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.

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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.

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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.

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Steep cuts in CO2 emissions, mainly from burning fossil fuels, will be needed in the coming years if targets to limit a global rise in temperatures and prevent runaway climate change are to be met, scientists have said.

“Far from falling rapidly – as is required to meet the global climate goals set out in the Paris Agreement – CO2 emissions reached a new record high,” the IEA said in a report.

Global emissions from energy rose by 410 million tonnes, or 1.1%, in 2023 to 37.4 billion tonnes, the IEA analysis showed.

A global expansion in clean technology such as wind, solar and electric vehicles helped to curb emissions growth, which was 1.3% in 2022. But a reopening of China’s economy, increased fossil fuel use in countries with low hydropower output and a recovery in the aviation sector led to an overall rise, the IEA said in its report.

Moves to replace lost hydropower generation due to extreme droughts accounted for around 40% of the emissions rise, or 170 million tonnes of CO2, it said.

“Without this effect, emissions from the global electricity sector would have fallen in 2023,” the IEA said.

Energy-related emissions in the United States fell by 4.1% with the bulk of the reduction coming from the electricity sector, according to the report.

In the European Union emissions from energy fell by almost 9% last year driven by a surge in renewable power generation and a slump in both coal and gas power generation.

In China, emissions from energy rose by 5.2%, with energy demand growing as the country recovered from COVID-19-related lockdowns, the report said.

China, however, also contributed around 60% of global additions of solar, wind power and electric vehicles in 2023, the IEA said.

Globally electric vehicles accounted for one-in-five new car sales in 2023, reaching 14 million and up 35% on the level of 2022.

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A building has been rented and equipment is being purchased for the center that will have police representatives from the other seven countries of the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization (ACTO).

The Center for International Police Cooperation (CCPI), now scheduled to be up and running in the first quarter of this year, will be financed with 9 million reais ($1.8 million) from the Amazon Fund, a multinational donation effort started by Norway to help finance sustainable development in the Amazon.

The center will fight drug trafficking and the smuggling of timber, fish and exotic animals, as well as deforestation and other environmental crimes, Humberto Freire, head of the Federal Police’s Environment and Amazon department, said in an interview on Friday. Illegal gold mining on protected reservations of Indigenous peoples like the Yanomami, will also be a priority, he said.

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Uniting the Amazon countries against criminal activity in the world’s largest tropical rainforest is key to President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva’s effort to restore Brazil’s environmental credentials after four years of soaring deforestation under his hard-right predecessor, former President Jair Bolsonaro.

Brazil will share with its Amazon neighbors the technology the Federal Police is developing to trace the origins of gold illegally extracted by wildcat miners in the rainforest, Freire said.

This technology, which should establish the “DNA of gold,” uses radioisotopes to determine what prospect the gold comes from by checking particles of the metal, ore or dirt against samples collected from gold mining areas across Brazil, a vast mapping process that is near completion, he said.

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ACTO members will be asked to do the same mapping of samples on their countries, Freire said.

The police developed the technology with the University of Sao Paulo and has 50 million reais from the Amazon Fund to implement a program that will require a radioisotope scan, possibly from Japan, and handheld radioisotope identification devices to be used in ports and airports, he said.

The Brazilian government wants to spend some of the Amazon Fund on paving a road through the rainforest, a move critics say will worsen forest destruction. Two major donors – the US and Germany – have warned the fund’s board against approving this spending.

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The notice, published on Thursday by China’s National Development and Reform Commission, calls for the creation of initial technical standards governing new energy vehicle integration into the grid by 2025.

New energy vehicles will become an important part of the country’s energy storage system by 2030, it said.

As electricity demand surges due to the increasing popularity of new EVs, solutions are being sought by governments and other stakeholders to prevent power networks from being overwhelmed, as millions of people plug in their vehicles for charging at the same time.

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Charging during off-peak hours as well as ‘vehicle-to-grid’ charging – where millions of EV owners could sell their EV batteries’ juice back to grid operators during peak hours – have been seen as potential solutions.

Last year, Brattle Group analyst Ryan Hledik told Climate Home that charging during off-peak hours should make EV use cheaper and therefore more widespread. But he warned that vehicle to grid technology and its business case are still in their infancy.

China is seeking to use these strategies to manage peak power demand through the integration of electric vehicles into the power system, according to the NDRC.

By 2025, NDRC said it would set up over 50 pilot programs in regions where conditions for vehicle-grid integration are relatively mature, including in the Yangtze River Delta, Pearl River Delta, Beijing, Sichuan and Chongqing.

China plans to build over 300 coal-fired power plants. But its government says it does not intend to run all of them at full capacity – instead running them only when needed to top up renewable electricity. So flattening demand peaks will reduce emissions.

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The transition away from fossil fuels to renewables is likely to make the supply of electricity more difficult to control. Power plants can ramp electricity production up and down in a way that solar panels and wind turbines can’t.

So across the world, governments are looking to similar policies to manage the demand for electricity so that it fits more closely with the supply of electricity – known as demand management.

In the Canadian province of Ontario, for example, electricity costs different amounts at different times of the day. This encourages people to use electricity at night when its cheaper.

Similarly in South Africa, the grid operator Eskom incentivises its biggest industrial customers to shift their use of electricity to when its most abundant.

In the US state of Vermont, a utility called Green Mountain Power is deploying Tesla Powerwall batteries to people’s homes.

Most of the year when there’s no shortage of power, residents use this as a backup generator but when there is a shortage the utility uses the electricity for the grid.

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Federal Police have joined the government’s biodiversity conservation agency ICMBio on a series of recent operations to catch illegal gold miners and destroy their camps and equipment.

Gold mining is a small but growing contributor to the cutting down of the Amazon rainforest, reducing its ability to suck up greenhouse gas.

Leftist President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva’s government has already been cracking down on mining on Indigenous reservations.

But that has pushed some miners to other forests where there has been little enforcement.

Wildcat gold miners are briefly detained and questioned at an illegal gold mine (REUTERS/Adriano Machado/File Photo)

This month, armed officers of ICMBio, a government agency named after murdered environmental activist Chico Mendes, swooped down in helicopters on wildcat camps in the upper reaches of the Tapajos, a tributary of the Amazon River.

They set fire to barges used to pump and filter ore, destroyed excavators and chainsaws, and seized weapons, radios and scales used by miners to weigh their gold.

Lula has vowed to stamp out illegal mining and end deforestation by 2030. That is a sharp reversal of policy from his predecessor Jair Bolsonaro, who was criticized globally for relaxing environmental controls, giving illegal loggers and miners free range in the Amazon. He argued that Brazil had the right to develop its natural resources.

On one recent mission, a Reuters photographer followed an ICMBio team into the Urupadi National Forest where agents detained a handful of wildcat miners and destroyed their tents, excavators, dredging equipment and fuel supplies.

Brazil lawmakers approve using green fund to pave road through Amazon rainforest

The miners had cut down swathes of jungle and dug dozens of ponds to dredge for gold that they separated from sand and ore with mercury, a contaminant that poisons fish in the rivers.

Through the open door of their incoming helicopter, the ICMBio agents fired automatic weapons at motor boats carrying fleeing miners. They fired again to blow up barrels of diesel fuel and set fire to excavators so they could not be used again.

“We destroy their camps and they keep coming back,” said mission commander Sidney Serafim.

During a three-week operation, the agents found 20 mining sites and 11 clandestine airstrips in the forest, along with kilos of mercury and thousands of liters of diesel.

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Detained miner Fabio Santos said he had worked prospecting for gold in Munduruku territory further along the Tapajos river, but had moved out due to law enforcement missions and conflict with the Indigenous people.

“We thought it would be quieter here. Bolsonaro did not destroy our equipment,” he said.

“Things are going downhill with the new government,” said another miner, Ramon Marques. “God left the gold here for us to enjoy it,” he added.

The men were set free into the jungle on foot. Only the manager of one of the wildcat mining sites, Manuel de Jesus Silva, was taken into police custody.

He ran a store in a wooden shack where he sold canned food and liquor to the miners for grams of gold, and had a snooker table outside for them to play.

“I used to make 200 grams a month, but in the last two months I got just 100 grams,” Silva complained.

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More than 475 billion rupiah ($30.7 million) in fines have been issued so far, an official from the ministry of Maritime Affairs and Investment Firman Hidayat told reporters, who did not provide further details or identify the companies fined.

But experts and campaigners said it would be difficult to check if fines had actually been paid and that the level of fines is “miniscule”.

Greenpeace Indonesia forest campaigner Arie Rompas said that the government and palm oil companies were “fearful” that new European Union rules against deforestation would exclude Indonesian palm oil. So they are “attempting to paper over the illegal destruction of the past”, he said.

Pardoning palm oil

Indonesia said last month it had identified some 200,000 hectares of oil palm plantations in areas designated as forests, which are expected to be returned to the state to be converted back into forests.

Indonesia, the world’s biggest palm oil producer and exporter, issued rules in 2020 to sort out the legality of plantations operating in areas that are supposed to be forests, aimed at fixing governance in the sector.

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Officials said the measures were necessary as some companies have already been tending the land for years.

Rompas described the measures as a “pardoning of companies that have illegally expanded their oil palm plantations into the forest estate”.

“This effectively encourages companies to continue expanding into forest as they know they will be given an amnesty later,” Rompas said.

Companies have to submit paperwork and pay fines to obtain cultivating rights on their plantation by Nov. 2, 2023, according to the rules.

While 3.3 million hectares of the country’s nearly 17 million hectares of palm plantation have been found in forests, only owners of plantations with a combined size of 1.67 million hectares have been identified. That leaves around half unaccounted for.

Lack of transparency

Aida Greenbury, an Indonesian sustainability expert, told Climate Home “It is difficult to assess or see if the fines are real and will be followed through without the government publicly announcing the identity of the companies and the maps of where they are located”.

She pointed out that palm oil companies have been slow to pay fines in the past, as reported by Mongabay.

Brazil lawmakers approve using green fund to pave road through Amazon rainforest

Rompas said the fines were “miniscule compared to the massive losses to society and the environment from deforestation”.

“The government calculation of the fines is very much in favour of the companies”, Rompas said.

Greenpeace calculate the fine as $185 per hectares whereas, they say, the companies making one or two thousand dollars per hectare a year from the palm oil plantations.

As well as contributing to climate change, deforestation endangers organgutans, Sumatran tigers and other species and can threaten indigenous peoples rights and livelihoods.

This article was updated on 27/12/24 to include Greenpeace’s comments

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The bill, which was voted late on Tuesday and still needs Senate approval, allows for the use of conservation funds donated to Brazil to finance the highway project, such as the $1.3 billion Amazon Fund backed by the U.S. and European allies.

The highway was built in the 1970s by a military government pushing to populate the Amazon, but it was quickly abandoned. By the late 1980s, most of the highway running some 900 kilometers from Porto Velho in Rondonia state to Manaus in Amazonas state, had disintegrated into a rutted dirt road.

The BR319 highway (Photo: Reuters)

Much of the route is now impassable during the rainy season. Vehicles that attempt it during dry months crawl along the broken pavement, dodging huge potholes and jungle debris.

Amazon researchers say the repaved road would trigger an explosion of deforestation in Amazonas state, home to most of Brazil’s best-preserved rainforest state due to a lack of roads.

Every major highway project in the Amazon has set off a surge in land grabbing and illegal deforestation. Researchers say BR-319 would open a new frontier for logging that could push the rainforest past a point of no return.

One of the Amazon Fund’s creators Tasso Azevedo told Climate Home in September that the money shouldn’t be spent on the road.

“I don’t think it makes any sense. This project does not fit into any of the fund’s planned support lines,” he said.

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Sila Mesquita is civil society’s representative on the Amazon Fund committee. She said the fund “is meant to keep the forest anding, to maintain its biodiversity and to fight climate change. I don’t see its resources being used for paving”.

The ministry, however, argues that the paving of BR319 would turn the road into the world’s “most sustainable highway” and would allow easier access for police patrols to monitor and prevent deforestation.

Defenders of the project call it necessary to reduce the isolation of the two connected states, Amazonas and Rondonia. With BR-319 out of service much of the year, Manaus is often accessible only by river and air travel from the rest of Brazil.

The bill calls the highway “critical infrastructure, indispensable to national security, requiring the guarantee of its trafficability.” It would authorize the use of donations received by Brazil to help conservation of the Amazon for the “recovery, paving and increasing the capacity of the highway.”

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Methane is the second-biggest cause of climate change after carbon dioxide, and in the short term has a far higher warming effect. Rapid cuts in methane emissions this decade are crucial if the world is to avoid severe climate change.

After all-night talks, negotiators from EU member states and the European Parliament agreed to impose “maximum methane intensity values” by 2030 on producers abroad sending fossil fuels into Europe, the council of the EU, which represents member states, said in a statement.

While burning oil and gas produces carbon dioxide, the process of taking it out of the the ground and transporting it often causes methane gas to leak into the atmosphere.

The import rules are likely to hit major gas suppliers which include the U.S., Algeria and Russia. Moscow slashed deliveries to Europe last year and has since been replaced as Europe’s biggest pipeline gas supplier by Norway, whose supply has among the world’s lowest methane intensity.

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“Finally, the EU tackles the second most important greenhouse gas with ambitious measures,” said Jutta Paulus, the EU Parliament’s co-lead negotiator, adding that the law “will have repercussions worldwide”.

Paulus told reporters importers will face financial penalties if they buy from foreign suppliers that don’t comply with the limit – effectively imposing a fee on non-compliant fuels.

The methane standard would be mandatory for supply contracts signed after the law enters into force, likely later this year, after the European Parliament and EU countries give it final approval.

That step is usually a formality that waves through pre-agreed deals.

A spokesperson for the International Association of Oil & Gas Producers said it is supportive of proportionate, efficient and implementable EU Methane Regulation but said there are still a lot of unknowns left to clarify in the legislation.

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The EU’s exact methane emissions limit will be set out by the European Commission before it applies.

Green group, the Environmental Defense Fund Europe said the measures send a clear signal ahead of the upcoming international climate talks in the United Arab Emirates, COP 28, that climate responsibilities don’t end at county borders.

“As the world’s biggest buyer of natural gas, the EU is strategically leveraging its economic influence to drive global reductions in methane emissions,” Flavia Sollazzo, Senior Director, EU Energy Transition at EDF Europe said.

Methane leaches into the atmosphere from leaky pipelines and infrastructure at oil and gas fields.

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The regulation also introduces new requirements for the oil, gas and coal sectors to measure, report and verify methane emissions.

The deal obliges oil and gas producers in Europe to regularly check for and fix leaks of the potent greenhouse gas in their operations.

It also bans most cases of flaring and venting, when companies intentionally burn off or release unwanted methane into the atmosphere, from 2025 or 2027 depending on the type of infrastructure.

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Climate envoys John Kerry and Xie Zhenhua, meeting in Sunnylands, California on 4-7 November, agreed to revive a bilateral climate working group that will discuss areas of cooperation between the two countries, the joint statement said, though differences remain on issues like phasing out fossil fuels.

“The Sunnylands statement is a timely effort of aligning the United States and China ahead of Cop28,” said Li Shuo, incoming director of the China Climate Hub at the Asia Society.

Li described the relationship between the world’s two biggest greenhouse gas emitters as “a precondition for meaningful global progress” and said the Sunnylands agreement will help “stabilise the politics” ahead of Dubai talks.

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The re-launch of the working group marks the normalisation of the climate relationship between the two countries following a hiatus triggered in 2022 by the visit of former House of Representatives speaker Nancy Pelosi to Taiwan, a self-governing island that China claims.

It will focus on key areas of cooperation, including cutting methane emissions and boosting efficiency and the “circular economy”, and exchange information on policies and technologies to reduce emissions. The two sides also promised to work together to curb forest loss and plastic pollution.

Fossil fuel divide

China’s efforts to cut its own carbon emissions will be in sharp focus at the Cop28 talks, with the country still approving new coal-fired power plants in a bid to ensure energy security.

The United States and China said they support a declaration by G20 leaders to triple global renewable energy capacity by 2030, and also agreed to “accelerate the substitution for coal, oil and gas generation”.

The joint statement said they anticipate “meaningful” reductions in emissions from the power sector this decade, but it fell short of calling for the phasing out of fossil fuels, a goal that China has described as “unrealistic”.

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Both sides also agreed to include methane in their 2035 climate goals – the first time China has made such a pledge – and committed to advancing “at least five” large-scale cooperation projects in carbon capture, utilisation and storage by the end of the decade.

Li said Cop28 still “has its work cut out”, particularly on fossil fuels.

“China also needs to consider what further ambition can be brought to COP,” he added. “Stopping the approval of new coal power projects is a good next step.”

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Under the treaty announced by Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and his Tuvalu counterpart Kausea Natano, Australia will also vet Tuvalu’s security arrangements with other nations.

Albanese said it was Australia’s most significant agreement with a Pacific Island nation, giving “a guarantee that upon a request from Tuvalu for any military assistance based upon security issues, Australia will be there.”

Tuvalu is one of just 13 nations to maintain an official diplomatic relationship with Taiwan, as Beijing has made increasing inroads into the Pacific.

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Under the treaty, “both countries commit to mutually agree any partnership, arrangement or engagement with any other state or entity on security and defence related matters in Tuvalu,” Albanese said in a press conference on the sidelines of a Pacific leaders meeting in the Cook Islands.

An Australian government official said this requirement covered any defence, police, port, telecommunications, energy or cyber security arrangements by Tuvalu.

Although Australia has defence agreements with other Pacific Islands nations, in a region where China recently struck a security pact with Solomon Islands and is seeking to expand its policing ties and infrastructure projects, the Tuvalu treaty goes much further in positioning Australia as its primary security partner.

Migration allowance

Australia would allow 280 people a year to migrate from Tuvalu, boosting remittances back to the island nation with a population of 11,000, which is threatened by rising sea levels caused by climate change.

Natano said Tuvalu had requested the treaty to “safeguard and support each other as we face the existence of threat of climate change and geostrategic challenges”.

The annual cap on visas would ensure migration to Australia “does not cause brain drain”, he added.

“The Australia-Tuvalu Falepili union will be regarded as a significant day in which Australia acknowledged that we are part of the Pacific family,” Albanese said.

Funds will also be provided for land reclamation in Tuvalu to expand land in capital Funafuti by around 6%.

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Tuvalu, a collection of nine low-lying islands mid-way between Australia and Hawaii, is one of the world’s most at-risk countries from climate change and has long drawn international attention to the issue.

Tuvalu told the Cop27 climate summit last year Tuvalu plans to build a digital version of itself, replicating islands and landmarks and preserving its history and culture.

A plan announced by Canberra and Washington last month to fund a new undersea cable in the Pacific would connect Tuvalu, which relies on satellite, to a cable for the first time.

Australia sees deeper economic and social integration with the Pacific Islands as a way to ensure the security of the region, a government official said.

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President Felix Tshisekedi, who is seeking re-election in December, has promised to shake off Congo’s reputation for opaque dealings as he pushes plans to develop dozens of oil and gas blocks – many of them in environmentally sensitive areas.

First to be auctioned were three methane blocks in Lake Kivu, sometimes dubbed a “killer lake” because of a risk of deadly eruption. The extraction project aims to supply gas for power generation, including to hundreds of thousands of people living on the lake’s shores.

The auction, which took place last year, was the first of its kind to be conducted in Congo under a law from 2015 that was designed to promote transparency in the oil and gas sector.

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Canada-based Alfajiri Energy Corporation was included in the auction although an evaluation report produced by a government-appointed commission in October 2022 found the company did not meet minimum financial requirements.

The report, along with two others, was obtained by Reuters in collaboration with the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, a non-profit news organisation. Reuters also independently interviewed three sources directly involved in the auction.

Additionally, a technical report assessing the bid, dated 8 December 2022, appeared to have been altered in Alfajiri’s favour, according to the documents and the sources. The documents do not show why Alfajiri was included in the auction, who requested that the report be edited, or why.

No financial records

Hydrocarbons Minister Didier Budimbu denied any problems with the tender process in an emailed response to questions from Reuters.

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“The process was very transparent and it will remain so. I will make sure of it,” he said in an earlier text message exchange.

Tshisekedi’s office declined to comment, saying any questions about the auction should be directed to Budimbu.

In a written reply on 23 October, Alfajiri’s founder and chief executive Christian Hamuli called the process “rigorous, transparent and credible.”

Congo-born Hamuli registered Alfajiri Energy Corporation on January 10, 2022, three weeks after plans for the auction were first announced, using the address of his home in Calgary, Canada’s company registry shows.

The hydrocarbons ministry’s call for expressions of interest in the project spelt out a clear stipulation, only companies with three years of financial records would be considered suitable, a requirement that reflected a clause in Congo’s new oil and gas regulations.

Specifically, articles 66 and 67 of the regulations say offers will be rejected if they do not meet certain conditions including “the presentation of balance sheets and statements from the last three financial years.”

First hurdle

The first hurdle to clear was the pre-selection stage where a panel of government oil sector officials and technical experts evaluated the suitability of the companies competing for the three blocks.

Having only existed for a few months, Alfajiri failed to produce the required financial records, according to the eight-page, Oct. 22 report from the committee. It showed the three rival applicants for the Lwandjofu block met the requirement.

Joseph Nzau was a lawyer for the ministry when the regulations governing the sector were drafted. He said the financial history requirement was created after several companies that signed previous oil and gas contracts ended up lacking the means to execute projects.

“The rule is clear. A company applying for pre-selection must provide proof of its accounts and balance sheets for the past three years,” he said. He declined to comment on the merits of individual companies.

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In his response to Reuters, Minister Budimbu denied Alfajiri’s lack of financial records should have disqualified it in the pre-selection phase, saying this amounted to a misinterpretation of the law.

Budimbu was responsible for organising the auction to find suitable operators. He was also in charge of forming the panel that drew up the bid assessment reports and passing the panel’s conclusions to the council of ministers, which approved the winner based on the recommendations.

He said Alfajiri scored highly enough to make it through the pre-selection stage despite its lack of paperwork.

Alfajiri’s Hamuli did not directly address questions about the lack of required financial records in Alfajiri’s bid. Alfajiri has “highly qualified and experienced professionals with integrity capable of developing the project in a secure manner,” he said.

The ministry has not announced the size of the investment in the blocks, how the project will be financed, or production goals.

“Killer lake”

Lake Kivu lies in the Rift Valley on Congo’s eastern border with Rwanda. Dissolved at great pressure in water hundreds of meters down near the lake’s bed are large methane reserves and even greater quantities of carbon dioxide.

Lake Kivu is one of three lakes in Africa scientists say are at risk of limnic eruption.

Extracting methane from Lake Kivu, located in one of Africa’s most heavily populated areas, could provide power to some of the 80% of Congolese who have no access to electricity, and potentially reduce the risks from the lake, the Congolese government and experts say.

However, some scientists, including vulcanologist Dario Tedesco, say failure to properly reinject water and by-products could increase the chances of eruptions of carbon dioxide and poisonous hydrogen sulfide, pollute the lake bottom and alter its delicate chemical and physical balance.

Moving on

Despite its lack of financial history, Alfajiri advanced in the process, and its bid for the Lwandjofu block was assessed alongside those of US firm Winds Exploration and Production and Congolese-Lebanese firm Ray Group.

Alfajiri’s bid performed badly on several criteria at this stage, and a report from the panel dated Dec. 8, 2022 showed it received the lowest suitability score among the three bidders.

Of the three submissions, Alfajiri initially received the lowest score – a total of 30.7 points out of a possible 100 – on a scale that assessed how well the bids met financial and technical criteria including their proposed partnership terms with Congo, work plan, and the qualifications of key personnel.

Of that score, it received just two of a possible 30 points in the financial portion of the assessment and 28.7 out of 70 points in the technical portion.

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Alfajiri failed to demonstrate it employed qualified staff, had not submitted a feasibility study or a timetable for the project and “had not taken account of public safety issues,” the report said.

Winds scored the highest of the three bidders, with 53.8 points, the report shows.

Score boosted

But then, an edited version of the report put Alfajiri in first place, the documents show.

The report’s second version – also dated 8 December and seen by Reuters – raised Alfajiri’s score to 55.75, putting it ahead of Winds.

In his response, Budimbu told Reuters the only version of the final report that mattered, and that he had received, was the one in which Alfajiri was awarded the highest score.

Although it gave a higher score, the final report added a number of concerns to the earlier version, including comments that Alfajiri had proposed insufficient financing for requisite state bonuses and social projects.

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Reuters was unable to establish the motive for the new scores in the second report.

Asked if he was aware about any irregular change to the results, Frank Ihekwoaba, chief executive of Winds said “we heard rumours” but had not wanted to escalate it to avoid souring relations with the government. He said the process seemed rigorous for Winds, which won another of the three blocks.

Ray Group did not respond to Reuters’ request for comment.

Hamuli did not directly respond to Reuters’ questions about the changes in the report that led to it winning the block.

Regarding Alfajiri’s suitability for the project, he said Alfajiri was a start-up that would use a better extraction method than competitors, without giving further details on this method.

“I am very proud and confident of our team’s ability to bring the project to fruition,” Hamuli said by text message in September.

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The documents, which were finalised by donor countries in late October, reveal for the first time the breakdown of the $15.5 billion pledge that G7 countries and partners made in December to help the Southeast Asian manufacturing hub and heavy coal user reach net-zero emissions by 2050.

Vietnam pushed for a large share of grants and cheap funding to smooth its planned costly phase-out of coal-fired power plants and replace them with wind farms and other renewables sources, but donors offered mostly expensive loans at market rates amid chronic delays in the country’s power projects.

China objects to UN fund warnings on solar’s forced labour risks

Donors have struggled in climate talks with other developing partners: an $8.5 billion plan for South Africa was adopted in 2021 but has yet to deliver concrete results, and Indonesia has delayed its investment plan linked to donors’ $20 billion pledges.

400+ projects

Vietnam remains committed to cooperating and has prepared a draft list, seen by Reuters, of reform commitments and over 400 projects which could receive G7 money, including 272 on energy infrastructure such as wind and solar farms, power grid upgrades and battery storage systems.

Ahead of the UN Climate Change Conference which begins on 30 November in Dubai, the list needs the approval of international partners who have asked for more ambitious regulatory reforms and the involvement of the civil society in decisions to fight climate change, one official from a donor partner said.

The authoritarian government of Vietnam has jailed five environmental campaigners in the last two years.

Vietnam’s ministries of finance and environment did not reply to requests for comment.

The current G7 offer, which was circulated among selected experts last week, includes $321.5 million in grants, almost entirely from the European Union and EU states, which together are the top financial supporters.

Another $2.7 billion are in concessional loans at low interest rates, of which about two-thirds are provided by the EU, Germany and France, and the other third by the Asian Development Bank (ADB) – with a small portion from Canada.

The overall public funding was slightly increased to $8 billion from the $7.75 billion pledged in December, but over half is in commercial loans at market rates, which Vietnam has been reluctant to accept – especially in the current global context of high interest rates.

The remaining $7.5 billion are expected to come from private investors in costly loans, but those investments hinge on regulatory reforms and the quality of specific projects, the documents said.

Saving the Three Basins means stopping fossil fuel expansion

Washington and Hanoi upgraded their relations to the highest diplomatic status in September, and the United States has pledged $1 billion, almost exclusively in loans at market rates.

Coal generation rising

A climate expert, who declined to be named amid the crackdown in Vietnam on energy experts and activists, said the amount of grants was very low and may not be enough to convince Hanoi to phase out coal.

To finance its power generation plans Vietnam needs roughly $135 billion until 2030 and much more by mid-century, according to government estimates. G7 funds are for an initial three-five year period and are meant to attract much larger private investments.

Under Vietnam’s plans which raised eyebrows among donors when they were published in May, energy generated from coal will increase until 2030, before falling in the following two decades. As a share of total power output, however, coal is expected to drop to 20% in 2030 from 31% in 2020.

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Hundreds of labour-intensive mines are expected to close in the coming decades as they reach the end of their lifespans and countries replace coal with cleaner low-carbon energy sources.

But most of the mines likely to shut down “have no planning underway to extend the life of those operations or to manage a transition to a post-coal economy,” US-based think tank Global Energy Monitor (GEM) warned.

Dorothy Mei, project manager for GEM’s Global Coal Mine Tracker, said governments needed to make plans to ensure workers do not suffer from the energy transition.

“Coal mine closures are inevitable, but economic hardship and social strife for workers are not,” she said.

GEM looked at 4,300 active and proposed coal mine projects around the world covering a total workforce of nearly 2.7 million. It found that more than 400,000 workers are employed in mines set to cease operations before 2035.

Shanxi hardest hit

If plans were implemented to phase down coal to limit global warming to 1.5C, only 250,000 miners – less than 10% of the current workforce – would be required worldwide, GEM estimated.

China’s coal industry, the world’s biggest, currently employs more than 1.5 million people, GEM estimated. Of the 1 million job global job losses expected by 2050, more than 240,000 will be in the province of Shanxi alone.

China’s coal sector has already undergone several waves of restructuring in recent decades, with many mining districts in the north and northeast struggling to find alternative sources of growth and employment following pit closures.

“The coal industry, on the whole, has a notoriously bad reputation for its treatment of workers,” said Ryan Driskell Tate, GEM’s program director for coal.

“What we need is proactive planning for workers and coal communities… so industry and governments will remain accountable to those workers who have borne the brunt for so long.”

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The ADB’s “energy transition mechanism” (ETM) makes use of private and public capital to refinance investments in coal-fired power, allowing power purchase agreements to be shortened and plants to be shut as much as a decade earlier than planned.

ADB’s senior climate advisor Warren Evans said negotiations on the Cirebon One project in Indonesia were now on schedule, and talks were also underway to launch similar projects in the Philippines and Vietnam.

“This is the first that has ever been done, so there are a lot of challenges and uncertainties to be resolved, but the negotiations are proceeding and we expect this to go forward soon,” he told Reuters.

“If we are successful across the countries we are having discussions with right now – if we are successful in reducing the lives of 50% of coal-fired power plants – this will be the largest decarbonisation initiative the world has seen.”

Loan-based finance

The mobilisation of climate finance to help developing countries adapt to climate change will be a major theme at Cop28 climate talks in Dubai this year.

Developed nations have not yet fulfilled a pledge to make $100 billion in annual funding available by 2020, but even when they do, it would not be enough, Evans said.

ADB recently launched its Innovative Finance Facility for Climate in Asia and the Pacific (IF-CAP), a donor-backed guarantee facility allowing it to free up billions of dollars of capital for loans to climate projects in the region.

IF-CAP, launched in May, was criticised by charity group Oxfam, which said it would pile more debt on Asia’s most vulnerable communities.

Evans said he agreed that more concessional and grant finance would also be required to help poor communities adapt, but “action needs to be taken now”.

“If somebody comes up with a different model, where there is funding available, we’ll be all for it,” he said.

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The Global Stocktake report, the latest warning from the U.N. about environmental perils, will form the basis of the COP28 talks in Dubai at the end of the year and follows months of terrifying wildfires and soaring temperatures.

The UN report, culminating a two-year evaluation of the 2015 Paris climate agreement goals, distils thousands of submissions from experts, governments and campaigners.

“The Paris Agreement has driven near-universal climate action by setting goals and sending signals to the world regarding the urgency of responding to the climate crisis,” it said. “While action is proceeding, much more is needed now on all fronts.”

The UN report also calls on governments to scale up renewable energy and phase out all “unabated” fossil fuels, adding both are “indispensible” for a clean energy transition.

Nearly 200 countries agreed in 2015 Paris to limit warming to no more than 2 Celsius above pre-industrial levels, and to strive to keep the increase to 1.5 C.

While each country is responsible for deciding its own climate actions, they also agreed to submit to a progress report by 2023 to see what more should be done. More than 130 countries sent their submissions.

The U.N. said existing national pledges to cut emissions were insufficient to keep temperatures within the 1.5 C threshold. More than 20 gigatonnes of further CO2 reductions were needed this decade – and global net zero by 2050 – in order to meet the goals, the U.N. assessment said.

Bold to-do list

The report urged countries to cut the use of “unabated” coal power by 67-92% by 2030, compared to 2019, and to virtually eliminate it as a source of electricity by 2050.

Low and zero-carbon electricity should account for as much as 99% of the global total by mid-century, and technological challenges holding back carbon capture must be resolved.

The report also called for funding to be unlocked to support low-carbon development, noting that billions of dollars were still being invested in fossil fuels.

“It serves up a bold to-do list for governments to limit warming to 1.5C and protect people everywhere from climate devastation,” said Tom Evans, policy advisor on climate diplomacy at British climate think tank E3G.

Commitment was needed to phase out fossil fuels, set 2030 targets for renewable energy expansion, ensure the financial system funds climate action, and raise funds for adaptation and damage, he said.

“Anything less will fall short on the necessary steps laid out in this report.”

Real commitments

Sultan Al Jaber, who will preside over the Nov. 30-Dec. 12 summit in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), told Reuters the stocktake gave good direction, and urged states and private sector leader to come to COP28 with real commitments.

“To keep 1.5 within reach we must act with ‘ambition and urgency’ to reduce emissions by 43% by 2030,” Al Jaber said in a statement.

UN Climate Change chief, Simon Stiell, urged governments to “carefully study the findings of the report and ultimately understand what it means for them and the ambitious action they must take next.”

On Friday, UN secretary general Antonio Guterres told G20 bloc leaders that they have the power to reset a climate crisis that is “spinning out of control”.

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The northern hemisphere summer of 2023 has been the hottest since records began, with prolonged heatwaves in North America and southern Europe causing catastrophic wildfires and spikes in mortality rates. July was the hottest month ever recorded, while average August temperatures were also 1.5 Celsius higher than pre-industrial levels.

A study by Climate Central, a US-based research group, looked at temperatures in 180 countries and 22 territories and found that 98% of the world’s population were exposed to higher temperatures made at least twice more likely by carbon dioxide pollution.

“Virtually no one on Earth escaped the influence of global warming during the past three months,” said Andrew Pershing, Climate Central’s vice president for science.

“In every country we could analyse, including the southern hemisphere, where this is the coolest time of year, we saw temperatures that would be difficult – and in some cases nearly impossible – without human-caused climate change,” he said.

Heatwaves ‘infinitely more likely’

Climate Central assesses whether heat events are made more likely as a result of climate change by comparing observed temperatures with those generated by models that remove the influence of greenhouse gas emissions.

It said as many as 6.2 billion people experienced at least one day of average temperatures that were at least five times more likely as a result of climate change, the maximum value in Climate Central’s Climate Shift Index.

The heatwaves in North America and southern Europe would have been impossible without climate change, said Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment.

“We have looked at isolated heatwaves,” she said. “They have not been made five times more likely. They have been made infinitely more likely because they would not have occurred without climate change.”

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Developing nations successfully demanded at last year’s Cop27 climate summit funding for loss and damage caused by climate change, including a dedicated fund, which countries will adopt this year.

In climate negotiations, “loss and damage” refers to existing costs incurred from climate-fueled weather impacts, such as last year’s devastating Pakistan flooding.

EU puts Maroš Šefčovič in charge of climate policy

The new Loss and Damage fund should target the most vulnerable countries and focus on areas not already covered by development banks or emergency relief funds, two U.S. State Department officials told Reuters.

The European Union has taken a similar position. But the G77+China umbrella group of countries classified as developing by the United  Nations argues that they are all particularly vulnerable and should be eligible.

Need to specialise

US negotiator Christina Chan is part of a 24-country committee deciding how the fund will work before the Cop28 climate summit in Dubai can officially adopt it this year. The committee will meet again next week in the Dominican Republic.

“We don’t really want redundancy with existing funds, because that’s not an effective and efficient way to deal with the issue,” said Sue Biniaz, deputy special envoy for climate at the State Department.

Instead, she said, the new fund should develop an expertise “as opposed to covering everything in the universe.”

Germany set to miss net zero by 2045 target as climate efforts falter

The U.S. had wanted a two-year process to analyse funding gaps before launching a fund, but it went along with the Cop27 consensus for action this year, Biniaz said.

At the committee’s last meeting in July, the U.S. proposed focusing the fund on covering slow-onset events such as sea level rise and desertification, as such needs can fall through the funding cracks, said Chan. This would mean less focus on climate disasters like floods, heatwaves and storms.

She said the US also suggested the fund be used for post-disaster reconstruction if a country needs more beyond eligible development bank grants.

Reluctant evolution

The U.S. position on loss and damage has evolved in recent years, from a point at which Washington and the EU resisted even discussing the issue for fear of legal liability for historic emissions.

At Cop27, the EU agreed to a fund on the condition that China pays into it – although it later abandoned that insistence. The US did not block the Cop decision approving the fund.

Biniaz said she “violently opposes” arguments by some countries and environmental groups that developed countries have a legal obligation to pay into the fund.

Nonprofit Action Aid has said, for example, that the 1992 U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change implies this obligation with the idea that industrialized nations responsible for emitting most of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere over the last century should do more to address climate change.

“That’s just completely inaccurate,” she said on whether developed countries are liable, adding that the 2015 Paris Agreement did not include such an obligation.

Other sources

Instead, both Washington and Brussels say the fund should be filled from myriad sources including industry taxes, philanthropic donations or other schemes. Biniaz said one example might be revenues from the U.S.-proposed carbon reduction accelerator.

The U.S. and EU have also said a big economy like China could contribute, despite its low per person income and relatively small historic contribution to climate change .

Biniaz said this came up during recent bilateral meetings with China, but she did not offer more details.

Other negotiators and officials have proposed ideas including creating new revenue streams through taxing environmental pollution, such as methane emissions or shipping pollution and windfall profits from oil and gas.

Ecuadorians reject Amazon oil drilling in historic referendum

“We need to have a global system with a broad contribution heavily weighted to the richest people to make the biggest contribution,” said Avinash Persaud, special finance envoy to Prime Minister Mia Mottley of Barbados.

With many national budgets strained, Persaud said the idea of taxing emissions was gaining popularity in some countries.

Who benefits?

Another sticking point likely to emerge is who should benefit from a fund, with disagreement over which countries are most vulnerable

“It's very difficult to create a straight cut dividing eligible and noneligible,” said Dileimy Orzoco, senior policy advisor at climate advisory group E3G.

The world’s least developed nations and small island developing nations want to be prioritised for funding.

Others worry that limiting funds to these countries will leave out some of the worst hit by climate impacts, such as middle-income countries like Pakistan or the Philippines.

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The European Union has sought to be a climate leader and Germany has set itself more ambitious targets than the bloc as a whole, but in many countries politics and the economic crisis have pushed the climate crisis down the agenda.

Germany, Europe’s largest economy, aims to cut its carbon dioxide emissions by 65% by 2030 compared with 1990. Last year its CO2 levels were already 40% below the 1990 level, but the new reports said that was not enough.

“The expected overall reduction is probably overestimated,” Hans-Martin Henning, the chairman of a council of climate experts that advises the government said in a statement on Tuesday.

Ecuadorians reject Amazon oil drilling in historic referendum

Failing net zero plan

The German government has ordered 130 measures in various sectors. The buildings and transport sectors in particular are failing to implement them, the council of government climate advisers’ report said.

The buildings sector is expected to be 35 million tonnes of CO2 short of target by 2030, while the transport sector is expected to have excess emissions of between 117 million and 191 million tonnes compared with the government target.

Tuesday’s advisers’ report coincided with another from the UBA that found Germany cannot become climate neutral by 2045 on the basis of planned and existing government climate policy.

US sparks controversy by backing oil company’s carbon-sucking plans

It drafted two scenarios, one for current policy and one for planned, that found only 82% and 86% of targeted emissions cuts compared to 1990, would be achieved.

“According to the current status, Germany would still emit 229 million tonnes of climate-damaging greenhouse gas emissions in the target year 2045,” the UBA report found.

Government promises

The economy ministry said policies it has implemented since the current government took office in late 2021 would cut around 80% of the surplus CO2 emissions it said were a legacy of policies by the previous government. It also said the coalition government would examine the council’s findings to try to get the country on target.

Under pressure from the pro-business FDP party, the ruling coalition in June agreed to dilute a bill to phase out oil and gas heating systems from 2024. The changes would contribute to the building sector missing its targets, the report found.

Devastating Beijing floods test China’s ‘sponge cities’

The transport sector accounts for two thirds of the emissions remaining to be cut, the UBA report showed.

The council said assumptions made by the transport ministry on the effectiveness of the planned and already implemented measures, such as a discounted national rail ticket, a CO2 surcharge on truck tolls and increased working from home, were also optimistic.

“Private vehicle individual transport is not addressed, so to speak. And that is ultimately a gap in the transport programme,” Brigitte Knopf, deputy chairwoman of the council, told a news conference presenting the report findings on Tuesday.

The transport ministry was not immediately available for comment.

In response to the reports, non-profit group Deutsche Umwelthilfe (DUH) said an emergency climate programme was needed, especially for the transport sector.

It said it would take legal action to try to enforce a speed limit on German motorways, which currently have no limits on how fast motorists can drive, and to reduce government subsidies that harm the environment, such as tax relief for company cars.

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China has ramped up its wind and solar manufacturing capabilities in a bid to decarbonise its economy and ease its dependence on coal, and it is now on track to meet its goal to bring total wind and solar capacity to 1,200 gigawatts (GW) by 2030, up from 758 GW at the end of last year.

But as older projects are replaced and decommissioned, waste volumes are set to soar, with large amounts of capacity already approaching retirement age, posing big environmental risks.

To cope with the challenge, China will draw up new industrial standards and rules detailing the proper ways to decommission, dismantle and recycle wind and solar facilities, the National Development and Reform Commission, said on Wednesday.

Indonesia delays $20bn green plan, after split with rich nations on grants and new coal plants

The state planning agency said that China would have a “basically mature” full-process recycling system for wind turbines and solar panels by the end of the decade.

Photovoltaic (PV) panels have a lifespan of around 25 years, and many of China’s projects are already showing significant signs of wear and tear, China’s official Science and Technology Daily newspaper said in June.

The paper cited experts as saying that China would need to recycle 1.5 million metric tons of PV modules by 2030, rising to around 20 million tons in 2050.

The problem of waste from the renewable energy sector has become a growing global concern. Total waste from solar projects alone could reach 212 million tons a year by 2050, according to one scenario drawn up by the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) last year.

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Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who has staked his international reputation on improving Brazil’s environmental standing, had been pushing for the region to unite behind a common policy of ending deforestation by 2030 – one he has already adopted.

Instead, the joint declaration issued on Tuesday in the Brazilian city of Belem created an alliance for combating forest destruction, with countries left to pursue their own individual deforestation goals.

The document also leaves out any mentions to halting fossil fuel contracts in the Amazon rainforest, a proposal that was championed by the Colombian President Gustavo Petro but ultimately failed to make it into the final text.

The Brazilian coalition of climate NGOs, Climate Observatory, said the declaration fell short of expectations, adding the agreement “fails the rainforest and the planet”.

Pressure grows on governments and banks to stop supporting Amazon oil and gas

Slow action

The failure of the eight Amazon countries to agree on a pact to protect their own forests points to the larger, global difficulties at forging an agreement to combat climate change. Many scientists say policymakers are acting too slowly to head off catastrophic global warming.

Lula and other national leaders left Tuesday’s meeting without commenting on the declaration. Presidents from Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia and Peru attended the summit, while Ecuador, Guyana, Suriname and Venezuela sent other top officials.

Brazil’s Foreign Minister Mauro Vieira said in a press briefing that the issue of deforestation “in no way whatsoever will divide the region” and cited “an understanding about deforestation” in the declaration, without elaborating.

As Guyana shows, carbon offsets will not save the Amazon rainforest

This week’s summit brought together the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization (ACTO) for the first time in 14 years, with plans to reach a broad agreement on issues from fighting deforestation to financing sustainable development.

Márcio Astrini, executive secretary of the Brazilian NGO coalition Climate Observatory, said the summit’s declaration is a “first step” but added it still lacks “concrete responses to the situation we’re dealing with”.

“The planet is melting, we are breaking temperature records every day. It is not possible that, in a scenario like this, eight Amazonian countries cannot put in a statement, in bold letters, that deforestation needs to be zero and that exploring for oil in the middle of the forest is not a good idea,” said Astrini.

Oil in the Amazon?

Tensions emerged in the lead up to the summit around diverging positions on deforestation and oil development.

Fellow Amazon countries also rebuffed Colombia’s leftist President Gustavo Petro’s ongoing campaign to end new oil development in the Amazon. In his speech on Tuesday, Petro likened the left’s desire to keep drilling for oil to the right-wing denial of climate science.

He said the idea of making a gradual “energy transition” away from fossil fuels was a way to delay the work needed to stop climate change.

G20 climate talks fail to deliver emission cuts despite leadership pleas

Civil society organisations accused the Brazilian government of opposing a mention to fossil fuels in the final text, adding the country wanted to “bury” any mentions of a fossil fuel phase out in the region.

Brazil is weighing whether to develop a potentially huge offshore oil find near the mouth of the Amazon River and the country’s northern coast, which is dominated by rainforest.

“What we are discussing in Brazil today is of an extensive and large area – in my vision perhaps the last frontier of oil and gas before … the energy transition,” Brazil’s Energy Minister Alexandre Silveira told reporters after Petro’s speech.

Silveira said they should conduct research into what oil is there in order to make a decision on the issue.

Illegal mining

Beyond deforestation, the summit also did not fix a deadline on ending illegal gold mining, although leaders agreed to cooperate on the issue and to better combat cross-border environmental crime.

The final joint statement, called the Belem Declaration, strongly asserted indigenous rights and protections, while also agreeing to cooperate on water management, health, common negotiating positions at climate summits, and sustainable development.

As Reuters previously reported, the declaration additionally established a science body to meet annually and produce authoritative reports on science related to the Amazon rainforest, akin to the United Nations’ International Panel on Climate Change.

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The meeting of the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization (ACTO) gathers heads of state from Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Peru, Suriname and Venezuela for two days in the northern Brazilian city of Belem.

They will aim to forge unified policies, goals and positions in international negotiations on some 130 issues ranging from financing for sustainable development to indigenous inclusion.

But at a pre-summit meeting last month, Colombian President Gustavo Petro pushed his Brazilian counterpart Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva to block all new oil development in the Amazon. Brazil is weighing whether to develop a potentially huge offshore oil find near the mouth of the Amazon River.

Gas lock-in: Debt-laden Ghana gambles on LNG imports

“Are we going to let hydrocarbons be explored in the Amazon rainforest? To deliver them as exploration blocks? Is there wealth there or is there the death of humanity?” Petro asked in a speech alongside Lula.

Days later, Petro underscored the issue in an op-ed in the Miami Herald, writing: “As heads of state, we must assure the end of new oil and gas exploration in the Amazon.”

The debate over drilling for oil near the mouth of the Amazon has sparked fierce infighting in Lula’s seven-month-old government, pitting advocates for regional development against environmentalists.

Asked whether oil would factor into an accord at the summit, Brazilian diplomats told journalists last week that a joint statement was still being negotiated and economic development more broadly was under discussion.

UK government bets on ‘pragmatic’ climate inaction ahead of election

A Brazilian government official, who was not authorized to speak to the media, said that Colombia was in an easy position to propose no new drilling in the Amazon because it did not have significant oil reserves there, unlike Brazil or Peru.

For his part, Lula pushed at the pre-summit meeting in Leticia, Colombia, for all countries in the region to pledge an end to deforestation by 2030. Only Bolivia and Venezuela have not yet made such a commitment.

Bolivia could be a barrier to such a regional 2030 pact, the Brazilian government source said. Primary forest loss there rose 32% last year amid fires and rapid agricultural expansion, according to Global Forest Watch.

The Bolivian government did not respond to requests for comment.

Amazon governments set sights on narco-deforestation

Other differences that could surface at the summit are more subtle disagreements about priorities. Colombia hosted the pre-summit meeting where top on the agenda was cross-border collaboration to address the rising threat of drug traffickers perpetrating environmental crimes in the Amazon.

Brazil, by contrast, has emphasised opportunities for sustainable development, reflecting Lula’s campaign platform focused on poverty reduction and conservation.

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The court’s interim charging order – meaning it is not yet final and can be objected to by the debtor – was issued on Wednesday but made public on Friday.

The judgement was issued under the controversial energy charter treaty (ECT) which protects investments in both clean and polluting types of energy.

The Spanish state-owned land that can be seized by the foreign investors – Infrastructure Services Luxembourg and Energia Termosolar – houses the an international private school located in a former Dominican convent.

Gas lock-in: Debt-laden Ghana gambles on LNG imports

Nick Cherryman, one of the lawyers representing the investors, said the step was “only necessary because Spain, a recalcitrant debtor, refuses to honour the judgment against it”.

The investors took Spain to arbitration under the ECT nearly 10 years ago for withdrawing subsidies for renewable energy.

Spain, which relies heavily on foreign energy sources, tried in the early 2000s to lure renewables investors with a programme combining subsidies, tax breaks and guaranteed fixed feed-in tariffs.

But after the 2008 financial crisis, it started altering the framework under which renewables could receive support, which some investors saw as a violation of their legitimate expectations.

UK government bets on ‘pragmatic’ climate inaction ahead of election

The World Bank’s International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) awarded the investors 101 million euros plus interest in 2018, with the award later being registered at London’s High Court.

Spain tried to overturn the award citing sovereign immunity, but the High Court dismissed Madrid’s application in May.

Alongside other European countries, Spain has announced its intention to leave the treaty – although both renewable and fossil fuel investments will remain protected for 20 years under the treaty’s  so-called sunset clause.

The European Commission negotiated reforms to the ECT last year which allowed countries to stop protecting fossil fuel investments while continuing to protect renewables.

But these reforms were rejected by Spain and other EU countries, who decided to leave under the unreformed treaty and try to limit the effects of the sunset clause through agreements with other EU member states.

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“Narco-deforestation,” as it was referred to in a United Nations report last month, represents a new target for law enforcement operating in the Amazon rainforest, where the lines between specialist criminal outfits are increasingly blurred.

The eight member countries of the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization (ACTO), who are due to meet in the northeastern Brazilian city of Belem for an Aug. 8-9 summit, are expected to reach an agreement to cooperate on combating such crimes, said Carlos Lazary, the organization’s executive director.

“We’re worried about the Amazon,” Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who proposed the summit on the campaign trail, said in a speech last month. “It’s there that organized crime, drug trafficking and everything illegal is fomented.”

Deep-sea mining ban draws closer despite China’s opposition

Boosted by bumper Andean coca harvests and record-breaking cocaine demand in Europe, the Amazon has in recent years become a drug-trafficking thoroughfare. Illicit cargos easily pass through the vast, sparsely populated and thinly policed region on boats, planes or even submarines on their way to the Atlantic Ocean.

With booming profits, many of the drug gangs in the Amazon are now laundering the money through illegal land speculation, logging, mining and other means, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime warned in its annual World Drug Report.

Charles Nascimento, a Brazilian Federal Police officer and veteran of the Amazon drugs beat, said criminal groups often use existing drug routes to get illegally harvested gold and wood to market.

“Many people who work in wildcat mines also work as traffickers and vice versa,” he said. “It’s like they feed off of each other.”

This increasing criminal cross-pollination has prompted police to expand a recurring Amazon anti-narcotics operation between Peru and Brazil, scheduled for later this year, to also target environmental crimes, Nascimento said.

Murders prompt pushback

The 2022 murders of indigenous expert Bruno Pereira and British journalist Dom Phillips, allegedly at the hands of a poaching ring with organized crime connections, prompted Lula to increase policing in remote areas, Nascimento said.

Lula – who has staked his international reputation on ending the rampant deforestation that surged under his far-right predecessor Jair Bolsonaro – has reeled off a flurry of measures to combat environmental crime since taking office on Jan. 1.

The most important has been the creation of a specialized Federal Police directorate focused on the Amazon and environmental crime.

His administration has also proposed a center for international police cooperation in the Amazon’s largest city of Manaus, which may factor into the final agreement at the summit, ACTO’s Lazary said.

Brazil seeks European trade advantages in return for Amazon protection

Neighboring countries – as well as agencies in developed countries importing illegal wood and gold – will be invited to send permanent representatives to the center to help coordinate investigations, said Valdecy Urquiza, head of the Federal Police’s international cooperation directorate.

At a meeting of international police in Belem a day before next week’s presidential summit, Brazil will also promote plans to share lab technology that can pinpoint whether wood and good is illegally sourced, Urquiza said.

Databases of gold and wood samples taken from around the Amazon – which use molecular analysis to identify the specific locations of the source – can help police determine if seized goods originated in an area where it is illegal to mine, such as in Indigenous reserves, Urquiza said.

Brazil – which will host the global COP30 climate change summit in Belem in 2025 – has begun to train police in Latin America and Europe on these methods.

As Guyana shows, carbon offsets will not save the Amazon rainforest

Past international meetings and agreements have largely failed to generate much cooperation between wary national police forces in the Amazon, said Robert Muggah, lead author of the U.N. report’s chapter on organized crime in the Amazon.

Amazon countries signed a strongly worded commitment to cooperate on environmental crimes in the 2019 Leticia Declaration. But Brazil’s Bolsonaro and former Colombia President Ivan Duque excluded leftist Venezuela, and the signatories failed to follow through with concrete actions, Muggah said. South America’s swing left under Lula and Colombia’s Gustavo Petro may help improve cooperation, he added.

“Crime is among the top, if not the top issue confronting the protection of a standing forest in the Amazon,” he said. “It should be concerning to our decision-makers.”

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Brazil felt targeted by a “side letter” added this year to the trade deal struck in 2019, adding environmental guarantees to the original accord, they said. The new Brazilian government of President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who has made bold pledges of environmental stewardship in contrast to his predecessor, has taken its time to come up with a response.

But the South American trade bloc Mercosur will prepare its counterproposal this weekbefore meeting with EU negotiators in August in the hopes of closing the accord by the end of the year, two Brazilian diplomats told Reuters.

The sources said Brazil would also seek new exceptions to opening government purchases for foreign firms in the health industry, public-sector construction and green technology.

Brazil’s Foreign Ministry and the EU declined to comment.

As Guyana shows, carbon offsets will not save the Amazon rainforest

The Europeans drafted the side letter in response to Brazil’s far-right former President Jair Bolsonaro, who undercut environmental protections, allowing deforestation to soar. Since coming to power at the start of the year, Lula has improved Brazil’s environmental policy, but European diplomats say the EU still needs guarantees against a relapse.

Brazil fears the addendum could lead to trade sanctions. Its diplomats complain that the new rules go beyond the Paris climate agreement.

“There are new obligations that are unacceptable. If sanctions are applied, we want other concessions to compensate,” the diplomat said, requesting anonymity ahead of sensitive negotiations.

The EU recently passed a law banning six imported products if linked to deforestation, which Brazilian exporters and government officials saw as a protectionist move.

G20 climate talks fail to deliver emission cuts despite leadership pleas

One of the Brazilian diplomats said that new law had muddied the waters by failing to distinguish between legal and illegal deforestation in Brazil, making it more difficult to conclude the trade talks by year-end.

The EU has warned against trying to renegotiate parts of the trade agreement, given that it took two decades to reach an initial deal. Brazilian diplomats say they are seeking to tweak concessions and quotas, so as not to reopen chapters that could stall the whole deal.

A European diplomat in Brasilia said the EU hoped to resume talks in August with the Mercosur counterproposal on the table.

He said a “re-balancing” of concessions, however, would be difficult without reopening chapters of the trade deal.

UN deep-sea mining talks deadlocked over agenda clash

“The government procurement chapter is not very comprehensive and already includes a lot of exceptions, but okay, let’s look at this,” he added, noting that the defense industry was already excluded, along with Brazil’s state and municipal governments.

On the environmental guarantees irking Brazil’s new government, the European diplomat said the EU recognized what Brazil is now doing to protect the Amazon forest.

“But we still need guarantees going forward because we conclude agreements with the country and not with the government that is in office,” he said.

For Welber Barral, a former Brazilian foreign trade secretary, there is a window to finalize the accord, which has never had so much support from Brazil’s private sector. But ironing out remaining differences could take time.

“To be realistic, concluding it by the end of the year is a very optimistic goal,” he said.

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At a summit in Chennai, India, on Friday developed countries pushed for a commitment to peak emissions by 2025 and to cut them by 60% by 2035 (from 2019 levels) to limit global warming. This is what needs to happen to limit global warming to the critical figure of 1.5°C, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

But developing nations opposed the demands, wanting to stick to the Paris Agreement that allowed different countries to tackle global warming in different ways depending on their circumstances, Reuters reported.

The outcome conflicts with a joint plea by the Cop28 boss Sultan al Jaber and the head of the UN climate body Simon Stiell urging G20 ministers to “leave Chennai on the right path and with a clear signal that the political will to tackle the climate crisis is there”.

G20 climate talks

The G20 is seen as a key forum to reach a consensus on targets ahead of UN climate summits. The group of nations is responsible for 85% of the world’s GDP and 80% of the world’s emissions. “The world needs its leaders to unite, act and deliver; and that must start with the G20”, said al Jaber and Stiell.

But, after days of intense discussions, the talks ended with the same outcome as the meeting of G20 energy ministers’ last week: no agreement and fractured relations.

Some European officials accused a “small group of countries” of trying to walk back previous climate pledges.

As fires rage around the world and temperatures break records, the #G20 has unfortunately failed to act as a group with the necessary urgency and clarity. In the face of an acute climate crisis, such a signal from the world's biggest emitters is unacceptable. 1/2

— Jennifer Morgan (@climatemorgan) July 28, 2023

“We were asked to make bold choices, to demonstrate courage, commitment and leadership. But we, collectively, failed to achieve that. We cannot be driven by the lowest common denominator, or by narrow national interests. We cannot allow the pace of change to be set by the slowest movers in the room”, the EU’s Environment Commissioner Virginijus Sinkevicius said.

UN climate fund suspends project in Nicaragua over human rights concerns

Disagreements also resulted in the failure to produce a joint text at the end of the meeting. Instead, officials issued an outcome statement and a chair’s summary of the debate.

The summary said countries had “divergent views on the issues of energy transitions and how to reflect them in this document”.

Division ahead of Cop28

The talks in Chennai are a replay of the divisions on display last Saturday when G20 energy ministers sparred over commitments to cut the use of fossil fuels and set renewable energy targets.

Phasing down unabated fossil fuels by mid-century and tripling renewable energy capacity by 2030 are among the pillars of the plan outlined by Cop28 chief Sultan al Jaber.

Observers told Climate Home News they were surprised by the divisions over the renewables goal that had until then appeared to attract broad consensus.

G20 divisions over key climate goals pile pressure on Cop28 hosts

At last week’s meeting governments split into three camps, according to two sources with knowledge of the talks.

The Indian G20 presidency, supported by the EU and Germany, championed the higher-achieving target of tripling renewable energy capacity.

UN deep-sea mining talks deadlocked over agenda clash

A group of nations, including France, the US and South Korea, pushed to water down the commitment and broaden the language away from a specific focus on renewables and towards the inclusion of “low-carbon” solutions, including nuclear power and carbon capture technologies.

Hardliners like Russia, Saudi Arabia, China and South Africa opposed the inclusion of any renewable energy targets at all.

Last call

The spotlight is now on the Cop28 team headed by al Jaber. He has been under mounting pressure to bridge divisions and engineer some consensus ahead of the Dubai summit in November.

“The Cop28 Presidency will continue to call on all parties to make a clear commitment to this ambitious but achievable target at every opportunity in the lead-up to COP28″, a spokesperson for the team told Climate Home News.

The meeting of the G20 leaders in September will be one of the last opportunities on the calendar to show some progress toward achieving that goal.

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The summit was expected to lay down groundwork ahead of the Cop28 in Dubai. But it unearthed deep divisions between governments over some of the key issues at stake, piling pressure on the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to find a consensus around its vision for the climate summit in November.

Phasing down unabated fossil fuels by mid-century and tripling renewable energy capacity by 2030 are among the pillars of the plan outlined by Cop28 chief Sultan al Jaber.

Alden Meyer from climate think tank E3G said the Cop28 presidency “now has an even clearer sense of the fault lines among major countries” in reaching the outcome it is seeking for the climate summit and “must intensify its discussions with ministers and leaders in the weeks ahead”.

Under record heatwave, US and China “unstick” climate talks

A Cop28 spokesperson told Climate Home News that “tripling renewable energy capacity by 2030 is a critical enabler of keeping the goal of 1.5 degrees Celsius within reach”.

“The COP28 Presidency will continue to call on all parties to make a clear commitment to this ambitious but achievable target at every opportunity in the lead up to COP28”, they added.

G20 ministers could not strike a deal after days of intense discussions, during which some fossil-fuel-producing nations, led by Saudi Arabia, opposed those targets, according to sources familiar with the matter.

Disagreements also resulted in the failure to produce a joint text at the end of the meeting. Instead, officials issued an outcome statement and a chair’s summary of the debate.

Fossil fuel divisions

The document said some nations emphasized the “importance of making efforts towards phase down of unabated fossil fuels”, while others focused on the use of technologies to capture greenhouse gas emissions.

At the root of the divisions – the summary says – is the view that “fossil fuels currently continue to play a significant role in the global energy mix, eradication of energy poverty, and in meeting the growing energy demand”.

Frans Timmermans steps down from EU’s climate leadership

This is understood to reflect the position of countries like Saudi Arabia and Russia, which had already blocked the inclusion of similar language at Cop27 last year.

At this year’s climate summit, the EU will push again for a global pledge to phase out unabated fossil fuels “well ahead of 2050” with support expected from a range of small island states and Latin American nations.

‘Disappointing’ renewables language

Further fault lines emerged over a pledge to triple renewable energy production by 2030. The summary said countries noted that there is a “need to scale up the deployment of renewable energy at an accelerated pace”. But the goal of tripling capacity within the next seven years was only mentioned in the context of “voluntary contributions”.

Major fossil fuel producers Saudi Arabia, Russia, China, South Africa and Indonesia have opposed this language, Reuters reported.

Dozens of oil & industry lobbyists attended secretive shipping emissions talks

Dave Jones, global insights lead at Ember, told Climate Home News the failure of the G20 to get behind this commitment is disappointing. “It shows that we will need to fight a lot harder than perhaps we thought to get these agreed at Cop28”, he said.

The G20 member countries together account for over three-quarters of global emissions and gross domestic product, and a cumulative effort by the group to decarbonise is crucial in the global fight against climate change.

The article was updated after publication to include a statement from the Cop28 team

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Timmermans has led the climate policy of the EU’s executive arm, the European Commission, since December 2019. He led the EU’s delegation to three Cop climate talks but he will not do so at Cop28 in December.

His successor currently unknown but may be just a stop-gap until the next set of commissioners come into power next year, around June. One commissioner from each country is nominated by each of the EU’s member states.

Under Timmermans leadership, the EU pushed internationally for measures to cut methane emissions at Cop26, ended its long-standing opposition to a loss and damage fund at Cop27 and is pushing for a commitment to phase out fossil fuels and ramp up renewables at Cop28.

Domestically, during Timmermans tenure the EU set to target net zero by 2050 and to reduce emissions 55% by 2030 on 1990 levels through a package of measures known as “fit for 55”. But the bloc was widely criticised for endorsing gas as a transition fuel last year.

Alessia Virone, Clean Air Task Force’s European government affairs director, told Climate Home Timmermans would be missed.

“He was the driving force for the green deal,” she said, “now we will have to see who will ensure the remaining green deal legislations are going across the finishing line”.

The 62-year old speaks English, German, French, Italian and Russian in addition to his native Dutch. He is known for speaking frankly and emotionally at international climate talks. At Cop27, he threatened to walk away from talks unless he won concessions before failing to follow throw on that threat, saying that to do so would hurt vulnerable countries.

At a summit to discuss adaptation finance last September, he told African leaders that many European citizens would not be persuaded by the “moral point that those suffering the most consequences are not responsible for creating the crisis” because “what is closer to your own worries is always bigger on your agenda than someone else’s worries”.

Dutch opening

Before joining the European Commission in 2014, Timmermans was the Dutch foreign minister. He represented the centre-left Labour Party in a coalition government led by Mark Rutte.

Earlier this month, Rutte’s latest coalition government collapsed after failing to reach an agreement on restricting immigration, triggering a vote on Nov. 22.

Timmermans formally announced his candidacy to lead the ticket for Labour and Green Left parties, which are joining forces in a bid to stem a decline in support for left-leaning parties.

“This morning I told the Labour and Green Left parties that I would love to be a candidate to lead them in the next elections,” Timmermans said on national Dutch television.

An EU commission spokesperson declined to comment on his possible departure, first reported by Dutch newspaper de Volkskrant.

He was expected to leave his EU post before the autumn to join campaigning in the Netherlands.

This article was updated to include Alessia Virone’s comment on 20 July

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In a speech laying out the country’s plan for the COP28 summit, to be held in Dubai in November, Sultan al-Jaber said the event should also yield international goals to triple renewable energy, double energy savings and hydrogen production by 2030.

“We must be brutally honest about the gaps that need to be filled, the root causes and how we got to this place here today,” Jaber told a meeting in Brussels of climate ministers and officials from countries including Brazil, China, the United States and European Union members.

“Then we must apply a far-reaching, forward-looking, action-oriented and comprehensive response to address these gaps practically,” he said.

EU to push for fossil fuel phaseout ‘well ahead of 2050’ at Cop28

The Cop28 summit will be the first formal assessment of countries’ progress towards the Paris Agreement’s target to limit climate change to 1.5 Celsius of warming. Countries’ current policies and pledges would fail to meet that goal.

“We can’t afford a meaningless stocktake. This is about accountability of our previous, present and future updates,” Canadian Climate Minister Steven Guilbeault told Thursday’s meeting.

The assessment at Cop28 – known as the Global Stocktake – will increase pressure on major emitters to update their actions to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

Canada pledges US$340m to UN’s Green Climate Fund

Al-Jaber appointed Denmark’s climate minister Dan Joergensen and South Africa’s climate minister Barbara Creecy to co-ordinate discussions on the response to the stocktake.

Jaber said all governments should update their emissions-cutting targets by September, which the UAE did last month.

Climate finance

The UAE, a major oil exporter, has been under pressure to lay out its vision for the Cop28 summit and guide preparations among the nearly 200 countries expected to attend.

A round of preparatory United Nations climate negotiations in Bonn in June yielded little progress. Countries spent days wrangling over issues including whether to even discuss urgent CO2-cutting action – known in U.N. jargon as the “mitigation work programme”.

After “sleepless nights”, governments strike deal on Green Climate Fund strategy

Jaber, who is also the head of UAE state-owned oil company Adnoc, said the Cop28 summit also aims to establish a promised fund to compensate poorer countries where climate change is inflicting irreparable damage.

Countries finally agreed at last year’s UN climate talks to form the “loss and damage” fund – but left the toughest decisions for later, including which countries should pay into it.

Finance has dominated recent climate negotiations, as poorer nations demand greater support to both invest in low-carbon energy and cope with spiralling costs from droughts, floods and rising sea levels.

Jaber called for a “comprehensive transformation” of international financial institutions to unlock more capital to tackle climate change – echoing ideas put forward by climate-vulnerable nations including the Barbados-led “Bridgetown Initiative” to reform multilateral finance institutions.

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Consultants and analysts have warned of looming shortages due to surging demand for key minerals like lithium and cobalt used in electric vehicles, wind turbines and other clean energy technologies.

But after investment in critical minerals production jumped 30% last year to $41 billion, having gained 20% in 2021, that picture is looking brighter, the IEA said.

In key battery mineral lithium, the IEA forecasts supply by 2030 will reach 420,000 metric tons – only a touch short of demand estimated at 443,000 to meet government pledges, though well below the 702,000 required for net zero.

The size of the market for critical minerals for EVs, wind, solar & other clean technologies hit $320 billion in 2022 & is growing rapidly

Investment in mineral development is surging too, up 60% in last 2 years, showing how fast clean energy is moving https://t.co/2Daf1Y0qp0 pic.twitter.com/m2aqldrBH0

— Fatih Birol (@fbirol) July 11, 2023

“We are happy that for a change we can give some good news,” IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol told Reuters in an interview.

“This is testimony that the markets are buying in to the fact that the clean energy transition is moving very fast.”

Critical mineral start-up firms raised a record $1.6 billion in 2022, up 160% from the previous year, the IEA said.

Demand for critical minerals has surged over the past five years, including a tripling in consumption of lithium and a jump of 70% for cobalt, with the total critical mineral market now worth $320 billion, it said.

While the supply picture is improving, the Paris-based energy watchdog warned that delays and cost overruns for projects posed a risk to the upbeat scenario.

More work is also needed to diversify from key nations that have tight control on output of many minerals, such as China, Indonesia and Congo, the IEA added in a report.

The newly financed projects will help meet rising demand for critical minerals that the IEA has calculated will be needed to meet climate pledges made by governments, which would likely result in a global temperature rise of 1.7 C by 2100.

The agency made separate estimates of what would be necessary to meet a net zero-emission scenario by 2050.

Mining companies needed to make more progress in curbing greenhouse gas emissions and water use, the IEA said.

Twenty top miners emitted 0.18 kg of CO2 per kg of minerals in 2021, the same as in 2020, while water use climbed to 7.9 cubic metres per metric ton of mined output in 2021 from 5.4 cubic metres in 2019, the IEA said.

Climate Home has reported on lithium mining causing conflict over water supply in Argentina and indigenous and non-indigenous people battling in court for control of nickel resources in Guatemala.

In Jamaica, governments at the International Seabed Authority are currently debating whether to allow companies to mine the deep sea bed for critical minerals like nickel and cobalt.

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The 1998 Energy Charter Treaty, which has around 50 signatories including European Union countries, lets energy companies sue governments over policies that damage their investments – a system initially designed to support investments in the sector.

But in recent years it has been used to challenge policies that require fossil fuel plants to shut, raising concerns in some European capitals that it is an obstacle to addressing climate change.

A Commission spokesperson told Reuters it will make legal proposals for a coordinated EU exit “in the coming weeks”, after EU countries – some of which already plan to exit the treaty – could not agree to pass reforms to it which would have allowed government to phase out protection for fossil fuels.

Latin America leads resistance to global shipping emission tax

“As it stands, the treaty is not in line with the EU’s investment policy and law and with the EU’s energy and climate goals,” the spokesperson said.

Four sources familiar with the discussions told Reuters the EU executive will make the proposal next week. Three of the sources said Brussels had considered a partial exit that would let some countries stay in the treaty, but opted against it over legal concerns.

Pressure has mounted on Brussels to lead an EU-wide exit after Denmark, France, Germany, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Poland and Spain announced they planned to quit the treaty. Italy left in 2016.

But the proposal is likely to be opposed by countries including Cyprus, Hungary and Slovakia, which have said they would prefer to stay in an updated version of the accord.

Spain proposes improved 2030 climate target as it awaits Supreme Court ruling

Any proposal will need backing from a reinforced majority of member states and support from the European Parliament, which has publicly backed the idea.

“A coordinated withdrawal would remove one of the main obstacles to realising the EU’s binding climate targets,” said Lukas Schaugg, an analyst at the International Institute for Sustainable Development think tank.

Treaty signatories last year negotiated reforms designed to address some of the climate concerns, but which received a mixed reception from EU countries and criticism from campaigners. The reforms would struggle to pass without EU support.

The unreformed treaty has a “sunset clause” that would protect existing fossil fuel investments in Europe for 20 years even after the EU quit.

Norway approves oil and gas fields despite Cop fossil phase-out push

Despite leaving in 2016, Italy was last year made to pay €190 million ($206 million) to a British oil company for restricting oil drilling.

European officials hope that they can arrange that the treaty is not enforced between EU member states, partly neutralising the sunset clause.

The reformed version would have let governments end investment protections for fossil fuels, a power the EU and UK planned to use to phase out protections in ten years.

Switzerland plans to remain in the treaty while the UK’s position is unclear. Other states in Central Asia and Japan have shown no interest in either reforming the treaty or leaving it.

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The news comes six months after the Norwegian government pushed unsuccesfully at the Cop27 climate talks for an agreement to phase out unabated fossil fuels and six months before Cop28, where they are likely to try again.

Norway’s parliament in 2020 introduced temporary tax incentives to encourage petroleum investment at a time of low activity, triggering a rush of applications from energy companies.

UK off course for net zero, its advisers say

Among the field developments receiving final approval on Wednesday were nine operated by Aker BP, three by Equinor and several by Wintershall Dea and OMV.

“These are projects that will contribute to a continued high and stable output from Norway’s continental shelf as well as employment and value creation,” Minister of Petroleum and Energy Terje Aasland told a news conference.

Fight back

Norway’s petroleum production is fiercely opposed by environmentalists and others concerned that carbon emissions from the burning of oil and gas contributes to climate change.

The International Energy Agency said in 2021 that no new fossil fuel production projects are compatible with limiting global warming to 1.5C.

Campaigners immediately announced they were taking the decision on three of the 19 fields to court, claiming they violate Norway’s constitution and international human rights committments.

US ‘still on the fence’ as nations debate global shipping emission tax

Greenpeace’s Norweigan head Frode Pleym said the government is “blatantly disregarding the climate, the science, and even our own Supreme Court in its effort to please the oil industry”.

The three fields being legally challenged by campaigners are Yggdrasil, Tyrving and Breidablikk. Campaigners say their impact assesments are either non-existent or inadequate and have applied for a legal injunction on construction.

Those fields were chosen as campaigners think they have the best legal case against them, as they are based on new infrastructure and are about oil not gas.

Bad example

Norway is the seventh richest nation on earth and its continued fossil fuel production will be used by supporters of fossil fuel production in poorer countries to undermine opposition to their projects.

Asked whether governments should agree at Cop28 to phase out fossil fuels, Egyptian ambassador Wael Abdoulmagd told Climate Home recently that poor oil-producing nations like Guyana can’t be treated the same as rich ones like Norway.

Norway’s example has recently been used to justify fossil fuel production in countries like Guyana, Barbados and Costa Rica.

South African Groundwork activist Bobby Peek commented: “How do those who have polluted the most and taken up an unfair share of carbon space, expect the global South to stop fossil fuels while they expand and delay immediate and deep cuts in their fossil fuel addiction?”

Only a handful of countries, like Denmark and Colombia, have said they will end fossil fuel production.

Public banks agree to check investments against countries’ climate plans

The Norwegian government says Norway’s oil and gas resources are essential to Europe’s energy security and will be needed for decades to come.

But the IEA said this year that “a peak in oil demand is on the horizon” and, to limit global warming to 1.5C, fossil fuel use should fall from providing almost four-fifths of total energy supply today to slightly over one-fifth by 2050.

Other nations who are expanding oil and gas production domestically while pushing for a fossil fuel phase-out at Cop talks include the USA, UK and Australia.

This article was updated on 30 June to include Bobby Peek’s comments

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Britain in 2019 became the first member of the Group of Seven wealthy nations to set a target to achieve net zero emissions by 2050, requiring major changes in the way Britons travel, eat and use electricity.

But strategies in place are unlikely to deliver the required emission cuts and last year’s announcements on new fossil fuel projects have tarnished Britain’s reputation as a climate leader, an annual progress report by the Climate Change Committee (CCC) said on Wednesday.

“The UK has lost its clear global leadership position on climate action,” it said. “We have backtracked on fossil fuel commitments, with the consenting of a new coal mine and support for new UK oil and gas production.”

US ‘still on the fence’ as nations debate global shipping emission tax

The impact of climate change is already evident in Britain, which experienced record temperatures over 40C (104F) last year.

“There is a worrying hesitancy by ministers to lead the country to the next stage of net zero commitments,” CCC Chairman John Gummer said.

Over the last year, the leadership of the UK has passed from Boris Johnson to Liz Truss briefly before the current prime minister Rishi Sunak took over in October. All are from the ruling Conservative Party and there were no public elections held.

The CCC, set up as an independent adviser on climate action to the government, found Britain had fallen behind in areas including improving energy efficiency in buildings, rolling out heat pumps, curbing emissions from industry and increasing the rate of tree planting, which must double by 2025.

Public banks agree to check investments against countries’ climate plans

Internationally, it said the UK could move past general statements of support for the Bridgetown agenda and back specific proposals to reform the global finance system so that it works for the developing world and climate.

It added that the UK had used its aid budget to support refugees in the UK, “creating pressure” on international climate spending.

“Even if they are compensated for in future years, temporary cuts cause disruption to programmes and can make outcomes less effective,” it said. The UK froze “non-essential” new aid spending last July.

Last year’s CCC progress report also flagged Britain’s lack of action, saying the UK had done “surprisingly little” to deliver on its ambitious climate targets.

Unfinished paperwork is kneecapping solar’s potential in China

Since then, the government has launched its first oil and gas exploration licensing round since 2019 and approved a new coal mine.

A spokesperson said the government was proud of its record in cutting emissions, had attracted billions of pounds in investment in renewable projects and backed new industries, including carbon capture and floating offshore wind.

“With a new department dedicated to delivering net zero and energy security, we are driving economic growth, creating jobs, bringing down energy bills, and reducing our dependence on imported fossil fuels,” the government spokesperson said.

The Labour opposition, however, was highly critical.

“This is by some distance the most damning indictment of a government since the climate change committee was established in 2008,” Labour’s Shadow Climate and Net Zero Secretary Ed Miliband said.

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The label is equivalent to a ban on the group’s activities in Russia.

On Wednesday, the prosecutor-general had accused WWF-Russia of presenting “security threats in the economic sphere”. It said WWF had waged “tendentious” campaigns against the energy, oil and natural gas industries, which it said were aimed at “shackling” Russia’s economic development.

WWF-Russia had already been labelled a “foreign agent”, a designation that carries connotations of spying. The tag has been applied widely to civil society groups, with the effect of further crushing citizen-led activism, already under broad pressure from authorities.

WWF International said its Russian branch had operated as a “non-partisan national organisation, fully governed and managed by Russian citizens working towards the preservation of the biological diversity of the planet”.

WWF began working in Russia in 1989 and has been involved in major projects to protect endangered species such as Siberian (Amur) tigers, polar bears and European bison.

The organisation said it regretted being accused of posing a security threat, and that “conservation of our natural world is vital, particularly as the climate and biodiversity crises accelerate around the world”.

WWF’s fellow environmental group Greenpeace was banned in Russia last month. WWF Russia said it would no longer use the WWF acronym or panda logo.

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There is “abundant proof” current head Jose Miguel Linares, who took up his post in 2013 after serving as vice-president of legal, and Augusto Jimenez, who headed the company’s Colombia operations between 1990 and 2012, conspired to finance a paramilitary group, the prosecutor said in a statement.

“Linares Martinez and Jimenez Mejia, between 1996 and 2001, increased the value of a food provision contract with a provider company to obtain additional resources and use them to cover previously-agreed illegal obligations with…the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC),” the statement said.

The effort was a bid to protect assets and ensure the free operation of Drummond’s mine in Cesar province, the statement added.

“Green” finance bankrolls forest destruction in Indonesia

Drummond rejected the accusations, saying in its own statement that they are the product of “a cartel of false witnesses.”

“These accusations are not backed up with credible proof and are based, principally, on false declarations by convicted criminals, who receive payments for testimony,” the company said, without providing further details.

The company is confident evidence will demonstrate Linares’ and Jimenez’s innocence, it added.

The case is a “moral triumph,” said Joris van de Sandt of Dutch non-governmental organization PAX, which has campaigned to raise awareness over alleged wrongdoings by Drummond, which the company has always denied.

FSC’s rehab scheme for forest destroyers under fire after fresh allegations

Drummond – Colombia’s largest producer of thermal coal – has three mining contracts in the country and also holds a port concession on the Caribbean coast.

It expects to export around 30 million tons of coal this year, Linares said this week.

Paramilitary groups emerged in the 1980s, funded by landowners, merchants and drug traffickers to defend themselves from attacks by leftist guerrillas.

Paramilitary groups – accused of murders, rapes, torture and other crimes – demobilised under a peace deal in the 2000s, though many members later formed crime gangs.

Colombia is one of the most dangerous countries in the world for environmental activists, with at least 33 dying in 2021, according to Global Witness’s research.

Last year, Colombian anti-fracking activist Yuvelis Natalia Morales told Climate Home that unidentifiable armed men had held a gun to her head, resulting in her fleeing abroad.

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The UN warned against a “catastrophe” in Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia, which it described as the epicentre of the world’s worst climate emergencies.

Donor countries have pledged a total of $2.4 billion for 2023, but only $0.8 billion in new financial support was announced at this week’s event. The US will provide nearly two-thirds of the money, followed at some distance by the European Commission, Germany and the UK.

The money raised at a pledging conference this week will help humanitarian agencies provide food, water, healthcare and protection services to over 30 million people across the three countries.

Tinebeb Berhane, country director for ActionAid in Ethiopia, told Climate Home News she was “extremely disappointed” and “saddened” with the outcome. “The pledges do not even touch the surface of the level of support needed on the ground”, she added.

Oxfam has called the commitments “dismally inadequate”.

The shortcomings of UN pledging events like this one will put the spotlight on the implementation of the landmark loss and damage deal struck at Cop27. Governments agreed to create a fund for vulnerable communities hit by climate impacts.

Climate-induced drought

The Horn of Africa has been suffering its worst drought in 40 years since October 2020. Five consecutive seasons of rainfall below normal levels have led to crops failing and farm animals dying.

A group of scientists estimated that human-driven climate change has made these events “much stronger” and “about 100 times more likely”.

World Bank body delays vote on controversial loan to Brazilian dairy firm

The World Weather Attribution group said the drought was made much more severe because of the low rainfall and increased evaporation caused by higher temperatures in the world.

Kenya, Somalia and Ethiopia combined now contribute less than 0.5% of the greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change despite having 2.5% of the world’s population.

“People in the Horn of Africa are paying an unconscionable price for a climate crisis they did nothing to cause,” UN chief Antonio Guterres told the pledging event in New York.

The crisis has been made worse by conflicts and rising global commodity prices as a result of the war in Ukraine. More than 32 million people are facing acute food insecurity and 2.7 million people have been displaced.

UN advises against offsets for carbon removal technologies

The United States made the top pledge – an additional $524 million on previous announcements, taking its total for 2023 to some $1.4 billion. The European Commission committed $185 million, Germany $163 million, Britain $120 million and the Netherlands $92 million.

“This is a global problem that requires all of us,” U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield told the event.

‘Moral failure’

Andrew Mitchell, the UK minister for development, said “the clear and present threat remains, and we must act now to prevent further suffering”. But aid groups have criticised the pledge made by the UK, branding it a “moral failure”.

A group of organisations led by the International Rescue Committee has called on donors “to take immediate steps to break the cycle of short-term, inadequate funding” in the Horn of Africa.

ActionAid’s Berhane hopes the limited funding promised will be delivered swiftly. “Time is a big factor for these life-saving humanitarian interventions,” she said.

The Eastern African drought is only one of the many climate-induced crises in which financial aid has been slow-moving.

Echoes of Pakistan

Devastating floods struck Pakistan last year, causing $10 billion in estimated damage. After a UN appeal, wealthy countries pledged a sum roughly sixty times smaller in support. But even those funds were slow to arrive.

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Subsequently, at a pledging event last January, a group of 40 countries, multilateral banks and private donors committed more than $8.5 billion towards Pakistan’s recovery.

But Pakistan’s climate minister Sherry Rehman said yesterday that “pledges made at international conferences solely for Pakistan have still not been realised”.

“UN flash appeals are no longer capitalised as they used to be,” she said, as “at least half of the UN flash appeals go unfunded”. She called for the loss and damage fund to be set up as soon as possible.

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In 2021, amid growing global outrage over Bolsonaro turning a blind eye to the destruction of the Amazon rainforest, his government pledged to cut greenhouse emissions by 50% by 2030, up from a previous commitment of 43%.

But Bolsonaro’s government used a higher, 2005 baseline – a move that made it easier for Brazil to reach its target compared with the previous pledge and that was widely criticized by environmentalists.

Brazilian lobby group Climate Observatory calculated that the Bolsonaro target would allow an additional 400 million tonnes of greenhouse gas to be emitted, compared to the prior target.

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To address those issues, Lula’s leftist government intends to maintain the 50% reduction but fix the issue with the baseline, two sources with direct knowledge of the matter told Reuters. Both spoke anonymously as the move is not yet public.

The goal is to issue the revised target, known as a nationally determined contribution under the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change, later this year. After the change, the target will be “more ambitious,” one of the sources said.

The government is exploring ways to simplify the target, including issuing the exact number of gigatonnes of greenhouse gas that the country will seek to reduce, the source added.

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Neither Brazil’s Environment Ministry nor a representative for Bolsonaro responded to requests for comment.

Lula took office on Jan. 1 with a pledge to restore Brazil as a global leader on climate change. Bolsonaro had appointed climate skeptics to key positions and presided over soaring levels of Amazon deforestation, the largest source of Brazil’s greenhouse gas emissions.

Before he was elected, his environmental adviser Izabella Teixera told Climate Home that he would update Brazil’s climate target if elected. Campaigners called for him to do so in his first 100 days, a deadline Teixera did not commit to and which Lula has now missed.

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Brazil’s environmental regulator Ibama, late on Wednesday, said it would block a request by state-run oil giant Petrobras to drill at the mouth of the Amazon river near Amapá, in a much-awaited decision that followed a technical recommendation by Ibama experts to reject the project.

In a filing, Petrobras said it planned to file an appeal for Ibama to reconsider its ruling, saying it “strictly complied with all the requirements of the licensing process.”

The decision by Ibama, which is overseen by Lula’s environment minister, the globally recognized environmentalist Marina Silva, has riled some within the governing coalition.

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Lula, who hails from the poor northeast, has staked his international reputation on reversing environmental back-sliding under his far-right predecessor former President Jair Bolsonaro. But he is also under pressure to deliver much-needed growth to poor, under-developed regions in the north and northeast, and wants state-owned Petrobras to be an engine of that growth.

Lula ally resigns

Senator Randolfe Rodrigues, who represents the state of Amapa, said Ibama had taken a decision with major economic impact for the state without taking into account the views of the people of Amapa or its state government. Rodrigues is a senior Lula ally who ran his presidential campaign last year.

“We’ll fight against this decision,” Rodrigues wrote on Twitter, adding that “the people of Amapa want to have the right to be heard”. He later announced he was departing his party, the center-left Sustainability Network, in light of the decision.

A decisão do Ibama contrária à pesquisas na costa do Amapá não ouviu o governo local e nenhum cidadão do meu estado. O povo amapaense quer ter o direito de ser escutado sobre a possível existência e eventual destino de nossas riquezas (…)

— Randolfe Rodrigues (@randolfeap) May 18, 2023

The Sustainability Network was founded in the early 2010s by Silva, the environment minister, who appointed Ibama head Rodrigo Agostinho.

Agostinho told GloboNews TV on Thursday that Petrobras would be allowed to file a new request to drill in the region, but noted that studies presented by the firm to date were not enough for the move to be cleared.

Petrobras said in its filing that it was not giving up hope on its plans to develop an oil-rich region with potential reserves of up to 14 billion barrels of oil.

“The company remains committed to the development of the Brazilian Equatorial Margin,” it said, adding it would “ensure the country’s energy security.”

Final decision

Despite Petrobras’ stated intentions, the ruling effectively ends all future development of the unexplored oil prospects at the mouth of the Amazon river, former Ibama boss Suely Araujo told Reuters.

Araujo said that even if Petrobras undertakes the deeper studies requested by Ibama, the final say would still rest with the regulator. “The decision is final,” she said, adding she expected Lula to support Ibama’s ruling.

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Exploration rights in the area were auctioned in 2013, but oil majors BP and TotalEnergies pulled out due to the cost of the off-shore studies and difficulties in obtaining licenses for drilling, while Petrobras kept going.

Neither Lula’s office, nor the environment ministry responded to requests for comment.

Environmental groups celebrated Ibama’s decision.

In a statement, Greenpeace said Ibama had emphasized the need for “a fair energy transition, instead of insisting on yet another oil exploration frontier in the context of the climate crisis.”

Ibama has “postponed the end of the world,” environmental group Observatorio do Clima proclaimed.

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The tax credit makes France the first EU country to take advantage of a loosening of European state aid rules in recent months in response to new tax subsidies in the United States made available by the Biden administration’s $430 billion Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).

Le Maire’s ministry said the tax credit, which will be available on a temporary basis in line with the new EU rules until 2025, with the possibility of an extension to 2029, was expected to generate private investments totalling 23 billion euros by 2030 and directly create 40,000 jobs.

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The tax credit aims to spur investment in environmentally friendly projects and revive France’s industrial sector as European companies come increasingly under pressure from U.S. companies, major tax subsidies in the IRA to cut carbon emission, boost domestic production and manufacturing.

“We have no reason to be embarrassed by comparisons with the United States,” Le Maire said on Tuesday, adding that various European and existing French aid available was of a similar scale.

The tax credit will cover companies’ capital expenditures on 25-40% of their investments in wind and solar power facilities, heat pumps and batteries.

US backs Indonesian oil refinery despite pledge to end fossil fuel finance

It will be included in the 2024 budget law and its cost will be offset by reducing tax breaks available for certain types of carbon-intensive fuels which remain to be determined.

The bill also aims to make 2,000 hecatres (4,900 acres) available for new industrial sites and cut in half how long it takes to approve a new industrial project from 17 months to nine months.

It also will create a new class of tax-free savings accounts available to people under the age of 18 through their banks, which the finance ministry expects to generate 5 billion euros that can be used to finance green industrial projects.

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The proposal would limit the amount of carbon dioxide that power plants, which are the source of more than a quarter of U.S. emissions, can send into the atmosphere, putting the industry on a years-long course to install billions of dollars of new equipment or shut down.

Environmental groups and scientists have long argued that such steps are crucial to curb global warming, but fossil-fuel-producing states argue that they represent government overreach and threaten to destabilise the electric grid.

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The Environmental Protection Agency projects the plan would cut carbon emissions from coal plants and new gas plants by 617 million tonnes between 2028 and 2042. That’s around 44m tonnes a year, about the same as the nation of Denmark pumps out.

CCS or hydrogen

The proposal sets standards that would push companies to install carbon capture equipment that can siphon the carbon dioxide from a power plant’s smokestack before it reaches the atmosphere, or use super-low-emissions hydrogen as a fuel.

“EPA’s proposal relies on proven, readily available technologies to limit carbon pollution and seizes the momentum already underway in the power sector to move toward a cleaner future,” Administrator Michael Regan said in a statement.

Nations split over fossil fuels and carbon capture

Regan is to announce more details of the proposal in a youth-focused speech at the University of Maryland later on Thursday.

White House climate adviser Ali Zaidi told reporters the proposal will keep the U.S. on track to meet its goal to achieve net-zero power sector emissions by 2035.

“When you look at what is in the rule and what is proposed we are absolutely in line with the president’s goal,” he said.

Plan B

The proposal, more than 18 months in the making, reflects constraints imposed on the EPA by the Supreme Court, which ruled last year that the agency cannot impose a system-wide shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy, but can regulate plants by setting technology-based standards applied on-site.

Europe’s push for global renewables target gains support

An effort by the administration of Democratic former President Barack Obama in 2015 to broadly slash power industry emissions was hung up by legal challenges and eventually repealed in 2019 under the administration of Republican President Donald Trump.

West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey, who led the legal challenge against the previous EPA carbon rule, said in a statement that his state will “be ready once again to lead the charge in the fight against federal overreach.”

Industry push back

Investor-owned utility group Edison Electric Institute said it has been in close consultation with the EPA to ensure that the agency is flexible with compliance deadlines and recognizes the role of natural gas in cleaning up the sector.

Gas is a fossil fuel and the International Energy Agency has said that, if global warming is to be held to 1.5C, the amount of electricity produced with gas should peak around 2030 and fall dramatically by 2040. No new gas production projects are compatible with the strongest target of the Paris Agreement, it says.

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“We will assess EPA’s proposed new regulations through the lens of whether they align with our priorities and support our ability to provide customers with the reliable clean energy they need at an affordable cost,” EEI President Tom Kuhn said.

The proposal is subject to the regulatory rule-making process, including a public comment period. The final rule will have to reflect the public comments, although Congress has already authorized the EPA to craft the rule. It will likely take about a year for the rule to be finalized.

Better air

The EPA anticipates the proposal will cost the power industry over $10 billion, while yielding health and climate benefits of around $85 billion.

It said the Inflation Reduction Act, President Joe Biden’s signature climate bill, will offer billions of dollars in tax incentives and credits that will bring down costs for deployment of CCS and green hydrogen, justifying its decision to base new standards on those technologies.

According to the proposal, new and existing large natural gas plants will be expected to install CCS that removes 90% of their carbon emissions by 2035, or alternatively to co-fire with 30% hydrogen by 2032 and 96% hydrogen by 2038.

Verra’s revamped forest offset programme comes under fire

New gas-fired “peaker plants,” used as backup generation, would face less stringent standards.

For existing coal plants – whose numbers have been declining in recent years – the EPA will take into account their planned lifespan. Coal plants that run past 2040, for example, will be required to install CCS technology starting in 2030, while those shutting between 2035 and 2040 would be required to co-fire with 40% gas by 2030.

Regan said the EPA is planning to see some early retirements of older plants as a result of the proposals, but said the impact on electricity prices will be “negligible.”

Environmental groups welcomed the proposal, saying it has been crafted carefully to weather legal fights.

“After two failed attempts to regulate the power sector’s tremendous carbon pollution load, EPA finally gets it just right with this proposal,” said Jay Duffy, litigation director for the Clean Air Task Force.

The post After court blocks renewables push, US promotes carbon capture & hydrogen appeared first on Climate Home News.

Having bought back roughly $1.6 billion of the country’s debt at a near 60% discount late last week with the help of Credit Suisse, Ecuadorean Foreign Minister Gustavo Manrique Miranda said biodiversity was now a valuable “currency”.

Protecting nature often also benefits the climate as carbon sinks like forests and seabeds are protected. Debt-for-climate swaps are also growing in popularity.

Nations split over fossil fuels and carbon capture

Tuesday’s $656 million “Galapagos Bond,” as it has been dubbed, will run until 2041 and gave investors that bought it a 5.6% “coupon” or interest rate, its bankers said.

Ecuador sovereign bonds currently yield from 17% to 26%, but the new bond has an $85 million ‘credit guarantee’ from the Inter-American Development Bank and $656 million of political risk insurance from the U.S. International Development Finance Corp (DFC), effectively making it less risky.

Debt-for-nature swaps have proved successful in Belize, Barbados and the Seychelles in recent years, but Ecuador’s deal is by far the largest to date, cutting the country’s debt by over $1 billion once the $450 million of total conservation spending is taken into account.

Europe’s push for global renewables target gains support

The driver has been the remote Galapagos Islands, some 600 miles (970 km) off Ecuador’s mainland coast, that inspired Charles Darwin’s Theory of Evolution.

Many species on the islands, including giant tortoises, marine iguanas and Darwin’s finches, are found nowhere else on earth so their conservation is seen as vital.

While Ecuador’s government will pocket more than $1 billion worth of savings from the buyback for other purposes, the key appeal has been the environmental benefits and the hope it will be a catalyst for other highly indebted but nature-rich countries.

Giuseppe Di Carlo, director of the Pew Bertarelli Ocean Legacy, one of the groups involved in the deal, said the $12 million a year earmarked for conservation, plus another $5 million a year being put into a fund that should last decades, were an “extraordinary win”.

India mulls end to coal plant construction

There will be regular monitoring of the protection work and of “purse seine” and “longline” fishing vessels by a newly formed body, with Hawaii’s Papahānaumokuākea marine park seen as a potential template.

Conservation funding there now protects a 200-mile (322-km) radius around the archipelago. It has helped revive local tuna and other fish stocks, but also increased catches further out where local fishing is still allowed.

The hope is for similar results from a new 11,500-square mile (30,000-sq km) reserve Ecuador set up last year between the Galapagos and Costa Rica’s maritime border used as a migratory corridor by sharks, whales, sea turtles and manta rays.

Verra’s revamped forest offset programme comes under fire

Scott Nathan, the chief executive of DFC, said people needed to “stay tuned” for similar deals in other countries and the Galapagos deal had been a long time coming.

It was first floated over three years ago. Final preparations occurred during a time of political turmoil, with Ecuador’s National Assembly seeking to impeach President Guillermo Lasso for alleged embezzlement, which Lasso denies.

The turbulence boosted economics of the deal, slashing prices of the original bonds, although it also faced troubles of lynchpin lender Credit Suisse, which required an emergency takeover in March by rival UBS.

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