Two lakes in Nepal burst last Friday, destroying dozens of homes in a village known for its Everest sherpas, raising fears that global warming is likely to cause more such disasters as glaciers melt in high mountain ranges.

After last week’s flood, Jagadishwor Karmacharya, the head of Nepal’s hydrology and meteorology department, told Climate Home the Chinese government has not shared “essential” information about its glacial lakes and the risk of floods that threaten Nepal.

In 2016, for example, Gongbatongshacuo Lake in Tibet burst, causing a flood along the Bhote Koshi River in Nepal’s northern district of Sindhupalchowk. It swept away 20 houses, a boarding school and parts of a customs office, damaging dozens more buildings and a hydropower plant and destroying large stretches of road, including a highway linking Nepal and China.

Sign up to get our weekly newsletter straight to your inbox, plus breaking news, investigations and extra bulletins from key events

Karmacharya said China, Nepal and India must collaborate to prevent such disasters, adding that Nepal has been asking China for many years to supply data about its glacial lakes but China has not met promises to do so made in bilateral meetings and other fora.

“If a lake in China bursts, the impact on Nepal could be unimaginable,” he said. “This information is essential for us to prepare and reduce the impact of floods.”

The Chinese embassy in Kathmandu did not respond to an emailed request for comment.

Melting ice

A glacial lake is made up of water from melted glacier ice. Climate change has sped up the melting of glaciers which forms lakes and can cause avalanches, making it more likely that the water in these lakes bursts through the ice holding it back, causing what is known as a Glacial Lake Outburst Flood (GLOF).

That’s what happened last week in a relatively small pair of lakes called Para Chhumo in Nepal. According to University of Alaska Fairbanks researcher Amrit Thapa, warming air melted snow and glacier ice, causing an upper lake to form in the 2010s, adding to the lower lake which has existed since the 1980s.

Both lakes burst their banks on Friday, with water rushing 10 km down the mountain to hit the village of Thame, famous as the home of Sherpa mountaineers like Tenzing Norgay, where it destroyed 23 homes and damaged 40 more, according to the Khumbu Pasang Lhamu Rural Municipality. 

The village of Toktok, about 50 km downstream from Thame, where three homes were swept away and two were damaged by the flood from the Dudkoshi River. (Photo by Khumbu Pasang Lhamu Rural Municipality.)

A bridge and tourist trails were also washed away and local business-owners told Climate Home they feared the tourist industry the village relies on will be hit, as there are fewer places for visitors and trekkers to stay. 

Basanta Raj Adhikari, an engineering professor at Tribhuvan University and director of its Centre for Disaster Studies, asked: “If a small glacial lake like this can cause such destruction, what would happen if a larger one bursts?”

A 2020 report from the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) and the UN Development Programme (UNDP) in Nepal identified 47 glacial lakes in the Himalayas as potentially dangerous. One, Tsho Rolpa, is 30 times bigger than Para Chhumo. Of these 47 glacial lakes, one is in India, 21 are in Nepal and 25 are in Tibet, which is governed by China.

Most of the potentially dangerous glacial lakes (red) are in the Koshi river basin which spans Nepal and Tibet (Screenshot/ICIMOD)

Between 1977 and 2020, Nepal experienced 26 GLOFs, 14 of which originated in the country, the inventory noted. 

Move the village?

To compensate local people for this month’s damage in Thame, the Nepali government has provided about $450 to each affected family and is preparing temporary accommodation. 

Anil Pokhrel, head of the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority, said the government is studying whether the area is suitable for continued settlement. “If it is not safe, we will relocate the village to a safer place,” he said.

Other measures that can be taken to protect people from GLOFs include lowering water levels in glacial lakes and installing community-based early warning and response systems, according to ICIMOD and UNDP. 

In an ongoing court case in Germany, a Peruvian farmer is suing energy giant RWE over the contributions its planet-heating fossil fuel emissions have allegedly made to the threat to his village from Lake Palcacocha in the Andes, which burst in the 1940s killing 2,000 people.

The local government is planning to build a new dam and drainage system at the lake to reduce the risk of flooding, at a projected cost of around $4 million, and the lawsuit argues that RWE should contribute funding of about $20,000 in line with its share of global emissions.

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

Whatever the outcome of this closely watched legal case, veteran Nepalese tourism entrepreneur Ang Tshiring Sherpa said climate change is already damaging Himalayan tourism, and Sherpa communities are bearing the burden. 

“Those who have contributed the least to climate change are facing the worst consequences,” he said. “Climate change is not in some distant future; it is already happening. Why do our voices always fall on deaf ears? And how is it fair that our remote mountain communities have to fend for ourselves?” 

(Reporting by Mukesh Pokhrel; editing by Joe Lo and Megan Rowling)

The post Nepal says China withholds “essential” info on bursting Himalayan glacial lakes appeared first on Climate Home News.

The US government told stakeholders yesterday that, while demand side measures to reduce plastic production, consumption and waste can be part of the solution, Washington recognises that supporting goals to encourage and advance supply side measures will be critical tools, according to notes from a source at the briefing.

Three more sources at the briefing confirmed to Climate Home that the US government had shifted its position, as first reported by Reuters.

Up until now, the US has sided with Saudi Arabia in arguing for the new treaty to focus on recycling, while measures to curb production should be left up to individual countries.

The US is the only G7 member not to join the self-proclaimed “high ambition coalition against plastic pollution”.

The members of the self-described “high-ambition coalition” are in light blue

Their change of stance drew praise from environmental campaigners and anger from the plastic industry’s main trade association – the American Chemistry Council (ACC).

Industry anger

The ACC’s CEO Chris Jahn said the White House had “cave[d] to the wishes of extreme NGO groups” and was “willing to betray US manufacturing”. He warned that the Senate is likely to block the US’s entry to a plastics treaty which reflects this new position.

But environmental campaigners reacted positively. Tim Grabiel, a lawyer from the Environmental Investigation Agency NGO, said it “marks a decided shift in position” which “has the potential to salvage difficult negotiations”. But he called on the US to go further by committing to cutting virgin plastic production by 40% by 2040 – a target put forward by Rwanda and Peru at the latest rounds of negotiations last April.

FAO draft report backs growth of livestock industry despite emissions

Dennis Clare, a plastics negotiator for the Pacific island nation of Micronesia, told Climate Home that the new US position was a “major development with the possibility of turning the tide towards a much more ambitious treaty”.

Years in the making

The journey towards a global plastics accord began at the United Nations Environment Assembly in Nairobi in 2022 when all governments agreed to set up a treaty “to promote sustainable production and consumption of plastics”.

Since then, negotiators have held four rounds of talks, with the fifth and supposedly final due to take place in the South Korean city of Busan from November 25 to December 1. Any agreement struck there would then be signed off at a diplomatic conference a few months later.

Sign up to get our weekly newsletter straight to your inbox, plus breaking news, investigations and extra bulletins from key events

Ahead of those talks, the European Union has warned that “delaying tactics” from some nations will make it “very difficult” to agree a treaty in Busan.

The European Commission blamed “mainly major oil producing countries” for slowing negotiations while a Latin American negotiator told Climate Home in June that these delaying tactics were coming from the Like-Minded Group, which includes Russia and Saudi Arabia.

Production or just pollution?

One key divisive issue is whether the treaty should be limited to halting plastic pollution or also set targets to reduce the rising plastic production that is causing the problem in the first place. Besides environmental contamination, plastic contributes to planet-heating emissions as its manufacture relies on fossil fuels.

Powerful governments like Russia, Saudi Arabia and India have opposed targets to limit plastic production, preferring to focus on promoting recycling and keeping plastic waste out of the sea. The US and Iran have also tried to water down the treaty’s ambition.

Key UN report lends weight to Pacific plan for shipping emissions levy

On the other hand, a coalition of countries launched an initiative called “Bridge to Busan” aimed at reaching an agreement with targets to reduce plastic production. Plastics are made from oil and gas, and their production is a significant and growing source of greenhouse gas emissions.

Micronesia is one of the nations leading the Bridge to Busan coalition. Their negotiator Dennis Clare told Climate Home on Thursday that he hopes the US now signs up “and seeks to play a leadership role on addressing plastics production, which is the cornerstone of any effective treaty on plastic pollution”. The US has not indicated whether it would support this initiative.

There are also splits over the level of detail the treaty should include, how legally binding it should be, and what a financial mechanism to support government efforts to tackle plastic pollution should look like, according to an EU summary from June.

While some countries want a new dedicated fund, others including Gulf nations want to use an existing institution like the Global Environment Facility to channel finance. Additionally, Ghana has proposed a global fee on plastic production.

The post US turns against plastic producers, boosting hopes for ambitious treaty appeared first on Climate Home News.

The latest suggestion was made by an EU delegation led by Gerassimos Thomas, director general for taxation and customs union within the European Commission, who defended the proposed carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM) in its meetings with Indian officials.

Ajay Seth, India’s economic affairs secretary, told Reuters in an interview: “Their suggestion is not practical. Their team had come and met us … the solution they are offering doesn’t work for a developing economy like India.”

New Delhi has conveyed its stance to the EU delegation, labelling the proposed CBAM as unfair and detrimental to domestic market costs, Seth said.

Sign up to get our weekly newsletter straight to your inbox, plus breaking news, investigations and extra bulletins from key events

The EU last year approved the world’s first plan to impose tariffs on imports of high-carbon goods, including steel, aluminium and cement, aiming to reach net-zero greenhouse emissions by 2050.

Negotiations between the EU and India continue at a “technical level,” an EU statement said after the delegation’s visit earlier this month.

EU officials are trying to win over countries like China, South Africa and India that have opposed the CBAM.

The European Commission delegation had told India that the carbon tax’s primary intent was not to raise revenue but to ensure the supply of greener goods to the EU market.

The EU delegation suggested India could implement its own carbon tax to fund advancements in supply chains and cut carbon emissions, while maintaining its share of the EU market.

Higher costs

Seth said the greening of the steel industry would entail higher costs for the economy, and “with income levels which are one-twentieth of the income levels in Europe, can we afford a higher price? No, we can’t.”

Assuming there is no domestic Indian plan to tax high-carbon production – and incentivise a move to lower-carbon methods – the EU plans to collect the carbon tax on each consignment of steel and aluminium from Jan. 1, 2026, potentially imposing tariffs of between 20% and 35%, according to industry estimates.

Analysts warn that the deadlock over carbon emissions could strain bilateral trade and affect discussions on a free trade agreement (FTA).

“As India is negotiating an FTA with the EU, it should be ready for the scenario that Indian products will attract a high 20%-35% CBAM tax in the EU and their products will enter India duty free,” said Ajay Srivastava, founder of Global Trade Research Initiative (GTRI), a New Delhi-based think tank.

Pollution clampdown on Delhi kilns threatens brick workers’ future

The EU is India’s second-biggest export destination with nearly $100 billion of exports in total in 2023.

Seth said India wants that EU to adhere to the carbon emission rules agreed in the 2015 Paris Agreement, which allowed developing nations like India more flexible emission-cutting targets compared with developed countries.

India, with a carbon intensity of 632 grams per KWh in 2022, according to think tank Ember, is expanding its renewable capacity and has reduced its carbon intensity by 3.5% since 2018. It aims to achieve net zero by 2070.

“We have now about 170 or 180 gigawatt of renewable energy, but that is not available during night time,” Seth said, noting the challenges of producing greener exports solely for the EU market.

The post Indian official calls EU carbon border tax unfair and unacceptable appeared first on Climate Home News.

In question is a proposed development called the Energy Transition Zone (ETZ), which is intended to bring in more renewable energy investments as the city tries to cut its dependence on the oil and gas industry that has defined it for half a century. 

As the UK’s new Labour government promises not to issue any more oil and gas licences, the future of the sector is in doubt and the company behind the ETZ says it wants to “protect and create as many jobs as possible” in the region through investing in clean energy.

But the ETZ has received significant pushback from community groups in the part of Aberdeen it is destined for. That’s because the proposed development, as currently designed, would pave over about a third of St. Fittick’s Park in Torry, the only public green space in one of Scotland’s most neglected urban areas.

The battle over St Fittick’s Park illustrates the friction that is emerging more frequently around the world as the ramp-up of clean energy infrastructure changes communities. Climate Home has reported on these tensions provoked by Mexico’s wind farms, Namibia’s desert hydrogen zone, Indonesia’s nickel mines and Germany’s Tesla gigafactory.

Just transition?

The ETZ is backed by fossil fuel giants BP, Shell and local billionaire Ian Wood, whose Wood Group made its money providing engineering and consulting services to the oil and gas industry.

The plan is to create campuses focused on hydrogen, carbon capture and storage, offshore wind, and skills development in an area initially the size of 50 football pitches, but expanding as private investment grows. 

To this end, ETZ Ltd – the company set up to build and run the zone – will receive up to £80m ($103m) from the UK and Scottish governments. Announcing some of that funding in 2021, the Scottish government’s then net zero, energy and transport secretary Michael Matheson said “urgent, collective action is required in order to ensure a just transition to a net-zero economy”, adding “Scotland can show the rest of the world how it’s done”.

But many Scottish climate campaigners don’t see this as a just transition. About 100 of them travelled to St. Fittick’s Park last week to hold a five-day “Climate Camp” in a clearing that would become part of the ETZ.

One camper, who did not want to give her name, told Climate Home that the energy transition should not “exacerbate existing inequalities, but try to redress existing inequalities”. A just transition, she said, must protect both workers in the fossil fuel industry and community green spaces.

Another protestor who did not want to giver her full name is Torry resident Chris. She said “the consultation process was flawed”. Not many people participated to start with, and some stopped going to meetings because “they were disillusioned with the way that good ideas were co-opted and then used to justify the expansion of the industrial area into the park”, she added.

Green MSP Maggie Chapman at the Climate Camp on 13 July (Photo: Hannah Chanatry)

Local Member of the Scottish Parliament (MSP) Maggie Chapman, from the Scottish Green Party, agreed, adding “the best transition zone plan in the world will fail” if it is done to a community rather than with meaningful input from them.

Another protesting resident, David Parks, said wealthier parts of the city would not have been disregarded in the same way. “You wouldn’t see this in Old Aberdeen and Rosemount,” he said. “[Torry] is just kind of the dumping ground for all these projects that you wouldn’t get off with anywhere else.”

Industrial developments have encroached on the old fishing town of Torry for decades. Today, residents are hemmed in by an industrial harbour, roads and a railway and live alongside a waste-to-energy incinerator, a sewage plant, and a covered landfill. 

David Parks at the Climate Camp in St. Fittick’s Park on 13 July (Photo: Hannah Chanatry)

Some of the activists also take issue with the emphasis the ETZ places on hydrogen and carbon capture and storage, which they see as “greenwashing”. 

Hydrogen is a fuel that can be made without producing greenhouse gas emissions, and used to decarbonise industries like steel-making which are difficult to clean up.

But a Climate Camp spokesperson told Climate Home that, “given the industry’s tendencies” and the fact that 99% of hydrogen is currently made using fossil fuels, they assume it will be produced in a polluting way at the ETZ.

Backers respond

ETZ Ltd told Climate Home in a statement that the project is committed to collaborating with the local community, particularly on efforts to refurbish what would be the remainder of the park. 

While the ETZ’s opponents argue there are existing industrial brownfield sites in the area that could be used instead of the park, the company said the area in St. Fittick’s Park next to the port is essential for the development to draw in substantial investment for renewables and for Aberdeen to compete in a new energy market.

Many brownfield sites are already planned for use by the ETZ, and would not provide the kind of logistical access needed for the planned projects, they added.

Sign up to get our weekly newsletter straight to your inbox, plus breaking news, investigations and extra bulletins from key events

“Almost all other ports in Scotland are making similar investments, and we simply don’t want Aberdeen to miss out on the opportunity to position itself as a globally recognised hub for offshore renewables and the significant job benefits this will bring,” said the statement.

The company added that the original plans for use of the park had been considerably reduced and the new master plan includes several measures to revitalise parts of the park and boost public access. It includes several parklets, a boardwalk, enhanced wetlands and a skate and BMX bike park.

While the oil industry’s backing has raised campaigners’ eyebrows, ETZ Ltd said the industry’s involvement is key to ensuring the development of skills and jobs central to the ETZ’s goals. 

The section of St. Fittick’s Park  up for development was rezoned in 2022 by the Aberdeen City council in order to allow industrial use of the land. Campaigners have challenged that decision and Scotland’s highest civil court will issue a judicial review later this month.

“You can’t just switch it off”

The ETZ dispute is just one example of efforts across Scotland to navigate the planned shift away from fossil fuels to renewable energy.

Tools to support a transitioning workforce have stalled. An offshore skills passport is meant to streamline and unify the certification process for both the fossil fuel and renewable offshore industries, to enable workers to go more easily from one sector to the other. But it was delayed for years before a “roadmap to a prototype” was released in May this year.

“The people can see a future, but it’s not happening – and they can see the current reality, which is [fossil fuels] declining, and that makes it very challenging,” said Paul de Leeuw, director of the Energy Transition Institute at Aberdeen’s Robert Gordon University. 

He said the focus needs to be on manufacturing and the supply chain, as that supports about 90% of employment in renewables such as solar and wind power. “If you don’t get investment, you don’t get activity, you don’t get the jobs,” he added.

That’s the key concern for Alec Wiseman, who spoke to Climate Home while walking his dog in St. Fittick’s Park on Saturday. He seemed mostly unbothered by the climate camp, but complained it meant he couldn’t let his dog off leash. 

Alec Wiseman walks his dog in St. Fittick’s Park on 13 July (Photo: Hannah Chanatry)

A Torry resident, Wiseman worked offshore for 25 years. He said he wants the ETZ to leave the park alone – and he also wants the overall energy transition to slow down until there is a clear plan.

“The government needs to sit down with the oil companies and figure out something proper” for both the transition and the ETZ, he said, expressing scepticism about employment in wind energy. Overall, operating wind farms, once they’re up and running, does not require as many skilled workers as operating an oil and gas field. “You can’t just switch it off [the oil and gas],” he said.

Lack of planning is what worries Jake Molloy, the recently-retired regional head of the Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers Union (RMT). Before leading the union, Molloy spent 17 years working offshore, and now sits on Scotland’s Just Transition Commission. He has spent years advocating for a fair deal on behalf of workers and local communities.

“We need to do that value-sharing piece, that community-sharing piece, which was lost with oil and gas,” he said, referencing the privatisation of the industry in the 1980s. Right now, he says, communities that bear the brunt of the impact of oil and gas production don’t see the majority of the benefits – those flow to corporations. “If we allow that to happen again, we’re a million miles away from a just transition,” he warned.

UK court ruling provides ammo for anti-fossil fuel lawyers worldwide

Molloy also thinks the investment and jobs promised by the ETZ are not realistic, because previous changes to government policies caused too much whiplash, making investors shaky. However, he is curious about what will come from Labour’s announcement of Great British Energy, described as a “publicly-owned clean energy company” headquartered in Scotland.  He also hopes to see climate change addressed on a crisis footing, similar to the approach to the COVID pandemic.

There are indications of renewed momentum on renewable energy in the UK. The Labour government has already lifted an effective ban on onshore wind in England and brought together a net-zero task force led by the former head of the UK’s Climate Change Committee,  Chris Stark. 

“In the context of an unprecedented climate emergency,” the ETZ said in a statement, “there are widespread calls from government and industry for energy transition activities to be accelerated.”

But, for many, it is still too soon to know whether that shift will materialise, and be implemented in a just way.

“The opportunities are there,” said MSP Chapman. But, she added, “it requires political and social will to make it happen and that’s the big challenge.”

(Reporting by Hannah Chanatry; editing by Joe Lo and Megan Rowling)

The post Scottish oil-town plan for green jobs sparks climate campers’ anger over local park appeared first on Climate Home News.

Veteran climate diplomat Laurence Tubiana is in contention to be France’s new prime minister, with three left-wing parties backing her as a compromise candidate following inconclusive legislative elections. But infighting among the leftist political coalition that won the most seats means she has yet to be confirmed as its official choice.

France’s Green Party (EELV), Socialist Party (PS) and Communist Party (PCF) have proposed Tubiana – a key figure in securing the Paris Agreement on climate change – for the leadership role, representing the New Popular Front (NFP) coalition of left-wing parties. She has no formal political affiliation.

The head of the PS, Olivier Faure, said Tubiana “completely corresponds to what we are promoting”, praising her as the “architect of COP21 [where the Paris Agreement was adopted in 2015], commissioner for the climate convention, economist and diplomat engaged in both the environmental and social fields”.

But the biggest member of the NFP alliance, hard-left party France Unbowed (La France insoumise, LFI), is opposed to Tubiana getting the job, as they fear she is too close to the current President Emmanuel Macron and his centrist Renaissance party. “If this is the profile our partners are working on, I’ll fall off my chair,” said LFI coordinator Manuel Bompard on Tuesday, adding the suggestion was “not serious”.

In the July 7 elections, which resulted in a surprise defeat for the far right, no block won a majority of seats in the French legislature, known as the National Assembly. Of the 577 seats, the NFP left-wing alliance won 182, President Macron’s centrist party 168 and Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally (RN) 143.

On Tuesday, French President Emmanuel Macron accepted the resignation of current Prime Minister Gabriel Attal, although he will lead a caretaker government with a limited mandate until a new government is named.

The choice of the new prime minister is ultimately up to President Macron, but in order to govern, the PM must have the support of a majority of National Assembly deputies.

The left-wing parties have been searching for a joint candidate and, after the LFI’s suggestion of Huguette Bello was rejected by the Socialists, Tubiana’s name was put forward. Faure said Tubiana had been consulted before the suggestion was made.

UK court ruling provides ammo for anti-fossil fuel lawyers worldwide

Tubiana, he said, is “someone who has strong convictions, who has never compromised. She has always been on that side [the left], she has never deviated. This is a demonstration of her ability to stand her ground.”

But according to French newspaper Le Monde, the LFI suspects she is too close to Macron. He twice offered her the job of ecological transition minister, which she declined, and she recently co-signed an editorial calling for the the left-wing block to reach out to Macron’s centrist party in order to govern.

Climate pedigree

Tubiana started out at the French National Institute for Agricultural Research before setting up and leading an NGO working on food security and the global environment called Solagral through the 1980s and 1990s.

In 1997, then French President Lionel Jospin of the Socialist Party appointed her as his environmental advisor until he stepped down in 2022.

Tubiana next founded an influential French think-tank called the Institute for Sustainable Development and International Relations (IDDRI) before re-entering government as France’s lead negotiator in the run up to COP21, at which the landmark Paris Agreement was signed.

Since then, she has been an official United Nations champion on climate action, as well as president and CEO of the European Climate Foundation (ECF), which funds green think-tanks and media outlets including Climate Home News.

Where East African oil pipeline meets sea, displaced farmers bemoan “bad deal” on compensation

In these roles, she has pushed for governments at UN climate summits to agree to phase out fossil fuels, and called carbon capture and storage a false solution to the fossil fuel industries’ emissions.

In 2018, Macron appointed her as a member of France’s official climate advisory body, the High Council on Climate Change.

The ECF has recently worked alongside the French and Kenyan governments looking into global green taxes that could fund climate action.

Laurence Tubiana (left) celebrates the signing of the Paris Agreement in 2015 (credit: IISD.ca/Kiara Worth)

Environmental lawyer Arnaud Gossement said Tubiana’s appointment as France’s prime minister would be “a really good idea” as she is “a recognised climate specialist”.

Florence Faucher, professor of political science at French university Sciences Po, told Climate Home that Tubiana’s appointment “would certainly be interesting” but “I really doubt it [will happen]”.

The leftist coalition has said it hopes to find agreement on a candidate soon, with the new National Assembly set to meet for the first time on Thursday. One way the matter could be settled is by holding a vote among the new left-wing deputies.

On Wednesday morning, EELV deputy Sandrine Rousseau told French TV: “The discussions are not over – we will find a solution.”

(Reporting by Joe Lo; editing by Megan Rowling)

The post Climate diplomat Laurence Tubiana backed by some left-wing parties as next French PM appeared first on Climate Home News.

But now it is becoming the end-point for the East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP) where, after a journey of over 1,400 km through Uganda and Tanzania, the oil is stored and put onto ships bound for customers abroad.

EACOP is a joint venture between French multinational TotalEnergies, the China National Offshore Oil Corporation and the governments of Uganda and Tanzania. It plans to bring oil from the Tilenga and Kingfisher oil fields near Uganda’s Lake Albert, down past Lake Victoria and all the way east through Tanzania to the Chongoleani Peninsula.

While the $4-billion project promises economic growth and energy security for the region, it has sparked protests due to its negative environmental, economic and social impacts – which have been met by crackdowns on the part of the authorities in both countries.

East African climate activists have joined forces with their international counterparts in a campaign called #StopEACOP, arguing that the pipeline will exacerbate climate change by transporting 246,000 barrels of oil a day to customers to burn, releasing greenhouse gases. They also warn that it will displace thousands of people and endangers water resources, wetlands, nature reserves and wildlife.

The Ugandan government says that it has the right to exploit the country’s fossil fuel resources in order to fund much-needed economic development and is taking measures to reduce the project’s climate impact, such as heating the pipeline with solar energy. Wealthy nations like the US, Canada and Australia, meanwhile, are also increasing fossil fuel production.

Living “like town dwellers”

In Tanzania, Chongoleani residents said they had been warned by the village chairman and other ward leaders not to talk to journalists, but Climate Home spoke to two whose land had been taken over by the government for the pipeline and its port.

Without adequate compensation, they said they had been unable to buy a new farm in the area and have to buy food from the city rather than growing their own and selling the surplus.

Mustafa Mohammed Mustafa said his family used to own two farms in Kigomeni village, together about as big as eight football pitches. On these, they grew coconut, cassava, corn and groundnuts. They ate some of it and sold the rest.

But with the pipeline coming, the government-owned Tanzania Ports Authority took over their land, compensating them with 15m Tanzanian shillings ($5,700), which hasn’t been enough for them to buy new farmland in the area.

“We live like town dwellers these days,” said Mustafa. “We buy firewood, we buy charcoal, we buy lemons, coconut, cassava. We buy all of these supplies from the city centre. How is this alright?”

House prices soar

Part of the reason they cannot afford a farm, says Mustafa, is that EACOP’s arrival has increased the price of local land, as it is considered a project area with potential for business investment.

Villagers either put a high price on their land or hold onto it and only accept offers from the government or foreign investors, according to Mustafa, believing this will get them a better deal.

A sign for Chongoleani oil terminal (Photo: Climate Home News)

Mustafa blames the government for not giving them proper information from the initial stages of the project, nor a choice about whether they wanted to sell their property. Instead, he said, they were told that the project is of great economic importance for the country.

“I am angry that the government took advantage of our ignorance of legal matters and gave us a bad deal that we couldn’t argue against,” Mustafa said.

Sitting alongside Mustafa in Chongoleani village, Mdiri Akida Sharifu said he regrets selling his family’s land in Kigomeni but they had no other option.

“At the moment, we have very little faith that this will benefit us. When government officials came here, they encouraged us to give up our land with the promise that once the project started, we would be given priority in getting jobs. But now that we’ve given up our land, we even have to buy lemons from Tanga town,” he said.

Countrywide compensation battles

Elsewhere along the pipeline’s routes, landowners have complained about unfair compensation, saying the government paid them in 2023 using price estimates made in 2016, ignoring seven years of inflation. Kamili Fabian from the Manyara region told local paper Mwananchi that he was paid less than a third of his land’s value. “Where is the justice in that?” he asked.

The government says it uses national and international standards to compensate people fairly. Energy minister Doto Biteko has said 35bn shillings ($13m) had been allocated for this purpose and the government had built 340 new homes for relocated people.

Reporting on these issues is a challenge. When Climate Home visited the coastal village of Putini, a man called Mahimbo – who would only give one name – refused to comment on the compensation process and said local leaders had told the villagers not to speak to journalists about the pipeline.

But he took Climate Home to the office of village chairperson Abdallah Said Kanuni to seek permission to comment on the record. “We have been given clear instructions to neither speak with journalists nor allow them to interview villagers on matters relating to the pipeline, unless the journalists have official permits from the regional [government] office,” Kanuni said.

Sign up to get our weekly newsletter straight to your inbox, plus breaking news, investigations and extra bulletins from key events

Compensation battles are playing out far beyond this area.  A Total spokesperson told Climate Home nearly 19,000 households have been compensated for the effects of the pipeline and the associated Tilenga oil field on them and about 750 replacement houses have been handed over.

But Diana Nabiruma, communications officer for the Africa Institute for Energy Governance (AFIEGO), said her organisation had spoken to hundreds of people who had received compensation and had yet to meet any that said it was adequate.

She said a major problem has been that people were paid in 2023 based on their land’s value in 2019. As in Chongoleani, the price of land rose in those four years, partly because of EACOP and the promise of paved roads. Many people have not been able to replace the property they lost, she said.

Ugandan riot police officers detain an anti-EACOP activist in Kampala, Uganda, on October 4, 2022. (REUTERS/Abubaker Lubowa)

Nabiruma added that many people want to seek top-up compensation but are scared – and unable to afford – to challenge EACOP and the government in court. In Uganda’s capital Kampala, police have beaten and arrested activists protesting against the pipeline.

The Total spokesperson said EACOP will improve living conditions, adding that Total complies with local regulations and international standards and there is a fair grievance management mechanism in place for local people.

An EACOP spokesperson said that since last year, the project has provided households affected by leasing of their land in Chongoleani with food baskets and cash transfers, adding that the villagers are given preferential access to unskilled or semi-skilled work on the project.

The Tanzania Ports Authority did not respond to a request for comment.

(Reporting by CHN staff and Joe Lo, editing by Joe Lo and Megan Rowling)

The post Where East African oil pipeline meets sea, displaced farmers bemoan “bad deal” on compensation 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.

A simmering conflict over one of Latin America’s biggest wind hubs confronts Mexico’s next president

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.

New South African government fuels optimism for faster energy transition

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.

Beyond lithium: how a Swedish battery company wants to power Europe’s green transition with salt

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)

The post Global goal of tripling renewables by 2030 still out of reach, says IRENA  appeared first on Climate Home News.

Claudia Sheinbaum will be sworn in as Mexico’s first female president on October 1 with a broad electoral mandate. Before entering politics, she was a scientist studying renewable energy, including the ongoing conflict over wind farms on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. The tensions have spawned deadly violence, and lawsuits from Oaxaca City to Paris.

One of Mexico’s windiest areas, energy companies have flocked to the strip of land between the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific Ocean since 2006, making it one of the most important locations for renewable energy in the world’s 13th largest country.

Supporters say projects like this are crucial for transitioning Mexico away from fossil fuels and creating green jobs based on renewable energy. Opponents are concerned about wind turbines harming migratory birds, land access, revenue sharing and – most importantly – problems related to Indigenous community consultations over the investments.

Bloody conflict

In several cases, anger sparked by the projects has turned bloody, including at least 15 killed in a dispute over the wind farms in 2020.

Today, more than 2,000 turbines cover the land, according to data from Amnesty International, leading to “dispossession” and violations of the “collective rights of Indigenous communities”, the rights charity says. Hundreds of millions of dollars have been invested in the projects, mostly by European energy companies.

Anti-wind farm activist Guadalupe Ramirez poses for a picture inside her home in Union Hidalgo, Mexico. (Leon Pineda/Climate Home)

Guadalupe Ramirez is an Indigenous Zapotec farmer who grows pumpkins and corn on a communal plot in the town of Union Hidalgo, a hub for wind energy.  She told Climate Home that “at first, they (wind companies) said they would just take a little piece of the land but they ended up destroying a big piece”.

“The companies started dividing families,” said Ramirez, who also complained about local environmental disruption from the projects. “We were very mad about this. I have hope with Sheinbaum.”

Ramirez expects the new president and former Mexico City mayor may have some unique insights on the problems her community faces. The academic turned politician co-authored a study analysing the unrest over wind projects in Oaxaca state.

“Although wind energy has numerous benefits, [the] concerns of the local people have to be taken seriously,” Sheinbaum wrote in 2016. “Far from the old-fashioned thinking of looking at social acceptance of renewable technologies as a NIMBY (not in my backyard) problem… information, consultation, and participation are key elements to the success and acceptance of wind farm projects.”

Sheinbaum celebrates her election victory in Mexico City on June 3, 2024. (REUTERS/Raquel Cunha TPX)

Those are exactly the elements Ramírez and many of her neighbours say were missing when they were first approached by energy companies back in 2009.

From there, the conflict escalated, said Carlos Lopez, who has experienced it firsthand. As an activist and community journalist in Union Hidalgo, he said he was threatened by masked men toting automatic weapons. He suspects they were hired by landowners or corrupt local politicians who wanted windmills erected in the area in order to receive rent from companies.

“They were killing people here,” Lopez told Climate Home, during an interview in a crumbling building which had been a community radio hub in Union Hidalgo as it underwent renovations.

In 2013, for instance, he said local fishermen and hunters were working in an area near Union Hidalgo coveted by wind investors, when they were accosted by masked men with heavy weapons. The fishermen then fled to the radio station, so Lopez could broadcast what was happening.

Deadly violence

“They [investors and their supporters in government] don’t respect the vision and culture of the original peoples of the Isthmus and want to push through these megaprojects,” said Lopez, sitting on a plastic chair  next to pictures of Che Guevara and posters for protest movements.

Posters are displayed inside a community radio station in Union Hidalgo (Picture: Leon Pineda)

Residents later set up barricades around six areas they considered sacred sites to stop encroachment by companies, he added, as threats continued and violence simmered.

In 2020, for instance, at least 15 people were killed in San Mateo del Mar, a coastal community in Oaxaca and a hotbed of Indigenous opposition to wind projects. Campaigners said they were stopped at a coronavirus checkpoint and shot at by supporters of a local mayor who backed the wind projects.

Last month, a French court allowed a civil case against the energy giant EDF to proceed after Indigenous people in Oaxaca argued the company failed to prevent violence and intimidation of wind farm opponents.

The violence has quietened down in the past few years due to national government policy changes and several court cases limiting new wind investment in the area, said local residents, including both critics and supporters of the projects.

Opposition is “political”

Not everyone in Union Hidalgo is opposed to the wind farms. On a rainy Saturday on his mango, avocado and guava farm, Dueter Toledo Ordonez told Climate Home: “These projects aren’t bothering me.”

“Some people don’t like it,” he said, with wind turbines in the distance, “but it’s all political … It’s clean energy; it’s the future.”

His father, who farms a nearby plot, had a contract with an energy company to install windmills on his land, added Ordonez, “but something happened with the politics and people said they were polluting” so the company stopped construction.

Deuter Toledo Ordonez tends to crops on his land in Union Hidalgo on June 8, 2024. (Photo: Leon Pineda)

Juqulia Elizabeth Lopez Ruiz, a spokesperson for the secretary of renewable energy for Juchitan district, told Climate Home the 28 wind parks in Tehuantepec bring a lot of jobs.

But she acknowledges some farmers aren’t happy about the projects. “To respond to these concerns: we have Indigenous assemblies where we decide the correct way to act with these wind farms,” she said.

As for concerns raised by wind farm opponents that some municipal lawmakers have been corrupted by energy companies, Lopez Ruiz said this was “just speculation”.

“At one point there was a candidate who had the support of the companies but he stopped being a candidate,” said the local government spokesperson, without naming the politician or discussing specifics of the case.

Saudi visa crackdown left heatwave-hit Hajj pilgrims scared to ask for help

Eduardo Martinez Noriegua is  an ecologist with the environmental group Ecological Forum in Juchitan, which has conducted some monitoring around the projects.

He said local anger over potential disruptions to migratory bird populations from wind farms, increased litter, and soil and water contamination from the oil lubricating the turbines is justified.

“I believe the government is being very permissive with the quality control for these operations,” he said.

Energy nationalisation

When Sheinbaum takes office, she will be leading a country that gets nearly 80% of its electricity from fossil fuels and is one of only two G20 countries without a commitment to reach net-zero carbon emissions.

Her key political backer – the popular current president, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) – invested heavily in new oil infrastructure, and asserted greater national control over the electricity market.

Mexico nationalised its oil industry in the 1930s, and AMLO has taken a similar approach to key materials for the energy transition, cancelling lithium mining concessions granted to foreign firms and creating a new national company to extract the critical mineral.

EU “green” funds invest millions in expanding coal giants in China, India

The Federal Electricity Commission (CFE), a state agency, was also given more control over power generation and distribution.

Sheinbaum has signalled she will continue her predecessor’s policies of state dominance in the energy sector.

Despite the government’s “quest to nationalise electricity generation”, Marilyn Christian, an advisor to the Mexican Centre for Environmental Law, an advocacy group, said the CFE doesn’t currently have the technology to rapidly increase renewable power production. Instead, as demand grows, it has turned to fossil fuels to generate electricity.

“Emissions in the electricity sector … have been on the rise since 2021 – that is bad news for our commitments on reducing carbon emissions,” she said. “We have many expectations with Claudia Sheinbaum. She has a solid academic background in environmental issues … [but] Claudia is also a politician. She has a clear position and ideology.”

Christian said she supports the idea of public control over electricity in principle, an effective option in some European countries, but it will only work if the CFE has the capacity to deliver.

Back in Union Hidalgo, most wind farm critics said their views wouldn’t change if a public institution like the CFE, rather than private companies, managed the projects, posing another complication for generating more renewable power.

But some of the changes recommended by Sheinbaum in her study on Oaxaca – including deeper consultation with communities living nearby and taking their concerns seriously – could help smooth things out, Ramirez said.

“We are not totally against this kind of green energy,” she said as hundreds of white windmills whirred in the distance. “It’s about how they do business.”

(Reporting by Chris Arsenault and Philippe Le Billon, editing by Joe Lo and Megan Rowling)

The travel and reporting for this story were funded by a grant from the Global Reporting Centre and Social Sciences Humanities and Research Council.

The post A simmering conflict over one of Latin America’s biggest wind hubs confronts Mexico’s next president appeared first on Climate Home News.

On Sunday President Cyril Ramaphosa appointed ministers from his ANC party and the pro-business opposition Democratic Alliance (DA) to serve in his “government of national unity”.

In one of the most significant changes, Ramaphosa took away pro-coal minister Gwede Mantashe’s control of the energy sector. Hilton Trollip, a Cape Town University energy researcher, told Climate Home that Mantashe had previously “paralysed” the government’s renewables programme.

The Department of Mineral Resources and Energy has now been split in two. Mantashe is only keeping control of mining and hydrocarbons, while the ANC’s Kgosientsho Ramokgopa, previously the electricity minister, will now be in charge of setting energy policy with a wider mandate. 

EU “green” funds invest millions in expanding coal giants in China, India

Trollip said it was unclear if Ramokgopa would boost renewables as he has not held much power until now. But there is now a better chance that Mantashe’s highly contentious Integrated Resource Plan – which envisages a slowdown in renewable energy investments and a switch to gas-fired power – will be revised, he added.

DA’s Dion George is the new environment minister replacing Barbara Creecy, who has been moved to transport.

Creecy played an active role in several COP climate talks, most importantly successfully proposing a global goal on adaptation at COP26 in 2021. 

JETP talks

Owing to its heavy reliance on coal for electricity, the country is Africa’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases. 

That made it a prime candidate for a world-first funding agreement, backed by wealthy nations, aimed at ramping up investments in clean energy while also protecting those reliant on the fossil fuel sector.

But two and a half years after it was announced, the now $9.3 billion “Just Energy Transition Partnership” (JETP) has made little tangible progress on the ground. 

Meanwhile, as the country grapples with rolling blackouts, state-owned utility Eskom has announced plans to delay the decommissioning of at least three of its coal-fired power plants by several years  – raising the risk that funding partners will walk back on their offers.

A general view of Kendal Power Station, a coal-fired station of South African utility Eskom, in the Mpumalanga province. REUTERS/Siphiwe Sibeko

Kevin Mileham, the DA’s shadow minister of mineral resources and energy, told Climate Home that South Africa’s JETP “will need to be accelerated” as the country is currently not on track to meet global climate goals.

The party wants to see “a rapid roll out” of the programme which will require improved dialogue with the wealthy European and North American countries funding part of it, he added.

It also wants to advance the implementation of a climate change adaptation strategy and believes South Africa needs to do a better job at tracking and reporting its efforts to reduce carbon emissions, Mileham said.

Much of the progress will hinge on the government’s ability to form a united front on foreign policy and forge an effective relationship with the international funding partners.

The ANC and DA have regularly clashed on international affairs, such as the country’s support to Palestine.

They will need to “reconcile their differences [on foreign policy] and come to a shared understanding on international multilateral processes,” says Happy Khambule, energy and environment policy director at Business Unity South Africa, a business lobby group.

Tensions over private sector role

He added that private companies, which will have a significant role in the transition, want to see policy certainty enhanced in the months ahead.

The group is awaiting the finalisation of the Electricity Regulation Amendment Bill, which promises to open up the electricity market and put an end to Eskom’s longstanding monopoly, and the Integrated Resource Plan.

Comment: Africa cannot afford to be complacent about solar radiation management

Meanwhile, the DA’s preference for greater private sector involvement in the energy transition could create fresh tensions with key stakeholders. Left-wing adversaries often deridingly label the DA a “neoliberal” party.

The country’s largest trade union group COSATU wants the newly separated energy department to “stop the privatisation of electricity and energy”, and instead promote state and social ownership models.

“We don’t expect major shifts with regards to the just transition, but rather a more focused approach on its implementation, in particular to make sure workers and communities and value chains are not left behind,” a spokesperson for the organisation told Climate Home.

The just transition should be overseen by multiple government departments given “the triple crisis” of unemployment, climate change and energy shortages, they added, suggesting that, for example, the finance ministry should raise spending on climate-focused public employment schemes.

(Reporting by Nick Hedley, editing by Joe Lo and Matteo Civillini)

The post New South African government fuels optimism for faster energy transition appeared first on Climate Home News.

Global temperatures have crossed 1.1^oC above pre-industrial levels. They are likely to cross the 1.5^oC Paris Agreement threshold within the next decade, and despite countries’ pledges to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions entering the atmosphere, the world is likely to breach  2^oC of warming.

Moving beyond these thresholds significantly raises the threat of irreversible tipping points around the world. 

While scientists insist that decarbonization efforts, net-zero targets, and wide-scale adaptation must be prioritized, the Global Stocktake Report notes that our emissions keep rising. Given this race against time, controversial approaches are being put on the table, such as solar radiation modification (SRM, also known as solar geoengineering), a potential stopgap measure against worsening climate change. 

Still in its research infancy, SRM refers to large-scale, intentional interventions that increase the amount of sunlight reflected back into space to counteract some types of climate change impacts.

If ever used, it is proposed as a range of relatively fast-acting approaches with potential global benefits, but even this may well be debatable. Governance over the use or non-use of these technologies needs a global approach that requires deep public understanding. 

Untangling uncertainty

SRM technologies offer two sides of the same coin –  potential benefits include reducing global temperature rise and secondary benefits such as slowing the rate of sea level rise, and limiting harm to the poles, but potential risks include impacts on precipitation patterns, agriculture, and biodiversity. 

Uncertainty exists in both the science and the social response.

The usefulness of SRM in the context of climate change is deeply dependent on how science unfolds, who the decision makers are, who has access, willingness, capacity and resources required to master these technologies and the context within which it exists.

Nations fail to agree ban or research on solar geoengineering

To be clear, SRM is not a solution to climate change. It can only be considered alongside robust decarbonization and adaptation efforts. Given the early stages of the development of SRM, more information, discussion, and open-minded conversations with broad groups of stakeholders are needed.

We are at a clear inflection point for the field where momentum is clearly shifting in funding, research, media, and governance. However, much of the narrative about SRM is currently being built in the Global North, where the majority of research and funding on this subject exists.

African voices unheard

The use, or non-use, of this suite of technologies will have global impacts. It is all the more important for the Global South to be actively and effectively engaged with SRM research and governance, due to its potential impacts on their climate vulnerable communities. 

Despite Africa’s low contributions (< 4%) to global greenhouse gas emissions, it suffers disproportionate climate change impacts. Its agrarian-dependent economy  necessitates an elevated interest in changing local and regional weather patterns; there are strong incentives for Africa to better understand the physical and socio-economic implications of SRM. 

African research and policy perspectives on SRM are starting, highlighting several gaps that exist in understanding how these technologies may benefit or harm the continent’s climate efforts.

EU “green” funds invest millions in expanding coal giants in China, India

One key example is the recent deliberation on a SRM resolution at the Sixth United Nations Environment Assembly (UNEA-6). The Africa Group (AG) functioned as a bloc during the deliberation, and proposed the establishment of a publicly accessible repository of existing scientific information, research, and activities on SRM, including submissions from member states and stakeholders.

While the resolution did not reach consensus, the deliberations signified an important shift that African nations are starting to weigh in on the issue. 

Building awareness

But more resources, expertise, and engagement are necessary to generate African knowledge and capacity across a range of sectors to contribute to – and start leading – SRM deliberations in the international sphere.

Policymakers across Africa need access to relevant information and an informed civil society sector to shape decisions. Diverse perspectives on whether and how to consider SRM, with grounding and knowledge in the near term, can help African nations prepare for the critical decisions to come.   

Building awareness on this topic, with unbiased information rooted in science and based in the African context, will provide answers from both physical and social science perspectives for inclusive and fair SRM decision-making.

UN action on gender and climate faces uphill climb as warming hurts women

Driving demand to focus on specific issues that Africans are raising, and building their capacity to govern through their key government and NGO institutions, is necessary to enable informed deliberations on SRM regulations at national, regional and international levels. 

This summer, the African Climate Foundation and The Alliance for Just Deliberation on Solar Geoengineering are kicking off a series of Africa-focused workshops to build knowledge around the science, governance, and justice dimensions of SRM.

The first two in the series will highlight African scientists and thought leaders and are virtual and open to the public.

We hope to catalyze interest and engagement across the African continent, widen public discourse on SRM and ensure these discussions go beyond certain circles of experts and the negotiating community. Debates on SRM need to reflect the full spectrum of interests in Africa, and it is time for voices across the continent to coordinate and coalesce.

The post Africa cannot afford to be complacent about solar radiation management appeared first on Climate Home News.

For the first time this year, Saudi authorities required all pilgrims to wear identification on a “Nusuk Card” around their neck, allowing security forces to check they had the Hajj visa. Banners and phone messages warned against attending Hajj without this visa and many breaching these rules were deported.

A government-controlled Youtube channel said before the Hajj that the Nusuk Card “enables access to urgent medical care” and one survivor told Climate Home that, despite feeling tired and dizzy, he felt unable to ask for medical help for fear of punishment and deportation because he only had a tourist visa.

Temperatures in Mecca reached 51.8C this year, an unusually high figure which Climatemeter scientists have said was “mostly exacerbated by human-driven climate change”.

Over 1,300 people died during the heatwave and more than four-fifths of them were without official permits, according to Saudi Health Minister Fahad Al-Jalajel. Foreign governments have largely blamed travel agents for facilitating these irregular pilgrimages, while the Saudi authorities and climate change have mostly escaped blame.

One of those without a permit was Ibrahim, a retired Egyptian head teacher. To dodge visa checks, he walked 19 km in the baking heat to Arafat, a sacred hill near Mecca. He told Climate Home that he had asked buses carrying pilgrims with permits to stop and take him “but no one stopped, no one helped us”.

#No_Hajj_without_a_permit because services are directly linked to it, and accessing the Holy Sites without a permit is a violation that merits legal consequences.#Makkah_and_Madinah_Eagerly_Await_You#No_Hajj_without_a_permit#Hajj_1445H pic.twitter.com/aapODeC018

— Ministry of Hajj and Umrah (@MoHU_En) May 22, 2024

Fahad Saeed, a Pakistani climate scientist with Climate Analytics, told Climate Home: “The Hajj pilgrimage is a profound reminder to every Muslim of equality in the eyes of God. Yet, the disparity in the safety of pilgrims based on their financial means starkly contradicts this spirit of equality.”

Two-tier system

The city of Mecca is where the founder of Islam, the Prophet Muhammad, was born and lived most of his life. One of the religion’s five central pillars is that all believers should, if they’re healthy and can afford it, visit the city at least once on a pilgrimage known as Hajj and carry out a series of rituals.

Since Muhammad’s time, Islam has expanded across the globe and is now the religion of about a quarter of the world’s people. As the Hajj takes place for a single five-day period each year, there are far more people wanting to take part than the city can handle. Over 1.5 million pilgrims arrived in Mecca for the event last June. 

Beyond lithium: how a Swedish battery company wants to power Europe’s green transition with salt

Official visas to enter Mecca during the Hajj are rationed through a lottery system, working with specialist travel agencies. But some travel agents also advise pilgrims on how to enter Mecca without an official visa.

That was how Ibrahim, who had been saving up for the Hajj for thirty years, got to Mecca. He did not want to reveal his second name out of fear of the Saudi government’s punishment.

He told Climate Home that he couldn’t afford an official visa 500,000EGP ($10,000). He entered Saudi Arabia with a normal tourist one and, with the help of a tourism company, he was able to bribe his way through checkpoints into Mecca.

He found accommodation in the suburb of Al-Aziziyah but authorities quickly raided the area before the start of Hajj. Many pilgrims without official visas were fingerprinted and deported but Ibrahim was just driven out of the city towards Jeddah.

For 1,000 Riyals ($267), he found a taxi to take him back to Al-Aziziya where he hid until the first day of Hajj. This is the pilgrimage’s most important day when pilgrims spend a day next to Mount Arafat, where Prophet Muhammad delivered his Farewell Sermon. There, they pray and ask for forgiveness.

Most pilgrims get buses from Mecca to Arafat but, worried about soldiers searching these buses, Ibrahim and his companions made the 19 km journey on foot. When he got there, the area was crowded and the temperature reached nearly 50C (122F).

The 62-year old said he began to feel exhausted and dizzy even though he was not fasting that day. “My foot, which had undergone three surgeries before, felt like a piece of fire. I could not walk”, he said.

Standing up in the heat lessens the blood flow to the brain, which can cause fainting but also heart or kidney failures, explained Mike Tipton, a British professor who advises athletes and soldiers on heat.

Muslim worshippers make their way to cast stones as part of a symbolic stoning of the devil ritual on June 18, 2023. (Photo: Medhat Hajjaj/apaimages)

Ibrahim said that getting water for him was difficult and that he did not want to ask the clinics along the road to Arafat for medical help because of his lack of visa. “We saw the bodies of pilgrims on the road in need of help,” he said, “some of them were dead, some were suffering from heat exhaustion and no one was helping them”.

The claim that irregular pilgrims were denied help has been made by many, including the official spokesperson for pilgrims from Iraq’s autonomous Kurdistan region Karwan Stoni, who told Agence France Presse they could not access air-conditioned spaces that the authorities had made available.

Ibrahim survived, completed his Hajj and returned to Egypt. But Jordanian cousins Tariq, 48, and Hossam Al-Bustanji, 52, were not so lucky. Their cousin Ahmed told Climate Home that their companions told him they died after walking about for seven or eight hours without any services.

“They fell and pleaded for water but no one helped them”, he said. “Their bodies were buried in Mecca and were not sent to Jordan despite our requests”.

Pilgrims receive a spray of water from volunteers in Mecca on June 17, 2024 (Photo: Arab World Press)

While irregular pilgrims had it worse, even those with official visas suffered and some died in the heat. Jordanian Rania Bassam told Climate Home her brother and his family went to Mecca, where he volunteered as a doctor. 

She said they complained to her about the services provided and the extreme heat. Bassam’s brother later died in Arafat. “His body was identified by his fingerprint but we were prevented from seeing him and saying goodbye”, she said.

Tipton said that, while many of the dead were likely to be over 65-years old with existing heart problems, the heat can kill healthy young people too from heat stroke. 

Without getting bodies into cold water, heat stroke can be a “runaway route to hypothermia with death occurring at [a core temperature of] 40-44C”.

Safer Hajj

Campaigners are appealing to Saudi authorities to take measures that would reduce the risk of mass deaths, especially as the situation is expected to get worse as the world warms.

A 2021 study published in Environmental Research Letters found that if the world warms by 1.5 C above pre-industrial levels, heat stroke risk for pilgrims on the Hajj will be five times greater.

Heat expert Mike Tipton said that they should encourage people to sit down when they can, reduce any stress, fan people and cool their hands, feet and bodies down with cold water. But, he said, it’s difficult to look after so many people.

Sign up to get our weekly newsletter straight to your inbox, plus breaking news, investigations and extra bulletins from key events

Limiting numbers would help, he said, and that’s the route the authorities have been going down. Government reactions in Saudi Arabia and across the Muslim world have been to prosecute and crack down on travel agents who encourage pilgrims to evade visa laws.

But that has not been enough to dissuade Ibrahim’s wife. Despite her husband’s ordeals, she is keen to follow in his footsteps next year, performing Hajj unofficially.

But speaking in their Giza home, Ibrahim warned her against the idea. “You will not be alive again if you go unofficially – either you go on an official Hajj or not at all”, he said.

(Reporting by Eman Muhammed and Joe Lo, editing by Joe Lo and Matteo Civillini)

The post Saudi visa crackdown left heatwave-hit Hajj pilgrims scared to ask for help appeared first on Climate Home News.

Europe’s first comprehensive climate risk assessment, published in May, sent a clear and unequivocal message: climate risks facing Europe have reached a critical level and urgently require decisive actions from European policymakers.  

Yet the recent EU parliamentary elections – which delivered significant gains for Europe’s far-right and dealt a blow to its green parties – alongside a recently leaked list of EU Council priorities for the next five years, indicate a marked U-turn in the EU’s commitment to climate action.  

The EU has faced a dramatically changed geopolitical situation over the past few years, marked by the upsurge of far-right political forces in several member states, growing trade-tensions with China, and a humanitarian disaster and heightened energy security risk caused by Russia’s war in Ukraine.  

Against this backdrop, EU policymakers have had to make tough decisions on strengthening security in Europe, diverting their attention to defense, security and migration issues, although this has come at the expense of the EU’s much flagged international climate leadership and green agenda.  

IEA calls for next national climate plans to target coal phase-down

We argue that the EU should stay the course on climate action. Despite geopolitical turns and a backlash from some industries over legislation brought on by the Green Deal, European policymakers have a responsibility to follow through on climate commitments – and thereby avoid the tremendous risks that face us if they do not. 

Exacerbating geopolitical risks 

Protests have included those by European farmers against sustainability provisions in the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy. Recently, the EU Council only just managed to approve the highly anticipated, but embattled Nature Restoration Law, thanks to a rare display of political defiance by the Austrian environment minister.  

The law provides critical policy levers for improving Europe’s much degraded ecosystems, strengthening their resilience towards climate change. Hence this vote was critical, although it may still face a legal challenge.  

Despite dilution, officials say new nature law can restore EU carbon sinks

There is ample irony in the notion that political efforts and financial resources should be diverted to enhance Europe’s defence and security capabilities and strengthen the EU’s external borders from human migration. Climate change is certain to exacerbate the impacts and risks from geopolitical conflicts and wars and will be the mega-driver of migration over the coming years. 

And while legislation that requires businesses to take action on climate change and biodiversity loss is certainly going to be burdensome for some, these costs pale in comparison with the effects that climate change will have on the European economy.  

Corporate credit rating downgrades due to companies’ exposure to climate risks have already accelerated, according to S&P Global. And climate-induced disruptions of supply chains are likely to cost the global economy up to $25 trillion over the next 35 years under the current trajectory. Much of this cost will be borne by businesses. 

Ways to protect Europe 

EU-level policies are currently dangerously inadequate to safeguard European lives and livelihoods from the majority of the potentially catastrophic threats that will loom over Europe in the coming years and decades.  

But there are solutions, if bold action is taken in the following areas: 

• Protect and restore marine and coastal ecosystems by minimising pressures from overfishing, agricultural runoff and other industrial activities to avoid disastrous degradation of marine ecosystems. 
• Conserve and restore Europe’s forests through the recently passed Nature Restoration Law to safeguard Europe’s ecosystems and their many services on which the European economy and wider society heavily depend. 
• Leverage the Common Agricultural Policy to strengthen incentives and policy certainty for transforming and adapting Europe’s agricultural sector to extreme heat and drought. 
• Shore up the preparedness of healthcare systems and resources against the impacts of heat waves on vulnerable populations and outdoor workers, especially in southern Europe.  

• Bolster investments in climate adaptation abroad. This support will also be critical to reduce cascading climate risks that originate beyond Europe’s outer borders.   

With this comprehensive body of scientific evidence and advice at hand, European policymakers must resist the urge to adopt a tunnel-vision approach and focus solely on near-term risks, but rather approach climate change as a systemic threat to European’s economy, society and natural capital.  

The scientific community already has called on policymakers to reverse the current course of retreat from the EU environmental agenda, in an open letter to the EU’s legislative bodies.  

EU warns “delaying tactics” have made plastic treaty deal “very difficult”

The actions taken by the incoming group of elected lawmakers and appointed officials will determine the level of harm and damage European citizens will have to endure over the coming decades. It is critical that European policymakers take the long view.  

The decisions and actions they take today will lock our children’s future onto a path. Only today’s policymakers can make sure that path takes us towards a world that can sustain a functioning social order and human life.  

The post New European Parliament must act on climate change as a systemic threat   appeared first on Climate Home News.

Speaking on Monday at an old London coal power plant-turned-shopping centre, IEA head Fatih Birol said he would be “very happy” to see new NDCs (Nationally Determined Contributions) that “include no new unabated coal and also early retirements of existing coal”.

In 2021, the Glasgow Climate Pact, agreed at the COP26 UN climate summit, called on countries 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 carbon dioxide emitted during the process.

Birol, a Turkish energy analyst, said that stopping coal-plant construction was “as our North American colleagues would say, a no-brainer”. Yet, he added, while “the appetite to build new coal plants is in a dying process, some countries still do it”. He singled out China’s plans to build 50 gigawatts (GW) of new coal plants.

Shutting down existing coal plants, particularly young ones in Asia, is more difficult because the companies that have built and operate them would lose money, Birol noted. There is almost $1 trillion of capital to be recovered from existing coal plants, “so who is going to pay for this?” he asked, calling it “a key issue”.

Birol praised the Just Energy Transition Partnerships that have been set up between wealthy countries and several coal-reliant emerging economies like South Africa and Indonesia to help address the problem. He added that “there are some countries in Asia who can, in my view, afford to retire their coal plants earlier”, without mentioning which.

Malaysia’s Deputy Prime Minister Fadillah Yusof announced at the event organised by the Powering Past Coal Alliance, which includes 60 countries, that Malaysia aims to reduce its coal-fired power plants by half by 2035 and retire all of them by 2044. It will also tackle social and economic challenges through reskilling programmes for workers and promoting renewable energy adoption, he added.

Speaking later at London’s defunct Battersea power station, Indonesia’s deputy minister for maritime affairs and investment, Rachmat Kaimuddin, explained some of the challenges his country faces in phasing out coal.

Kaimuddin (right) speaks alongside Germany’s climate envoy Jennifer Morgan (centre) in London on June 24, 2024. (Photo: Powering Past Coal Alliance)

After China and India, Indonesia has the world’s biggest pipeline of new coal power plants under construction. Kaimuddin said the state energy company would not build any more but added that cancelling existing contracts is “very, very difficult” unless the company constructing the plant wants to pull out – which none have yet.

In addition, shutting down existing power power plants is expensive, he said, because many coal power plants have “take or pay” contracts signed in the 1990s under which the government pays them whether their electricity is required or not.

Another concern is that the Southeast Asian nation does not want to lose its energy security in the switch to renewables, Kaimuddin noted. Indonesia currently mines domestically most of the coal it uses. “We’re trying to partner with other people to try to build [a] renewable supply chain in the country,” he said.

Millions of people in Indonesia work in the coal industry, he added, so a shift towards clean energy will need to include new jobs for them. “It doesn’t have to be green jobs – it has to be jobs, right?” he said.

Five things we learned from the UN’s climate mega-poll

Singapore’s climate ambassador Ravi Menon told the same event that the economies of China, India and Indonesia are growing and so are their energy needs, meaning that renewables have to be rolled out rapidly to meet demand.

Energy storage is also required to smooth intermittent supply from solar and wind, while electricity transmission infrastructure, including power lines, is needed to transport power from solar and wind farms to cities that account for a large share of consumption.

Both Kaimuddin and Menon said carbon credits should be used to offset losses for the owners of coal plants that are shut down early. “Retiring [plants] definitely will destroy financial value and… and we also need a better way to compensate them,” said Kaimuddin.

The event’s focus on coal raised concerns among some campaigners. Avantika Goswami, climate lead at the Delhi-based Centre for Science and Environment, told Climate Home that “singling out coal” in the NDCs, rather than including fossil fuels more broadly, “equates to giving a free pass to oil and gas-dependent countries, many of whom are wealthy”.

It could penalise many developing countries, where coal is a cheap source of fuel and energy needs are still growing, she warned.

“A global climate policy that allows unfettered use of oil and gas – which together account for 55% of fossil fuel emissions – is incomplete and inequitable,” she added.

Romain Ioualalen, global policy lead at advocacy group Oil Change International, said the IEA’s head should know that “the time to focus only on coal as a climate culprit is over”. He pointed to a subsequent agreement at COP28 last year where governments agreed to “transition away” from fossil fuels in their energy systems, without setting a deadline.

“We need a full, fast, fair, funded phase-out of all fossil fuels. Setting such a low bar for ambition is out of touch and inequitable, keeping the door wide open for major oil and gas producers,” Ioualalen added in a statement.

He called on rich countries that are “most responsible” for the climate crisis to foot the bill for a just transition. “We know they have more than enough money. It’s just going to the wrong things like fossil fuel handouts,” he said.

(Reporting by Joe Lo; editing by Megan Rowling)

This story was updated after publication to include comments from Avantika Goswami at the CSE and Romain Ioualalen at Oil Change International,.

The post IEA calls for next national climate plans to target coal phase-down 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.

The regulation, which tasks the EU’s 27 member states with reviving their land and water habitats and planting billions of trees, was narrowly passed by EU environment ministers.

The controversial law only gained enough backing because Austria’s minister for climate action, Leonore Gewessler, defied her country’s leader and voted in favour of it, a decision which may be challenged legally. 

But, while celebrating the bill’s approval, climate campaigners and scientists warned that its ambition had been diluted and it must be implemented effectively to reverse the destruction of Europe’s natural carbon sinks.

EU warns “delaying tactics” have made plastic treaty deal “very difficult”

The law requires each EU country to rejuvenate 20% of their degraded land and water habitats by 2030 and all of them by 2050, and to plant three billion more trees across the bloc by 2030.

It also requires countries to restore 30% of their drained peatlands by 2030 and 50% by mid-century.

Peatlands that have been drained, largely for farming, forestry and peat extraction, are responsible for 5% of Europe’s total greenhouse gas emissions. 

Climate breakthrough

Belgium’s climate minister Zakia Khatattabi told Climate Home that the law’s passing is “not only a breakthrough for nature but also for the climate”, and would enable the EU to meet its emissions-cutting targets.

Olivier De Schutter, the United Nations special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, said that “without it, carbon neutrality in Europe would have been put beyond reach”.

The amount of carbon dioxide sucked in by Europe’s carbon sinks – including forests, peatlands, grassland, soil and oceans –  has been falling since 2010. For forests, the World Resources Institute blames logging for timber and biomass and more wildfires and pests for the decline.

The amount of carbon sucked in is shrinking (black line) when it needs to increase to meet targets for 2030 (orange dot) and 2050 (blue dot)

But the EU’s plan to meet its goal of net-zero emissions by 2050 involves halting this decline and reversing it into a 15% increase on 2021 levels by 2030.

Jette Bredahl Jacobsen, vice-chair of the European Scientific Advisory Board on Climate Change, told Climate Home the new nature law “can contribute substantially to this, as healthy ecosystems can store more carbon and are more resilient against climate change impacts”.

The law is extremely popular with the EU public, with 75% of people polled in six EU countries saying they agree with it and just 6% opposing.

Watered down

But farmer trade associations were fiercely against it, and it became a symbolic battleground between right-wing and populist parties on one side and defenders of the EU Green Deal on the other.

Several of the law’s strongest passages ended up diluted before it reached ministers for approval, including caveats added to an obligation for countries to prevent any “net loss” of urban green space and tree cover this decade.

A new clause was introduced to deter EU states from using funds from the Common Agricultural Policy or Common Fisheries Policy to finance nature restoration – raising questions as to where money to implement the law will come from.

And, most importantly, an obligation to restore peatlands that have been drained for farming – a major source of emissions – was weakened.

A peat bog under restoration in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, pictured in January 2022. (Photo: Imago Images/Rüdiger Wölk via Reuters)

The original regulation would have instructed countries to rewet 30% of peatlands drained for agricultural use by 2030 and 70% by 2050 – the most effective way of restoring them. 

But, as a concession to farmers, the final version of the nature law mandates rewetting just 7.5% of these peatlands by 2030 and 16.7% by 2050, with exceptions possible for actions such as replacing peatlands drained for agriculture with other uses.

Rewetting usually involves blocking drainage ditches. As well as reducing emissions, this helps an area adapt to climate change, protecting it from floods, and improving the water quality, soil and biodiversity.

But the Commission will also count other actions as peatland “restoration”, such as the partial raising of water tables, bans on the use of heavy machinery, tree removal, the reintroduction of peat-forming vegetation or fire prevention measures. 

That’s despite the European Commission’s own rulebook describing these measures as “supplementary to gain better results” and saying that “peatland restoration should always primarily focus on rewetting”.

Lessons from trade tensions targeting “overcapacity” in China’s cleantech industry

Where rewetting does take place, as with all restoration measures in the final version of the regulation, EU states will be obliged to prioritise action in particular areas known as Natura 2000 sites. These cover around 18% of the EU’s territory, and should already have been restored under existing legislation.  

Environmentalists maintain that the legislation still has tremendous potential, pointing to possible actions such as the restoration of seagrass meadows which cover less than 0.1% of the ocean floor but absorb more than 10% of its carbon.    

EU countries will now draft national nature restoration plans over the next two years showing how they intend to meet their targets, for assessment by the Commission.

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

The post Despite dilution, officials say new nature law can restore EU carbon sinks appeared first on Climate Home News.

The head of the European Commission’s environment department, Virginijus Sinkevičius, said on Tuesday that the last round of plastics talks in the Canadian city of Ottawa in April had managed to “move the text forward despite delaying tactics by countries wanting to lower the ambition”.

Yet, he told environment ministers from EU member states, “at the current pace… it will be very difficult to close the negotiations at INC5 in November”. INC5 is the fifth and supposedly final set of talks on the treaty, taking place in the South Korean city of Busan from November 25 to December 1.

A Latin American plastics negotiator, who did not want to be named, told Climate Home that everything Sinkevičius had said was right and the delaying tactics were coming from the Like-Minded Group, which includes Russia and Saudi Arabia.

Sign up to get our weekly newsletter straight to your inbox, plus breaking news, investigations and extra bulletins from key events

Bethanie Carney Almroth, an ecotoxicology professor at the University of Gothenburg who follows the talks, said there were “enormous challenges to closing the negotiations in November”. Campaigner Andrés Del Castillo, with the Centre for International Environmental Law (CIEL), added that Busan would either result in a “very, very weak agreement, or a realisation on Sunday evening that we did not succeed”.

Plastic production divisive

At the UN Environment Assembly in March 2022, all governments agreed to set up a treaty by the end of 2024. The talks’ organisers still hope agreement can be reached in Busan and the treaty can be officially signed by governments at a diplomatic conference a few months later.

One key divisive issue is whether the treaty should be limited to halting plastic pollution or also set targets to reduce the rising plastic production and consumption that is causing the problem. Besides environmental contamination, plastic contributes to planet-heating emissions as its manufacture relies on fossil fuels.

At the Ottawa talks, governments did not agree to continue formal discussions on how to cut plastic production. But informal talks have since taken place between countries in favour of reducing production, and there will be a formal meeting of an expert group in August.

Sinkevičius warned yesterday that “these expert meetings may not be enough to secure a successful end of negotiations” this year. “We need to step up effort at all levels, including high level political involvement” before and during the Busan talks, he added.

Lithium tug of war: the US-China rivalry for Argentina’s white gold

Speaking after Sinkevičius, French diplomat Cyril Piquemal was more optimistic, saying”significant progress” had been made in Ottawa. He noted that the G7 group of wealthy economies committed last week to reducing production of plastic and that China made a similar commitment earlier this month. “We are really on the home run,” he said through a translator.

Researcher Almroth said she was concerned that, if Donald Trump were to be elected president of the US, then it could weaken the ambition of treaty negotiations if they spill over into 2025. “A lot of people want to finish [this year],” she said, adding that “a start and strengthen approach will likely be very useful”.

But Dennis Clare, who negotiates for the Pacific Island state of Micronesia, said “it is much more important that the plastics treaty solves the overarching problem than that it is concluded by any particular date”.

“If essential elements such as constraints on plastics production are not included,” he said, “the magnitude of that mistake will only become more glaring by the day, as the health, climate and litter crises accelerate worldwide – and we will of course have to immediately get back to work to remedy the situation”.

Ana Lê Rocha, plastics lead at the GAIA campaign, agreed that the pact should not be rushed. “If we need to choose between maintaining ambition on the content of the treaty versus maintaining ambition on the timeline, it is preferable to compromise on the timeline than to have a treaty unable to meet its goal: to end plastic pollution,” she argued.

CIEL’s Del Castillo agreed, but said just prolonging the talks was unlikely to result in success. “So what we [would] need is the recognition that we need more time and a reset in the negotiation that offers a path to a useful agreement in a realistic time frame,” he added.

Big splits

While not naming individual countries and their positions, Sinkevičius told EU ministers there were still “major remaining divergences” such as on whether to limit the production of plastic.

In a written update, the European Commission said some governments – “mainly major oil-producing countries” – had slowed down negotiations in Ottawa. Similarly, Canadian environment minister Steven Guilbeault told Climate Home in April that some countries “are in more of a hurry than others”.

Powerful governments like Russia, Saudi Arabia and India have opposed targets to limit the production of plastic, preferring to focus on promoting recycling and keeping plastic waste out of the sea. The US and Iran have also tried to water down the treaty’s ambition.

On the other hand, a coalition of countries called the “Bridge to Busan”, which includes the EU, wants an agreement that curbs the production of plastic. Plastics are made from oil and gas, and their production is a significant and growing source of greenhouse gas emissions.

Visa chaos for developing-country delegates mars Bonn climate talks

There are also splits over the level of detail the treaty should include, how legally binding it should be, and what a financial mechanism to support government efforts to tackle plastic pollution should look like, the EU said.

While some countries want a new dedicated fund, others including Gulf nations want to use an existing institution like the Global Environment Facility to channel finance. Additionally, Ghana’s proposal for a global fee on plastic production remains “on the table”, the EU added.

Environmental Investigation Agency campaigner Christina Dixon said “we will need deep pockets and [to] rely on developed countries, as well as major producers, to front some of the costs if we are truly going to craft a treaty fit for purpose”.

“We need those countries leading on ambitious measures on production and product design, such as the EU, to be equally vocal on the necessary funding to deliver that ambition,” she added. “Otherwise we will have a fantastic treaty but no way to implement it.”

(Reporting by Joe Loe; editing by Megan Rowling)

The post EU warns “delaying tactics” have made plastic treaty deal “very difficult” appeared first on Climate Home News.

“Overcapacity”, a geeky economic term, has recently become the new buzzword for international discussion around China’s solar and electric vehicle industries. It is also becoming one of the thorniest issues in China’s relations with other major economies.

Notably, the word was mentioned five times in the G7 Leaders Communiqué released last week, with the G7 countries framing it collectively as a global challenge.

It is a debate that was initially sparked by US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen during her April visit to Beijing. According to her, China’s cleantech industry has excess capacities that cannot be absorbed domestically, leading to exports at depressed prices. And she stressed that this should be a concern not only for the US, but also for Europe and other emerging markets.

Days after climate talks, US slaps tariffs on Chinese EVs and solar panels

China strongly disagreed with this claim, while Yellen’s concern resonated in the EU, which has long focused on China’s market dominance. In short, there is an overcapacity of “overcapacities”, with neither side finding identical terms of reference. But as this debate is a harbinger of how climate solutions and political agendas will interweave, it’s worth parsing out some lessons for each side, on their own terms.

The US’ “overcapacity” claim as presented by Yellen is a non-starter in China.

China’s clean energy industry is an important point of pride internationally and a source of legitimacy domestically for Beijing. From that perspective countering the “overcapacity” claim is both emotionally and strategically important.

Strategically, this claim is being used to justify trade measures and tariffs against China’s clean energy products. Emotionally, the cleantech industry is a modern-day success story of China’s entrepreneurship and innovation. In China’s public discourse, the US “overcapacity” claims lands as a rejection of that success.

Lithium tug of war: the US-China rivalry for Argentina’s white gold

The result is a political debate in which – by design – no side can convince the other. And the lesson? This posturing is at odds with US-China climate diplomacy as we’ve known it to function in the past. Whatever objectives this approach serves, it does not include closer climate collaboration between the US and China, even as multilateral climate action at the UN level still requires them to take action in concert.

In China, discussion on “overcapacity” emerged from an ongoing conversation about how to manage investment hype. And the answer lies on the demand side.

For investors inside China at a time of challenging economics, few industries are as attractive as the clean energy industry. And business leaders have focused on the risks of hot money and breakneck expansion of clean energy manufacturing capacity for some time now, particularly in the solar industry.

This was probably the origin of “overcapacity”. But in China, this has been a familiar, almost perennial discussion of investment and industrial cycles. While the US argument equates exports to overcapacity, Chinese companies argue that it is demand that determines overcapacity, and they make investment and expansion decisions based on projections of both domestic and global demand.

Q&A: What you need to know about electric vehicles (EVs) and their batteries

That said, the size of China’s domestic market means it will remain the “base” for Chinese manufacturers. In the overseas market, the “overcapacity” claim underscores the complexity and uncertainties Chinese companies face.

For Chinese policymakers, one obvious response to the new market dynamics should be taking domestic demand to new levels. That means addressing lingering questions for China’s renewable energy future – namely, how to resolve the impact of coal. China’s power market was designed for a system dependent on coal, but it needs reform to allow wind and solar to take the central role. Injecting new political momentum to accelerate the reform will be key.

The EU has long been concerned about China’s market dominance, and the “overcapacity” debate is pushing it to decide its role in this trilateral trade and climate dynamic.

Even before this debate erupted, the EU had already begun, subtly, to diversify supply chains and build its own industrial strength, reducing dependence on Chinese products. Last week, the EU announced a maximum tariff of 38% on imported Chinese-made electric vehicles, concluding that Chinese EV makers are benefiting from “unfair subsidies”.

At this stage, it’s still unclear if this is the end of the EU’s low-key approach to date. Cultivating an EU-based clean industry hub without compromising the global response to climate change is a challenge, especially as the EU positions itself as a climate leader.

Entering the fray of US-China tension only makes this feat more complex, especially given uncertainties on the US end in an election year. How the EU approaches this climate and trade nexus will ultimately shape the trilateral dynamic among the world’s three largest carbon emitters in the coming years.

The Canadian city betting on recycling rare earths for the energy transition

For China, where relations with the EU and other countries are concerned, it’s worth taking a step back and looking at the hidden messages in the “overcapacity” debate. Other countries want more than just Chinese products.

Climate leadership is not a buyer-seller relationship, but one between partners who want solutions that create local jobs, develop opportunities, and enable native development of a sustainable future.

China should see its role in the global clean transition as more than a manufacturing hub. The transition requires tools, technology, finance and know-how, and China has much to offer. It is time for China to think more creatively about how to leverage its industrial advantages to provide the solutions with which the world is currently under-supplied.

The post Lessons from trade tensions targeting “overcapacity” in China’s cleantech industry 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)

The post Mexico elects a climate scientist as president – but will politics temper her green ambition? appeared first on Climate Home News.

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)

The post On beaches of Gaza and Tel Aviv, two tales of one heatwave appeared first on Climate Home News.

In a statement, a gathering of EU ministers called the Council of the EU said the decision “unlocked the process of modernisation of the Energy Charter Treaty (ECT) for its non-EU contracting parties”.

The compromise allows the EU as a body to withdraw from the treaty, while individual EU member states can stay in and approve the green reforms at a conference due to take place this year, if they wish.

The ECT currently allows all energy companies – including coal, oil and gas firms – to sue governments over climate and other policies they see as a threat to their current and future profits.

The proposed reforms to modernise the ECT, which are due to be voted on in November, would make it easier for ECT countries to prevent the treaty being used as a basis for lawsuits involving fossil fuel assets that are affected by green economy measures.

However, with several European countries already filing their notice to leave the ECT, it is unclear whether a sufficient number of EU states will stay in the treaty long enough to get the reforms approved. As part of today’s EU Council agreement, the EU confirmed it would leave the treaty.

Other ECT member states, including Japan and Kazakhstan, only grudgingly agreed to back the reforms under pressure from the European Commission.

For the ECT “modernisation” proposal to be adopted, none of the treaty’s member governments – now numbering 49 – must vote against it at November’s conference. Then three-quarters of ECT members need to ratify the reforms for them to take effect.

If the reforms fail, the ECT’s members across Europe and Asia will be unable to remove its protection for fossil fuel investments and – due to a 20-year sunset clause – even EU countries that have left would be exposed to lawsuits for that period.

Post-Soviet treaty

The ECT was conceived in the 1990s to boost investment flows between Western and post-Soviet countries. But its provisions to deter states from grabbing private assets have since been used by energy companies to fight back against climate policies.

In 2020, a British oil and gas company sued Slovenia over what it called “unreasonable” environmental protections”, while German energy company Uniper threatened to sue the Dutch government for €1 billion ($1.1bn)  over its coal phase-out plans.

In lawsuits brought under the ECT last November, British oil company Kelsch is suing the EU, Germany and Denmark for at least 95 million euros ($102m) over a windfall tax on energy firms.

G7 offers tepid response to appeal for “bolder” climate action

The European Commission reacted to these and other cases by attempting to remove fossil fuels from the list of investments protected by the ECT – with the aim that it would apply only to clean energy assets.

For two years, efforts by EU negotiators were repeatedly blocked by Japan and Kazakhstan. But in June 2022, a “flexibility mechanism” was agreed that would allow ECT states to end protection for fossil fuels, as long as no other ECT state objected.

Europe divided

Despite European Commission negotiators finally winning this right, EU member countries were divided on how to apply it.

Governments like France, Spain and Luxembourg wanted to immediately end protection for fossil fuel investments but faced push-back from several Eastern European countries.

They agreed a compromise to stop protection for new fossil fuel investments but to continue it for existing investments for ten years – a decision that angered climate campaigners.

Southern Africa drought flags dilemma for loss and damage fund

Friends of the Earth’s Paul de Clerck said at the time it would “lock the EU in fossil fuel investment protection” for a decade.

Despite this agreement, by the time the annual ECT conference came around in November 2022, EU governments no longer unanimously backed the reforms the European Commission had negotiated, and so they were shelved.

Locking in Asian fossil fuels

The EU’s stalling on the reforms drew an angry response from then head of the ECT secretariat, Guy Lentz of Luxembourg.

In a letter to the leader of the European Parliament in February 2023, he warned that if the EU withdrew as a bloc before approving the modernisation, it would amount to “an express prohibition” for other ECT members to better align with the Paris Agreement on climate change.

Tensions rise over who will contribute to new climate finance goal

He added that failure to agree reforms would essentially allow fossil fuel companies to sue EU states for longer because of an existing 20-year sunset clause, which means energy companies can bring lawsuits against governments for two decades even after a country leaves the treaty.

EU states wanted to neutralise this sunset clause by agreeing a side deal between themselves not to apply the treaty. But Lentz said these attempts “may not provide the expected legal certainty”. Campaigners accused him of “bluffing”.

Numbers game

EU countries then continued to debate among themselves whether to stay in or leave the ECT and – if they withdrew – whether to modernise it before exiting.

Despite the ongoing talks, France, Germany and Poland officially left the ECT in December 2023. Luxembourg and Slovenia will leave in June and October 2024 respectively. Portugal, the UK, Spain and the EU will leave next year.

This debate was resolved today, with EU states’ ministers agreeing to a compromise, brokered by the Belgian government. Governments that want to can stay and support the modernisation, but the EU itself can start process of exiting right away.

Belgian energy minister Tinne Van der Straeten said her government had “worked tirelessly to break this complex deadlock and found a balance acceptable and useful to all”.

The deal essentially makes the reforms contingent on timing and EU countries’ commitment to reform.

By November, after Luxembourg and Slovenia exit, there will be 47 ECT member states, including 22 from the EU. Eleven more – including the United Kingdom and Switzerland – are in Europe but not in the EU. Nine others are in Central Asia and three in the Middle East, with Japan and Mongolia the remaining two.

E3G analyst Eunjung Lee said ECT modernisation “is still uncertain” but added “with the EU Council decision today, it is probable that the modernisation might pass, particularly if the voting takes place via correspondence”.  

The ECT approved this option in October 2022. It means the conference’s chair sets a deadline by which any objections should be sent in.

“This will make things easier than voting at a conference, because unless there is a clear objection, the modernisation will be adopted”.

But even if the reform is approved, Lee said the ratification by three-quarters of countries “could take forever”.

De Clerck of Friends of the Earth agreed, saying “it is unclear if the reform would ever be ratified”.

(Reporting by Joe Lo; editing by Megan Rowling)

The post Despite exit, EU seeks to save green reforms to energy investment treaty appeared first on Climate Home News.

Pakistan’s southern province of Sindh has been sweltering under 52°C heat in recent days. Not in the news however is that wet-bulb temperatures in the region – a more accurate indicator of risk to human health that accounts for heat and humidity – passed a key danger threshold of 30°C.  

Climate change is increasing the risk of deadly humid heat in developing countries like Pakistan, Mexico and India, and without international support to adapt, vulnerable communities could face catastrophe.  

What is wet-bulb temperature? 

Wet-bulb temperature is an important scientific heat stress metric that accounts for both heat and humidity. When it’s both hot and humid, sweating – the body’s main way of cooling – becomes less effective as there’s too much moisture in the air. This can limit our ability to maintain a core temperature of 37°C – something we all must do to survive. 

A recent study suggests that wet-bulb temperatures beyond 30°C pose severe risks to human health, but the hard physiological limit comes at prolonged exposure (about 6-8 hours) to wet-bulb temperatures of 35°C. At this point, people can experience heat strokes, organ failure, and in extreme cases, even death. 

Climate change and deadly heat 

Globally, around 30% of people are exposed to lethal humid heat. This could reach as much as 50% by 2100 due to global warming. To date, the climate has warmed around 1.3°C as a result of human activity, primarily due to the burning of fossil fuels. And along with the extra heat, with every 1°C rise the air can hold up to 7% more moisture. 

A comprehensive evaluation of global weather station data reveals that the frequency of extreme humid heat has more than doubled since 1979, with several wet-bulb exceedances of 31-33°C. Another recent study predicts a surge in the frequency and geographic spread of extreme heat events, even at 1.5°C warming.   

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

What this shows is that the humid tropics including monsoon belts are all careening towards the 35°C threshold, which is very worrying for countries like Pakistan. The city of Jacobabad has already breached 35°C wet bulb temperatures many times. More areas of the country are likely to be exposed to such life-threatening conditions more often due to climate change.   

At 1.5°C of warming, much of South Asia, large parts Sahelian Africa, inland Latin America and northern Australia could be subject to at least one day per year of lethal heat. If the world gets to 3°C, this exposure explodes, covering most of South Asia, large parts of Eastern China and Southeast Asia, much of central and west Africa, most of Latin America and Australia and significant parts of the southeastern USA and the Gulf of Mexico.  

Areas of the world that will experience at least one day of deadly heat per year at different levels of warming   

Source: ScienceAdvances 

 Even at 1.5°C of warming, there will be high exposure to lethal heat in large regions where billions presently live. This terrible threat to human life calls for urgent action to limit warming and help at risk communities adapt.  

Adapting to hard limits 

 While 35°C can prove deadly, one study suggests a 32°C wet-bulb threshold as the hard limit for labour. More realistic, human-centred models found this overly optimistic, as direct exposure and other vulnerability factors were ignored. Vulnerable groups including unskilled labourers would be most at risk of losing their income.  

In densely populated urban centres, lethal humid heat is not just a future projection but a current reality. This calls for urgent adaptation measures which integrate the risk of deadly heat into urban planning, public health, early-warning systems and emergency response.  

Investments in green spaces, heat-resilient buildings and urban cooling are vital adaptation strategies. Community initiatives like awareness campaigns, indigenous cooling strategies and local heat action plans are also essential. Households could consider investing in cooling technologies or migrating – options mostly available to the wealthy.  

In Malawi, dubious cyclone aid highlights need for loss and damage fund

As climate change makes lethal humid heat a growing threat in some of the world’s most populous areas, more attention must be paid to understanding its risks – especially in vulnerable regions with huge data gaps. This demands a multidimensional response that combines scientific research, policymaking and community engagement.  

The potential scale and level of risk to human life also reinforces the importance of ensuring that the Paris Agreement’s 1.5°C global warming limit is met. To do this, we need to halve emissions by 2030. Countries should therefore strengthen their 2030 emissions targets in line with the warming limit as they prepare equally ambitious 2035 targets in updated NDCs. 

The Pakistan heatwave is a terrible reminder of this often-underestimated threat. We must act now to limit warming while we adapt to the growing danger of deadly heat if we are to avoid potentially wide-reaching tragedies in the future.  

The post Developing countries need support adapting to deadly heat appeared first on Climate Home News.

The Biden administration has laid out for the first time a set of principles that attempt to define how “high-integrity” carbon credits can play “a meaningful role” in helping cut greenhouse gas emissions and channelling “a significant amount of private capital” to combat climate change.

A 12-page policy document released by the US government on Tuesday includes provisions to ensure that carbon credit projects deliver real emission reductions, avoid harming local communities and encourage companies to decarbonise their own operations before buying offsets.

But it also recommends that businesses should be allowed to use carbon credits to cancel out some of the emissions generated by their suppliers and customers, known as “Scope 3”. A similar move by the board of the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi), a leading arbiter of corporate net zero plans, sparked a major backlash from staff last month.

The US government guidelines are neither binding nor enforceable. However, proponents hope they will reinforce a number of ongoing initiatives led by carbon credit developers, buyers and green groups to raise standards and boost the role of carbon markets in climate and nature protection.

Troubled market

Polluting companies, including major fossil fuel producers and airlines, spent an estimated $1.7 billion last year on voluntary carbon offsets meant to compensate their direct emissions by funding climate-friendly activities elsewhere, such as planting trees or rolling out renewable energy sources.  

But a series of revelations questioning the environmental and social benefits claimed by some developers and users of carbon credits have dented confidence in the market.

As South Africa heads to the polls, voters await stalled “just energy transition”

Scientific studies and investigative reports – including by Climate Home – have found that a growing number of projects failed to deliver the emission reductions promised. NGOs have also denounced instances of human rights abuse and environmental damage caused by carbon-offsetting activities.

“Voluntary carbon markets are a huge distraction and a waste of time and resources,” said Mohamed Adow, the Nairobi-based founder of the Power Shift Africa think-tank. “It’s sad to see politicians in the Global North desperately trying to find any way they can to avoid actually just cutting their carbon emissions,” he added.

Every tool needed

In its announcement, the US government acknowledged the shortcomings in voluntary carbon markets (VCMs), saying that “in too many instances” credits do not live up to the high standards required.

“For good reasons a lot of folks outside this room are skeptical,” National Climate Advisor Ali Zaidi told attendees at the policy launch in Washington. “[They are] scared off by news stories of things that went wrong and gloss of greenwash.”

US National Climate Advisor Ali Zaidi speaks during a press briefing at the White House in Washington, U.S., January 26, 2024. REUTERS/Julia Nikhinson

But, he added, that should not be seen as “an excuse to slow down but as an occasion to speed up” and do things better.

The Biden administration wants to be a leader in guiding “the development of VCMs toward high-quality and high-efficacy decarbonization actions”, the White House said. Its principles closely align with those of industry-led governance bodies that are trying to revamp the carbon market.

The Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market (ICVCM) is currently assessing project methodologies as part of its efforts to establish the first independent global benchmark for “high-integrity” carbon offsets, known as the “Core Carbon Principles”.

“We are in a climate emergency and we need every tool in the box to meet the 1.5°C [global warming] target,” said ICVCM Council Chair Annette Nazareth. “High-integrity carbon credits can mobilise private finance at scale for projects to reduce and remove billions of tonnes of emissions that would not otherwise be viable.”

Substitute for government aid

As most of the world’s largest carbon offsetting projects are based in the Global South, many rich governments view the market favourably as a way of getting dollars to developing nations without tapping into public budgets.

That is the case in the US where climate funding has fallen victim to political polarisation. President Joe Biden promised to increase international climate finance to over $11.4 billion per year by 2024. But Congress approved only a fraction of that as part of this year’s government budget: $1 billion of a spending package totalling $1.59 trillion.

In Malawi, dubious cyclone aid highlights need for loss and damage fund

The White House’s Zaidi said voluntary carbon markets can move “mountains of capital” if their integrity is improved. Better regulation could expand the market from its current size of around $1.7 billion to $1.1 trillion by 2050, according to predictions by BloombergNEF. 

Gilles Dufrasne, global policy lead at Carbon Market Watch, told Climate Home the US government will need to “walk the talk and ensure that its promises of transparency and integrity are followed up by actions”.

“There is currently no public data to measure how much finance is flowing to climate action through carbon credits and how much is staying in the pockets of Global North intermediaries and consultants,” he added.

International negotiations

The US government is also a strong proponent of private sector-led carbon credit initiatives in international climate circles.

In discussions at the COP28 climate summit last year on setting the rules for a new carbon market governed by the United Nations, Washington championed what observers described as a “light-touch, no-frills” approach that could hand a prominent role to private-sector players from the voluntary market.

The move was rejected by the European Union, causing a breakdown in the negotiations, which will resume at the mid-year UN climate talks in Bonn starting next week.

“By undermining the multilateral process … and placing more faith in private sector-governed voluntary carbon markets, the US appears to be shirking its responsibilities for financing climate action and offloading them onto the private sector,” said Trishant Dev, a carbon market expert at the Delhi-based Centre for Science and Environment.

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

The post US government backs the carbon credit industry’s push to fix itself appeared first on Climate Home News.

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.

A few months later, the US government accused Mmobuosi of fraud over his business dealings. Climate Home News visited Mchenga this month and found the new homes have cracks in the walls and floors, with residents scared they will collapse.

Emma Jeremia, a pregnant woman living in one house, said it would have been better to die in the storm than be killed by her house collapsing on her. Simon Mweyeli, who liaised with the Red Cross on behalf of Mchenga’s residents, said the homes can “fall anytime”.

This unsafe housing for cyclone survivors in Malawi, funded by a suspected fraudster, shows why governments need to get the new UN loss and damage fund up and running with decent resources and quality control, climate campaigners told Climate Home.

Cracks in the wall inside one of the homes in Mchenga, Malawi, pictured on May 8, 2024 (Photo: Raphael Mweninguwe)

International climate justice activists said the local testimonies show why funding for disaster victims should come from the governments that have predominantly caused the climate crisis rather than unaccountable benefactors – and recommended that affected people should be involved in designing and building their new homes.

After last year’s devastating cyclone – with the loss and damage fund not yet up and running – the cash-strapped Malawian government went looking for financial help around the world. According to national media, ex-president Bakili Muluzi recruited Nigerian businessman Dozy Mmobuosi.

The day after promising to build the homes – and the same day he was accused by short-selling firm Hindenburg Research of operating a scam company – Mmobuosi received a Malawian diplomatic passport, which is usually reserved for senior politicians, national media reported.

“Such instances highlight why we need a loss and damage fund that empowers affected communities to lead recovery and reconstruction efforts, and not allow politicians or corporations to further their own interests,” said Harjeet Singh, a climate activist who has long advocated for the fund.

In 2022, governments finally agreed at the COP27 climate talks to set up such a fund to channel money from wealthy nations to people in developing countries who have been harmed by climate change. The fund’s board hopes it can start distributing money next year.

Cyclone Freddy strikes

In March last year, Cyclone Freddy travelled from the west coast of Australia across the Indian Ocean over Madagascar and into southern Africa, where it caused floods and mudslides that killed more than 1,000 people in Malawi.

The village of Mchenga, in Malawi’s southern Phalombe district, was among the worst-hit. Its 72-year-old headman Laften Nangazi told Climate Home that 80 people died there in a single day.

He said he saw men, women and children being swept away in despair. “I cried when I saw children dying,” he said, “I saw about 40 people in a tree, and they were there for three days waiting for the water levels to go down.”

When the waters eventually receded, 176 of the village’s families were left homeless – a problem repeated across the country’s south.

Hendry Keinga reacts after he lost a family member during the Mtauchira village mudslide in the aftermath of Cyclone Freddy in Blantyre, Malawi, March 16, 2023. (REUTERS/Esa Alexander)

Looking for funds

Malawi is the world’s tenth poorest country, so government money to rebuild housing was scarce. The international fund for loss and damage, meant to address disasters like this, had just been agreed at COP27 but was not yet up and running.

President Lazarus Chakwera invited his three living predecessors for a meeting. Two of them – Bakili Muluzi and Joyce Banda – showed up and were made “Goodwill Ambassadors of Tropical Cyclone Freddy”, national media reported.

Muluzi’s son Atupele told Climate Home that his father and Banda tried to access finance “to support the very real costs to the country for housing, social infrastructure, agriculture and industry as we try to rebuild in a resilient manner”.

“Of course, the global economy and international politics means that this is a challenging task in the midst of the chaos, conflict and climate impact everywhere in the world,” he added.

To meet this challenge, Bakili Muluzi turned to Mmobuosi, a Nigerian businessman and founder of mobile banking company Tingo Group, who was then in the news for trying to take over English football club Sheffield United.

Twitter

Controversial Nigerian tech entrepreneur Dozy Mmobuosi recently visited the country to participate in the launch of a Cyclone Freddy relief project in Phalombe, an event supported by former Presidents Bakili Muluzi and Joyce Banda. pic.twitter.com/w1WlzANAKM

— Platform for Investigative Journalism – Malawi (@PlatformMalawi) June 15, 2023

On June 6, Mmobuosi, Muluzi and Banda travelled to Mchenga to launch construction work on new houses, posing with a foundation stone bearing their names. On Facebook, Banda said the houses “will be made possible because of a generous contribution” from Mmobuosi, who she called “a distinguished son of Africa” and “good friend” of Muluzi.

The next day, according to the Platform for Investigative Journalism, Mmobuosi met with Muluzi and President Chakwera at the president’s home. The Nigerian was unusually quickly granted a diplomatic passport, usually reserved for top Malawian politicians and their spouses.

“Exceptionally obvious scam”

But on the same day Mmobusi was in Mchenga, Hindenburg Research, which specialises in “forensic financial research”, accused his Tingo Group – which says it provides mobile banking to farmers – of being “an exceptionally obvious scam with completely fabricated financials”.

Hindenburg was short-selling Tingo Group shares, so it stood to profit if the share price of the firm – listed on the Nasdaq stock exchange in the US – went down.

Hindenburg accused Mmobuosi of inventing much of his backstory, of settling out of court with Nigerian authorities over alleged bad cheques in 2017, of photo-shopping Tingo logos onto planes to claim the company had an airline, and generally exaggerating the company’s assets.

While Muluzi stood by him, in December 2023 the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) sided with Hindenburg. They accused Mmobuosi of a “staggering” fraud against Tingo’s investors.

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

The SEC’s 72-page complaint included images of what it said was a real and an edited Tingo bank statement. The edited one had several zeros added to the balance.

US authorities charged Mmobuosi with security fraud and froze his assets. His whereabouts are reportedly unknown. If found guilty, he faces up to 20 years in prison.

On October 6 – after Hindenburg’s complaint but before the SEC’s – Muluzi and Mmobuosi went back to Mchenga village in Malawi to hand over the first batch of 17 houses.

Muluzi thanked Mmobuosi for the funding and said he had “committed to buy beds, mattresses and furniture for the households and also to bring solar electricity to the area”. In December, another 28 houses were handed over.

@MalawiRedCross has today handed over 45 houses to beneficiaries of T/A Phweremwe in Phalombe, that have been constructed with funding from The Dozy Mmobuosi Foundation through Goodwill Ambassador on TC Freddy Former President Dr Bakili Muluzi. pic.twitter.com/hVhOYdScjS

— Malawi Red Cross Society (@MalawiRedCross) December 19, 2023

Cracks and missing crockery

But five months on, when Climate Home visited the village, residents complained the homes were too few, dangerous and small, adding they had not yet received the promised furniture or solar power.

Jeremia said her father was given one of the houses but she sleeps in it instead. “He and my mother and my other siblings are living in a rented house. They cannot stay in a house that is threatening their lives. After all, it’s also a very small house to accommodate all of us,” she said.

Mweyeli, the chair of the village civil protection committee, said most new homes are “showing cracks – a sign that these houses are of sub-standard”. He said the first 17 homes were built with 45 bags of cement, but the later 28 were built with just 28 bags, making them weak and liable to fall down.

He demonstrated how the floors were made of sand covered by plastic with a “thin layer of cement which is now showing cracks all over”.

Simon Mweyeli shows cracks in the floor of one of the houses, which he said were sand covered by plastic and a thin cement layer

Charles Macheso, who climbed a mango tree to save himself from the cyclone but lost all his possessions, said village coordinators told the Malawi Red Cross that more cement was needed. But, he said, the Red Cross officers “were so defensive”. Mweyeli said he called the Red Cross to report the cracks and the aid organisation came to take pictures.

Charles Macheso in Mchenga village on May 8, 2024 (Photo: Raphael Mweninguwe)

Asked about these houses, the Malawi Red Cross’s communications specialist in the capital Lilongwe, Felix Washon, initially told Climate Home to go see them, and then hung up the phone without answering further questions.

“Not aware”

After a two-day journey from Lilongwe to the village, Climate Home contacted Washon again and was told by email that “we are not aware of any report about cracking of houses in Phalombe [the district that covers Mchenga]”.

Washon later said the Red Cross had a contract to build the homes with Muluzi rather than Mmobuosi. “We never received any money from Dozy [Mmobuosi] – direct from Dozy,” he said by phone. “Malawi Red Cross Society has no other links or contracts with Dozy,” he added.

Climate Home News emailed the contact address listed on the Dozy Mmobuosi Foundation’s website, but the email bounced.

Mmobuosi told Arise News in February that he was “taken aback” and “shocked” by the SEC’s allegations about Tingo Group. He said he had not run Tingo directly for seven years, adding that his lawyers were “on top of” responding to the SEC charges and that Tingo was conducting its own internal investigation. Mmobuosi is not currently listed as a member of the company’s board of directors.

In Mchenga, village headman Nangazi told Climate Home that 131 families are still without a home and called on national organisations like the Catholic Development Commission – that has provided iron sheets – to help build more accommodation.

Ida Mayilosi, 75, is one of those who missed out. “I wished I had also been assisted,” she said. “This house I am living in was built by some relatives but it took time.”

Ida Mayilosi, whose house was destroyed by Cyclone Freddy, sits in Mchenga village, May 8, 2024 (Photo: Raphael Mweninguwe)

Mattias Söderberg, climate lead for Danish charity DanChurchAid, which is currently building homes in Nepal after landslides there, said support for communities to rebuild after extreme weather that causes loss and damage “should be done so that they are more secure and robust to face the next climate-related disaster”.  “Investments which are not adapted risk being lost,” he added.

Singh – who fought to solve similar problems in India’s Andaman and Nicobar islands following the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2006 – said he had seen “firsthand how involving communities not only places them in the driving seat but also ensures accountability”.

(Reporting from Raphael Mweninguwe in Mchenga and Joe Lo in London; editing by Sebastian Rodriguez and Megan Rowling)

The post In Malawi, dubious cyclone aid highlights need for loss and damage fund appeared first on Climate Home News.

For too long, Africa has supplied the raw materials which drive development abroad, while Africans remain locked in endless cycles of poverty at home.  

This has been happening even before Western European colonial powers carved up the African continent in the 19th century’s “scramble for Africa”, exporting rubber, diamonds, gold, ivory, palm oil and other wealth, to process and transform it into saleable commodities. 

Today, this damaging pattern remains intact, as wealth continues to haemorrhage from Africa in this way. 

To take just one graphic example: 600 million people in sub-Saharan Africa – or 53% of the region’s population — still don’t have access to electricity on a continent that possesses all the minerals needed to build its own energy infrastructure.  

Now a new “scramble for Africa” has begun. This time, it is for the African minerals that will be crucial for the world to have any chance of halting climate chaos.  

Q&A: What you need to know about clean energy and critical minerals supply chains

The African continent holds vast quantities of the transition minerals – such as cobalt, lithium and nickel – which are used to help produce, transport, store and use electricity generated from cleaner sources such as wind and sun – and which are a prerequisite for a clean energy future.  

Tanzania, for instance, possesses huge reserves of nickel which is a key ingredient in the lithium-ion batteries that power everything from mobile phones to electric vehicles. 

As the world rushes to secure these precious materials, Africans must break with the past.  

The wealth these minerals generate must spur African development, giving our citizens the roads, hospitals, schools, electricity and other basic services so many of them desperately need. 

“New” partnerships? 

Many of Africa’s historic exploiters are among the Western powers which are now rushing to secure transition minerals. 

The US-led “Mineral Security Partnership,” which includes the European Union and other most powerful economies from the OECD block, is positioning itself in Africa’s resource-rich countries.  

Concurrently, the EU is supposedly redesigning its ties with Africa and other mineral-rich nations through “Strategic Partnerships“.  

All those initiatives are committed to “bring economic benefits to local communities”, allowing partner countries to “move up the value chain” – but are effectively enveloping the continent from multiple angles in a concerted push for resources. 

And it is no secret that mineral exports are ruled by international trade policies set up, influenced and dominated by Western powers, allowing them to access African resources at a good price. 

Zimbabwe looks to China to secure a place in the EV battery supply chain

In this realm, it remains an open question whether these partnerships will pave the way for genuine development, or – as so often in the past – merely serve foreign interests.  

In other words, will they simply be a means of continuing business as usual – keeping Africa trapped in ‘extractivism’ – or offer Africa a path to self-determination? 

Challenging the status quo 

The OECD Forum on Responsible Minerals Supply Chains, taking place this week in Paris, is a crucial opportunity for African leaders to assert their vision for a new era of mineral resource management.  

This event remains a forum dominated by consumer regions’ representatives and priorities, but we Africans need to make ourselves heard.  

We cannot wait any longer. African leaders must challenge the status quo and advocate for deals and trade policies that empower producer nations. 

They can also insist that mining companies respect the rights of the Indigenous and local communities most impacted by mining – peoples whose way of life protects priceless ecosystems that are crucial for preventing climate change, biodiversity loss and the risk of future pandemics emerging from deforested landscapes.  

Calls for responsible mining fail to stem rights abuses linked to transition minerals

Free trade rules favour already industrialised regions. One of the ways to counter this is by creating a web of preferential trade agreements among African countries. This would allow them to access their neighbours’ transition minerals at lower prices, to help them build their own clean energy technologies.  

Regional collaboration is the key to ensuring that Africa gains its rightful place in the new power map drawn by the energy transition. The African Union, the Southern African Development Community and other regional blocs could play a pivotal role in this process, promoting intra-regional trade and economic cohesion. 

African civil society works across borders to ensure that deals signed by African governments with consumer regions reflect the continent’s collective interests. But we can’t do this alone. 

We need to unite with our leaders around a just vision for our minerals. Only then can the continent truly benefit from them, turning the page on a history of exploitation and underdevelopment.  

The post Africa must reap the benefits of its energy transition minerals  appeared first on Climate Home News.

New data from a Transition Minerals Tracker compiled by the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre (BHRRC) shows that more than 630 allegations of human rights violations have been associated with minerals mining since 2010. Of those, 91 were made in the last year alone.

The tracker monitors human rights abuses associated with the extraction of seven minerals including copper, lithium and bauxite, which is new in this year’s update. These elements are essential for the production of solar panels, wind turbines, electric vehicles and electrification more broadly.

The latest BHRRC data points to widespread violations of Indigenous peoples’ rights – such as forced relocation, water pollution and denial of access to traditional land – as well as attacks on human rights defenders and workers’ rights abuses.

BHRRC also registered 53 allegations of work-related deaths since 2010, with 30 percent of those newly reported in 2023.

Supply chain FAQ: What you need to know about critical minerals

Caroline Avan, BHRRC’s head of natural resources and just transition, said the situation is not improving. “The sector is blatantly failing at protecting those who generate its profits, and this is only the tip of the iceberg,” she said.

“We are probably only capturing a fraction of abuses because we rely on public data and so many issues don’t get reported,” she added. The BHRRC gives companies an opportunity to respond to the allegations it documents.

Just ten companies are associated with more than half of all allegations registered since 2010 – including China Minmetals, Glencore, Grupo Mexico, First Quantum Minerals and Solway Group – while 46% of the total originated in South America.

Allegations of human rights abuses linked to transition minerals by category 

Source: Business & Human Rights Resource Centre

Avan explained that many abuses follow a pattern that begins with environmental violations –  such as water or soil pollution – compounded by inadequate consultation with local communities, which then leads to protracted conflict.

This has been the case at the Las Bambas copper mine in Peru, now owned by MMG Ltd – whose major shareholder is China Minmetals Corporation (CMC) – and formerly controlled by Glencore. It received the most allegations of rights abuses not only in 2023, but across the tracker’s full 13-year monitoring period.

The mine’s infrastructure, activities and expansion plans have led to a series of social and environmental impacts, provoking protests and blockades by Indigenous communities. Most recently, last November, 1,500 workers went on strike to ask for a larger share of profits.

CMC, MMG and Las Bambas have not responded to the BHRCC over the reported allegations.

New global principles

The persistence of human rights abuses in mineral mining is set to attract more attention, with the International Energy Agency estimating that mineral demand for clean energy applications is set to grow by three and a half times by 2030.

The BHRRC’s report notes that the mining sector is under pressure from civil society, Indigenous peoples and global policymakers alike to strengthen human rights protections.

For example, the new EU Batteries Regulation, adopted last July, obliges end users of battery minerals to carry out thorough supply chain due diligence.

“We are seeing the automotive industry asking more of the upstream mining sector, and that is good news,” said Avan. “But we are not seeing enough from the renewable energy sector in terms of asking mineral suppliers to ensure their operations are not linked with abuses.”

Days after climate talks, US slaps tariffs on Chinese EVs and solar panels

Last month, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres launched a high-level Panel on Critical Energy Transition Minerals tasked with developing a set of global principles to “safeguard environmental and social standards and embed justice in the energy transition”.

Guterres said supply chains must be “managed properly” to ensure that developing countries get a fair share of benefits and that the environment and human rights are protected.

“Too often, production of these minerals leaves a toxic cloud in its wake: pollution; wounded communities, childhoods lost to labour and sometimes dying in their work. And developing countries and communities have not reaped the benefits of their production and trade,” the UN chief said in comments at the launch.

“This must change… The race to net zero cannot trample over the poor,” he added. The panel is expected to deliver initial recommendations ahead of the UN General Assembly in September.

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

The BHRRC’s Avan told Climate Home it was “concerning that countries in the Global North are rushing to sign strategic partnerships with resource-rich countries in the Global South because they want to secure their mineral supply chains, but the companies who will be involved in delivering those minerals are not asked much in terms of requirements for human rights protections”.

For companies, recommendations from the centre’s new report include adopting human rights policies and giving affected communities access to the benefits and governance of projects.

Avan said government regulation and better business practices are essential “to ensure that the global energy transition is a just one, centred on respect for human rights, fair negotiations and shared prosperity”.

“The alternative is rising resistance, conflict, and distrust – all threatening to slow the pace of the transition,” she added.

(Reporting by Daisy Clague, editing by Megan Rowling)

The post Calls for responsible mining fail to stem rights abuses linked to transition minerals appeared first on Climate Home News.

Last Wednesday and Thursday, China’s new top climate diplomat Liu Zhenmin travelled to Washington DC for two days of talks with his US counterpart John Podesta, also fresh in the job.

They discussed co-operation on climate issues, including plans for both sides to ramp up renewables, and vowed to “intensify technical and policy exchanges”.

But the day after, with Liu still in the country, the US State Department briefed journalists that Podesta had told Liu that China was producing too many solar panels and lithium-ion EV batteries.

India wants its own solar industry but has to break reliance on China first

Then on Tuesday, the White House increased tariffs on Chinese EVs, lithium-ion batteries and solar panels, accusing the Chinese government of “unfair, non-market practices” and “flooding global markets with artificially low-priced exports”.

“Clear protectionism”

In response, the state-owned China Daily newspaper in an editorial described the tariffs as “a clear act of protectionism”.

The head of the China Automobile Association Fu Bingfeng agreed, adding that “the new energy industry is jointly created by mankind and can bring common benefits to mankind”, saying the tariffs were “very unreasonable”.

Asia Society analyst Li Shuo told Climate Home that, rather than thinking of over-supply of solar panels as a problem, “it is the world’s inability to deploy these products that is the problem”.

Lithium boom: Zimbabwe looks to China to secure a place in the EV battery supply chain

The tariffs reflect “the new reality global climate politics needs to deal with” – that low-carbon products will not be made in the most cost-efficient way and distributed around the world, he explained. India also has trade barriers against Chinese solar panels, designed to boost its domestic solar manufacturing.

Research from the Center for Strategic and International Studies has found that such trade barriers can, in general, delay the competitiveness of low-carbon technologies against their market rivals – like solar against gas, or EVs against internal combustion engines.

Limited effect on solar, batteries bigger

The US-imposed measures are designed to increase the cost of Chinese goods needed for the energy transition – and could therefore slow down America’s shift away from fossil fuels.

But BloombergNEF solar analyst Jenny Chase told Climate Home that the increase in the tariff on solar cells and modules from 25% to 50% would “have little effect”.

She noted that tariffs of 25% have been in place “for ages – and as a result the US imports almost no cells or modules directly from China, instead importing from Southeast Asia”.

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

The Biden administration is currently weighing whether to impose tariffs on solar imports from four Southeast Asian countries over concerns that China is routing its panels through these nations.

US solar panel manufacturers are lobbying the government in favour of those tariffs, while US solar panel installers are lobbying against them. A decision is needed by June 6, two years on from a pause on tariffs affecting the Southeast Asian nations.

Similarly, the US already imports relatively few electric vehicles from China, as it already has Trump-era tariffs on them. The US’s adoption of electric vehicles is far slower than in Europe or China.

But US car-makers do import lots of lithium-ion EV batteries for their vehicles despite existing 7.5% tariffs. China produces about three-quarters of all the world’s EV batteries, with the US producing less than a tenth.

(Reporting by Joe Lo; editing by Megan Rowling)

The post Days after climate talks, US slaps tariffs on Chinese EVs and solar panels appeared first on Climate Home News.

Conservationists have challenged the road construction project in the East African nation’s courts since 2009, arguing it threatens the region’s rich ecosystem and wildlife. But in January, President William Ruto declared his government would proceed with the works, a decision critics said undermined his climate-friendly image on the global stage. 

The road – now a rough dirt track punctuated with mounds of elephant dung – dissects the Aberdare Forest in central Kenya, cutting through an expanse of dense woods mingled with thick bamboo and colourful alpine vegetation. It also crosses the mountainous Aberdare National Park, a haven for wildlife including lions, antelope and elephants. 

The government wants to widen and tarmac the picturesque road to connect the two agricultural counties of Nyandarua and Nyeri, which it says would reduce local travel time and the cost of farm produce while boosting tourism. 

Environmentalists argue that the potential negative consequences for the forest, biodiversity and climate change far outweigh the purported benefits.   

“I don’t feel that this is what we want to offer to the Kenyan people in terms of connectivity,” Christian Lambrechts, executive director of conservation trust Rhino Ark, told journalists during a trip to the Aberdare Forest in Nyeri County.  

“We feel that this road is not justifiable from a socioeconomic standpoint. It will cut the Aberdare ecosystem into two, and lead to road user-wildlife conflicts.”   

Rhino Ark Executive Director Christian Lambrechts addresses journalists in Nyeri County, Kenya, during a media tour of Aberdare Forest and National Park on February 29, 2024. (Photo: Joseph Maina)

Threat to wildlife and water

In March, the East African Wild Life Society – in response to Ruto’s decision to press ahead with the project – filed a fresh petition to a local court in Nyeri. It ordered the road’s construction to be put on hold, pending a hearing in early June. 

Conservationists are calling for the government to upgrade an alternative road instead, which largely skirts around the forest, saying it will still cut travel time while protecting wildlife and the Aberdare ecosystem that is vital for the water cycle. 

Enock Ole Kiminta, CEO of KeNAWRUA, a national organisation bringing together local water user associations, told Climate Home that expanding the Ihithe-Ndunyu Njeru road in the Aberdare Forest would destroy almost 400 hectares of indigenous forests and 327 water springs. 

It would also negatively impact close to 70 percent of local biodiversity, including endangered birds and animals, and elephant breeding areas, he added.   

“And yet the president appears to be saying, ‘To hell with you – go to court. We don’t care what the courts will say; we’ll still go ahead and do it’,” Kiminta said, before the latest suspension of the project.    

A scene in the Aberdare National Park, central Kenya, pictured on March 1, 2024 (Photo: Joseph Maina)

In January, the National Environment Management Authority approved the road’s construction in a surprise move, after earlier opposing it, and issued a license for the roadworks to the Kenya National Highways Authority (KeNHA).   

It did, however, give instructions to reduce the road’s width from 40 metres to 25 metres in sections traversing the Aberdare Forest and the Aberdare National Park.  

On a tour of the region that month, Ruto asked a local crowd if they wanted the road’s expansion to proceed or to wait for the court’s final decision. After gaining their backing, Ruto instructed government officials to allocate funds to push ahead immediately.   

Neither KeNHA nor the Kenya Wildlife Service responded to requests for comment for this article.  

International accolades  

Kenyan climate policy experts told Climate Home the Aberdare case symbolises a wider disconnect between Ruto’s vocal support for greater climate action on the global stage and decisions by his government that threaten natural ecoystems and carbon sinks at home.   

Ruto has pushed for more climate finance for the African continent and hosted the African Climate Summit last September in Nairobi, which secured $23 billion in funding for green projects for the continent.  

Last November, he made it onto Time Magazine’s list of the 100 most influential leaders driving business to real climate action. 

He also rolled out an ambitious plan in 2022 to plant 15 billion trees in Kenya by 2032, in a bid to reach 30% tree cover, with all ministries urged to allocate funds for the initiative.  

Loss and damage board speeds up work to allow countries direct access to funds

“His right hand doesn’t know what his left is doing,” said Kiminta. “He’s not being honest when he’s out of the country speaking all about climate change in rosy terms and doing something different on the ground.”   

While attempting to plant billions of trees, the Kenyan authorities have also been dishing out permits to timber dealers, Kiminta added. 

According to the Global Forest Watch monitoring service, tree loss in Kenya increased to 11,000 hectares in 2023, of which about 10,000 hectares was natural forest. That rise followed a two-year decline in 2021 and 2022, when the country recorded its lowest deforestation levels since 2001. 

Failed effort to lift logging ban  

The Aberdare row is not the first time Ruto has pitted himself against the justice system over decisions involving forests.  

Last July, less than two years after coming to power, he unilaterally lifted a six-year logging ban in the country’s forests, saying it would benefit local economies – sparking a legal backlash.  

The Law Society of Kenya (LSK) petitioned against the move, saying it disregarded the crucial role forests play in mitigating climate change, preserving biodiversity and safeguarding vital ecosystems. 

“It may be for lack of vision, foresight, or even commitment to sustainable development, but it is by all means a blow to Kenya’s environmental conservation efforts and international standing,” wrote Faith Odhiambo, the current LSK president, in a post on Twitter.   

The LSK argued the public had not been involved in the process leading to the decision to lift the ban, as stipulated in the constitution – and in October succeeded in its push for the Environmental and Lands Courts to void the president’s directive.  

Farmers tilling land cleared from the forest in Kinale on March 7, 2024 (Photo: Joseph Maina)

Indigenous rights 

Another row erupted last year over the Mau Forest Complex in Kenya’s Rift Valley, following an effort by the government to evict indigenous communities who have resisted such attempts for years.   

The evictions are part of an official strategy to protect Kenya’s principal water catchment areas, with speculation the latest round may also have been tied to a deal with UAE-based firm Blue Carbon to generate carbon credits for use under the Paris Agreement on climate change. 

The Mau – Kenya’s largest forest – has been the theatre of drawn-out conflict between the government and forest communities, particularly the Ogiek, a minority ethnic group that lays claim to the forest as its ancestral land.  

The African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights determined in 2022 that the state had violated the Ogiek’s rights over a substantial period and directed it to adopt appropriate measures to prevent the recurrence of abuses.   

But in a surprise twist last October, the government embarked on another forceful eviction of forest communities, including the Ogiek.    

Damaris Bonareri, an advocate of the High Court of Kenya and senior programme advisor for legal affairs at the Kenya Human Rights Commission, told Climate Home the Ogiek people are protected by the constitution and the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights. 

“According to our constitution, the Ogiek have a right to be in that forest. The president is wrong,” she added, noting that Ruto has spoken about the country’s judiciary in ways that could turn public opinion against it. 

Indigenous lands feel cruel bite of green energy transition

The president has publicly defended his green agenda, and often ties climate change and its causes to the extreme weather hitting the country, including torrential rains that have caused severe flooding and landslides in recent weeks, killing around 230 people. 

“We must be careful on environmental issues,” Ruto told a political rally in March in Kericho, one of four counties covered by the Mau Forest, stressing that his administration would not permit people to graze animals or cultivate crops in forests. 

“You have heard about climate change. Kenya was almost destroyed by adverse weather conditions just the other year and it was because of environmental degradation,” he said.

(Reporting by Joseph Maina; editing by Megan Rowling)

The post Road row in protected forest exposes Kenya’s climate conundrum  appeared first on Climate Home News.

He added those countries should be “leading from the front” through much deeper emissions cuts, and bigger and better climate finance.

A day later, the gathering of the most powerful industrialised democracies responded with a tepid outcome, serving up a new commitment on ending coal power generation – weakened by a loophole in the language – a rehash of previous pledges and nothing new on climate finance, this year’s top priority in climate diplomacy.

For the first time, G7 countries all agreed to end the use of coal power generation in their energy systems “during the first half of the 2030s”.

While most members of the bloc are already planning to phase out coal before 2035, the commitment marks a step forward for Japan, analysts said. The Asian nation generates over a quarter of its energy from coal and, alongside Germany and the United States, had previously blocked international efforts towards setting a target date to shut down coal power plants.

Germany has written into its legislation a final target to exit coal by 2038 at the latest, but the government now intends to pull that forward to 2030. The United States unveiled new regulations last week under which coal plants planning to stay open beyond 2039 will have to cut or capture 90 percent of their carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by 2032.

Not enough

But the G7 coal-power agreement struck on Tuesday in Turin, Italy, comes with a caveat that gives countries an alternative choice to phase out coal “in a timeline consistent with keeping a limit of 1.5°C temperature rise within reach, in line with countries’ net-zero pathways”.

Gilberto Pichetto Fratin, Italy’s minister for environment and energy security, told journalists at the end of the summit that the text “for the very first time uses a deadline, wherever possible”.

“G7 countries undertake to phase out the use of coal without jeopardising the various countries’ economic and social equilibrium,” he added.

Researchers say that, even if countries do stick to the mid-2030s deadline, it will not be enough to limit global warming in line with the goals of the 2015 Paris Agreement.

G7 countries need to phase out coal from power generation by 2030 at the latest, and gas by 2035, according to a recent analysis done by Berlin-based policy institute Climate Analytics.

G7 climate and energy ministers meet at the Reggia di Venaria Reale in Italy. Photo: G7 Italy

“It’s notable that gas has not been mentioned [in the G7 ministerial agreement],” said Jane Ellis, head of climate policy at Climate Analytics, pointing at increased investment in domestic gas facilities. “This is absolutely the wrong direction to be heading in – both economically and for the climate.”

In their final communique, ministers said that “publicly supported investments in the gas sector can be appropriate as a temporary response, subject to clearly defined national circumstances”, in their efforts to reduce dependency on imported Russian fossil fuels.

They also repeated a previous commitment to eliminate “inefficient fossil fuel subsidies by 2025 or sooner”, without providing a clearer definition of “inefficient” or details on how that goal would be achieved.

Fossil fuel subsidies across G7 countries hit an all-time high of $199.1 billion in 2022, according to analysis by IISD and the OECD. “It’s very clear they are not going to meet that target,” said Farooq Ullah, senior policy advisor at IISD.

No progress on climate finance

This week’s ministerial meeting in Italy also failed to significantly move the needle on climate finance, as UN negotiations on a new collective quantified goal (NCQG) at COP29 in November are starting to gather pace.

G7 countries said in their final text they “intend to be leading contributors to a fit-for-purpose goal” and acknowledged the need for “mobilising trillions”, but stopped short of making any new financial commitment or offering clear ways forward.

The existing goal is set at $100 billion a year, but developing countries – excluding China – need an estimated $2.4 trillion a year to meet their climate and development needs, leading economists have said in a report commissioned by the Cop26 and Cop27 presidencies.

In order to loosen the purse strings, it is crucial that every minister across government cabinets – and especially finance ministers and treasurers – “push climate action into high gear”, the UNFCCC’s Stiell said on Monday.

But, according to Luca Bergamaschi, director of Italian think-tank ECCO, they appear “not to be caring enough about climate finance”.

“Climate ministers are hitting a wall on climate finance. These decisions rest on finance ministers so they need to step up, and step in, because they have the power and responsibility to do so,” he told Climate Home.

Meetings of G7 finance ministers in mid-May and country leaders in June are seen as last-ditch opportunities to push things forward.

Experts believe an ambitious deal on climate finance at COP29 can play a crucial role in getting developing countries, especially the poorest ones, to commit to stronger action on curbing emissions and boosting adaptation as they draft their new national climate plans due early next year.

The G7 ministers in Italy made a firm pledge to submit their own such plans – called nationally determined contributions (NDCs) – by the February 2025 deadline “with economy-wide, absolute reduction targets” that cover all greenhouses gases and sectors “in line with 1.5C”. They also called on other major economies to do the same.

The post G7 offers tepid response to appeal for “bolder” climate action appeared first on Climate Home News.

The dire outlook for Argentina’s renowned higher education system under President Javier Milei, a right-wing populist, was highlighted on April 22 – Earth Day – by Argentine plant ecologist Pedro Jaureguiberry, who was announced as a finalist in the prestigious Frontiers Planet Prize.

​“The current budget for universities in 2024 is insufficient, adding to the fact that in recent years we have only received 20% of the budget we asked for conducting research at our lab,” Jaureguiberry,  an assistant researcher with the Multidisciplinary Institute of Plant Biology at the National University of Córdoba (UNC), told Climate Home.

The 44-year-old scientist, who has spent his entire academic career in Argentina, was shortlisted for the award as one of 23 national champions drawn from science research teams across six continents, in recognition of a study he led on the drivers of human-caused biodiversity loss.

Dr Jaureguiberry conducting fieldwork in central western Argentina. (Photo: Diego Gurvich)

Of the finalists, three international winners will be announced in June in Switzerland, receiving prize money of $1.1 million each for their role in groundbreaking scientific research.

Global billionaires tax to fight climate change, hunger rises up political agenda

With annual inflation running close to 300%, this year’s freeze on Argentina’s government budget for universities and scientific research amounts to a spending cut in real terms of around 80%, according to the University of Buenos Aires, which this month declared itself in an “economic emergency”.

On Tuesday, university teaching staff and students, backed by trade unions, will march in Buenos Aires and other cities “in defence of public education”, which they say faces a grave threat from the budget squeeze.

Met office hit by layoffs

Argentine meteorologist Carolina Vera, former vice-chair of a key working group responsible for the latest assessment report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said that in four decades of teaching and research she had never seen “such a level of dismantling through the reduction of research grants and programs with such disdain for knowledge”.

“This is very serious for atmospheric and ocean sciences, key to issues such as climate change, placing a whole new generation of meteorologists and climatologists in danger,” she told Climate Home from Trevelin, in the southern province of Chubut.

There has been widespread condemnation of 86 layoffs affecting administrative and other contractors at the National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET), while Vera added that she is concerned about the situation at the National Meteorological Service, where 73 technicians have been let go. That, she warned, would affect the functionality of early warning and disaster prevention systems.

Canadian minister vows to fight attempts to weaken plastic pollution treaty

Climatic and meteorological challenges are increasing in Argentina, from heavy rains due to the El Niño weather phenomenon – which has caused an ongoing dengue epidemic – to extreme heat and wildfires.

A significant drought is forecast for the southern hemisphere summer of 2024-2025, from November to February, as El Niño gives way to an expected La Niña, with the National Meteorological Service having a key role to play in predicting conditions and disseminating information about them ahead of time.

Vera added that the budget restrictions on CONICET would also limit its research capabilities, particularly relating to climate change. “​We hope that this will be reversed soon,” she added.

Greenlight for extractive industries

Milei has branded climate change a “socialist lie” since 2021 and has also questioned public education for “brainwashing people” with Marxist ideology.

Sergio Federovisky, deputy minister of environment during the previous presidency of Alberto Fernández, said Milei is not only disdainful of scientific views on global warming but also on broader environmental protection. For example, Milei – a former university professor and television pundit – said during his presidential campaign that “a company can pollute a river all it wants”.

“Climate denialism is not a scientific position, but rather an argument used to release all types of extractive actions that could be hindered by an environmental policy on the use of natural resources and the concentration of wealth,” Federovisky told Climate Home from Buenos Aires.

Meeting between Argentine President Javier Milei and Elon Musk in Texas, United States, at the Tesla factory on April 12 2024, forging a partnership through which the government is betting on attracting investment to Argentina. (Photo: Prensa Casa Rosada via / Latin America News Agency / Reuters)

In an economic review published on February 1, which unlocked $4.7 billion to support the new government’s policies, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) expressed its support for investment to increase the exploitation of oil and gas reserves and metals mining in Argentina, in order to boost exports and government revenues.

World Bank head Ajay Banga told journalists before last week’s Spring Meetings that the Argentine economy is going through a “whole economic realignment”. The bank “is supportive of the direction of that economy” and looks forward “to working closely with their leadership to help them as they go forward”, he added.

Yet he also noted that the bank’s latest review of economic prospects for the region highlighted challenges, including the impacts of Argentina’s correction, with regional GDP projected to expand by 1.6 percent in 2024, one of the lowest rates in the world and insufficient to drive prosperity.

World Bank climate funding greens African hotels while fishermen sink

The IMF’s support for Milei’s neoliberal economic policies has been strongly criticised by the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), which said on Friday that fiscal austerity “is not the answer when people’s lives and their democratic rights are at stake”.

“The IMF is celebrating the budget surplus in Argentina, but it’s indefensible to ignore the human cost of this economic shock therapy,” the ITUC’s General Secretary Luc Triangle said in a statement.

“Pensions have been slashed, thousands of public sector workers fired, public services are on the verge of collapse, unemployment is growing and food poverty spreading.”

Last week the government attempted to head off Tuesday’s protest by announcing a last-minute budget increase for maintenance costs for universities. But that was rejected by a national council of rectors and has not deterred the movement against the austerity measures, with large numbers set to come out onto the streets as planned.

(Reporting by Julián Reingold; editing by Megan Rowling)

The post Argentinian scientists condemn budget cuts ahead of university protest appeared first on Climate Home News.

Canadian Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault, who will host the talks in Ottawa starting on April 23, said in an interview with Climate Home that all governments had “agreed collectively that we wanted an ambitious treaty to fight plastic pollution and to eliminate it by 2040”.

But, he added, “unfortunately some countries seem to have forgotten that’s what we agreed upon [at the United Nations Environment Assembly] almost two years ago. I’m going to make it my mission in life in the coming weeks to remind everyone that this is our collective agreement.”

He did not specify which countries appear to be backtracking, but noted that some “are in more of a hurry than others” to get a deal – “which is why you have a high-ambition coalition”.

That coalition is pushing for a strong accord to end plastic pollution and includes all large developed countries except the United States, plus some developing nations.

The members of the self-described “high-ambition coalition” are coloured in light blue.

Guilbeault was speaking during the latest UN Environment Assembly (UNEA) in Nairobi last month, where some governments tried to water down anti-plastics language.

David Azoulay, from the Center for International Environmental Law, told Climate Home “a number of countries” had tried at this year’s UNEA to “get around or away” from the mandate to set up a plastics treaty.

They did not propose a rival resolution, he said, “probably because they saw there was very little appetite for it”. But that did not stop them from attempting to use the assembly to influence the plastics treaty negotiations, he added. The talks are organised by the United Nations Environment Programme.

In submissions to the UNEA, the US tried to delete the words “legally binding” in reference to the plastics treaty, Iran wanted to remove “ambitious”, and Saudi Arabia attempted to cut a reference to accelerating the treaty talks.

Russia’s ambassador to Kenya, Dmitry Maksimychev, told the UNEA that Russia is an “active participant” in the talks and “we do not support shifting emphasis to restrictive measures of a productive or commercial nature”.

Plastics support fossil fuel demand

Over the last two years, government negotiators have gathered for three rounds of talks on setting up the treaty to tackle plastic pollution.

The fourth round will be held in Ottawa this month, and the fifth and supposedly final session will be in the South Korean city of Busan in November. The agreement should then be adopted officially at a diplomatic conference in 2025.

BP expects the share of oil demand from non-combusted (grey) sectors like plastic to rise in the next few decades. (Photo: BP/Screenshot)

Plastics are made from oil and gas, and their production causes 3% of greenhouse gas emissions. The fossil fuel industry predicts that as demand for oil and gas for energy falls, they can make up for it by selling their products to plastic manufacturers.

New estimates from the US-based Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory show plastic production emits as much carbon pollution each year (2.24 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent in 2019) as 600 coal-fired power plants.

A study published by the lab on Thursday, supported by Bloomberg Philanthropies’ Beyond Petrochemicals campaign, warned that carbon pollution from plastic production could triple by 2050.

And even if global power grids shift over to clean energy, the plastic industry’s share of the global carbon budget could rise from just over 5 percent now to more than 20 percent by mid-century, based on conservative projections for industry growth, it added.

Plastic litter also makes flooding – already exacerbated by climate change – worse.

In Zambia, Lwenga Mulela, whose company converts plastic waste into useful products like paving and plant pots, told Climate Home plastic bottles pile up in drainage channels in the nearby capital Lusaka and stop rain escaping down the drain, causing flooding on the streets.

Lwenga Mulela shows plastic wrappers which she turns into products like paving on March 12 24. (Photo: Joe Lo)

During a brief rainstorm in Lusaka’s Central Business District in March, Climate Home saw cars slowing to a crawl to pass through puddles and pedestrians jumping over water to stay dry.

Money talks

The UN treaty negotiations have so far been divided on whether to focus on the production of plastic, potentially through targets to reduce it, as the “high-ambition coalition” and climate campaigners want.

The alternative is to limit its scope to expanding recycling of plastic, as the industry itself and the US, Saudi Arabia and others are calling for.

Asked if plastic production should be in the treaty, Canada’s Guilbeault said: “We have to look at every element of plastic pollution.” But asked about the biggest remaining divides, he pointed to finance.

Many countries, particularly small islands, “receive an incredible amount of plastic pollution that they’re not responsible for, and there should be an international mechanism to help them deal with the problem,” he said.

Activists clean up a beach in Fiji in 2016 (Photo: Kurt Peterson/Greenpeace)

“Right now with the economic situation internationally – high interest rates, high inflation – it’s a difficult conversation but it’s a necessary conversation nonetheless,” he added.

This was highlighted by Madagascar’s representative at the UNEA who said his country backed a plastics treaty and was “insisting on the need to prepare global countries of the south and support them in this regard”.

In Zambia, entrepreneur Mulela also called for finance for developing countries to develop waste disposal and recycling systems. She said the companies that produce the plastic should provide that funding, as should richer nations.

“I think they have an obligation,” she said. “It’s a global village, so what is affecting one part of the world is also affecting every other part of the world.”

Approval by consensus or vote?

If governments do not unanimously agree on a text in November, a treaty could be endorsed through a two-thirds majority vote – but, for many negotiators, that would be a last resort.

Jyoti Mathur-Filipp, head of the secretariat responsible for the talks, told Climate Home “there is no wish on any member state’s part to actually have a vote on substance… so for us, we hope that we will adopt this treaty with consensus, without a vote.”

But, for campaigners like Greenpeace’s Graham Forbes, the apparent unwillingness to vote could end up weakening or delaying the treaty as he argued that a process based on consensus has enabled low-ambition countries to “undermine substantive progress”.

“Voting would enable member states that are serious about addressing the issue to negotiate a treaty that actually gets at the core of the issue: reducing plastic production and use,” he said.

Guilbeault took the middle-ground, noting that not every country has to agree to something for it to be adopted by consensus.

He wants the new treaty “to have as much buy-in as possible from as many countries as possible but, at the same time, I don’t think the world should be held hostage to the interest of a few countries – that’s not consensus either.”

The talks in Ottawa are tasked with narrowing down the draft text for the treaty. Guilbeault said he hopes to see 75-80% of it agreed this month, but added that the thorniest issues will be left to Busan in November.

(Reporting by Joe Lo; editing by Megan Rowling)

This article was amended on April 23, 2024 to clarify that Steven Guilbeault is the host of the plastics treaty talks in Ottawa – not the chair, as previously stated. The role of chair is currently held by Luis Vayas Valdivieso, Ecuador’s ambassador to the UK.

The post Canadian minister vows to fight attempts to weaken plastic pollution treaty 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”.

 

Ver esta publicación en Instagram

 

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.

The post World Bank climate funding greens African hotels while fishermen sink appeared first on Climate Home News.

Tech giant Intel said in its 2023 Climate Transition Action Plan that it faces challenges in setting targets for cutting its greenhouse gas emissions in line with the Science Based Targets Initiative (SBTi). The chip-maker is likely to be the first in a long list of companies to slowly break cover and admit that the SBTi is unfit for purpose.

As a professional sustainability advisor, I know that of the 5,000 or so companies that have signed up for the initiative, only a startling minority have robust and realistic plans for fulfilling their emissions-cutting commitments.

These ambitious yet under-interrogated targets are really just counterproductive “green-wishing”. When it comes to emission reductions, a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. In other words, the perfect often becomes the enemy of the good.

The SBTi has been endorsed by the United Nations as a global decarbonisation framework. It requires companies to commit to an ‘absolute contraction’ of Scope 1 and 2 emissions of 90%, and for some organisations to make cuts to their Scope 3 emissions as well, by no later than 2050. Absolute contraction is essentially a carbon budget, set from year one.

UN climate chief calls for “quantum leap in climate finance”

We must first consider the implications that SBTi has for climate innovation and a company’s business model. Here we run into a major obstacle because currently, SBTi does not take into account abated emissions – the environmental benefit that technology provides.

Take Tesla. Tesla’s plan to scale production could never be SBTi-aligned But according to the EV maker’s impact report, the company helped to abate 2.3 million metric tons of CO2 in 2022, which is more than the entire CO2 emissions of Malta.

Oxford PV is another example. It has succeeded in developing a breakthrough clean technology that makes solar photovoltaic panels 30% more efficient than average panels. Yet, despite the huge emission abatement potential of this technology, there’s no feasible way the company could scale, while being SBTi-aligned on its own emissions.

This points to a fundamental issue with the current limited and simplistic ‘territorial’ approach to carbon accounting. Instead, we must embrace more comprehensive strategies that can achieve meaningful and lasting reductions in carbon emissions.

Spring Meetings can jump-start financial reform for food and climate

Can SBTi, dreamt up in air-conditioned offices in the West, really tell innovative companies in emerging economies that they must make drastic emission cuts in their operations? For example, it would not be possible for South African clean energy start-up BioTherm Energy, or Nigerian solar company Lumos, to slash their emissions by 90%, all while delivering cleaner energy and pulling in tax revenue for their developing economies. After all, sea walls, flood barriers and drought-resistant crops need to be financed somehow.

The idea that we can contract our emissions with the technologies available today, by 90%, without triggering large-scale human and economic upheaval is a view rooted in dogma, not science or economics.

Anybody who has made New Year’s resolutions will know that a crash-diet that cuts your calorie intake by 90% is a pipe dream, especially if we don’t count calories burned. Instead, a gradual downsizing of snacking, along with a feasible, sustained increase in the intensity of exercise is far more likely to deliver the results you want.

Beyond the ‘green-wishing’, the SBTi’s design is fundamentally flawed because it allows businesses with over 250 employees to reduce their Scope 3 emissions on an intensity metrics basis (reduced energy per unit of production), but not smaller firms. For example, for an air travel company, this could be energy used per flight, or for a garment manufacturer, energy used per item of clothing produced.

European court rules climate inaction by states breaches human rights

SMEs make up 99% of businesses. To subject smaller, less well-resourced companies to a more stringent emissions-reduction requirement than larger firms seems bizarre.

So what’s the alternative? Every company should use an intensity metrics measurement, and set a transparent emissions target that is relative to an economic or operational variable, like emissions per unit of goods sold.

We know we need to carry on eating healthily – we now need to learn what exercise regime works best for us. Ultimately, we should be sceptical of any one-size-fits all plan pushed by those with no skin in the game.

An ‘intensity metrics’ basis for emissions reductions provides us with a far more attainable and universal decarbonisation framework. The need for a fair global system is clear. The SBTi, with its unrealistic and reductive approach, is simply not it.

This article argues that the SBTI’s rules are too stringent. We have also published a comment piece arguing they are too lax.

The post SBTi’s rigid emissions rules don’t reflect business reality appeared first on Climate Home News.

A decade ago, the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) was launched with the goal of mobilising the private sector for climate action.

Today, it stands as the largest and most influential validator of corporate climate targets, having confirmed the 2030 goals of around 5,000 companies.

Yet new analysis reveals a leniency within the initiative. According to the 2024 Corporate Climate Responsibility Monitor (CCRM), the emissions reduction commitments of 51 major global corporates are falling short of what’s needed at the global level.

Surprisingly, most of these companies received SBTi validation for their targets to be aligned with the 1.5ºC warming limit backed by governments in the Paris climate agreement. 

What explains this discrepancy?  

UN climate chief calls for “quantum leap in climate finance”

Currently, the SBTi’s 2030 target validations often overlook substantial shares of companies’ full value chain emissions by excluding upstream and downstream value chain emissions, known as “scope 3”. Scope 3 emissions account for the majority of corporate greenhouse gas footprints, sometimes exceeding 95%.  

The SBTi requires companies to set a near-term target for scope 3 emissions, but only when those emissions account for more than 40% of their greenhouse gas footprint. However, these targets do not have to cover all scope 3 emissions and only need to be aligned with global warming of 2ºC or well below 2ºC, not 1.5ºC.  

While the SBTi checks whether companies have set a scope 3 target, the initiative does not provide a temperature classification for these scope 3 targets – only for companies’ scope 1 and 2 targets, which apply to direct operations and their energy use.

Spring Meetings can jump-start financial reform for food and climate

This important nuance is often missed by the public, as many companies nonetheless prominently advertise their scope 3 climate targets as science-based.  

Take Fast Retailing, owner of clothing chain Uniqlo, for example. The company pledges to reduce its operational emissions (scope 1 and 2) by 90% by 2030, which represent just 5% of its total emissions.

It also commits to reduce its emissions from procured goods and materials (scope 3) by 20% by the end of this decade. However, upstream emissions in the fashion sector need to be reduced by around 40% to be aligned with global warming of 1.5ºC.

Whereas the SBTi validated the target for operational emissions as “1.5ºC temperature aligned”, the initiative did not provide a temperature classification for the scope 3 target.

European court rules climate inaction by states breaches human rights

Yet Fast Retailing also describes this target as “science-based”. This pattern is not unique to Fast Retailing but common across companies validated by the SBTi. 

As a voluntary organisation primarily funded by third parties, the SBTi relies on the voluntary participation of companies. Its methodologies need to accommodate the perspectives of various stakeholders.

This may explain why the SBTi’s methodologies for 2030 targets are not necessarily always aligned with the scientific consensus on limiting global warming to 1.5ºC.

However, addressing the lack of stringency in scope 3 targets is key to ensuring that the SBTi can effectively drive corporate climate ambition. 

Offsetting controversy 

Despite the large degree of leniency that already exists in scope 3 standards today, there is a significant risk that the rules will be loosened even further.

Just this week, the SBTi Board of Trustees issued a unilateral and possibly illegitimate decision to revise scope 3 standards to allow for carbon offsetting.

This decision is not based on scientific insights but comes after a lot of pressure on the SBTi from supporters of carbon markets. SBTi staff have already reacted strongly to voice their discontent with the decision and the process. 

Introducing offsetting in the SBTi scope 3 standards could effectively nullify already insufficient targets, reversing years of incremental progress that SBTi and its member companies have fought so hard to achieve. 

Forest carbon accounting allows Guyana to stay net zero while pumping oil

Allowing companies to offset their emissions could also deprive their suppliers – who are often located in the Global South – of much needed financial and technical support for their own emissions reduction efforts. 

Climate target-setting has become standard practice in the corporate world – progress the SBTi helped foster over the past decade. But the recent decision by the SBTi Board of Trustees on offsetting could bring any further advances to a halt.

Reversing this decision and tightening the rules for scope 3 targets would be the next step to propel corporate climate ambition forward. 

This article argues that the SBTI’s rules are too lax. We have also published a comment piece arguing they are too stringent.

The post SBTi needs tighter rules on companies’ indirect emissions appeared first on Climate Home News.

Set against the global backdrop of poverty, hunger, climate change, debt and conflict, it can feel hard to be hopeful at present. But there is a real win-win opportunity – as well as a deep moral obligation – to heal geopolitical divisions, foster peace, alleviate poverty, ensure food and nutrition security, address the climate crisis, and deliver a better, fairer future for people and planet. It lies in the reforms of the global financial architecture necessary to deliver the additional sum of at least $3 trillion required to support countries to meet the Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris Agreement on climate change.

Last year’s international meetings in Paris and Nairobi – leading to the Paris Pact for People and Planet, and the Nairobi Declaration – have made the case for debt relief, enhanced international taxation and global financial architecture reform. These reforms will be centre-stage at next week’s Spring Meetings of the World Bank and the IMF in Washington DC.

Here the world must urgently come together to articulate and deliver a clear plan for how to end hunger and build resilient food systems, backed by real leadership, enhanced coordination, accountability and finance. The task at hand is to connect the global imperative to act on food security, sustainable agriculture and malnutrition with the broader efforts underway to drive a reform agenda and to replenish the World Bank’s concessional lending arm, the International Development Association (IDA).

At UN climate talks in Dubai last year, 159 world leaders committed themselves to action on food security and climate change by signing the COP28 Emirates Declaration on Sustainable Agriculture, Resilient Food Systems, and Climate Action – the first of its kind. The commitments in this declaration now need to be linked with the emerging global plan for increased finance.

Is water provision in drought-hit Zambia climate ‘loss and damage’ or adaptation?

African potential

Africa is ground zero for the climate crisis, but is also the continent where solutions will have the most impact. Of the 9.8 billion people expected to live on the planet by 2050, a quarter will be African. Financial reforms must unlock climate-positive green industrialization and transform food systems across the continent in a way that is compatible with sustainable and inclusive economic growth. But the ultimate test will be whether the funds released reach the communities who need them most, when they need them, producing the desired results of ending poverty, building climate-resilient infrastructure, saving nature and biodiversity from extinction, and delivering prosperous lives for all.

This goal is within our reach – with evidence and farmers’ testimonials showing the success of innovative models such as the Arcos community-led scheme in Rwanda, which has empowered smallholder farmers to preserve and restore forests and agricultural landscapes. To date, 12,000 community members have grown 4.2 million trees, including fruit trees for boosting income and nutrition, nitrogen-fixing species to improve soil health, fodder species for livestock and indigenous species for biodiversity, on more than 20,000 hectares. The farmers have also built terraces across the hilly landscapes to reduce soil erosion and prevent pollution of lakes and rivers.

Nigeria’s path to net zero should be fully lined with trees – and fairness

Across much of the Global South, there are numerous such inspiring examples of where communities and societies have established social safety nets, fostered rural development, and promoted gender and social equity. These approaches have enhanced  communities’ capacity to plan for and respond to more extreme weather, to continue to deliver their crops to market despite climate change and other challenges, and to provide nutritious food for their families.

Smallholder farmers produce a third of the world’s food, yet receive only 1.7 percent of climate finance. Globally, there must be a major shift in financial flows to change that, including efforts by international development partners such as the World Bank and the philanthropic sector. National government leadership is a prerequisite to success, including revising agricultural subsidy programs to ensure they incentivize farming practices and behaviour that will help the world close the hunger gap while reducing greenhouse gas emissions, protecting biodiversity and restoring degraded lands.

Global momentum growing

This year there is a golden opportunity to make progress on financing for food systems. As a result of consistent advocacy – including from Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley, Kenyan President William Ruto and World Bank President Ajay Banga – an additional $300–400 billion in low-cost concessional finance and lending has been promised over the next decade by the multilateral development banks (MDBs) to low- and lower-middle income countries.

This recalibration of the international finance institutions’ balance sheets is a welcome development to build on – and demonstrates that climate and development commitments can be honoured. The social, economic and environmental case for making these kinds of investments in food security is unequivocal. Well-designed investments deliver four-fold benefits: they strengthen food security and nutrition; reduce greenhouse gas emissions; support nations and communities to adapt to a changing climate; and protect and restore nature.

The Brazilian government has committed to put zero hunger, sustainable agriculture and food systems centre-stage at the G20 this year, through its Global Alliance Against Hunger and Poverty, and has committed to work closely with Italy and the rest of the G7 on this agenda. President Lula has also rightly placed the ongoing deeper reboot and replenishment of the multilateral development bank system at the heart of his G20 agenda. His leadership – in partnership with African governments and the G7, and harnessing such key moments as the UN Summit for the Future – could drive major progress at this critical time, starting at the Spring Meetings this April.

The post Spring Meetings can jump-start financial reform for food and climate  appeared first on Climate Home News.

I was six when I started catching shrimp in the waterways of Louisiana. I inherited the livelihood that sustained my father, grandfather, and generations before them. My boat in the Gulf of Mexico is my second home. But I may lose it all – in part to Japan’s dangerous investments in fossil gas.

Eight years ago, fossil fuel companies and their government allies moved Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) projects into the region and turned our fishing community upside down. The Calcasieu Pass LNG export terminal was just 300 feet from my house, and promised “deep-water access, proximity to plentiful gas supplies and ease of transport for buyers”. Vibrations from its operations were so intense they knocked pictures off my wall. My wife suffered a heart attack, and my children were frequently ill. Facing dire health consequences and daily interruptions, my family was driven from our home.

Most people don’t realize that Japan is bankrolling LNG and the destruction along the US Gulf Coast. Japanese private banks MUFG, Mizuho, and SMBC are the first, second, and third biggest financiers of LNG export projects in the US. These banks have committed more than $13 million,  $11 million, and $10 million respectively to US-based LNG projects.

On April 10, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida will meet with President Joe Biden in Washington, DC to discuss the US and Japan’s commitment to promoting stability in the world and the advancement of clean energy supply chains. Biden clearly understands the need to take a hard look at the impacts of future LNG development as indicated by the pause he announced recently.

His administration has called the climate crisis the “existential threat of our time,” and sees the US as a champion to support other world leaders’ transition to green energy. But my family, and so many around me, are still waiting for change.

Travis Dardar drives his boat on the water with the Calcasieu Pass LNG terminal shown in the background. (Photo: Susanne Wong / Oil Change International)

Massive LNG tankers now crowd the water and wildlife is disappearing. Before the Calcasieu Pass LNG terminal started operating last year, local fishermen caught about 700,000 pounds of shrimp annually. The shrimp catch is now down nearly 90%, with no compensation for losing our livelihoods.

The devastating impacts of LNG on communities like mine and our unwavering opposition is the reason why in January President Biden paused LNG export approvals. The US Department of Energy is supposed to consider how to determine whether these projects are in the public interest and to take into account impacts on communities, ecosystems, and climate. Unfortunately, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm recently indicated this pause could be lifted within the year, when what we really need is for President Biden to stop all new LNG export projects for good.

European court rules climate inaction by states breaches human rights

Increasingly, the international community recognizes fossil fuels’ toxic effects on the environment and communities and the momentum is shifting towards clean energy.  Yet, Japan is still driving the expansion of gas and LNG in the US, across Asia and globally. In spite of Japan’s declining LNG demand at home, Japan is staking its economic growth on pushing governments across South and Southeast Asia to import LNG.

I invite Prime Minister Kishida to travel on my boat while he is in the US to see for himself the impact of Japan’s dirty energy projects on Gulf communities.

Air pollution hits health

Health deterioration in my community is unsurprising, given the plant’s pollution emissions. Long-term exposure to LNG chemicals can lead to heart disease and certain types of cancer, and living near a pollution center has been linked to increased stress, depression, and other mental health problems.

According to research by the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, the Calcasieu Pass LNG export terminal violated its air pollution permits on 286 of the first 343 days it was in operation – 83% of its first year. Rather than working to clean up its operations, Venture Global, the gas company behind the LNG facility, petitioned the state air quality agency to increase its allowable pollution limits. If the gas project already built can’t even follow pollution regulations, how can we expect the two plants posed for construction upstream to do so?

Despite this, the Gulf area buzzes with Japanese LNG operations. The proposed Calcasieu Pass 2 terminal is part of a 20-year contract with JERA, Japan’s largest gas company and the world’s largest LNG buyer. JERA agreed to buy 1 million tons of LNG annually from the project. INPEX, Japan’s largest oil and gas producer, also signed a 20-year contract to buy 1 million tons of LNG annually. These corporate operations and their profits are behind Japan’s push to expand LNG markets around the world.

Zambia’s fossil-fuel subsidy cuts help climate and kids – but taxi drivers suffer

Japan has developed a regional initiative, the Asia Zero Emissions Community, that will expand and prolong the use of fossil fuels by proposing to abate their emissions. This is a greenwashing effort to push governments in Asia to adopt dangerous distractions like hydrogen, ammonia, and carbon capture and storage. In reality, this will expand and prolong the harm of fossil fuels on communities like mine.

Although Biden’s pause on LNG export authorizations is a step in the right direction, it’s hard to celebrate here in Cameron Parish. LNG tankers dominate the water, and fishers are left to collect the scraps of our communities and livelihoods. Even with the setbacks, our community hasn’t given up hope. I founded Fishermen Interested in Saving Our Heritage (FISH), a united front that will fight to protect our homes, the environment, and access to the Gulf waters. We are focused on saving our way of life.

As the largest LNG exporter in the world, the US holds major influence in this tainted market. During their upcoming meeting, I urge Prime Minister Kishida and President Biden to recognize our future in renewables and stop sacrificing frontline communities for profit.

The post Louisiana communities are suffering from Japan-funded LNG exports appeared first on Climate Home News.

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.

The post What will it take to protect India’s angry farmers from climate threats? appeared first on Climate Home News.

In January, the two United Nations agencies that will manage the Santiago Network on loss and damage recommended that its headquarters should be in Nairobi as it is a relatively cheap location and home to other UN environmental bodies.

But during the first meeting of the network’s advisory board this week, at the four-star Warwick Hotel in Geneva, government climate negotiators rejected that proposal and instead chose the Swiss lakeside city as its headquarters.

The Advisory Board of the #SantiagoNetwork convenes for its inaugural meeting on 18-20 March in Geneva. Established in 2019, the Santiago Network aims to address loss & damage from climate change in vulnerable countries. Learn more: https://t.co/w9UwskGMW1#LossAndDamage pic.twitter.com/m3DTUCiT6g

— Adaptation Exchange by the NWP (@AdaptXChange) March 20, 2024

Last year, the Economist Intelligence Unit ranked Geneva as the third most expensive city in the world, twice as expensive as the 141st city on the list: Nairobi.

“Missed opportunity” for Global South

Swiss climate ambassador Felix Wertli called the decision an “honour”. “Geneva will offer great added value to the network” because of the wide range of relevant organisations in the city, while the network will in turn help strengthen that international ecosystem, he added.

But, according to a source who attended the meeting, African climate negotiators only accepted the decision grudgingly, asking for their reservations to be officially noted.

The source said Geneva had been pushed mainly by Latin American negotiators, who were angry that Panama had been ruled out for time-zone reasons and argued Nairobi was difficult to get to and did not have enough embassies.

At December’s Cop28 climate summit, the Swiss government said that, if the network was based in Geneva, it would donate 1 million Swiss francs ($1.1m), cover office costs and provide up to 10,000 francs ($11,000) per person for office materials and infrastructure. The network will spend about $8m a year. The source said the Swiss government had emailed board members last month, making the case for Geneva.

Mohammed Adow, the Nairobi-based founder of the Power Shift Africa think-tank, called the decision “yet another stitch-up by the Global North to keep power away from the places where the impacts of climate change are being felt”.

It “fails to put affected communities at the centre of decision-making” and further erodes the trust between the Global North and South that is needed to tackle climate change, he added.

Tasneem Essop, head of Climate Action Network International, told Climate Home it was “a real missed opportunity”. “It is unfortunate that wealthy countries can use their ability to resource infrastructure as a way to secure the presence of UN bodies in their territories,” she said.

Loss and damage expertise in demand

Governments agreed at Cop25 in 2019 to set up the Santiago Network and tasked it with “averting, minimizing and addressing loss and damage associated with the adverse effects of climate change” by collecting and sharing expert advice. Since then, the host organisation and location of the network’s secretariat has been debated at UN climate talks.

Small islands wanted the Barbados-based Caribbean Development Bank to host it, while African countries wanted the United Nations Office for Project Services (Unops) and the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR) to host it in Nairobi.

Both groups thought the other would not place sufficient priority – or have enough expertise – on the types of climate damage they are facing. For small islands, the main threats are rising sea levels and destructive storms, whereas Africa is grappling with more frequent and severe floods and droughts.

At Cop28, governments agreed that Copenhagen-based Unops would be the operational host, while Geneva-based UNDRR would organise the expert advice. The two agencies were commissioned to explore the best physical location for the network’s headquarters.

In Somalia, Green Climate Fund tests new approach for left-out communities

They shortlisted five options that were safe enough for staff to bring their families, in the European and African time zones, and had a UNDRR presence: Nairobi, Geneva, the German city of Bonn, Brussels in Belgium and the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa.

They evaluated the five locations based on staff, office and set-up costs, “operational efficiency” criteria like security, infrastructure and the skills of the local workforce and other factors, including being close to other UN agencies. 

The reviewers recommended Nairobi as “the optimal location”, citing strong UN relations with the Kenyan government, “maximum time zone coverage” for co-ordinating with developing countries, and its hosting of other UN agencies.

Nairobi is the base for the UN’s African headquarters, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), and its sustainable towns and cities programme (UN Habitat), as well as Unops and UNDRR’s African regional offices.

But now that the Santiago Network’s advisory board has opted for Geneva, Unops and UNDRR will look for office space in the city. The network will have eight full-time staff members in Geneva and four regional officers based around the world. 

A Swiss government spokesperson said Switzerland had “emphasised its stance of accepting any location choice deemed most beneficial to the affected regions”. It had suggested Geneva to advisory board members “as an alternative venue in case discussions over the future location stalled progress in the creation of the [Santiago Network] Secretariat and its important work”, the spokesperson added.

This article was updated on 21/3/2024 to include the Swiss government’s comment

The post African dismay at decision to host loss and damage advice hub in Geneva appeared first on Climate Home News.