dependence,” said UN chief Antonio Guterres last week. “Cop28 must send a clear signal that the fossil fuel age is out of gas – that its end is inevitable.”

But Al Jaber has not quit the day job as chief of Emirati state-owned oil company Adnoc, which is increasing production. The conflict of interest is writ large.

And despite the longstanding scientific consensus that burning fossil fuels is the main driver of the climate crisis, there was no political consensus to name them in UN climate decisions until very recently.

At the 2021 climate summit in Glasgow, UK, countries made a breakthrough agreement to phase down coal power generation. A group of around 80 countries pushed to extend that to oil and gas in Sharm-el-Sheik last year, but were stonewalled. Will Al Jaber’s rhetoric translate into an international agreement?

Phasing down or cashing in?

The science is clear: we need to substantially reduce the use of fossil fuels to stand a realistic chance of limiting global warming to 1.5C, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said. There is no room for new oil and gas fields, the International Energy Agency agreed.

While there is money to be made, though, mining and drilling continue. Buoyant oil prices since Russia invaded Ukraine last year have spurred development.

The top 20 fossil fuel-producing nations plan to extract twice as much by 2030 as the level consistent with meeting the Paris Agreement goals, according to the UN’s 2023 Production Gap report.

The difference between governments’ fossil fuel plans and projections and levels consistent with limiting warming to 1.5°C and 2°C remains wide. Credit: UN Production Gap Report

The first global stocktake of the Paris Agreement is due to conclude at Cop28 – a prime opportunity for a course correction. Two elements of the energy package under negotiation have broad support: a tripling of renewable energy capacity and a doubling of energy efficiency by 2030. But on a third plank – the fossil fuel phase-out – divisions remain stark.

“We are not going to solve the problem by scaling up renewables alone,” says Ploy Achakulwisut, a research fellow at SEI and one of the UN report’s authors. “Governments need to step up and commit to stronger language on fossil fuels now. Accepting a phase-out is the first step towards coordinating and implementing a well-managed and equitable transition.”

A fractured field

On one end of the spectrum, fifteen countries under the banner “high ambition coalition” are calling for a phase-out of fossil fuels production and use: no ifs, no buts. The group includes rich Western countries like France and Spain, African states, including Kenya and Ethiopia, and Pacific island nations.

Oil, carbon and loss: navigating Cop28 with Climate Home News

On the opposite end, Russia says nyet to any proposal of cutting the oil and gas production that makes up most of its revenues. “We oppose any provisions or outcomes that somehow discriminate or call for phase-out of any specific energy source or fossil fuel type,” the country’s recent submission to the UNFCCC said.

In between are developed countries justifying continued oil and gas development on energy security grounds and emerging economies resistant to any check on their growth.

One word is likely to dominate discussions: unabated.

Abatement fight

A universally-recognised definition of “unabated” does not exist – and that is a big part of the problem. Fossil fuel abatement generally refers to efforts to reduce the amount of greenhouse gas emitted throughout their life cycle, chiefly by using carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies.

But what percentage of emissions needs to be captured and how countries ensure this is not a delaying tactic are open questions.

“Differing views on abatement are causing hostages to fortune and allowing fractures to appear that are not helpful in terms of actually achieving fossil fuel phaseout,” Camilla Fenning, a fossil fuel transition expert at E3G, told Climate Home. “A clear definition is something that would be very useful.”

Chevron’s Gorgon gas project in Australia has one of the largest carbon capture and storage plants in the world. Photo: Chevron Australia

Rich countries all call for some form of phase-out of unabated fossil fuels, in line with what was agreed at a G7 meeting in Hiroshima last May.

Their interpretation is not univocal, however.

The EU wants to designate some clear boundaries around the use of technofixes. “Exaggerated expectations from CCS should not be a pretext to delay climate action now,” an EU negotiator told Climate Home. “It will not deliver what we need before 2030. In the longer term, we will need it in hard-to-abate sectors, but we need to see what is possible.”

Meanwhile, the US is betting big on CCS and curbs on methane leakage to limit the climate damage of oil and gas operations. It is a position that brings it closer to petrostates like Saudi Arabia and Cop28 hosts UAE.

EU law pushes foreign oil and gas producers to cut methane

China’s climate envoy Xie Zhenhua has also come out in favour of CCS while calling a global fossil fuel phase-out “unrealistic”.

The country, which is expanding both coal power capacity and renewables, risks being a major blocker to an agreement. Highlighting “the significant role of fossil fuels in ensuring energy supply security”, its latest submission said the transition needs to be achieved by “establishing the new before abolishing the old”.

For Cuban Ambassador Pedro Luis Pedroso Cuesta, chair of the G77 group of developing countries, development needs take priority over a fossil fuel phase-out. “The most important thing for developing countries is eradicating poverty and guaranteeing a right to development within a sustainability framework,” he told Climate Home.

Equity and money questions

For many developing countries, equity concerns will need to be addressed before signing on to any deal.

Negotiators from Africa and India are planning to push rich nations to commit to phasing out fossil fuels faster than the rest of the world. Their position is based on the “common but differentiated responsibilities” principle, where the wealthy countries who are most responsible for causing climate change take the lead in tackling it.

They will highlight the contradictions between what some developed countries advocate for in climate talks and what they do at home. For example, the US is responsible for more than one-third of the expansion of global oil and gas production planned by mid-century, followed by Canada and Russia, according to Oil Change International.

Cuba’s Pedroso Cuesta called this a “severe contradiction”. “Those who are proposing these initiatives [fossil fuel phase out] should lead by example. I don’t think they are currently,” he added.

France, Kenya set to launch Cop28 coalition for global taxes to fund climate action

Another sticking point is money. A huge amount of it will be required for developing countries to wean themselves off fossil fuels while investing heavily in renewables and energy efficiency, the other elements of the COP28 energy package. “Developing countries need to be given assurances about more financial support to encourage confidence in signing up for those commitments”, says E3G’s Fenning

It is not yet clear who is going to provide finance and on what terms. Energy transition partnerships between rich countries and South Africa, Indonesia and Vietnam have stuttered over the last year. Promises of significantly higher levels of support from development banks and the private sector still need to materialize.

Activists gearing up

While country delegates refine their rhetoric, activists are also gearing up their campaigning firepower to make sure a fossil fuel phase-out remains top of the agenda in Dubai.

Demonstrations and protests are expected to be limited to the UN-designated zones, given the harsh rules clamping down on dissent in the UAE, campaigners told Climate Home. But more creativity and better coordination will ensure impact, they promise.

Campaigners are planning to target anyone blocking a deal on fossil fuels. Not only governments but also industry lobbyists expected to descend onto the petrostate in vast numbers.

“The fact that we’re closer than ever to a decision on fossil fuel phase-out in a UN space means that the industry is mobilising more strongly to oppose this,” says Collin Rees, an activist at Oil Change International. “The industry has been forced to come out and show its face. Having that fight in full public view will be very important”.

The post The ‘inevitable’ fossil fuel fight set to dominate Cop28 appeared first on Climate Home News.

These reports can start to induce deja-vu. We’re doing some stuff to tackle climate change, usually more than the year before. But not fast enough to avoid some pretty terrifying destruction.

“Broken record,” is the title of the UN’s latest emissions gap report. “Temperatures hit new highs yet world fails to cut emissions (again),” the subtitle.

The world is breaking records for emissions and temperatures, fuelling climate disasters across the globe.

Discover how to put the world back on course for its climate goals in UNEP’s latest #EmissionsGap report: https://t.co/xTlAHFOGp1 pic.twitter.com/rYHhx9BzuA

— UN Environment Programme (@UNEP) November 21, 2023

So far, so gloomy. But the record may be about to come unstuck as some analysts predict emissions will peak in 2023.

By Cop29, we could be reading reports saying that this time the world has finally succeeded in cutting emissions – and not because a pandemic brought the global economy to a halt.

From then onwards, we will be damaging our planet less and less each year until we reach net zero and stop damaging it at all.

What is still to play for is how fast we reach that point and how much damage will have been done.

We’re nearing peak emissions…

A report by Climate Analytics finds a 70% chance that emissions will peak in 2023 and start falling in 2024, mainly thanks to electric vehicles, solar and wind power.

The International Energy Agency says similar, suggesting that fossil fuel CO2 emissions – a huge chunk of the total – could peak before 2025 and as early as 2023.

The US government’s Energy Information Administration is more pessimistic, predicting that solar won’t boom that fast and energy-related CO2 emissions will either continue to increase or plateau.

While emissions from producing electricity are going to come down, these gains will be partly cancelled out by still-increasing emissions from transport.

…but greenhouse gas levels keep rising…

But that doesn’t mean there will be less greenhouse gas in the atmosphere each year. Even if you pour less and less water into a bath, the bath still gets fuller each time.

The World Meteorological Organization reports that carbon dioxide concentrations in the air were 50% higher than pre-industrial levels for the first time in 2022. Methane and nitrous oxide levels also rose.

Greenhouse gas levels in our atmosphere continue to rise.
Concentrations of CO2, which is responsible for most of the warming effect on our climate, were a full 50% above the pre-industrial era for the first time in 2022. #COP28 #StateofClimatehttps://t.co/tm0uuH4Gx0 pic.twitter.com/Gs2yhRQKUt

— World Meteorological Organization (@WMO) November 15, 2023

…as does the earth’s temperature…

The world is now on average 1.25C hotter than it was in the latter half of the nineteenth century.

Last year, the United Nations Environment Programme (Unep) said governments’ climate plans would put us on course for 2.4-2.8C of warming.

Since then, very few countries have increased their ambition and emissions kept rising, so they now say we’re on course for 2.5-3C of warming.

That’s if governments plans are fully implemented. But the report says that most countries aren’t doing enough to meet their promises.

…and the damage done…

Rising emissions mean rising temperatures which means rising destruction caused by climate change. This devastation is hard to measure but there are a few metrics we can use.

A study in the Lancet medical journal found that climate change made 127 million extra people go hungry in 2021, compared to the 80s, 90s and noughties.

They found it increased the potential of mosquitos to transmit dengue fever transmission by about a quarter and put 1.4 billion people at risk of vibriosis as warmer water helps bacteria in the sea thrive.

The insurance company Swiss Re says people are losing more and more of their property because of storms, floods and wildfires.

With all these impacts rising, it’s more important than ever to adapt to climate change. But Unep’s adaptation gap report finds developing countries got less adaptation finance in 2021 than they did in 2020. They need an estimated $194-366 billion. They got $21 billion.

Unlock the path forward!

UNEP’s 2023 #AdaptationGap Report identifies 7 ways to increase financing and prevent future loss and damage from the devastating impacts of the #ClimateCrisis.

Explore here: https://t.co/pxZas4WpKE

— UN Environment Programme (@UNEP) November 9, 2023

…and investment in fossil fuel production

The world is still investing over $1 trillion a year in fossil fuels – almost double the level the IEA judges compatible with 1.5C of global warming.

Countries like the US, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, Russia and Qatar are boosting oil and gas production, while India slows down the global decline in coal mining.

Demand for fossil fuels is about to peak

While the supply of fossil fuels is increasing, the IEA says the demand for coal, oil and gas has either peaked or is about to peak.

Coal is about to start a rapid decline, the IEA predicts, while demand for oil and gas stays at about the level it is now for a few decades.

That's not good enough to limit global warming to 1.5C but it does suggest continued investment in fossil fuel supply is economically as well as environmentally foolish.

One sub-set of the fossil fuel market where supply is forecast to outstrip demand is liquified natural gas. This is when gas is turned into a liquid, put on a ship and sailed to customers around the world.

The US and Qatar have led a rush into this market to replace the piped Russian gas that places like Europe used to rely on. When this new LNG export infrastructure is up and running in a few years time, the IEA predicts a glut.

Solar is booming...

Solar continues to be climate change's success story. For a few years now, the world has invested more in clean energy than fossil fuels and that gap is growing.

Chinese factories are pumping out solar panels so fast we don't know what to do with them. If they can be connected to the grids and replace fossil fuels as fast as they are being built, limiting warming to 1.5C becomes a lot easier.

...and so are electric vehicles...

Five years ago, less than 2% of new cars were electric. Now that figure is more like 10%.

In a few years time, the World Resources Institute predicts, that figure will pass 50% and get up to near 100% by the end of the decade.

It will take longer for all cars on the road to be electric and buses and motorbikes are lagging behind still.

But electric vehicles are taking a big chunk out of oil demand and of road transport's 10% of global emissions.

...and heat pumps

When Russia invaded Ukraine, Europeans and their governments scrambled to stop heating their homes with Russian gas.

That led to a boom in heat pumps, which run on electricity and are around three times more efficient than gas boilers. Sales soared 40% in Europe and 10% across the world.

The post In numbers: The state of the climate ahead of Cop28 appeared first on Climate Home News.